by Sally Cooper
47
Captive on the Carousel of Time
There were days when I thought I would never leave the Ghan and there were days when I didn’t want to. But one sunny morning in April, I did. My departure from Kabul was never going to be neat, and for much of the previous month my stomach had been churning, a trampoline of leaping butterflies. I was never one for farewells and this one was always going to be messy.
The extraordinary rituals of the Ghan are never more prevalent than when it comes to saying goodbye, and the IRIN staff weren’t about to let the moment pass. I declined the lads’ request for a farewell lunch but accepted Ismail’s invitation for dinner with his family. Of all the Afghans in my life, I knew Ismail the best. Our relationship had managed to transcend the vast chasm between Afghan and foreigner while maintaining the essential elements of both, and I counted him as a good friend. Despite knowing him for two years, I had never met his family, including his wife, whom he talked of constantly and with great affection. At 6.30 pm, he picked me up from the Chez Ana in a yellow and white Kabul taxi, a vehicle long embargoed by UN security.
Ismail lived in Karte Char, the Hazara quarter, in a three-room apartment above a garage. He lived with his wife and their six children, and the wife and four children of his late brother.
Ismail’s wife and children were at the front door to meet me, the spluttering sound of the ancient taxi heralding our arrival. Mrs Ismail, whose name was Fereshta, the Dari word for angel, was a tiny woman whose head barely came up to my shoulder. She was dressed in a long tunic, loose trousers and headscarf. She held out her hand and greeted me in Dari.
‘She is very happy to meet you but sorry that it happens now, just when you are leaving,’ translated Ismail.
‘I, too, am very, very happy to finally meet her – and all your family.’
The six children were lined up, like the Von Trapps, in order of age, and dressed in their Friday best. The oldest, a young teenage boy, greeted me in English, while the youngest, a girl of two, hid behind her mother’s tunic.
In the Ghan, the most important person always walks in front, and Ismail’s family followed me as I carefully navigated my way up a dark concrete staircase into a brightly lit room whose centrepiece was a large carpet of exquisite gold, white and blue weave. The only furniture was an enormous new refrigerator which stood in the corner, dwarfing the maroon toshaks that lined the walls. Dinner was a traditional, home-cooked Afghan banquet with all the food I had come to love but rarely ate: mantou, freshly baked flat bread, salads of onion, radish and boiled egg, and ashak, leek dumplings in a creamy yoghurt sauce. Ismail and I ate alone, the man of the family and the honoured guest. Once we had finished, the plates were removed and the plastic tablecloth rolled up off the floor, and Ismail’s family reappeared to inundate me with questions about my life, Australia, Africa and the world beyond. I was pretty sure I had been the number one topic of conversation in the Ismail household for much of the previous two years, and here I was at last, in the flesh.
The following day, I did what all good foreigners do before they leave the Ghan: I went carpet shopping. Mahmood and I returned once again to a narrow doorway between stationers on the busy road that ran alongside the Mustafa Hotel. I had already invested heavily in the Afghan carpet industry and bought many of my rugs from the smiling old man in the white turban who owned this store. After seeing almost every carpet in the tiny showroom, whether I’d wanted to or not, I eventually settled on two and the haggling began. After twenty minutes of proffering numbers and shaking heads, I seemed to be getting nowhere and the three of us sat on the floor at an impasse. The old man wanted five hundred and ten US dollars for both, a figure I deemed too high, even if substantially below anything I would ever pay ‘outside’.
Mahmood cleared his throat, as he so often did when he was about to make a considered announcement. ‘Chief, may I help you?’ he asked quietly.
After three years of practice, my haggling skills had become quite polished, but I saw no harm in letting Mahmood have a try.
After five minutes of frantic Dari, multiple shrugs and a lot of thigh-slapping laughter my two carpets were rolled up and tied with a small piece of pink twine. Mahmood threw them over his shoulder.
‘Give him two hundred and eighty,’ he told me.
‘What?’
‘He will take two hundred and eighty. Let’s go.’
Bewildered, I handed the old man the money. He shook my hand, a beaming smile spread across his face.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked Mahmood once we were back in the car.
‘Chief, I told him that he could make better money off my next boss but you were a woman so he shouldn’t cheat you.’
I wasn’t sure that was the whole story but, possibly for the first time ever in my carpet-buying life, I’d gotten something as close as possible to the real deal.
