Magic Bus

by Rory Maclean

  19. I Can Hear Music

  I need to see the Buddhas, or at least the space filled by their absence. The HiAce minibus heads north from Kabul through the Ghorband valley – which Dervla Murphy likened to the Garden of Eden – towards Nuristan, the land of light, then hangs a left over the Shebar pass. Eight dusty, bone-crunching hours grind away covering the 140 miles, rising on fantastic corkscrew roads from the fertile plateau into the frozen splendour of the mountains.

  We reach Bamiyan at sunset, flaxen light spilling down its long, lentil-red valley, glancing the sheer sandstone cliffs. A steppe eagle soars above the one-street town. Beyond the lines of silver-barked sinjit trees, the cliff face is pitted with myriad caves, once the cells of monks, and my eyes are drawn toward the gigantic gaping alcoves.

  Bamiyan was a waystation and pilgrimage site on the Silk Road as well as on the hippie trail. For centuries, Hellenic, Persian, Hindu and Chinese culture were woven together here like an intricate Afghan rug. Buddhism had swept west from India along the same road that the Intrepids trekked east. The two Buddhas, the tallest standing statues ever made of him, were carved from the rock face around the sixth century AD. In 632, the visiting Chinese monk Hsuen Tsung noted the town’s ten convents, its one thousand priests and the statues with ‘golden hues which sparkle on every side, their precious ornaments dazzling the eye by their brightness’.

  A couple of centuries passed before Islam sent the monks packing from the valley. The great carved figures, their faces covered with gold masks and their niches painted with symbolism borrowed from Greek, Indian and Sassanid art, went largely unmolested for 1,500 years. In the sixties, the Intrepids recognized Bamiyan as the sanctuary it once had been, sleeping in tents and yurts, swimming in the blue lakes of Band-e Amir, at ease in a meeting point of East and West.

  But in March 2001, the ‘un-Islamic’ statues were shelled with tank fire and blasted by dynamite on the order of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Afghan soldiers are said to have refused to undertake the demolition and a special contingent of Sudanese, Chechens and Arabs had to be sent from Kabul. But the story has a ring of untruth to me. It will always be difficult for Afghans to accept that the greatest damage to the country was inflicted by themselves.

  Robert Byron would not have missed the statues. ‘Neither has any artistic value,’ he wrote in The Road to Oxiana. ‘A lot of monastic navvies were given picks and told to copy some frightful semi-Hellenistic image from India or China. The result has not even the dignity of labour.’ Bruce Chatwin likened the larger Buddha to an upright whale in a dry dock. Carla called them stocky, large-footed and clumsy.

  But at dusk, when the shadows are deepest, a trick of the light now seems to trace in their place a refined outline, ethereal and freed of what Byron called their ‘monstrous, flaccid bulk’. The immense trompe-l’oeil illustrates the enduring ethos of the valley; the glories that men can create – and destroy – through faith. The Buddhas seem most poignant in their absence.

  I wander towards the rubble. A path skirts a ruined tank, crosses a stream, then rises to the gaping holes. A boy soldier takes my hand and leads me by torchlight into a warren of chambers linked by passages and stairways. I’m astonished by the number of caves, as if the mountain’s face had been peppered by gunshot, which of course it was. Above the plastered walls and ruined arches no painted ceiling remains intact. The fragments of golden-hued fresco are blackened by smoke.

  I climb on to a shale ledge near the top of the niche and remember that Rudy, driver of the Last Silver Dart, often stopped in Bamiyan. Once, he jumped on to the large Buddha’s head. In one of the highest cells, Penny indulged in the Bam-bam-bamiyan, read Siddhartha and gazed out from the sheer rockface cut like the end of a loaf of bread towards the spectral peaks.

  Now I sit on the edge, my feet dangling two hundred feet above the ground, thinking not of what I’ve seen but what I couldn’t see on my trip: Penny’s imaginary candles, the stars behind the new moon, the museum’s pulverized Bodhisattva, the vanished Buddhas.

  In my shoulder bag is Penny’s Siddhartha. In my hand it falls open to a marked paragraph. ‘When someone is seeking,’ I read as she read, ‘it happens quite easily that he sees only the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.’

