TWENTY
Farid had warned me. He had. But, as it turned out, he had wasted his breath.We were driving down the cratered road that winds from Jalalabad to Kabul. The last time I’d traveled that road was in a tarpaulin-covered truck going the other way. Baba had nearly gotten himself shot by a singing, stoned Roussi officer--Baba had made me so mad that night, so scared, and, ultimately, so proud. The trek between Kabul and Jalalabad, a bone-jarring ride down a teetering pass snaking through the rocks, had become a relic now, a relic of two wars. Twenty years earlier, I had seen some of the first war with my own eyes. Grim reminders of it were strewn along the road: burned carcasses of old Soviet tanks, overturned military trucks gone to rust, a crushed Russian jeep that had plunged over the mountainside. The second war, I had watched on my TV screen. And now I was seeing it through Farid’s eyes.Swerving effortlessly around potholes in the middle of the broken road, Farid was a man in his element. He had become much chattier since our overnight stay at Wahid’s house. He had me sit in the passenger seat and looked at me when he spoke. He even smiled once or twice. Maneuvering the steering wheel with his mangled hand, he pointed to mud-hut villages along the way where he’d known people years before. Most of those people, he said, were either dead or in refugee camps in Pakistan. “And sometimes the dead are luckier,” he said.
He pointed to the crumbled, charred remains of a tiny village. It was just a tuft of blackened, roofless walls now. I saw a dog sleeping along one of the walls. “I had a friend there once,” Farid said. “He was a very good bicycle repairman. He played the tabla well too. The Taliban killed him and his family and burned the village.”We drove past the burned village, and the dog didn’t move.IN THE OLD DAYS, the drive from Jalalabad to Kabul took two hours, maybe a little more. It took Farid and me over four hours to reach Kabul. And when we did... Farid warned me just after we passed the Mahipar dam.
“Kabul is not the way you remember it,” he said.
“So I hear.”
Farid gave me a look that said hearing is not the same as seeing. And he was right. Because when Kabul finally did unroll before us, I was certain, absolutely certain, that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Farid must have seen my stupefied expression; shuttling people back and forth to Kabul, he would have become familiar with that expression on the faces of those who hadn’t seen Kabul for a long time.He patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome back,” he said morosely.RUBBLE AND BEGGARS. Everywhere I looked, that was what I saw. I remembered beggars in the old days too--Baba always carried an extra handful of Afghani bills in his pocket just for them; I’d never seen him deny a peddler. Now, though, they squatted at every street corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin. And the beggars were mostly children now, thin and grim-faced, some no older than five or six. They sat in the laps of their burqa-clad mothers alongside gutters at busy street corners and chanted “Bakhshesh, bakhshesh!” And something else, something I hadn’t noticed right away: Hardly any of them sat with an adult male--the wars had made fathers a rare commodity in Afghanistan.
We were driving westbound toward the Karteh-Seh district on what I remembered as a major thoroughfare in the seventies: