by Sally Cooper
3
Chicken Street
Long before the Russians, the mujahideen and the War on Terror, one single piece of real estate had been home to what was, without question, the biggest threat to any visitor to the Ghan – the carpet seller. The carpet sellers of Chicken Street were well practised in pushing their wares and many a customer had developed a nasty addiction to Central Asia’s finest handicraft as a result. In the centre of town, Chicken Street was a ramshackle arrangement of jerry-built shopfronts and gaping potholes. Deep red carpets and bright orange kilims hung in windows and doorways alongside swords and ancient muskets, antiquities alleged and otherwise. The street was supposed to be one way but most Afghan drivers took that to mean that traffic moved in the direction in which they happened to be driving. Chicken Street came with its own odour, a more intense variation of the pungent bouquet that engulfed the city year round. Despite the many changes in the Ghan since the fall of the Taliban, the Afghan capital in 2004 remained a city of open sewers, ancient car exhausts and no garbage collection, all filtered through a veil of fine Central Asian dust.
The day before, I had attended a UN security briefing, a mandatory requirement for all new arrivals in the Ghan. The meeting was short and encompassed a quick tour of a map of security zones around the country that predictably placed much of the south and the east as high risk and those areas further north less so. It also expanded on The Rules, of which The List was only a part. The rules included an 11 pm curfew, nightly radio checks, living at UN-approved guesthouses, eating at UN-approved restaurants and, when walking down the street, all ‘UN female internationals’ (i.e. me) were to be accompanied by a ‘UN male international’.
Having filtered out what wasn’t required for immediate necessity, I set off for a stroll down Chicken Street. I knew no ‘UN male internationals’ and as my ‘mission’, to adopt the parlance of my new employers, was simple though urgent, I decided not to go in search of one. This morning I was scouting for tonic water. As a Muslim country with a deeply conservative culture, Afghanistan is also dry. With the exception of two Western-style alcohol shops on the edge of town which served an exclusively expatriate clientele, there were no bottle shops, no off-licences, no bodegas. Having developed a liking for Bombay Sapphire gin and worried that an overzealous Pakistani customs official might take a look in my bag, I’d poured its contents into an innocuous-looking water bottle before leaving Nairobi. In fact, the smiling official at customs in Islamabad had assured me I looked ‘far too honest’, though he didn’t say for what, and hadn’t shown the slightest interest in my water bottle or anything else. As far as I was concerned, my greatest sin since then was in drinking my Bombay Sapphire with fruit juice from a carton. I needed redemption – I needed tonic.
Earlier in the week, I’d gone on a pre-emptive shopping expedition and bought a fine buzkashi whip for the princely sum of five dollars. Buzkashi is the forerunner to polo, though played a lot more aggressively than anything ever seen on the green fields of England.
‘Look what I bought. Isn’t it great?’ I said to Ismail, showing him the short leather riding crop. He looked perplexed, his eyes drifting to the floor. ‘It’s very nice but …’
‘But what?’ I got the feeling I hadn’t quite caused offence though I may have come close.
Ismail sighed. ‘You know the Taliban used these whips on the people. For nothing, just whipping and beating …’
‘Oh.’ I tucked the whip back in my bag, uncomfortably aware that while for me the Taliban had been little more than an item on a news bulletin far away, for people like Ismail they had been the perpetrators of unimaginable cruelties.
It was early and the carpet shops were quiet, empty of the prospective buyers who would flock to Chicken Street later in the day. Carpet prices had soared in Kabul over the last twelve months. The influx of foreigners had created a sellers’ market and no-one seemed interested in haggling. Chicken Street should have made for fun exploring but, even at this hour, beggars, street kids, amputees, burqas, hawkers and the mandatory crowd of onlookers all made a beeline for the next hapless foreigner to appear on the horizon – which, on this occasion, happened to be me. I had no idea a burqa could move so fast. They were alarmingly aggressive, jabbing their bony fingers and thrusting crusty-nosed children at me. I wasn’t sure if I was being asked to buy, to borrow or, like many an aid organisation advertisement that defined poverty as a snotty-nosed child, I was simply being asked to give what I could. I’d like to be able to call these burqas women but, as is intended, the blue shroud made their humanity almost invisible.
