An Awkward Affair, With a View of Chickens

I didn’t particularly want to go to Khash, but we were having dinner at Halim’s house one night, and one of his friends – Nazim – brought it up and invited me to come the next weekend. I couldn’t think of an excuse so I said of course I would, thinking that it was a long way off, and something was bound to come up. Nothing did. “What do you like to eat?” Nazim asked. “I will kill a sheep for you.”

Khash (you pronounce it a bit like “kosh” with the “k” stuck somewhere on the roof of your mouth) is a collection of villages in a high mountain valley. To get there from Faizabad, you first drive two hours to Baharak where the mountain ridge tapers, then double back around its shoulder and wind your way up stream beds and the edges of hills until you reach the top another two hours later. If it rains, the road might wash out, or it might be a long stretch of mud to drive through. In that case it takes longer. It was not a journey I relished, and staying the night as a foreign guest in a village that rarely sees foreigners meant I would be on show, expected to answer everyone’s questions, accept everyone’s curious stares, and eat everything they put in front of me with endless and appreciative appetite. Not exactly my idea of a restful weekend. With only a week left in Afghanistan, it seemed that my sense of adventure had entirely disappeared. I dearly wanted to stay home with a book. But I’d said I’d go, and less than that is taken as a promise around here, so I couldn’t back out. Nobody here understands why you’d ever want to stay home by yourself. All that was left was to negotiate the terms of my going, and more importantly, my return.

I told Halim we wouldn’t leave until 2pm on Friday. That way we’d arrive just in time for dinner, and after dinner I could claim tiredness and get to sleep early rather than try to explain myself to everyone. Halim acquiesced to this, and then said that we would stay for lunch on Saturday as well. I didn’t want to, but I let it slide for the moment. When I got back from a weekly meeting at 1pm on Friday, Halim was waiting. In typical Afghan style, he didn’t come out and say why he was early until he was stepping out the door to arrange a vehicle for us. “I come ten o’clock,” he said. “Guards say you gone to SFL. I go SFL, but you not there. I want take one new plan – we leave at ten o’clock. Because. This very long way for Khash and we leave now we get there some late.”

I tried a technique I’ve noticed people using in the bazaar; I made it sound like I agreed … “Ok, good, Halim” …but really, I didn’t … "We will leave at two o’clock.”

“Very good,” he said. I’d won this round, aided, admittedly, by the fact that it was almost two anyway. He went and got the vehicle. I prepared myself for the diplomacy of being a guest in Afghanistan. When Halim came back and I said that on Saturday I couldn’t stay for lunch because I had to get back to some work I had to do, he let it slip and came back about half an hour later with: “In Afghanistan we have one culture. For example, this example, guest say when he come, we say when he go.” Round two.

“Sorry, Halim, I have this much work, too much work.” I held up my hands to show how much work.

“Very good,” he said, but I knew that sooner or later we’d revisit this point.

It was hot in the car, and we had to stop in the bazaar while Halim and Nazim bought candy and treats for their families. When we stopped it felt even hotter. I was already irritable about having to negotiate this whole journey, irritable about not being able to just let go and enjoy it, irritable at everything and the heat wasn’t helping at all. I asked the driver if the air conditioner worked. “Maulum nest,” he said (It’s not clear). I felt like hitting him. Finally they returned with all their candy and Halim had a can of Pepsi. We started driving and he popped open the tab spraying soda all over the interior. So then I was hot and sticky. It didn’t improve my mood. I licked Pepsi off my arm and sulked.

I didn’t say anything for the first bit of the trip. It seemed smarter than saying surly things that would be lost in translation. Nazim and Halim chatted away in the back. I squinted out the window at the rocks. The light was so hot it burned everything interesting out of the scenery. We kept coming upon shepherds driving their flocks along the road and we’d have to stop and honk our way through them. Halim took these opportunities to yell streams of rude things at the shepherds. “Hey boy! What are you doing? We’re coming through here, can’t you see? Move the sheep! Is your head spoiled?”

