Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  Mortenson slid into the clean, oatmeal-colored shalwar shirt, which was crisp and still warm from the iron. Then, modestly shielded by the knee-length shirttails, he pulled on his baggy new pants. He tied the azarband, the waiststring, with a tight bow and turned toward Manzoor for inspection.

  “Bohot Kharab!” very horrible, Manzoor pronounced. He lunged toward Mortenson, grabbed the azarband, which hung outside the infidel’s trousers, and tucked it inside the waistband. “It is forbidden to wear as such,” Manzoor said. Mortenson felt the tripwires that surrounded him in Pakistani culture—the rigid codes of conduct he was bound to stumble into—and resolved to try to avoid further explosions of offense.

  Manzoor polished his glasses with his own shirttail, revealing his modestly tied trousers, and inspected Mortenson’s outfit carefully. “Now you look 50 percent Pakistani,” he said. “Shall you try again to pray?”

  Manzoor shuttered his shop for the evening and led Mortenson outside. The tropical dusk was quickly tamping down the daylight, and with it, some of the heat. Mortenson walked arm in arm with the tailor, toward the tiled minaret of the GTS Mosque. On both sides of Kashmir Road men walked similarly in twos and threes past closed and closing shops. Since driving is frowned upon during evening prayer, traffic was unusually light.

  Two blocks before the intimidating minaret of the GTS Mosque, which Mortenson assumed to be their destination, Manzoor led him into the wide, dusty lot of a CalTex gas station, where more than a hundred men were bent to wudu, the ritual washing required before prayer. Manzoor filled a lota, or water jug, from a tap and instructed Mortenson in the strict order in which ablutions were to be performed. Imitating the tailor, Mortenson squatted and rolled up his pant legs and his sleeves, and began with the most unclean parts, splashing water over his left foot, then his right. He moved on to his left hand and was rinsing his right when Manzoor, bending over to refill the lota before washing his face, farted distinctly. Sighing, the tailor knelt and began his ablutions again with his left foot. When Mortenson did the same, he corrected him. “No. Only for me. I am unclean,” he explained.

  When his hands were again properly pure, the tailor pressed a finger to his left nostril then his right, blowing, and Mortenson again mirrored his actions. Around them, a cacophony of hawking and spitting accompanied half a dozen distant calls to prayer. Imitating Manzoor, Mortenson rinsed his ears, then carefully swished water throughout what Muslims consider humans’ holiest feature, the mouth, from which prayers ascend directly to Allah’s ears.

  For years, Mortenson had known, intellectually, that the word “Muslim” means, literally, “to submit.” And like many Americans, who worshipped at the temple of rugged individualism, he had found the idea dehumanizing. But for the first time, kneeling among one hundred strangers, watching them wash away not only impurities, but also, obviously, the aches and cares of their daily lives, he glimpsed the pleasure to be found in submission to a ritualized fellowship of prayer.

  Someone switched off the station’s generator, and attendants cloaked the gaudy gas pumps beneath modest sheets. Manzoor took a small white prayer cap from his pocket and crushed it flat so it would stay on Mortenson’s large head. Joining a row of men, Mortenson and Manzoor knelt on mats the tailor provided. Mortenson knew that beyond the wall they faced, where an enormous purple and orange sign advertised the virtues of CalTex gasoline, lay Mecca. He couldn’t help feeling that he was being asked to bow to the salesmanship and refining skills of Texas and Saudi oilmen, but he put his cynicism aside.

  With Manzoor he knelt and crossed his arms to address Allah respectfully. The men around him weren’t looking at the advertisement on the wall, he knew, they were looking inward. Nor were they regarding him. As he pressed his forehead against the still-warm ground, Greg Mortenson realized that, for the first moment during all his days in Pakistan, no one was looking at him as an outsider. No one was looking at him at all. Allah Akbhar, he chanted quietly, God is great, adding his voice to the chorus in the darkened lot. The belief rippling around him was strong. It was powerful enough to convert a gas station into a holy place. Who knew what other wonders of transformation lay ahead?

  Chapter 7

  Hard Way Home

  This harsh and splendid land

  With snow-covered rock mountains, cold-crystal streams,

  Deep forests of cypress, juniper and ash

  Is as much my body as what you see before you here.

  I cannot be separated from this or from you.

