‘Hakim, darling, what is a very hooey man?’
He sat bolt upright in an attempt to appear alert because inevitably he was checking the cricket scores online.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Secrets of this House. Episode twenty-five. Scene four. “Kabir knew that the landlord was a very hooey man.”’
Intense concentration as he clicked on to the script and scrambled to find the word: ‘It’s a man who is very hooey.’
‘But sweetheart, that means nothing to me. Describe what the landlord is like.’
‘He’s hooey.’
‘Yes, so you keep telling me. But what is your understanding of this man? What do you mean?’
More furious clicking and pointing at his screen ‘It’s in the translation dictionary. It’s here and it says—’
‘I don’t care what’s there, darling. Back away from the computer and look at me. Now. You tell me, in your own words, what the landlord is like.’
He thought very hard because he didn’t want to get it wrong and disappoint me. ‘He’s very silly.’
‘Thank you. “Kabir knew that the landlord was a very silly man.”’
There was a long beat of silence as I went about replacing the word.
‘What’s wrong with saying he’s a hooey man?’
‘Well, darling, it’s just not something that we’d say. Believe me, in all my years of speaking English—and I’ve had a few—I have never heard anyone throw into any conversation that somebody is hooey.’
He nodded sagely and made a note of it on his pad, but I don’t think he ever really bought any of my revisions. He was studying English at university, with the aim of becoming a professor, and couldn’t comprehend how a woman, who didn’t know a ‘subordinating conjunction’ from an ‘indefinite pronoun’, could possibly hold herself up as an authority on the language.
Hakim’s second job was toilet watchman. Occupying the desk closest to the glass-panelled door, it was his job to alert Muffy or myself as to when the toilet next to our office was free. With forty people sharing just one bathroom, it was an intense and nerve-racking task.
‘Hakim! How’s the toilet looking?’
He’d crane his neck to get a better view before casting me an earnest and sorrowful look. ‘Not good . . .’
‘Well, I’m busting. So you’re on toilet watch.’
Toilet watch filled Hakim with incredible anxiety because there was always someone lurking in another office or lingering in the stairwell, waiting to pounce as soon as they heard the door being opened.
‘Now! Now! Now!’ he would cry.
I would jump out of my chair and dash across the room, only to have him groan and throw his hands up just as I reached the door. ‘No, you missed out again.’
‘Bugger. Who is it?’
‘Ahmed from IT.’
‘Oh Lord. He always takes forever.’
Hakim nodded in agreement. ‘Last time he took thirteen minutes,’ he confirmed.
Toilet timer was part of the watchman role and we both knew that Ahmed was one of the staff who routinely and inexplicably went into double-figure minutes on his visits to the loo. Muffy and I had our theories around this—virile young men, sharing a room each night with five siblings, the toilet at home nothing more than a mud brick outhouse sans a door . . .
‘Right darling, you’re still on watch. Rattle the handle in five minutes.’
Rattling the handle was a risky business, because there was always the chance that you’d be caught doing it just as the person was exiting the toilet. Hakim hated these embarrassing encounters and, more often than not, I’d end up doing the rattle—quite happy to endure the shame of intrusion for the sake of my aching bladder.
The period just before call to prayer was a traffic jam—everyone rushing to get their obligatory ablutions in before praying. The ritual requires the careful washing of the face, arms and feet, and very early on I quickly learnt that it was hopeless trying to get a look-in at certain times of the day. But my initial ignorance about the practice caused Hakim untold grief.
Hakim was a devout Muslim—he wouldn’t even wear aftershave that contained alcohol. So while he was trying to find a gap in the traffic for me, he would also be anxiously awaiting his turn to ablute before dashing off to the mosque next door to pray. I’d like to say that I possessed the profound awareness to figure this out all by myself, but it took a quiet word from Merzad to alert me to Hakim’s unspeakable dilemma.
Hakim’s third job was strictly a summer gig. He was the fly killer. The task was much less taxing than toilet watchman and he grew to enjoy the thrill of the chase. He was called up for duty soon after joining us, when we were still sizing each other up.
