Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  Abdul’s knock was timed to the morning call of the muezzin. At four-thirty, as the electronic crackle of a microphone switched on, and in the amplified throat-clearing before slumbering Rawalpindi was called to prayer, Mortenson opened the door to his shed to find Abdul gripping the edges of the tea tray with great purpose.

  “There is a taxi waiting, but first tea, Greg Sahib.”

  “Taxi?” Mortenson said, rubbing his eyes.

  “For cement,” Abdul said, as if explaining an elementary arithmetic lesson to an unusually slow student. “How can you build even one school without the cement?”

  “You can’t, of course,” Mortenson said, laughing, and gulped at the tea, willing the caffeine to get to work.

  At sunrise they shot west, on what had once been the Grand Trunk Road, ribboning the twenty-six hundred kilometers from Kabul to Calcutta, but which had now been demoted to the status of National Highway One, since the borders with Afghanistan and India were so often closed. Their tiny yellow Suzuki subcompact seemed to have no suspension at all. And as they juddered over potholes at hundred kilometers an hour, Mortenson, wedged into the miniature backseat, struggled to keep his chin from smacking against his huddled knees.

  When they reached Taxila at six it was already hot. In 326 в.с, Alexander the Great had billeted his army here on the last, easternmost push of his troops to the edge of his empire. Taxila’s position, at the confluence of the East-West trade routes that would become the Grand Trunk Road, at the spot where it bisected the Silk Road from China, shimmering down switchbacks from the Himalaya, had been one of the strategic hubs of antiquity. Today’s Taxila contained the architectural flotsam of the ancient world. It had once been the site of Buddhism’s third-largest monastery and a base for spreading the Buddha’s teachings north into the mountains. But today, Taxila’s historic mosques were repaired and repainted, while the Buddhist shrines were moldering back into the rock slabs from which they’d been built. The dusty sprawl, hard by the brown foothills of the Himalaya, was a factory town now. Here the Pakistani army produced replicas of aging Soviet tanks. And four smoke plumes marked the four massive cement factories that provided the foundation for much of Pakistan’s infrastructure.

  Mortenson was inclined to enter the first one and begin bargaining, but again, Abdul scolded him like a naive student. “But Greg, Sahib, first we must take tea and discuss cement.”

  Balanced unsteadily on a toy stool, Mortenson blew on his fifth thimbleful of green tea and tried to decipher Abdul’s conversation with a trio of aged tea-shop customers, their white beards stained yellow with nicotine. They seemed to be conversing with great passion and Mortenson was sure the details about cement were pouring out.

  “Well,” Mortenson asked after he’d left a few dirty rupee notes on the table. “Which factory? Fetco? Fauji? Askari?”

  “Do you know they couldn’t say,” Abdul explained. “They recommended another tea shop where the owner’s cousin used to be in the cement business.”

  Two more tea shops and countless cups of green tea later, it was late morning before they had an answer. Fauji cement was reputed to be reasonable and not too adulterated with additives to crumble in Himalayan weather. Purchasing the hundred bags of cement Mortenson estimated the school would require was anticlimactic. Girding himself for hard bargaining, Mortenson was surprised when Abdul walked into the office of Fauji cement, meekly placed an order, and asked Mortenson for a hundred-dollar deposit.

  “What about the bargaining?” Mortenson asked, folding the receipt that promised one hundred bags would be delivered to the Khyaban Hotel within the week.

  Patiently regaling his pupil once again, Abdul lit a reeking Tander brand cigarette in the overheated taxi and waved away the smoke along with Mortenson’s worries. “Bargain? With cement can not. Cement business is a…” he searched for a word to make things clear to his slow-witted American “… Mafia. Tomorrow in Rajah Bazaar much bes, much bargain.”

  Mortenson wedged his knees under his chin and the taxi turned back toward ‘Pindi.

  At the Khyaban Hotel, pulling the shirt of his dust-colored shalwar over his head in the men’s shower room, Mortenson felt the material rip. He lifted the back of the shirt to examine it and saw that the fabric had torn straight down the middle from shoulder to waist. He removed as much road dust as he could with the trickling shower, then put his only set of Pakistani clothes back on. The ready-bought shalwar had served him well all the way to K2 and back but now he’d need another.