As ubiquitous as the burqas were the shoe shiners whose average age barely stretched into double figures. Shoes could be shined for ‘wun dullah mista’ despite my badly wrapped headscarf loudly proclaiming my gender. A few days before, I’d promised one shoe shiner he could clean my shoes ‘next time’, a polite refusal in Africa where ‘no’ never really means ‘no’.
‘Mista, MISTA. Next time. TODAY NEXT TIME!’
I had been sprung. There were hundreds of dust-covered shoe shine boys in Kabul, each coated with a fine layer of seemingly immovable brown powder. Like the burqas, they all looked the same, as much a feature of the cityscape as the turbans and Land Cruisers. In a city with hundreds of foreigners, a ten-year-old shoe shine boy had remembered me. I turned to face my small accuser. His hair was shaved closely to his head, his eyes were wide and his smile enormous. He was dressed in tattered jeans, held in place by a small piece of rope fastened tightly around his waist. His blue and grey jacket was torn and dirty, and far beyond his size. At the end of a thin red rope that snaked its way over his left shoulder was a battered wooden box with a shiny lid.
‘Me Jamshed.’ He thrust his arm at his chest.
‘Okay, Jamshed. How much?’
‘FIVE DULLAH!’ he shouted cheekily, to the cheers of his friends.
‘I could buy a new pair of boots for that.’ I shook my head.
Jamshed didn’t speak much English, but he understood.
‘Okay. One dullah,’ he shrugged. He would never cut it as a carpet seller.
I agreed, and he got down to business, lifting the strap of the wooden box from over his shoulder and crouching down. His nugget-stained hands removed from the box a small bottle of shoe polish, a brush for dusting, another brush for the polish and a rag for the polishing. At the bottom of the box was a pair of ratty Chinese plastic sandals that Jamshed placed beside my feet. I took off my boots and slipped on the sandals, under the curious gaze of a dozen onlookers – all male – who had stopped to watch the foreigner get her shoes shined, providing a running commentary – in Dari – as to Jamshed’s performance and stealing occasional glances at me.
If this were Africa, my Blundstone boots might well have disappeared by now, but the streets of Kabul were a long way from Nairobi. Jamshed was a master of his trade and my Blundstones sparkled. I slipped them back on and handed him fifty Afghanis, the equivalent of ‘one dullah’.
‘Next time?’ he smiled.
‘Maybe,’ I said, and continued on my way.
Two blocks later, at a busy intersection, the carpet and souvenir sellers yielded to a street of DVD shops and small, single-fronted provision stores known as supermarkets, although their signage usually identified them as supremarkts or soupermarks. This was Flower Street, named for the handful of flower shops at its northern end – though most of the flowers on display were made of plastic. Afghans love flowers and the market for plastic flowers imported from China knows no bounds. Every Afghan home, office and taxi was decorated with at least one bunch of vivid artificial roses, but the best displays were usually found on bridal cars and inside wedding halls.
Kabul’s DVD shops did a roaring trade among Afghans and foreigners alike. For Afghans, Western films provided a glimpse of a world previously denied by the Taliban. For foreigners, watching DVDs was a favourite pastime in a city where there was little to do beyond staring at pancaked buildings, watchin
g helicopters circling overhead and taking bets on how many times the power would go out in one day.
The DVD shops of Flower Street sold all the latest releases, some even before their official release date. An Afghan friend, Ahmed, had told me he’d recently watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
‘I didn’t get it,’ he said. I’d worked with Ahmed the previous summer. He was twenty-four years old and had spent much of his youth outside the Ghan. There wasn’t a lot Ahmed didn’t ‘get’.
‘It was really violent,’ he frowned.