Nazim chortled and egged him on. “Dirty Yeftalis!” The driver got into it and started driving like hell up to the edge of the flock and slamming on the brakes at the last second, bumping up into the sheep. I closed my eyes. I was with the Afghan equivalent of over-aged rednecks past their prime. In a different country, we might have been tossing empties at migrant farm workers and hooting. Last week at dinner, Halim and his friend had bribed Halim’s three-year-old son with candy and money to drink vodka. I felt like the only thing we were missing was the trailer park and the rusting 4x4 on blocks in the front yard with the old beer boxes. Halim had always been my best Afghan friend, but this wasn’t a great side to him, and in my mood I didn’t feel at all gracious about it. I told the driver to stop hitting the sheep and did some more squinting out the window to ignore things.

The sun started falling and the glare of the world retreated a little, taking some of the heat with it. We were driving along the river and the fishermen were out with their long poles trailing lines into the water. I decided to come out of my funk, tentatively, and I asked Halim what they used for bait. He translated for Nazim, and Nazim started telling me about mulberries and small fish. “Do they have rivers in Canada?” he asked. I told him there were a thousand rivers in Canada, more than a thousand.

“I think Canada has like this big fish,” Halim said.

“Very big fish,” I said. The mood was lifting.

As we entered Baharak, they pointed out a green jeep with shiny new paint and tinted black windows. Halim told me the man that owned it was an opium trafficker from Faizabad. “His father is farmer, this very poor man. Now he in Baharak before five years. He moving this poppy all places. They have like this vehicles, too much vehicles, cars, much money. Before his father is sick man, too much thin; now he too much fat.”

After Baharak, we crossed the river and climbed up to the fields of Dashte Ferogh. Beyond them, where the road dropped back into the valley again, we could see up to Jurm and the mountains still covered with snow. I asked the driver to stop so I could take some pictures. Halim pointed to Jurm, one of the most notorious poppy growing areas in the region. “You checking this Jurm. You see they have much like this poppy.” I knew what was coming. Khash was the most notorious area for cultivating poppy, and he knew his village had a bad name and none of the NGOs would work there because of it. “You check Jurm, and you checking Khash. You see people say is true or no.” I was a foreigner working for an office, so Halim’s invitation to Khash was more than just a hospitable gesture; it was a nicely calculated move to bring assistance to his village. He would take me to Khash, show me that compared to Jurm, where the NGOs did work, his people grew comparatively little, and I, if I played along, would then speak to the NGO community and convince them to work there. I felt a little weary of this culture, where everything was a political manoeuvre, even the famed hospitality. But one must play the game, so I nodded and smiled and kept my thoughts to myself. Also, I was starting to enjoy the trip a little more and my mood had improved enough for me to remind myself that whatever else Halim had planned, he also just wanted to show me his village.

“I will see,” I said, and winked at him so he’d laugh.

Jurm, as Halim had said, was chock full of poppy, blooming everywhere in dark purple, pink, and white. Where there weren’t poppy fields there were great spreading mulberry trees and shade. Children were running around in the grass under them holding out blankets to catch the berries while their friends up in the branches shook them down. It was innocent, rural serenity with poisonous pink borders. I tried to take a photo, but people were jumpy about it. President Karzai had declared a Jihad on opium trafficking in Afghanistan the month before and the Afghan National Army had begun an aggressive eradication program in the last few weeks. The farmers were afraid that my photos would be used to target their area. Eradication in the worst cases would ruin the livelihoods of many of them; others, I’m sure, were just worried about the threat to their profit and cushy standard of living. The photo didn’t turn out, anyway. The contrasts of the scene weren’t only moral - children playing and dope growing – they were also visual: the light was too light and the dark too dark for my camera. We moved on.

Before we reached Khash, Halim had planned a little stop. We were winding up the side of a mountain following the river, which was down the bank to our left. Halim kept looking around and finally told the driver to stop. As he got out of the car he flashed open his vest like a shady watch salesman, and give me a peek at the bottle inside his pocket. “We go take something,” he said. I followed him down the bank to the riverside and we sat on a big rock by the water. Around us were tall grasses and trees. Just downstream you could see a little plot of poppy growing in a nook of ground by the river. Halim snuck a glance up to the road and then took out the bottle and two shot glasses. “These very old glasses,” he said. “Before 15 years I drinking with these. Mujaheddin come, I hide these.” The Mujaheddin pretty much destroyed Halim’s social life, from what I can make out. All he has left are these sneaky little detours for a nip or two, and stories of drinking forty-proof back in his army days. He took another look up to the road and poured the glasses.