For me at that time, Hakim was an enigma. He had none of the bling and brashness that the other boys in the department had. He was quiet and sensitive; he continually smiled and had no concept of personal space—he’d stand so close when talking to me that I could hear his heartbeat. To be honest, and to my great shame, I initially had him pegged as the ‘Most Likely to Arrive at the Office One Day and Mow Me Down with an AK-47’.
I can’t really say what Hakim thought of me at that time, but I’m guessing that ‘wanton heathen’ was up there in his assessment as I was constantly exposing him to depravity. The corruption of poor Hakim’s mind wasn’t a conscious act. In fact, being mindful of his conservatism, Muffy and I were initially very careful to mind our Ps and Qs—or rather, our ‘bastards and shits’—and we saved our discussion of after-hours activities for our coffee and ciggy breaks, or bantered in some lame and rather obvious code that Hakim never twigged to.
‘Oh! Did you talk to Kim last night?’
‘Just briefly. Why?’
‘You know she’s playing tennis with Neil.’
‘No! Stop it now! I thought she was playing tennis with Steve?’
‘She is.’
‘Does Steve know she’s playing doubles?’
‘I doubt it.’
No, the subversion was quite unintentional. For starters, there was our unfortunate weakness for So You Think You Can Dance, which aired on Indian cable every afternoon. While the boys were allowed to watch sport or dreadful Hindi movies most of the time on the sole television set in our office, The Dancing Show (as we referred to it) was our one viewing indulgence, and Muffy and I usually insisted on watching it. I might as well have been making Hakim watch hard-core porn.
At first he tried not to look, but the sight of all those apparently super-fit women—wearing nothing more than sequined tea towels and filling the screen with their leg splits, shoulder-high kicks and heaving bosoms—proved irresistible. I often caught him, his head lowered and fingers hovering over his keyboard, but his eyes clearly focused on the TV. If he caught me catching him peeping at the girls, he’d grin his unnerving grin, and blush and gush about the wonderful dancing.
Once, during the audition stage of the show, an overweight, strung-out stripper performed a particularly poor pole-dancing routine. Hakim couldn’t take his eyes off her. When I asked him what he thought of the dancing, he opined that it wasn’t very good and wondered why the woman had bothered to try out.
‘Oh darling, she’s just some poor delusional stripper on drugs,’ Muffy offered by way of explanation.
‘What’s a stripper?’ came his innocent reply.
‘Well, sweetie, it’s a woman who takes her clothes off for money.’
‘Who gives her the money?’
‘Men. Men pay to watch her take her clothes off.’
Hakim was genuinely astonished and clearly horrified. ‘Why would anyone want to see her take off her clothes?’
I also have to take responsibility for making him look at dirty pictures on the internet. One day Shakila came to me wanting to buy cosmetic latex for her make-up kit. Because there were no suppliers of it in Afghanistan, we would have to order it online, so I asked Hakim to look it up for her. I then returned to the script I was editing.
Shakila’s giggling made me look up. Hakim’s ashen face alerted me to the fact that the search had perhaps gone slightly haywire. When I walked over to take a look at his screen, I was confronted with images of women in black latex cat suits, men dressed as gimps and young girls cavorting in sexy nurse gear.
I also had a plastic, yellow baseball bat parked behind my desk—my whacking bat. I originally had a whacking stick, a decorative piece of wood that I found amongst the rubbish one day, but it mysteriously disappeared when the kids moved all my gear into our new office. If any of the boys were in ‘trouble’, I’d beat it menacingly against my hand or, at worst, demand that they bend over and cop a whacking. It was all in good fun—the whacks were no more than taps, and it gave us a giggle when the day was dragging. But at first, Hakim would just look at me, wide-eyed and expressionless, when I administered my ‘punishments’.
So when the first of the summer’s blowflies buzzed into the office and I delivered the sombre news to Hakim, bat in hand, that if it wasn’t dead in five minutes he’d be fired, he just sat in his chair and stared at me for a good thirty seconds.