My last days in the office were a blur of paperwork and packing. Just as there had been a multitude of forms to complete when I joined the UN, there were just as many, if not more, required to extract myself. I filled in the usual blanks – my name, my ID number, my call sign, my email address, a rarely used street address in Australia, my ‘country of residence’ – and signed on the dotted line. The security office, finance, payroll, human resources and procurement – everyone needed a piece of paper to confirm the decommissioning of Uniform November 43.
I had spent more time with the IRIN lads than anyone else in the Ghan, in workshops and lockdowns, kidnappings and bombs, real or imagined. They had looked after me, tolerated my trainer-wheel management skills, my cultural faux pas and all the paperwork with which I seemed to railroad their lives. On my last day in the office, coward that I am, I took a deep breath and dispatched Faheem and Mirwais home early. They were surprised at the gesture but left with a firm shake of my hand, good wishes for my future and lists of greetings for me, my family, my friends, our IRIN colleagues and everyone I would encounter for the rest of my years.
But Ismail could not be foiled – and nor should he be. An hour later, when there was nothing left to do and my desk had finally been cleared, it was time to go. Mahmood went out to the car. As if to honour the occasion, Ismail was wearing a brand-new suit of shiny grey. He stood up from his desk and I noticed his eyes were red.
‘You have been a wonderful colleague and a good friend.’ I began to cry as we shook hands.
‘You too,’ he said quietly.
I didn’t want to leave Ismail. He had run my life for the better part of two years. He’d bravely navigated the UN system on my behalf, keeping the paperwork at bay and the bureaucrats from our door. He’d booked my flights, paid my phone bill and organised my pay. He’d bought me my burqa, hired my late-night driver and recovered my lost ID cards. Most of all, Ismail had come to embody all that I loved and respected in the new Afghanistan, a country that looked to a future of education and prosperity for everyone, including its women. I wanted to give him a farewell hug, but I knew it was impossible. Instead, I gave him a firm handshake, grasping his hand for as long as I could.
Eventually I let go and walked to the door. Without another word, I opened it and, for the final time, walked down the long, dark corridor out to the car park and got into the car for one last bumpy ride along Jalalabad Road.
Check-in time for the UN flight was 7 am. Mahmood arrived at six on the dot to collect me, my green metal trunk, my backpack, and two carpets. I’d like to be able to say that my thoughts on the drive to the airport were a solemn reflection on my three years in the Ghan. In fact, I was feeling slightly the worse for the margaritas I’d had with dinner the previous evening. I’d been out to a restaurant for a farewell meal with a couple of friends. Sometime during the course of our dinner, a distant boom rattled the windows and shook the doors. Heads looked up briefly but, as always in Kabul, a T-bone steak and a fresh garden salad beat a badly aimed rocket any day. My friends and I took a detour on the way home, in search of the rocket’s landi
ng place, which was believed to have been the offices of RTA, the government broadcaster.
Back in July 2003, I’d spent my first evening in Kabul peering through a small gap in the curtains of my guesthouse window, watching in a combination of fear and awe as the turbans passed by on the street below.
In addition to my queasiness, my chief concern on the drive to the airport was that I was about to blubber all over Mahmood just as I had with Ismail the afternoon before. As we drove into the airport car park, for once I was pleased to see the legion of ancient porters who quickly took over and divided my luggage among themselves.
‘Ismail asked you to sign these,’ said Mahmood, producing a pen and a bundle of papers I’d neglected to sign the day before. Two hours short of leaving the Ghan and there was still paperwork to complete.
I signed my name on each and handed the sheets and the pen back to Mahmood.
‘He said this is for you.’ He passed the pen back.
I smiled. It was Ismail’s final goodbye, a parting gift that had more meaning than anything he could have bought on Chicken Street.
‘And I should give you this,’ I said, producing my UN radio. Its once-pristine black buttons were worn, the radio itself now covered in the fine layer of dust that eventually enveloped everything in Kabul. I had carried it with me to the airport, in case ‘the worst’ happened on the day of my departure.
‘Thanks, boss.’ Mahmood took the radio and extended his hand. ‘You are a good chief.’
‘Thanks, Mahmood. Thank you for everything.’ It was all I could think of, my thoughts and words lost somewhere in the cultural chasm that separated us. I wanted to say more: how much I liked him, how grateful I was to him for his kindness, navigating UN security decrees and the streets of Kabul, delivering me home in one piece night after night. But the words were fading. I was biting my lip, trying my best not to cry.
Like me, Mahmood seemed speechless as we stood shaking hands in the early morning light, oblivious to the surrounding chaos of the airport car park.
‘Will you come back?’ he asked eventually.
‘Inshallah,’ I said softly before releasing his hand, adjusting my headscarf and walking towards the terminal for the last time.