Nazim and the driver joined us. I told them about the legal drinking age in Canada, and how underage kids go off like this and sneak drinks and cigarettes. I told them that they were just like naughty teenagers in my country, and we had a laugh about it. When we were done, Halim peeled the label off the bottle and tossed it in the river. “They thinking this just bottle, no vodka,” he said with an impish grin. He carefully tucked away his glasses and we went back up to the car.

It was nearly dusk when we arrived in Khash, and it really was beautiful with the sun going down. The houses were piled all over up the sides of hills, tumbling around and sitting on top of one another like puppies. It had the charm of looking like it had been built on a whim and left unchanged for a hundred years. I felt as if I could be in any time at all and the whole scene would be the same. Old men sitting on their haunches, little streets twisting up around corners, boys swatting at donkeys with sticks, the fields spreading out in the twilight, the closing of a day like every other day in an ancient rhythm of life untouched by the outside world.

By the time we reached Nazim’s house it was almost dark. Halim said we should go up to see his father right away and then come back down to Nazim’s for dinner. There was a scattering of chickens and women as we entered Halim’s house. We didn’t stay long, considering he hadn’t been there in ten years. His brothers ushered me into the guestroom and outside he greeted his younger sister quickly before she disappeared completely. We all sat for a while drinking tea. Halim answered his father’s questions impatiently and then stood up to leave, saying we needed to get back to Nazim’s house because he would be waiting for us.

Since we arrived late they didn’t have time to put on the full spread for dinner, and I was spared having to eat the usual mountains of food one is expected to eat as a guest to show appreciation for their lavish hospitality. After dinner, they asked what kind of movie I wanted to watch … Indian? American? I asked if they had any Afghan ones. We watched a touching little film about two Afghan teens in California, trying to figure out love in two different cultures. There was a wise Afghan mentor with thick Babylonian features, thick, long curly hair, and a surprising selection of waistcoats. He came in at key moments and offered advice to everyone. They told me he was a big Afghan movie star. I got too tired to see how it ended, but I imagine the Afghan boy came to his senses finally and fell in love with the bombshell of an Afghan girl instead of the Indian one, all the parents were happy, and the Babylonian mentor nodded sagely and got pulled into the dancing at the end.

They brought me Afghan clothes to sleep in and blankets and I fell asleep with the moon coming in the window and the sound of water running in the irrigation channel outside.

The next morning early I discovered the latrine, which was on the second level with a hole down into the yard below. I looked down and saw chickens pecking around and dodging the drops. It didn’t seem to have mattered to the previous occupant whether he got things in the hole or not, so finding places for my feet was a ginger process, and the rest of it was a rather awkward affair, with a view of chickens. After this they gave me water to wash with, and I decided not to ask where it came from. Before breakfast, Halim took me up a small hill inside the village so that I could see around. It was a magical morning, with mist and the smoke from cooking fires wisping through the trees and children herding cattle up to the watering hole.

For breakfast the important men of the village brought tall kettles of shir chai, which is a kind of thick tea made with cream and salt. Halim had boasted earlier to everyone that even though I was a foreigner I could drink five bowls of shir chai, which was true, thankfully. We drank bowl after bowl and the old guys told all their stories and everyone laughed. Then there was a silence, and the village leader turned to me and asked why the offices didn’t do any work in Khash. I’d been planning for this. My strategy was simple: first ask what work they wanted, and then not promise to do it. They needed a school. I said I would tell this to my colleagues, but that didn’t mean they would come and do it. They seemed moderately satisfied with this, but they all knew the poppy was the issue and it was obvious that I needed more convincing on this point. “Walk around our village,” they said. “See if there’s too much poppy here. You tell people.”

