The Sewing Circles of Herat

by Christina Lamb

  The place where I was staying was not really a guesthouse, just an empty house abandoned by Taliban and commandeered by one of the Karzai cousins, in which myself and an American TV crew from CBS had landed up. It was in the new part of town near the Red Mosque (no longer red, but cream and turquoise as the Taliban had repainted it), and it was a peaceful area of wide avenues away from the crowds and dirt. There was no electricity, often for days at a time, and sometimes no water, but it had a small army of guards who sat round a fire outside, and every time we paid rent, new things appeared, first carpets, then curtains, a plastic table and chairs, paraffin heaters, potted red and pink geraniums and eventually even a roaring log fire, making it almost homely.

  It also had a talented if rather languid cook called Humayun who was such a late-riser that breakfast was long after we had all set off for the day. He was a sensitive soul with long delicate fingers who had somehow decided that his destiny was to be a pastry chef; a job there was little if any call for in Afghanistan where it was hard to find butter or sugar and most people survived on nan bread. In the meantime from the limited produce available in Kandahar bazaar, he managed to concoct wonderful spicy dishes of tomato and aubergine, which he ate with us. He was waiting with lunch when I arrived.

  ‘I’m sorry Humayun, I’ve just been to the stadium and it’s put me off eating,’ I explained, toying with my food, knowing how moody he got if we didn’t eat everything. ‘I can’t believe the awful things the Taliban used to do.’

  Humayun cleared his own plate and helped himself to more. ‘Executions were good,’ he said, heaping forkfuls of stewed aubergine into his mouth. ‘I went a couple of times. I saw the execution of a woman who had shot her husband and the amputation of the hand of a robber. Another time I saw a man hanged who had been stealing lots of sheep.’

  ‘Didn’t you find it shocking?’

  ‘These people were criminals and deserved to be hanged. Under the Taliban you could leave a bar of gold outside your house and no one would take it and you could roam the streets at 2 a.m. and be perfectly safe. Now if we didn’t have ten guards here even this plastic chair would be taken. Already last week the owner of a gold jewellery shop and his son were shot dead on their way home just for his gold chain and watch. Things were better before.’

  Humayun’s defence of executions turned out to be a fairly common view in Kandahar. Unlike Herat, Kandahar had always been a conservative place, and a month after the Taliban surrender, their main stronghold and spiritual heartland seemed – perhaps unsurprisingly – still a city of Taliban.

  I had arrived in the town well after sunset, coming through the arch that was all that remained of the city walls much later than I had planned because thick snow had blocked the Khojak Pass from Pakistan. The only hotel in town, the grimy Noor Jahan, already had four to a room so I stopped at a chai-khana on the main street to enquire about places to stay. Sitting cross-legged on wood and string charpoys under a large canopy, drinking glasses of tea from small blue enamelled pots, were a crowd of men in black turbans with kohl-rimmed eyes who regarded me with hostility, in between puffing at their water pipes.

  ‘Taliban!’ whispered my driver Hakim, ‘better we go.’ It was getting near curfew so he announced that I would have to stay with his family and whisked me off through a maze of alleyways between earthen-walled compounds, the way getting narrower and narrower until eventually we had to abandon the car and walk. The only light was the glow of the swollen yellow moon above and I bumped my head as I followed Hakim through a low archway into a courtyard and then up a few steps to a typical Pashtun house with barrel-vaulted roof.

  The house belonged to Hakim’s father-in-law Mohammed Daoud, a white-haired former mujaheddin commander with a noble nose who stared fiercely ahead as Hakim apologised for the humble surroundings. I was taken to meet the women who were giggling and self-conscious, then embarrassed me by presenting me with a gold-tasselled white handkerchief. I had nothing to offer them except half a jar of Nescafé, which I handed over rather grudgingly, knowing that I would miss the coffee in the mornings. A young girl with a pink headscarf framing her gipsy face produced a tin bowl of warm water for me to wash, trembling so much that most of it spilled out as she led me to the ‘bathroom’ – a small second courtyard off the first. The ground felt rather soft and, needing to relieve myself after the long drive, I shone my torch around in vain for the usual hole in the ground. Then I noticed a spade and the little brown deposits all around and realised with a sinking feeling what it was I was standing in.