  As the sun sets behind the Hindu Kush, an Apache helicopter flies overhead and I hear singing.

  Only now do I notice that the cliff’s lower flanks are not deserted. A dozen families are living in the caves, poor refugees scraping out an existence on half-measures of rice and a couple of chickens. Boys scavenge firewood on the plain to feed glowing cooking fires. A girl lays out her father’s prayer mat by a mud doorway. A grey-moustached elder exudes an aura of dignified old age as he scoops trickles of water for his ablutions.

  I step toward them, beating a path along the hillside with the soldier, not wishing to intrude but anxious to find the source of the singing. I’ve heard no live music since leaving Turkey.

  Over an arm of scree I see the boy. He is sitting quite alone in the dirt, drawing stones toward him. I watch as he gathers them into a square of walls. When he finishes, he places a threadbare toy figure inside his building. Then he knocks it down with sudden violence, scattering the stones across the rough slope.

  I crouch beside the boy, who is no more than five or six years old, as he begins again to collect the stones. For a moment he ignores me.

  ‘What do the words mean?’ I ask the soldier. The song has a curious ring of familiarity.

  ‘Words are English,’ the soldier replies. ‘You not speak English?’

  The singing is phonetic, a feat of memory, and I don’t recognize a single word.

  ‘But what is he building?’ I ask the soldier.

  ‘Hose,’ the boy answers me. ‘Cookie hose.’

  ‘Cookie house?’ I say.

  In Kabul I heard a story about a child who became terrified of aircraft after the Coalition bombardment. Every time a plane passed overhead he raised an imaginary gun and pretended to shoot at it. To ease his fear his mother told him that aircraft now dropped sweets instead of bombs. But cookies?

  ‘Cookie hose on TV,’ the boy adds unexpectedly.

  An hour later, at my one-room hotel-restaurant the owner braises kebabs, dropping an egg and meat pieces into a sizzling metal platter set on the coals. With blackened fingers he serves the oily kadai to my table-cum-bed. A bullet round has pierced its frame, leaving a flower of torn metal at my elbow.

  ‘TV?’ he says when I relate the story of the singing, housebuilding child. ‘You talk to Sanjar. He make TV. You want more chips?’

  In the morning I search out Sanjar, which doesn’t take long. His electronic shop lies across the road. Behind the dusty window are stacks of televisions, both new and prehistoric, as well as tinny transistors and a rental library of Bollywood epics. On the wall are Sony schematic diagrams and fading pictures of Ahamd Zahir, the Afghan Elvis. Beyond a curtain is the studio.

  Sanjar is Hazara, a tall and stringy young man without an ounce of fat on him. His light-brown hair is curly and, behind his dark glasses, his hazel eyes are optimistic. He never stops moving, yet he radiates a calmness, a kind of peace that can’t be touched. In the shop – while upgrading a CD machine into a DVD player – he tells me that he is a trained engineer, which means he worked one winter in a relative’s shop in Peshawar. He is probably all of twenty years old. Survival in Afghanistan depends on resourcefulness, on rising to the occasion and on the occasional lie.

  A couple of months ago, an aid worker stopped by the shop with a small, broken video camera, he tells me. Sanjar hadn’t been able to repair it – at least he said he couldn’t do it – and, as the model was outdated, the foreigner gave it to him. Over the next few evenings, he ma
naged to fix the camera, checking it out by recording Bamiyan’s street life: his fellow shop-keepers, the rheumy-eyed beggars, kids playing in the ruins of the bazaar.

  The repair was fortuitous, but even more rewarding for Sanjar was the excitement of neighbours seeing themselves on screen. The valley, with a population of 50,000 souls, has no local TV station. There is a radio operator – the upstart Radio Bamyaan – but Sanjar decided the town needed community television. So he set to work to build it.

  ‘Just like in ET,’ he tells me. ‘I collected stuff together and start to send messages.’