  Our many hearts have only a single beat.

  —from The Warrior Song of King Gezar

  ABDUL’S KNOCK CAME well before dawn. Mortenson had been lying awake, on his string bed, for hours. Sleep had been no match for the fear of all that, this day, could go wrong. He rose and opened the door, trying to make sense of the sight of a one-eyed man holding out a pair of highly polished shoes for his inspection.

  They were his tennis shoes. Abdul had clearly spent hours while Mortenson slept mending, scrubbing, and buffing his torn and faded Nikes, trying to transform them into something more respectable. Something a man setting out on a long and difficult journey might lace up with pride. Abdul had transformed himself for the occasion, too. His usually silvery beard was dyed deep orange from a fresh application of henna.

  Mortenson took his tea, then washed with a bucket of cold water and the last bit of the Tibet Snow brand soap he’d been rationing all week. His handful of belongings only half-filled his old duffel bag. He let Abdul sling it over his shoulder, knowing the firestorm of offense he’d encounter if he tried to carry it himself, and bid his rooftop sweatbox a fond good-bye.

  Conscious of his gleaming shoes, and seeing how much keeping up appearances pleased Abdul, Mortenson consented to hire a taxi for the trip to Rajah Bazaar. The black colonial-era Morris, flotsam abandoned in ‘Pindi by the ebbing tide of British empire, purled quietly along still-sleeping streets.

  Even in the faint light of the shuttered market square, they found their truck easily enough. Like most Bedfords in the country, little remained of the original 1940s vehicle that had once served as an army transport when Pakistan had been but a piece of British India. Most moving parts had been replaced half a dozen times by locally machined spares. The original olive paint, far too drab for this king of the Karakoram Highway, had been buried beneath a blizzard of decorative mirrors and metal lozenges. And every square inch of ungarnished surface area had been drowned out beneath an operatic application of “disco paint,” at one of Rawalpindi’s many Bedford workshops. Most of the brilliantly colored designs, in lime, gold, and lurid scarlet, were curlicues and arabesques consistent with Islam’s prohibition against representative art. But a life-sized portrait of cricket hero Imran Khan on the tailgate, holding a bat aloft like a scepter, was a form of idol worship that provoked such acute national pride that few Pakistanis, even the most devout, could take offense.

  Mortenson paid the taxi driver, then walked around the sleeping mammoth, searching for the truck’s crew, anxious to begin the day’s work. A sonorous rumbling led him to kneel underneath the truckbed, where three figures lay suspended in hammocks, two snoring in languid concert.

  The hazzan woke them before Mortenson could, wailing out of a minaret on the far side of the square at a volume that made no allowance for the hour. While the crew groaned, hauled themselves out of the hammocks, spat extravagantly, and lit the first of many cigarettes, Mortenson knelt with Abdul and prepared to pray. It seemed to Mortenson that Abdul, like most Muslims, had an internal compass permanently calibrated toward Mecca. Though they faced the uninspiring prospect of their lumber yard’s still-padlocked gates, Mortenson tried to look beyond his surroundings. With no water on hand, Abdul rolled up his pantlegs and sleeves and performed ritualized ablutions anyway, symbolically rubbing away impurities that couldn’t be washed. Mortenson followed, then folded his arms and bent to morning prayer. Abdul glanced at him critically, then nodded with approval. “So,” Morten
son said, “do I look like a Pakistani?”

  Abdul brushed the dirt from the American’s forehead, where it had been pressed to the cool ground. “Not Pakistan man,” he said. “But if you say Bosnia, I believe.”

  Ali, in another set of immaculate shalwar, arrived to unlock the gate of his business. Mortenson salaamed to him, then opened a small black student’s notebook he’d bought in the bazaar and began jotting some calculations. When the Bedford was fully loaded with his purchases, more than two-thirds of his twelve thousand dollars would already be spent. That left him only three thousand to pay laborers, to hire jeeps to carry the school supplies up narrow tracks to Korphe, and for Mortenson to live on until the school was completed.

  Half a dozen members of Ali’s extended family loaded the lumber first as the driver and his crew supervised. Mortenson counted the sheets of wood as they were wedged against the front of the truckbed, and confirmed they were in fact the reliable four-ply. He watched, contented, as a neat forest of two-by-fours grew on top of them.