I didn’t really want to go on a walk. I felt like I’d seen enough, I’d had all the experience I wanted and I was ready to go. But it seemed diplomatic to go. Besides, Nazim and Halim were hinting again about staying for lunch, and I definitely wanted to leave before then. So I gave in to the walk and stood firm on the departure time. “We’ll go for a walk for one hour, then we will leave,” I said.

The walk was more of a herding, actually. It’s polite in Afghan culture to let the more respected person go ahead of you, which works poorly if you happen to be the most respected person and you don’t know where you’re going. Plus, even though I was walking ahead, I wasn’t allowed to choose where to go anyway. I would take one turn and Halim would come up and say, “Mr. Ryan, we go this way,” then steer me along. We ambled around in a large circle until an hour was up and I’d seen everywhere there wasn’t poppy growing. Finally I just started walking straight back to the house and Halim followed. Nazim took a long time to catch up to us. I was impatient to leave. “You walk too fast,” he said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“First you should stay for lunch,” he said. He started talking to Halim, and I understood enough to get what was going on. Nazim was hoping for a ride back, but he didn’t want to leave until evening. Inviting me to lunch would string out the length of my stay and make it so he could get a ride with us at a time he liked better. I suddenly got tired of all this dealing. Diplomacy and firmness weren’t working. I decided to lose patience.

“Halim, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I told you, I have a lot of work to do and we have to leave. Now!” I let him translate that so it would sound at least a little more polite, and I walked out of the room. It wasn’t an impressive display of sensitivity to culture, but it was effective, and in fifteen minutes we were leaving Khash.

It was hot on the road again, and mostly we went in silence. I felt a bit guilty about forcing everyone to my will. When we got close to Faizabad, Halim asked me for the English word for when you do some things and see some things and then later you write it down. “Like this trip to Khash,” he said. We struggled around with “autobiography” and “memoirs” and finally settled on simply “memories.”

“Yes,” said Halim. “I want for you this good memories from Afghanistan. For example, this trip to Khash. I pray for you good memories from this we take one trip to my village, drink shir chai, see these muysafaid (elders – literally, whitehairs). You writing for this, this good memories from Afghanistan.”

I thought about all the bargaining of this trip, the heat and the agendas. I thought about the beauty of Khash in a misty dawn, the old men and their laughing stories, the bowls of shir chai, the latrine with it’s view of chickens, Halim sneaking shots of vodka by the river, the moon at night and falling asleep to the sound of water under my window. In a week I would leave Afghanistan and these would be all that was left of this time, these memories. He’d driven me up the wall this weekend, but he was right. I turned around and winked at him. “Very good memories,” I said. He laughed.

“Very good,” he said and laughed again, as if he knew.

A Portable Life

I’m going to Africa. How’s that for out of the blue? One minute, Afghanistan, the next one, Africa. But really, it’s not that far, and besides, I’m all packed.

For the last two years I’ve been constructing myself a portable life. I have two backpacks, one big, one small, and a bag for my laptop. I take a meticulous pleasure in calculating just what will fit in this luggage, the things that will do for every situation, which clothes will be comfortable yet suitable for any occasion, which books I will want to read over and over. My computer is a genius, and home to all my addresses, my notes, my writing, my photos, the music I want with me, all in one little box. I have a down jacket for the cold, techie socks that last several days, a sleeping bag and mat that compress to the size of a small melon with the total weight of a bedpost – a light one. My water bag doubles as a solar shower and fits onto my water filter. I have efficient spiral notebooks for journaling and pens that slip neatly into their spiral spines. My camera is the size of a stack of 15 credit cards … I checked. Everything clicks and interlocks into neat shapes, it all folds and rolls and hides away. I get excited in stores that sell luggage locks and towels the size of drink coasters. Sometimes I flip through my passport just to feel the 48 pages of possibilities it holds.