  Abdul intercepted Mortenson on the way to his room, tsk-tsking at the tear, and suggested they visit a tailor.

  They left the oasis of the Khyaban’s greenery and stepped out into ‘Pindi proper. Across the street, a dozen horse-drawn taxi-carts stood at the ready, horses foaming and stamping in the dusty heat while an elderly man with a hennaed beard haggled energetically over the price.

  Mortenson looked up and noticed for the first time the billboard painted in glowing primary colors at the swarming intersection of Kashmir and Adamjee roads. “Please patronize Dr. Azad,” it read, in English. Next to a crudely but energetically drawn skeleton with miniature skulls glowing in its lifeless eyes, Dr. Azad’s sign promised “No side effects!”

  The tailor didn’t advertise. He was tucked into a concrete hive of shops off Haider Road that either had been decaying for a decade, or was waiting forlornly for construction to be completed. Manzoor Khan may have been squatting in a six-foot-wide storefront, before a fan, a few bolts of cloth and a clothesmaker’s dummy, but he exuded an imperial dignity. The severe black frames of his eyeglasses and his precisely trimmed white beard gave him a scholarly air as he drew a measuring tape around Mortenson’s chest, looked startled at the results, measured again, then jotted numbers on a pad.

  “Manzoor, Sahib, wishes to apologize,” Abdul explained, “but your shalwar will need six meters of cloth, while our countrymen take only four. So he must charge you fifty rupees more. I think he says true,” Abdul offered.

  Mortenson agreed and asked for two sets of shalwar kamiz. Abdul climbed up onto the tailor’s platform and energetically pulled out bolts of the brightest robin’s egg blue and pistachio green. Mortenson, picturing the dust of Baltistan, insisted on two identical sets of mud brown. “So the dirt won’t show,” he told a disappointed Abdul.

  “Sahib, Greg Sahib,” Abdul pleaded, “much better for you to be the clean gentleman. For many men will respect you.”

  Mortenson pictured the village of Korphe, where the population survived through the interminable winter months in the basements of their stone and mud homes, huddled with their animals around smoldering yak dung fires, in their one and only set of clothing.

  “Brown will be fine,” Mortenson said.

  As Manzoor accepted Mortenson’s deposit, a muezzin’s wail pierced the hive of small shops. The tailor quickly put the money aside and unfurled a faded pink prayer mat. He aligned it precisely.

  “Will you show me how to pray?” Mortenson asked, impulsively.

  “Are you a Muslim?”

  “I respect Islam,” Mortenson said, as Abdul looked on, approvingly.

  “Come up here,” Manzoor said, delighted, beckoning Mortenson onto the cluttered platform, next to a headless dummy, pierced with pins. “Every Muslim must wash before prayer,” he said. “I’ve already made wudu so this I will show you the next time.” He smoothed out the bolt of brown cloth Mortenson had chosen next to his mat and instructed the American to kneel beside him. “First, we must face Mecca, where our holy prophet, peace be upon him, rests,” Monzoor said. “Then we must kneel before the All-Merciful Allah, blessed be his name.”

  Mortenson struggled to kneel in the tailor’s tiny cubbyhole and accidentally kicked the dummy, which waggled over him like a disapproving deity.

  “No!” said Manzoor, pincering Mortenson’s wrists in his strong hands and folding Mortenson’s arms together. “We do not appear before Allah like a man waiting for a bus. We submit res
pectfully to Allah’s will.”

  Mortenson held his arms stiffly crossed and listened as Manzoor began softly chanting the essence of all Islamic prayer, the Shahada, or bearing witness.

  “He is saying Allah is very friendly and great,” Abdul said, trying to be helpful.

  “I understood that.”

  “Kha-mosh! Quiet!” Manzoor Khan said firmly. He bent stiffly forward from the waist and prostrated his forehead against his prayer mat.

  Mortenson tried to emulate him, but bent only partway forward, stopping when he felt the flaps of his torn shirt gaping inelegantly and the breath of the fan on his bare back. He looked over at his tutor. “Good?” he asked.

  The tailor studied Mortenson, his eyes taking his pupil in piercingly through the thick black frames of his glasses. “Try again when you pick up your shalwar kamiz,” he said, rolling his mat back up into a tight cylinder. “Perhaps you will improve.”