  By the time the sun illuminated the market, the temperature was already well over a hundred degrees. With a symphonic clanging, shopkeepers rolled up or folded back their businesses’ metal gates. Pieces of the school threaded their way through the crowds toward the truck on porters’ heads, carried by human-powered rickshaws, motorcycle jeepneys, donkey carts, and another Bedford delivering one hundred bags of cement.

  It was hot work in the truckbed, but Abdul hovered over the crew, calling out the name of every item as it was stowed to Mortenson, who checked them off his list. Mortenson watched, with increasing satisfaction, as each of the forty-two different purchases he and Abdul had haggled for were neatly stowed, axes nestling against mason’s trowels, tucked together by a phalanx of shovels.

  By afternoon, a dense crowd had gathered around the Bedford as word spread that an enormous infidel in brown pajamas was loading a truck full of supplies for Muslim schoolchildren. Porters had to push through a ring five people thick to make their deliveries. Mortenson’s size-fourteen feet drew a steady stream of bouncing eyebrows and bawdy jokes from onlookers. Spectators shouted guesses at Mortenson’s nationality as he worked. Bosnia and Chechnya were deemed the most likely source of this large mangy-looking man. When Mortenson, with his rapidly improving Urdu, interrupted the speculation to tell them he was American, the crowd looked at his sweat-soaked and dirt-grimed shalwar, at his smudged and oily skin, and several men told him they didn’t think so.

  Two of the most precious items—a carpenter’s level and a weighted plumb line—were missing. Mortenson was sure he’d seen them delivered but he couldn’t find them in the rapidly filling truck. Abdul led the search with fervor, heaving bags of concrete aside until he found the spot where they’d slipped to the bottom. He rolled them inside a cloth and gravely instructed the driver to shelter the tools safely in the cab all the way to Skardu.

  By evening, Mortenson had checked off all forty-two items on his list. The mountain of supplies had reached a height of twenty feet and the crew labored to make the load secure before dark, stretching burlap sacking over the top and tying it down tightly with a webwork of thick ropes.

  As Mortenson climbed down to bid Abdul good-bye, the crowd pressed in on him, offering him cigarettes and handfuls of battered rupee notes for his school. The driver was impatient to leave and revved his engine, sending spouts of black diesel smoke out the truck’s twin stacks. Despite the noise and frenzy, Abdul stood perfectly still at the center of the crowd, performing a dua, a prayer for a safe journey. He closed his eye and drew his hands toward his face, fanning himself in Allah’s spirit. He stroked his hennaed beard and chanted a fervent plea for Mortenson’s wellbeing that was drowned by the blast of the Bedford’s horn.

  Abdul opened his eye and took Mortenson’s large dirty hand in both of his. He looked his friend over, noting the shoes he’d polished the evening before were already blackened with grime, as was the freshly tailored shalwar. “I think not a Bosnian, Greg Sahib,” he said, pounding Mortenson on the back. “Nowadays, you are the same as a Pakistan man.”

  Mortenson climbed on top of the truck and nodded to Abdul standing alone and exhausted at the edge of the crowd. The driver put the truck in gear. Allah Akbhar! the crowd shouted as one, Allah Akbhar! Mortenson held his arms aloft in victory and waved farewell until the small flame of his friend’s hennaed beard was extinguished by the surging crowd.

  Roaring west out of Rawalpindi, Mortenson rode on top of the Bedford. The driver, Mohammed, had urged him to sit in the smoky cab, but Mortenson was determined to savor this moment in style. The artists at the Bedford shop in ‘Pindi had welded a jaunty extension to the truckbed, which hung over the cab like a hat worn at a rakish angle. On top of this hat brim hovering over the rattling cab, straddling supplies, Mortenson made a comfortable nest on burlap and bales of hay that swayed high over the highway their speed swallowed. For company he had crates of snowy white chickens Mohammed had brought to sell in the mountains, and untamed Punjabi pop music that shrilled out of the Bedford’s open windows.

  Leaving the dense markets of Rawalpindi, the dry, brown countryside opened, took on a flush of green, and the foothills of the Himalaya beckoned from beyond the late-day heat haze. Smaller vehicles made way for the massive truck, swerving onto the verge with every blast from the Bedford’s air horns, then cheering when they saw the portrait of Imran Khan and his cricket bat passing them boldly by.