  We ate dinner seated on cushions in a windowless room under the stairs. The room was also used for sleeping, judging by the pile of quilts in a corner. The young girl brought in an oil lamp and one of Mohammed Daoud’s sons came in bearing trays of qabli rice decorated with raisins, almonds and shredded carrot; mutton bones in a porridge of nan bread soaked in meat juice, and bowls of gristly meatballs, as well as a large jug of curd drink, all of which he laid out on a sheet on the floor.

  We had just started eating when there was a knock on the door, followed by another, then another. The neighbouring men had all come to see the firangi, the foreign woman, greeting Mohammed Daoud by pressing him to each side of their chests, as was their tradition, then laying their Kalashnikovs against the wall as they joined in the feast. For a while there was silence apart from eating, and an occasional popping noise as someone gobbed into the blue spittoon, then a young boy came in, deftly pulled the four corners of the cloth together with all the remaining food inside and tied it in a bundle. Tea and a hookah pipe were brought in, and the men leaned back on their cushions, regarding me intently.

  Once I told them I had been to Kandahar before, during the jihad, the ice was broken and we discussed the commanders I had travelled with and what had happened to them. When I said I had known Bor Jan, the commander who became a founding member of the Taliban then was killed, one of them produced a photograph from his pocket of Bor Jan against a backdrop of flowers, which he insisted I kept. As was common among Pashtuns, getting information took a long time because each mention of someone new would involve enumerating all their forenames. The talk then moved on to Mohammed Daoud’s son who was due to arrive from Quetta. His right hand had been chopped off by the Taliban after he had borrowed money from Haji Lalik, the city’s biggest moneydealer, then been accused of stealing it from a moneychanger’s shop.

  Bor Jan.

  ‘They put a hood over his face, tied a cable round his wrist then cut it off,’ said the old man. ‘It was in the stadium in front of everyone. When he took off the hood and saw his hand on the ground he fainted. He was a builder, a brickmaker but what good is a builder with one hand? We have found out who made the accusation and asked for compensation but he has not agreed. Under Pashtunwali we have a code of an eye for an eye. Only a weak person wouldn’t take revenge. If my son doesn’t then his son will.’

  It became clear from the conversation that everyone in the city was suspicious of everyone else. To survive and have a decent life in Kandahar it seemed many of the city’s residents had become collaborators just as thousands did in Second World War France and Holland, only in the Kandaharis’ case the occupiers were from their own country, their own town even.

  Dusty, impoverished Kandahar with its bitter winters and fishgrilling summers was to the Taliban as the Vatican to the Catholic Church. It was where Mullah Omar had lived as a virtual recluse. Even in Kandahar, most people I met said they had never seen him nor knew what he looked like. If he really did cruise the bazaars at night on his motorbike to hear what his people were saying, he had gone unnoticed. But the Amar bil Marouf, his Moral Police, were everywhere for Kandahar was the centrepiece of his project to impose Shariat law on Afghanistan and village ways onto urban life.

  Although Mullah Omar had fled into the mountains and the headquarters of the bil Marouf stood in ruins at the end of Kandahar’s main road, bombed by the Americans, there were more reminders of the rule of the one-eyed
cleric than that of its first king.

  The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, after the American bombing in 2001.