I laughed. ‘But Afghans can’t get enough of Rambo and Jean-Claude Van Damme.’
He shook his head. ‘This was different. And can I ask you a question – who was Mary Magdalene? I didn’t know Jesus got married. And what about all those men that kept following him around?’
One thing I never ceased to find amazing about the Ghan was its perception of the world around it. While Ahmed and I discussed the significance of Mary Magdalene and the Twelve Apostles, I thought better than to tell him to read the Bible. There were few places left on the planet that didn’t, in some way or another, see the world through Western and, therefore, Christian eyes. The Ghan, at least for now, remained one of them.
Passing the DVD sellers, I came to the provision stores. Flower Street’s supermarkets had multiplied in the last six months in response to the number of Westerners in the city demanding things that only Westerners seemed to want: Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Twinings tea, Pringles and, my Holy Grail, tonic water. Shopfronts boasted artful displays of carefully stacked layers of bottled water, Persil soap powder and Weetabix packets.
These shops lacked only one crucial item – alcohol. For that, Kabul’s expats made the trip to either the Supreme or the Blue on the edge of town. Instead of artful displays of cereal boxes, both the Supreme and the Blue were heavily fortified with high walls, sandbags and razor wire. Despite their slightly off-putting appearance, inside, with their wide aisles, their shopping trolleys and their neatly stacked shelves of consumer goods, they were closer to the notion of Western supermarkets than their Flower Street counterparts. Unlike most Western supermarkets however, many of the customers browsing the shelves were wearing bulletproof vests, with the latest in US weaponry slung over their shoulders or guns in their holsters. There were no trolleys for children though the sweets aisle did remarkably brisk business. As alcohol is haram (forbidden) in Islam, the Supreme and the Blue were, of course, off-limits to Afghans.
The first thing a prospective buyer must do when he or she walks into a shop anywhere in Afghanistan is to exchange greetings with the shopkeeper.
‘Salaam aleikum,’ I said to the bearded man whose store seemed to sell nothing but washing powder, salt and tonic water.
‘Waleikum a-salaam,’ he smiled from behind his dusty wooden counter. Afghan manners put most Westerners to shame. Every conversation in the Ghan began with ‘Salaam aleikum’ – ‘peace be upon you’ – and was quickly followed with a string of rapid-fire questions about your health, the health of your soul, the health of your family and your household. Where ‘how are you?’ had seemed a redundant waste of my conversational time in Sydney, in the Ghan it became my life’s daily mantra. To fail to ask after someone’s health made me rude at best and ignorant at worst, the two things Westerners were so often assumed to be.
Like the rest of the city, shopkeepers were at the mercy of Kabul’s sporadic power supply. Most carpet stores had a small generator that was kick-started into action the minute a prospective buyer crossed the threshold. The tiny generators provided enough power to light a single bulb, sufficient to see the threads and colours of a carpet’s weave. The refrigerators of the provision stores were, more often than not, left darkened, and as a result the cheese selection – Dutch Gouda, Danish Brie, English cheddar, still bearing the price tags of the supermarket in Dubai from which they were originally purchased – was sweating and, on occasion, stinking.
Because of the dubious nature of the ‘import’ business, some shops had more goods than others. Today I was in luck. The dusty yellow cans of tonic water were stacked in a small pyramid beside the door. As I took one from the top, an eager pair of hands materialised beside me. Here in Kabul I had my own personal shopping assistant, a young man whose job it was to carry my shopping basket around the store while I browsed the shelves and made my selections. I handed him six cans which he carried to the counter and, producing a small cloth, diligently wiped clean. As the Ghan is a country where pecking order counts for a great deal, in the confines of this small store, the hierarchy was clear. There was the beardless assistant in front of the counter and the bearded shopkeeper behind. Only one was important enough to handle the money and, as always, it was the one with the beard.