  His glass box on the roof of the Khyaban gathered the sun’s full force all day and sweltered all night. During daylight, the sound of mutton being disjointed with a cleaver echoed unceasingly from the butcher shop below. When Mortenson strained to sleep, water gurgled mysteriously in pipes below his bed, and high on the ceiling, a fluorescent tube stayed unmercifully on. Mortenson had searched every surface inside and outside the room for a switch and found none. Thrashing against damp, well-illuminated sheets some hours before dawn, he had a sudden insight. He stood on the rope bed, swaying and balancing, then reached carefully toward the fixture and succeeded in unscrewing the tube. In complete darkness, he slept blissfully until Abdul’s first firm knock.

  At sunrise, the Rajah Bazaar was a scene of organized chaos that Mortenson found thrilling. Though operating with only his left eye, Abdul took Mortenson’s arm and threaded him neatly through a shifting maze of porters carrying swaying bales of wire on their heads and donkey carts rushing to deliver blocks of burlap-covered ice before the already formidable heat shrank their value.

  Around the periphery of a great square were shops selling every implement he could imagine related to the erection and destruction of buildings. Eight shops in a row offered nearly identical displays of sledgehammers. Another dozen seemed to trade only in nails, with different grades gleaming from coffin-sized troughs. It was thrilling, after so much time spent in the abstraction of raising money and gathering support, to see the actual components of his school sitting arrayed all around him. That nail there might be the final one pounded into a completed Korphe school.

  But before he let himself get too giddy, he reminded himself to bargain hard. Under his arm, wrapped in newspaper, was the shoebox-sized bundle of rupees he’d received at the money-changer for ten of his hundred-dollar bills.

  They began at a lumber yard, indistinguishable from the almost-identical businesses flanking it on both sides, but Abdul was firm in his choice. “This man is the good Muslim,” he explained.

  Mortenson let himself be led down a long, narrow hallway, through a thicket of wooden roof struts leaning unsteadily against the walls. He was deposited on a thick pile of faded carpets next to Ali, the proprietor, whose spotless lavender shalwar seemed a miracle amidst the dust and clamor of his business. Mortenson felt more self-conscious than ever about his own torn and grease-spotted shalwar, which Abdul had at least stitched together until his new clothes were ready. Ali apologized that tea was not yet brewed and sent a boy running for three bottles of warm Thums Up brand orange soda while they waited.

  For two crisp hundred-dollar bills, Abdul Rauf, an architect whose office consisted of a cubicle in the lobby of the Khyaban hotel, had drawn plans of the L-shaped five-room school Mortenson envisioned. In the margins, he had detailed the materials constructing the two-thousand-square-foot structure would require. Lumber was certain to be the school’s single greatest expense. Mortenson unrolled the plans and read the architect’s tiny printing: “Ninety-two eight-foot two-by-fours. Fifty-four sheets of four-by-eight-foot plywood sheeting.” For this the architect had allotted twenty-five hundred dollars. Mortenson handed the plans to Abdul.

  As he sipped at the tepid orange soda through a leaky straw, Mortenson watched Abdul reading the items aloud and winced as Ali’s practiced fingers tapped the calculator balanced on his knee.

  Finally, Ali adjusted the crisp white prayer cap on his head and stroked his long beard before naming a figure. Abdul shot up out of his cross-legged crouch and clasped his forehead as if he’d been shot. He began shouting in a wailing, chanting voice ripe with insult. Mortenson, with his remarkable language skills, already understood much everyday Urdu. But the curses and lamentations Abdul performed contained elaborate insults Mortenson had never heard. Finally, as Abdul wound down and bent over Ali with his hands cocked like weapons, Mortenson distinctly heard Abdul ask Ali if he was a Muslim or an infidel. This gentleman honoring him by offering to buy his lumber was a hamdard, a saint come to perform an act of zakat, or charity. A true Muslim would leap at the chance to help poor children instead of trying to steal their money.

  Throughout Abdul’s performance Ali’s face remained serenely disengaged. He sipped at his Thums Up cozily, settling in for however long Abdul’s diatribe lasted.

  Tea arrived before he could be troubled to respond to Abdul’s charges. All three added sugar to the fragrant green tea served in unusually fine bone china cups, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the faint clinking of spoons as they stirred.