It’s funny, actually. Maybe it comes from my childhood, from the weeklong treks into the wilderness I would go on with my family while everyone else was going to Disneyland or the condo on the lake. I learned to compress and roll, tuck things in, glory in compact gear, to build a home from the contents of a backpack. I have no idea how to use a barbeque because it doesn’t fit into a stuff sack, but I can cook a whole meal with coals and a piece of tinfoil. I think I can, anyway. (I once met a guy who said he could cook a fish using only a piece of tinfoil, a long stretch of road, and his Chevy. I wonder what his childhood was like). I have this idea that the best things are the things you can take with you. I’m a fan of pockets. I like the things that fit in them and unfold later into dinner sets and hand tools and armchairs. I always liked the bits in Science Fiction stories when they would get stuck on some planet and Spock would take out something the size of a mango, pull a cord, and have a pavilion erupt out of it. But that’s not what’s funny. Well maybe it is, but that’s not what I was thinking was funny. What I think is funny is that I’m also completely obsessed with the idea of Home.

I love going away. I love vacations and road trips and all-night adventures. But I can’t decide if I don’t love more the moment when we pack up and turn downhill, crank the wheel the other way, step into the airplane and head for home. Or take surfing. It’s a big rush to paddle out into the surf at sunset, a bigger one to pop up on a glassy wave just ahead of the curl. But I don’t think I’ll ever be a real surfer, because there’s this whole other pleasure that comes from dropping back down on the deck and letting the wash carry you back to the beach, where you can sit by the fire with friends and warmth, with the evening and the Merlot sinking in. And I can’t decide if I like the surfing better, or that. Maybe I like both better. It’s the same with adventure. It’s really something to travel across the world, to bump over roads in dusty Russian jeeps, to see the villages, the towers, the citadels, the minarets, the mosques, but it’s not the same without the memory of Vancouver back home. And it’s beautiful to fly in over Vancouver on a summer evening and see the Lions and Burrard Inlet and the Lion’s Gate lit up like a drawbridge on a fairy castle, but it’s only if I’ve been away on the dusty roads that I get that feeling of my heart collapsing in relief like a knight at the long end of a battle. As exciting as adventures are, there’s too little of home in any of them, and even though there’s no place like home, there’s not much adventure there.

The fact is, I feel a bit restless no matter where I am. There’s just something in me that keeps on moving. The more I live the more I fall in love with life; it’s just becoming clear that there will never be enough of it for me – not here. The more world I see, the more it delights me, terrifies me, astounds me, and the more I become convinced that it will never be the right world for me. It’s hard to explain. It’s as if everything is like coming back to an old fort; it’s never as big as you remember and you wish it could’ve grown with you. Maybe somewhere in me is a distant memory of a world from my childhood or even before that, from the time I was a twinkle in Abraham’s sky, from the moment the voice spoke into the darkness and light rose like a daisy. I guess I construct my own portable life on the hopeful thought that life itself is actually portable, that I am one of those who live here in tents, admitted strangers on earth, and that all this life in me, too big for this place, will last through to a world where it really belongs. I’m not ungrateful; I love it here, maybe even more for all the longing. I just don’t think that means I should swallow my longing down and shrug and say, oh well, that’s life. Because I don’t think it is. There is neither home nor adventure enough for me in this world. What there is, is enough of each to set me off questing for a place where home is really Home and adventure is really Adventure - enough to satisfy the paradoxical longings of my soul.

Someone wrote a long time ago that, “people who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own ... if they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had an opportunity to return.” That’s a haunting thing to say. Once you know you don’t belong here, it’s still a fascinating place, but it never looks quite right again. It can only remind you of something, something that must be unbelievably grand, because the world, with only whispers and shadows left, is still a jaw-dropping place, wonderful, fabulous, terrible; it makes you catch your breath, scream, dance, laugh out loud, pray, sing, gasp … because isn’t it just like, like … what? Like whatever is just on the tip of your soul, some dream of a place they all told you to forget, but you can’t help it because it’s what - as Chesterton says – it’s what makes you “feel homesick at home.” I could never stay here. I’d need room to explode all over at the sight of a sunset, and there’s not enough room.

It might not even be a place or a thing that I want. There’s a part in one of Frederick Buechner’s novels that I love. A man has a dream that he finds a silver dollar with a name on it. He says,

“It wasn’t any of the other names I’ve been called by various people at various times in my life, and yet it was my name. It was a name so secret that I wouldn’t tell it even if I remembered it, and I don’t remember it. But if anybody were ever to show up and call me by it, I’d recognize it in a second, and the chances are that if the person who called me by it gave me the signal, I’d follow him to the ends of the earth.”