There were no price tags and my poor grasp of Dari prohibited me from asking so, as was often the case, my transaction was carried out in silence. From underneath the counter, the beard produced a calculator wrapped in thick, clear plastic to protect it from the dust. He punched in the numbers and showed me the price.
I passed him a handful of US dollars. The Afghani may be the currency of the new Afghanistan but, as in the rest of the world, a greenback would do just as well. My change was carefully counted out for me in Dari and my purchases placed inside a bright green plastic shopping bag decorated with a 2004 calendar that wished me a happy new year. I bade the storekeeper and his sidekick ‘Khuda Hafiz’ (Goodbye) and walked out into the Kabul sunshine. Tonic in hand, I was prepared to face my future.
4
The Office
The IRIN office occupied two rooms of a UN guesthouse halfway down a dusty Kabul lane. The usual security measures were in place: armed guards, high walls, heavy gates and razor wire. The office itself was a large room on the mezzanine floor. One of the bedrooms down below had been converted into our radio studio.
The term ‘Afghan radio studio’ shouldn’t be confused with the state of the art, soundproofed splendour on which I’d cut my teeth at the ABC in Sydney. Afghan radio studios didn’t have to look good, they just had to work. The walls of the IRIN studio, like those of Radio Bamyan, were clad in mattress foam. In an effort to make it a little more aesthetically pleasing, the foam was covered in a thick nylon fabric of deep maroon. Some may have called it garish though they weren’t likely to be Afghan.
There were eight of us in total: myself, Ismail, three radio producers, a journalist who wrote stories for the IRIN news service, Qasim the driver and Farhad. Farhad was the office gofer. He swept the floor, made the tea and stared at me. I don’t know what he made of the foreign woman with short hair and no husband, who sat at the computer all day and disappeared each evening behind the walls of a foreigner guesthouse. He spoke no English and was only now learning to read and write Dari. My privileged upbringing couldn’t conceive of a life where I could neither write my own name nor read it when someone else had. Yet at eighteen, Farhad was the head of his household. His father had died in the war leaving his mother to care for five children. In the Ghan, a country with a barely functioning government and no social security, the welfare system existed solely within the confines of one’s family.
Farhad worked for us for half the day on the condition he went to school for the other half. Up until this week, his school had been on the other side of town which meant he spent most of his day on a bus in one of Kabul’s interminable traffic jams. Like many schools in the Ghan, his classroom was nothing more than a tent, a fact that had come to light only recently when Ismail asked him if he’d been to the principal’s office to ask about changing schools.
‘No,’ replied Farhad.
‘Why not?’ asked Ismail.
‘Because the principal doesn’t have an office, the principal sits in a tent like everyone else.’
Farhad’s new school was just around the corner. It was made of a few bricks, a little mortar and a lot of adobe.
To the Afghans, Ismail was the ‘uncle’ of our office, a position be
stowed on him by his relatively grand old age of forty-two. In Afghanistan, age brings instant respect. Ismail remained eternally optimistic, was quick to learn and had a great sense of humour. He was something of a self-made man. Like many Afghans, he had taken his family to Pakistan during the war, getting a job as a taxi driver in Islamabad. Deciding he’d had enough of being a cabbie, Ismail knocked on the UN door, insisting that they take him on. Persistence paid off and he eventually became the IRIN driver, returning to Kabul when IRIN opened its Afghanistan office. While in Pakistan, he had worked on his English and paid close attention to how things worked, and he was now IRIN’s office administrator – ‘the paper guy’ – for which I was eternally grateful. No matter its provenance, paperwork had never exactly been my forte.
Ismail was Hazara, the ethnic group from central Afghanistan, the area surrounding Bamyan. The Hazara, easily distinguishable by their Mongol features, are believed to be descendants of Genghis Khan’s invading army of the thirteenth century. Because they were Shiites, they were at the bottom of the social heap in a country traditionally run by the majority Sunni. Few Hazara worked in government, slightly more in Development Inc., but most were relegated to work as cleaners, labourers or pulling carts of refuse around the city.