  With two cycle rims, a discarded satellite receiver, a pair of VCR recorders and twenty-five transistors, Sanjar launched his backroom station. Behind his shop curtain he set up a table with a world map as background and two 250-watt bulbs for lighting. He updated a vintage Soviet military transmitter, which had been discarded by the state broadcaster, then carried a battery-powered TV set around town to test its reception. Additional condensers and diodes increased its range from a hundred metres to almost three kilometres.

  Every evening, Sanjar broadcasts two hours of programming, except on the occasions when his generator breaks down. Local traders are given free air-time, as is the town’s doctor, to disseminate information on physiotherapy and iodine deficiency. Village maliks air public announcements. Spare air-time is filled by popping any convenient DVD into the player. Friends, Rambo and all of Sanjay Khan’s films are perennial favourites. Plans for a phone-in programme, offering viewers somewhere to turn to for advice outside the family or mosque, are on hold until more people have telephones.

  He tells me the most popular spot by far is We Are Bamiyan. With his hand-me-down Panasonic, Sanjar wanders the valley’s lanes and orchards, filming the harvest and first day of school, quizzing locals about their hopes and demands. In his hurried yet calm manner he draws out men – and women – by asking them how, if they were the mayor or a government minister, they would solve this or that problem. Back at the shop he edits the tapes, adding titles and background music. His aim is both to make television a friend of the viewer and, borrowing a phrase, to encourage truth and reconciliation.

  ‘For twenty-seven years, people were just surviving,’ he tells me. ‘Now they see the newest DVD movies and want to have a kind of Western life. This brings new pressures and problems.’

  Sanjar also includes children in his programme. Most young Afghans have only ever known war. By one calculation, two-thirds of children have witnessed the killing of a relative, friend or neighbour. The legacy of loss, compounded by displacement and poverty, has scared millions of vulnerable hearts and minds.

  To encourage young people to talk about their experiences, Sanjar arranged and recorded a kishranu jirga, or junior assembly. He brought ten boys together and asked one of them to lie on the floor on a large piece of paper. Sanjar drew a line around the body, then instructed the boys to decorate that outline with crayons and chalk.

  When they finished, Sanjar – his running camera mounted on a recycled machine-gun tripod – pointed at the drawing’s eyes and asked each of them in turn, ‘What do you like to see?’ and ‘What don’t you like to see?’ He wrote down their responses on the sheet of paper.

  Next he pointed at the ears, then the nose, asking again what the boys liked and didn’t like to hear and smell. He carried on with other parts of the body; the mouth for eating and speaking, the hands for doing, the feet for going, the head for thinking, the heart for feeling.

  ‘I don’t like tasting bad water,’ said one boy. ‘I like the smell of the mosque on Friday,’ reported another. ‘I cried seeing my father die,’ responded the smallest boy.

  ‘Where do you feel pain?’ he then asked, and each child told a story about their fears and the family or friends who helped them to cope. All the children’s ideas were recorded on the sheet around the life-size drawn figure.

  The next morning, he hung the drawing in the town office to stress its importance. Only one neighbour thought the kishranu jirga was a waste of time. ‘If we beat children with a stick,’ he said, ‘it helps them to understand everything.’ The next day, Sanjar repeated the exercise with ten girls.

  ‘This is what I do,’ he tells me simply, humbly, not pausing while he drafts the day’s news. ‘A good Muslim should help his community. God chose me to bring television to Bamiyan.’

  He has no operating licence, which irritates the state broadcaster RTA. Twice, Sanjar went to Kabul to try to reassure them that his little station benefits the community. The local warlord also threatened to shut him down, arriving in person at the shop with half a dozen armed bodyguards.

  ‘Of course I must modify my content from time to time,’ he admits. ‘Afghanistan was ruined by Pakistan, by Russia, but most of all by ourselves. We are left with only one set of clothes, one mouthful of food, one last chance. Islam says that everyone carries their own burden. You can’t be damned by Adam and you can’t be saved by Isa – your Jesus. We each must make our own life now.’ Sanjar smiles, then looks at the clock. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’

  That day I take in the town. The Hazara, who claim descent from the Mongols, are Afghanistan’s largest Shia community. The Taliban, as Sunni rulers, considered them to be heretics. ‘Hazaras are not Muslim,’ the governor of Mazar-e Sharif once claimed. ‘They are infidels.’ During the civil war, Taliban forces blockaded the poor, drought-stricken province for a year and, when Bamiyan surrendered in August 1998, they killed 6,000 residents. Houses were burnt and fields sprayed with chemicals. Men were beheaded or shot in the testicles. Women and children were loaded into metal shipping-containers without food or water and driven around the country until they died. The bazaar was put to the torch and smoke had enveloped the whole valley, blocking out the sun.