I looked at my watch. ‘You’ve only got four-and-a-half minutes now before you’re out of a job, Hakim.’
He instantly leapt up and threw himself around the room searching for the fly swatter, and then frantically hunted his prey as I delivered regular time updates. As Muffy, Merzad and I counted down the final ten seconds, he became positively manic. And the ‘Time’s up!’ call saw him slump against the wall and lower his head with a look of real anguish. I turned to Merzad, who just shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. Muffy bit her lip before mouthing a concerned ‘Ooh-ah!’ in my direction.
I got out of my chair and slowly walked towards him. It was too early in our relationship to give him a hug, so I just gently touched his shoulder. ‘Hakim darling, I’d never fire you. At least not for being unable to kill a fly . . .’
He lifted his face to look at me . . . and smirked for a brief moment before dissolving into giggles. He then jigged around the office on his toes, tittering and pointing at me and loving himself sick. Hakim received his first whacking that day, squealing with delight at every blow, for having tricked the infidel tricker.
So, as we tidied our desks and closed down our laptops that particular Thursday afternoon in November, Hakim approached each of us, fanning out the cards like a seasoned magician. The good-news ones were extended out of the pack just a little; his winks and nods, meant to alert us to their positive portents, were really not necessary.
Hakim was the last to choose and, as seemed to be his constant good fortune, he once again got LOVE. His delight at this remarkable turn of events was only marginally tempered by Merzad’s assertion that he had cheated. As we headed down the stairs, another week spent, I predicted that his parents would spring a surprise betrothal to some distant cousin on him over the course of the weekend. The idea made him positively giddy.
A group of my female friends and I gathered one night in March 2011 at Gandamak, a big British bar in the centre of town, to eat pizza, guzzle white wine and dissect Marg’s recently failed relationship. There wasn’t a great deal to pick over, really, common consensus being that Marg’s ex-boyfriend was an absolute nutter.
Muffy, Marg and I had all met him on the same evening about a month before at Gandamak. He seemed friendly and sweet, and he and Marg had soon cocooned themselves away from the rest of our party, engaging in hours of animated and flirtatious chatter. As they wandered off together, hand in hand in the early hours of the morning, Muffy and I cooed like contented parents.
It all moved rather quickly from there, propelled along by the nut-job, and at her birthday dinner just three weeks into their coupling, he stood before all her best friends in Kabul declaring that he was madly in love with her and was so excited about their future together. This enthusiastic assertion caused Marg’s eyes to pop just a little, while the rest of us stole sideways glances at one another, confounded and a little embarrassed by this seemingly premature pronouncement.
Apparently, at 5am the next day, Marg awoke to find her beloved sobbing next to her in bed—he regretted that he had to end the relationship as he was, in fact, in love with Muffy.
Muffy herself was totally in the clear. She was truly astonished to learn that a five-minute chat with this man in the loo line at the birthday bash could have elicited such intense feelings—that a casual conversation, comparing her penne chicken to his spinach ravioli, had been endowed with so much subtext and meaning.
A lot of people hook up in Kabul—it’s kind of like a hobby. I could try to propound some worthy excuses for this—how the stresses of living in a war zone compelled us to embark upon reckless sexual encounters, how our constant craving for intimacy in the midst of the chaos and madness drove us onwards to la petite mort, and all that. But I imagine it had more to do with the fact that we were forced to spend so much time indoors—once the drinking, karaoke, TV viewing and video games had lost their charm, copulating seemed like just another appealing diversion.
Of course the romantic in me is right now cursing my deceitful pragmatism and I fully concede that there are certain physical attachments that you hope will lead to true love. After Nick and I had broken up during a teary phone conversation on an afternoon in May, soon after I’d returned from the patch-up job, I initially dipped my freshly manicured toes into the hook-up slipstream with the somewhat desperate intention of finding the next ‘one’. But whether it is in the pursuit of love or leisure-time activity, the hook-up is an entrenched part of expat life in Kabul.