  The city walls of mud and stone which once stood twenty-seven feet high with a twenty-four-feet wide moat, and six giant gates, had long since disappeared, but it was still possible to discern the rectangular grid system laid out by Ahmad Shah Durrani on land given to him by the Popolzai tribe, and in giving directions people referred to the gates as geographical points as if they still stood. Like Kabul, Kandahar had been an important trading post on the caravan routes linking India with Persia and Turkey and was famous for its four bustling bazaars. In the tiny open-fronted shops one could buy birds in wooden cages, gunpowder or opium inside the skins of sheep, sandals made from car tyres, old Persian scimitars, embroidered hats and shawls, and prayer beads made from a glassy green stone found in the mountains north of the city. The air was thick with the smoke of fires grilling kebabs sprinkled with coriander seeds and the occasional whiff of musk or other ancient perfumes. Probably the only thing that was not on sale in Ahmad Shah’s day was Tupperware. Near Char Suq, the square where the four bazaars met, were the extensive foundations of a partially built mosque, Jamia-a-Umari, named after Mullah Omar.

  But it was in Shahar-i-Nau, the New Town, that Mullah Omar had really left his mark.

  First there was his house, a walled compound inside a vast walled estate including a mosque and farm which I explored with a group of guards who kept asking for their photographs to be taken in unlikely places, such as standing in the cot bed of one of Mullah Omar’s children. Just as Mullah Khalil Hassani, his former bodyguard, had described to me back in Quetta, in front of the iron gates to the inner compound was a twenty-foot-high fountain consisting of a fibreglass log out of which sprouted strange plastic palm trees. We climbed the stairs to the roof terrace of his house where a large crater from a cruise missile revealed the six-feet-thick protective cushioning of rubber tyres and steel stopping the missile going through.

  A guard perches on a child’s cot inside the house owned by Mullah Omar, Kandahar 2001.

  Mullah Omar’s fibre-glass fountain, Kandahar 2001.

  Not far away, on the edge of the Sufi Saheb desert southwest of the city, where Arab sheikhs used to come hunting and caravans of camels laden with opium still trod gently through tracks in the sand, rose a shimmering dome of eggshell blue. This was the Eid Gaha Mosque, meant to be Mullah Omar’s great legacy and completely to eclipse the dome of Afghanistan’s first king that had dominated the city for more than two hundred years. Set in a ten-acre walled compound planted with rows of saplings, thousands of men had been working on it for four years but the project was far from finished and the hundred-and-fifty-foot-high dome was still supported on wooden scaffolding. Next to it were unfinished blocks of housing meant for students and teachers in what was intended to be a religious seminary. No expense had been spared in its construction, employing numerous gardeners and importing equipment and engineers from abroad, and also relocating the national engineering institute from Kabul to Kandahar.

  Just as in Mullah Omar’s house, the inside of the dome was painted with garish murals of flowers in pinks, blues, greens and yellows and beneath them, depictions of historic monuments such as the mosque of Herat, the minaret of Jam, and curiously, once again the Hotel Continental in Kabul with its swimming pool. A monument to bad taste, its decoration was the sort of thing one might expect to find in a second-class brothel, rather than a place intended to be the holiest site in the land.

  The vast Eid Gaha Mosque was meant to be Mullah Omar’s great legacy, paid for by bin Laden.

  While all this was being built, allegedly with funds provided by Osama bin Laden whose own house in Kandahar was said to have had jewelled door handles and bath taps of gold, the Taliban had done little for the city. Afghanistan remained one of the poorest nations on earth, struggling under two sets of UN sanctions imposed in response to the Taliban’s appalling human rights record. Many people in the city told me that Kandahar had just five schools (all boys) and five hundred mosques and I could see for myself that the canals were all dried out, the famous orchards withered, and piles of rubbish everywhere. One day Hakim threw a Coke can out of the window onto the street and I reprimanded him, saying, ‘Oh Hakim, you’ll make your city dirty.’

  He laughed, replying, ‘The city is already dirty.’

  It wasn’t just the infrastructure that had been neglected. Something had happened to the spirit of the city. It was partly the years of drought which meant that the lush pomegranates which Persian princesses used to breakfast on and the forty varieties of grape sweet enough to make men cry, were nowhere to be found. But it seemed a town with no soul. I remembered Kandahar even in the midst of the war, as a place with a lot of laughter, loud belly laughs and locals always described themselves as the Texans of Afghanistan. There had been music, searing mournful melodies sung by boys strumming lute-like instruments or tapping tabla drums. Now the only music was muzak from Hindi films, and the Kandaharis looked cowed, scurrying along, heads bent in the shadows of buildings.