  Ali took a critical sip, nodded with approval, and then called down the hall with instructions. Abdul, still scowling, placed his teacup by his crossed legs untasted. Ali’s faintly mustachioed teenage son appeared bearing two cross-sections of two-by-four. He placed them on the carpet on both sides of Mortenson’s teacup like bookends.

  Swirling his tea in his mouth like an aged Bordeaux, Ali swallowed, then began a professorial lecture. He indicated the block of wood on Mortenson’s right. Its surface was violated by dark knots and curlicues of grease. Porcupiney splinters stood out on either end. He lifted the wood, turned it lengthways like a telescope, and peered at Mortenson through wormholes. “Local process,” he said in English.

  Ali indicated the other length of wood. “English process,” he said. It was free of knots, and trimmed on a diagonal with a neat rip cut. Ali held it under Mortenson’s nose with one hand and fanned his other hand underneath, conjuring the Kaghan Valley, the pristine pine forest from which it had recently departed.

  Ali’s son returned with two sheets of plywood, which he placed atop stacked cinder blocks. He took his sandals off and climbed on top of them. He couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred pounds, but the first sheet buckled beneath him, bowing with an ominous screetch. The second sheet flexed only a few inches. At Ali’s request the boy began jumping up and down to drive home the point. The wood still stood firm.

  “Three-ply,” Ali said to Mortenson, with a disgusted curl of his lips, refusing even to glance toward the first sheet. “Four-ply,” he said beaming with pride at the platform where his son still bounced safely.

  He switched back to Urdu. Following his exact language wasn’t necessary. Obviously, he was explaining, one could acquire lumber at a pittance. But what sort of lumber? There was the unsavory product other unscrupulous merchants might sell. Go ahead and build a school with it. It might last one year. Then a tender boy of seven would be reciting from the Koran one day with his classmates when the floorboards would give way with a fearful crack and his arteries would be severed by this offensive and unreliable substance. Would you sentence a seven-year-old to bleed slowly to death because you were too frugal to purchase quality lumber?

  Mortenson drained a second cup of tea and fidgeted on the dusty pile of carpets while the theatrics continued. Three times Abdul stalked toward the door as if to leave and three times Ali’s asking price dropped a notch. Mortenson upended the empty pot. Well into the second hour, Mortenson found the limit of his patience. He stood and motioned for Abdul to walk out with
him. There were three dozen similar negotiations they’d have to navigate if he hoped to load a truck and leave for Baltistan the day after tomorrow and he felt he couldn’t spare another minute.

  “Baith, baith! Sit, sit!” Ali said, grasping Mortenson’s sleeve. “You are the champion. He has already crushed my price!”

  Mortenson looked at Abdul. “Yes, he says true. Greg Sahib. You will pay only eighty-seven thousand rupees.” Mortenson crunched the numbers in his head—twenty-three hundred dollars. “I told you,” Abdul said. “He is the good Muslim. Now we will make a contract.”

  Mortenson struggled to smother his impatience as Ali called for another pot of tea.

  In the late afternoon of the second full day of haggling, Mortenson, swollen with tea, sloshed toward the Khyaban with Abdul on the back of a cart pulled by a small horse that looked even more exhausted than they felt. His shalwar pocket was crammed with receipts for hammers, saws, nails, sheets of corrugated tin roofing, and lumber worthy of supporting schoolchildren. All the materials would be delivered beginning at dawn the next day to the truck they’d hired for the three-day trip up the Karakoram Highway.

  Abdul had proposed they take a taxi back to the hotel. But Mortenson, stung by the quick depletion of his stack of rupees every time he paid another deposit, insisted on economizing. The two-mile trip took more than an hour, through streets fugged with exhaust from black, unmufflered Morris taxis.

  At the hotel, Mortenson rinsed off the dust of the day’s bargaining by dumping bucket after bucket of lukewarm water over his head, not bothering to remove his shalwar, then hurried to the tailor’s hoping to retrieve his new clothes before the shop closed for Friday evening prayers.

  Manzoor Khan was smoothing Mortenson’s completed shalwar with a coal-fired iron, and humming along to a woman’s voice wailing an Urdu pop song. The tinny tune echoed through the complex from a cobbler’s radio down the hall, accompanied by the melancholy sound of steel shutters being pulled down at day’s end.