  I climb in the cool sunshine past the salt and wheat shops, back toward the Buddhas’ niches, thinking about Sanjar and his ambition to rise above the bitter betrayals. Near the Bamiyan Hotel, a band of Korean tourists snap photographs of the rubble.

  On a hill flank beneath the sandstone cliff, the singing child sits cross-legged in the dirt, building then destroying his ‘cookie’ house. I listen to him for a moment and then, like a window of light opening in the sky, I recognize the words.

  ‘Sunny day, sweepin’ the clouds away…’

  ‘Cookie?’ I say to him. ‘Cookie Monster?’

  His flat Asiatic features crease into an alarmed smile and he laughs, delighted to be understood at last.

  ‘On my way to where the air is sweet,’ he sings on.

  I join him for the next line. After all, I grew up with the programme. ‘Can you tell me how to get…’

  And I saw the pirated DVD copy in Sanjar’s shop.

  ‘… how to get to Sesame Street.’

  Pakistan

  20. Games People Play

  I’m at the frontier, swept up in a Koranic scene, pressed between praying refugees, tired-eyed traders and half-starved dogs, herded by soldiers through a propitious gate.

  I slipped out of Kabul this morning, leaving behind a bit of my heart, carrying my small rucksack of nascent ideas, driving towards Jalalabad and the dirty white Safed Koh mountains. As if to reflect my mood, the taxi outran the hard-skinned and reptilian landscape. Rough ranges of lizard hills, with scaly flanks and scalloped backs, rose shoulder to shoulder above the burnt-ochre plateau. The mountains seemed ready to shake their snow-capped heads, to lift their foothill tails and lash out at the car. But like the Intrepids before me, I sprinted ahead to find a new way forward.

  Ten minutes ago, I emerged from that primeval terrain into this crush of men, animals and machines. A mother pulled her headscarf over her reddened lips and a pale baby. A high-sided truck hauled home a whole village and its single buffalo. A detachment of Khyber Rifles paused in their search of an aid convoy to drop to their knees and pray. The Torkham checkpoint marks the second great historical border of the trail. Behind me lay the Turkish and Pe
rsian empires, ahead spreads the Indian world. On the subcontinent live one-fifth of humanity. Here, four of the world’s great religions – Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and, oldest of them all, Hinduism – were born. Here, too, the twentieth-century Islamic revival first took root. I’m on the threshold of a uniquely spiritual land, waiting beneath stony grey-brown mountains in the midday heat for my ride into Pakistan.

  ‘Homeland of Muslims?’ roars Iqbal, finding me in a tea shop bent over my notes, writing with new confidence. ‘By the grace of God, you are a dreamer, sir. I am obliged to inform you that Pakistan is no Kingdom Come.’ He drops his voice in sudden melodrama to hiss, ‘It is a heavenly nightmare.’

  Canadian friends in Islamabad have sent their driver to collect me. Big-bellied and jocular, Iqbal is not what I expected. With good humour and stale breath, he sweeps me into the LandCruiser. He tucks the dashboard’s CD plate beneath an embroidery of the Prophet’s teachings, unleashes the horn and accelerates away from the Durand Line. I feel as if I’ve stepped into the jovial pages of an eighties travel romp.

  ‘I will go further,’ he ventures, cutting in front of an oncoming Afghan bus. ‘My Pakistan, which was born with such high hopes, has become a whore.’

  Iqbal is lucid and charming, a frank fiftysomething with piercing brown eyes and an air of urgency that suggests any delay might cause an explosion. His crisp clothes and remarkable colonial English are immaculate. Only his corpulence seems to weigh on him, as does his back, the consequence, he claims, of too often ‘lifting the legs’.