At one time there was a chlamydia scare that had half my posse racing to the clinic to be tested; for months afterwards expat conversations were riddled with scandalous assumptions as to who was ‘ground zero’ for the outbreak. A friend of mine was a prime suspect and, when his test results came out clean, he posted them on Facebook to proclaim his innocence.
The Kabul hook-up was fraught with complications. It’s a small town, so you went into the hook-up fully expecting everybody to know about it before it was even over. And gossip being the most valuable form of currency, intimate details that you’d shared with your housemates over a friendly drinking session could end up as table talk at an embassy function that very same week.
As a woman, you had to keep your guard up for men who were ‘Kabul single’—hiding away a wife, partner, maybe kids back home while on the prowl in the Ghan. Vague excuses as to why they couldn’t be contacted while on leave were a giveaway, as could be the absence of a Facebook account. And if they did have a Facebook account, comfortable photos of that ‘special divorcee’ with his children in a nice domestic setting were another clue. As my mate Andy said: ‘If there are photos with the kids, you have to ask yourself: who’s holding the camera?’
Men in Kabul are just lucky to get a look-in. With the ratio of males to females standing at a steady nine to one, chicks could afford to be choosy and the same guys seemed to be on high rotation. In conversations with members of this elite group of Lotharios, I was told that their only real issues were with ‘stalkers’ (a rather odious and exaggerated term for sexual partners who found it hard to accept that a ‘one-night stand’ was simply just that) and women looking for baby makers. I did know that the phantom-pregnancy card had been played on more than one male acquaintance who had foolishly entered into the hook-up sans protection.
One Thursday night a group of twenty-something male friends were invited to a party at an embassy where the women, all a considerably few years older, rarely got out. The men had headed off in good spirits, certain of scoring, all carrying condoms. As my Italian mate explained in his irresistible, lilting tones: ‘These women are of that certain age where they will view getting pregnant as fate, or God’s will, or some nonsense like that. I am taking no chances.’ I was tempted to put up the misogyny call, but being on the downhill side of forty, and living a lifestyle that was certainly not conducive to conceiving a c
hild, I myself could possibly have been tempted to view a surprise pregnancy as some miraculous sign from the Almighty.
Hook-ups could last a mere matter of hours, or a couple of weeks, or for the duration of the respective parties’ Kabul internment. And a small number managed to survive outside the theatre of war. When Lynchy left the year before, he walked away with not only a terrific TV show to add to his CV but a stunning wife in tow—a beautiful American woman, Joni, who had worked in business development.
My appointment as best man for their happy nuptials was nominal at best, as women aren’t actually allowed to witness official documents in Afghanistan. So, as we wandered from court house to court house with two male Afghan colleagues obtaining all the necessary approvals for their betrothal, I simply took photographs—only to have my camera stolen at the Thai restaurant where we held the hastily arranged reception.
My dear mates Dave and Sienna were the most unlikely hook-up I had ever witnessed. I think it had something to do with the fact that, when they first met, Dave was faithfully married with four grown children back in the States and Sienna, a Kiwi and twelve years Dave’s junior, was engaged to Dean, a British security contractor living in Kabul.
Dave was one of my longest-standing friends in Afghanistan. He was a regular at The Den when I worked there during my early days in Kabul, sneaking out of his compound every night with his two mates to arrive bang on my doorstep at 5pm. They were a funny trio, welcoming and warm when I was first finding my feet, and inevitably arguing over the bar tab as I attempted to shove them out at the end of the night.
For me, Dave epitomised mid-west America. He was an ex-army captain . . . A Republican . . . And he shared his Facebook account with his wife because his local church frowned on personal usage. He also carried around a photo of him and his missus wearing matching, hand-knitted, reindeer jumpers on Christmas Day. He dutifully sent home his entire pay packet to his wife each month, existing on a meagre $400 allowance that he dwindled away on drinking and a Thursday-night feast at the local Chinese. But, despite all this show, their union had obvious cracks, and Dave returned after more than one leave break troubled and distressed that his wife had dabbled in talk of a trial separation.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 12