  In the centre of town, people kept passing close to me and whispering, ‘be careful, there are al Qaeda around’. Four tanks kept guard outside the new Governor’s office and bunkers being built along the roads into the city. The intermittent roar of American warplanes overhead, carrying out raids in the pink cliffs north of the city, added to the tension. One day posters appeared all over the city, warning, ‘Be Careful of Present Government. Don’t be Associated with it. Its Fate is Short.’

  My young interpreter Ahmed Jan was terrified. Though his family was from Kandahar, he had grown up as a refugee in Quetta, and while I found Kandahar infinitely preferable to Quetta, he was horrified by the place. ‘I can’t understand these people,’ he would complain. ‘They are my people but they speak differently, eat differently, even sleep differently. They spit. I don’t like it. Not at all.’

  Most of our time together was spent by Ahmed Jan telling me I couldn’t do this or that because it was dangerous and he was furious at my refusal to hire a jeepload of bodyguards to travel round with us as the American television crews were doing. ‘Can’t we even have one bodyguard?’ he would whine. He loathed being given instructions by a woman and sometimes instead of translating my interviews, told me they were stupid questions that no one would answer. He rudely refused to take tea when we were offered it by commanders, telling me I would catch terrible diseases from using their cups. Every afternoon he would say he wasn’t feeling well and insisted we stop at a pharmacy so he could stock up on pills. He was nineteen-years-old yet claimed he needed an after-lunch nap.

  Ahmed Jan was an only son who had left the city with his mother and uncle when he was just six, and remembered nothing of Kandahar except the photographic shop. ‘My father was killed because of enmity with another tribe, the Alkozai. We’re Popolzai and they killed so many members of my family. One of my uncles was a very good-looking boy and he was abducted and found in a garden two or three days later. His body was unrecognisable, not even bones left they said. They did the same thing to my father. It is not good to be handsome in this city. My grandmother and one uncle went to New York and we went to Quetta.’

  Once he told me this I could understand why he might not like the place and I kept encouraging him to go back to Quetta or even to America but he spoke fluent English, a rare skill in Afghanistan, and had decided there was money to be made. At least he was not handsome – he had a doughy complexion with lips that were too thick and drooping eyes – so was unlikely to attract the attentions of a lovelorn commander. My hopes of palming Ahmed Jan off on some other journalist were dashed when he moved into the ground floor of my guesthouse from where he would emerge each morning, managing to look ever more doleful about the day’s plans. When I told him we were going to look for Abdullah, the last victim of the Taliban, he insisted it was impossible.

  ‘But the boy at the football sta
dium said everyone knows about him,’ I protested.

  ‘Everyone here lies,’ he replied. ‘They are incapable of telling the truth. Asking them things is as useful as speaking to stones in the yard. I don’t know why you waste your time.’

  The next afternoon we set off to the woodcutters’ bazaar to try and find Abdullah’s uncle. The sweet smell of balsam brought back the night more than twelve years before when I had hidden there with the motorcycling mullahs as they waited to launch an attack on the Communist defence post. Even though the street was now crowded with honking rickshaws and jingling pony traps and people going about their business, I could feel the fear tightening my chest remembering how every breath I took had seemed to be amplified in the quiet of the night.

  As Ahmed Jan had glumly predicted, we could not find Abdullah’s uncle but in a small shack where a man was sawing away at a plank sending woodchips flying, we did discover his brother-in-law Agha Gul. ‘Abdullah,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘They hung the body at 4 a.m. One of my sons Sardar Gul is a driver and he drove through Herat bazaar early that morning and saw his cousin hanging there and came home to tell me. I was asleep and he took me to see the body. When I saw that I vowed I would kill the man who did it. They had taken everything from his pockets. His skin had gone black from so much beating and all his bones were broken like a rag doll. His face was all swollen and he had been hung from the neck.’

  ‘Why did they do it?’ I asked.