  Mortenson’s own mood felt as serene as the peaceful tobacco fields they sailed past, shimmering greenly like a wind-tossed tropical sea. After a hot week of haggling and fretting over every rupee, he felt he could finally relax. “It was cool and windy on top of the truck,” Mortenson remembers. “And I hadn’t been cool since I arrived in Rawalpindi. I felt like a king, riding high on my throne. And I felt I’d already succeeded. I was sitting on top of my school. I’d bought everything we needed and stuck to my budget. Not even Jean Hoerni could find fault with anything I’d done. And in a few weeks, I thought, the school would be built, and I could head home and figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so satisfied.”

  Mohammed hit the brakes heavily then, pulling off the road, and Mortenson had to clutch at the chicken crates to avoid being thrown down onto the hood. He leaned over the side and asked, in Urdu, why they were stopping. Mohammed pointed to a modest white minaret at the edge of a tobacco field, and the men streaming toward it. In the silence after the Punjabi pop had been hastily muffled, Mortenson heard the call of the hazzan carried clearly on the wind. He hadn’t known that the driver, who’d seemed so anxious to be on his way, was devout enough to stop for evening prayer. But there was much in this part of the world, he realized, that he barely understood. At least there would be plenty of opportunity, he told himself, searching for a foothold on the passenger door, to practice his praying.

  After dark, fortified with strong green tea and three plates of dhal chana, a curry of yellow lentils, from a roadside stand, Mortenson lay back in his nest on top of the truck and watched individual stars pinprick the fabric of twilight.

  Thirty kilometers west of Rawalpindi, at Taxila, they turned north off Pakistan’s principal thoroughfare toward the mountains. Taxila may have been a hub where Buddhism and Islam collided hundreds of years ago, before battling for supremacy. But for Mortenson’s swaying school on wheels, the collision of tectonic plates that had occurred in this zone millions of years earlier was more to the point.

  Here the plains met the mountains, this strand of the old Silk Road turned steep, and the going got unpredictable. Isabella Bird, an intrepid species of female explorer who could only have been produced by Victorian England, documented the difficulty of traveling from the plains of the Indian subcontinent into Baltistan, or “Little Tibet” as she referred to it, during her 1876 journey. “The traveler who aspires to reach the highlands cannot be borne along in a carriage or a hill cart,” she wrote. “For much of the wa
y he is limited to a foot pace and if he has regard to his horse he walks down all rugged and steep descents, which are many. ‘Roads,’” she wrote, adding sarcastic quotation marks, “are constructed with great toil and expense, as nature compels the road-maker to follow her lead, and carry his track along the narrow valleys, ravines, gorges, and chasms which she has marked out for him. For miles at a time this ‘road’… is merely a ledge above a raging torrent. When two caravans meet, the animals of one must give way and scramble up the mountain-side, where foothold is often perilous. In passing a caravan… my servant’s horse was pushed over the precipice by a loaded mule and drowned.”

  The Karakoram Highway (KKH), the road their Bedford rumbled up with a bullish snorting from its twin exhausts, was a costly improvement over the type of tracks Bird’s party traveled. Begun in 1958 by a newly independent Pakistan anxious to forge a transportation link with China, its ally against India, and in a perpetual state of construction ever since, the KKH is one of the most daunting engineering projects humans have ever attempted. Hewing principally to the rugged Indus River Gorge, the KKH has cost the life of one road worker for each of its four hundred kilometers. The “highway” was so impassable that Pakistani engineers were forced to take apart bulldozers, pack their components in on mules, and reassemble them before heavy work could begin. The Pakistani military tried flying in bulldozers on a Russian MI-17 heavy-lifting helicopter, but the inaugural flight, trying to maneuver through the high winds and narrow gorge, clipped a cliff and crashed into the Indus, killing all nine aboard.

  In 1968, the Chinese, anxious to create an easy route to a new market for their manufactured goods, to limit Soviet influence in Central Asia, and to cement a strategic alliance against India, offered to supervise and fund the completion of the thirteen-hundred-kilometer route from Kashgar, in southwestern China, to Islamabad. And after more than a decade of deploying an army of road workers, the newly christened “Friendship Highway” was declared complete in 1978, sticking its thumb squarely in India’s eye.