I wonder if that’s just it. Suppose what I keep calling home and adventure could do with a bigger name, say “God.” Suppose when God says “come on, let’s go home,” or “come on, I know this great place …” or “follow me” – suppose it’s all the same thing, simply because God is there. What if with God there is enough adventure at home and enough home in the adventure? What if God makes one feel adventurous while sitting in front of the fire in an armchair and the next day quite at home while soaring with eagles? Rich Mullins wrote a song that said (apparently to God): “I’m at home anywhere, if you are where I am.” If it had fit the meter, he might have just as easily said: “I’m in the middle of a hundred-foot swan dive anywhere, if you are where I am.” And he could have added: “And I don’t really care if there’s water down there.” I think that’s what “follow me” means. It means you’re going home and heaven knows where all else.

Which brings me to Africa, somehow. I’m leaving Afghanistan. I have a new job in Mozambique; it starts in three weeks. The position was advertised with the fantastic title of Storyteller. I’ll be writing articles for an NGO called World Relief, for me the most fantastic summer job in the world. Finally I get to do what I love and call it work. After everything I’ve just supposed about God, maybe I don’t really need to take my three bags of cleverly packed stuff and gadgets, but I’m kind of attached to them. I still need them to feel adventurous and ready for anything; I still use them to feel at home. See, the truth is that it’s not just the world that doesn’t seem quite right yet. It’s also me. To borrow from Chesterton again, I have to say “that whatever I am, I’m not myself.” I don’t just need a better world, I need a better self; I need a real name. The backpacks and the down jacket and the computer are a good playact but they’re not going to do it. They’re only a poor substitute at best. But one day Someone will come and flip me my silver dollar and call my name. Then I’ll drop these three bags in the twinkling of an eye and discover the real world at last.

Opening The Water Supply

We are sitting on the hillside around the reservoir, which stands like an altar of stones on some high place, while the village mullah sings a prayer into the dead quiet and the wind. He is standing on a higher rock above us and we are looking off into space, into the valley, into the mountain. Before he began there was a bustle and milling among the men of the village, who have come to inaugurate this drinking water supply. Then he stepped up to stand like a prophet on his rock and began to sing. We fell silent before the song and sank to the ground to sit as we do now, in memory, perhaps, of where we came from.

When the song ends it lingers awhile in the air, until the speeches begin and diminish its sanctity with too much pride and flattery. My attention wanders. I’m supposed to be taking photographs, but the light here at mid-day is far too bright overhead and everything looks overexposed. The camera has its uses, however. It is a good excuse to disconnect myself from the proceedings and distract people from noticing that I’m not falling all over to congratulate myself and everyone else for the good work we’ve done here.

Of course it's true; we have done good work. These people used to drink out of muddy ditches. The water they are passing around now in a polished ceremonial cup is clear, cold, and sweet, and it comes right to their doorsteps. The grubby children peeking at the proceedings from the safety of the peripheral rocks will no longer have to collect water three times a day, rain or shine, freezing winter or burning noon. The diseases that attacked them every summer from dirty drinking water will recede. The villagers worked hard for this. They neglected their fields to dig straight up the mountain, to break rock with hammers and their bare hands, to haul sand and cement and pipes up a forty-degree pitch day after day. Now it’s finished and worth a celebration. So what is bothering me?

I look up the mountain, as if the answer to my discontent is somewhere up there where the spring water is pouring out of the rock. The pipe ditch cuts like a scar up across the green furrows of the hillside. Up above us, sitting with her chin in her hands and her headscarf slipping back off her forehead, is a little girl. She is quiet, and still like a stone. She simply watches, with her head cocked to one side, all of these men and their words and their words and words. The Governor is congratulating my organization, the village mullah is congratulating the Governor, my colleague is congratulating the head of the village, and everyone is carefully deferring to the local commander, who accepts all of it with bored detachment, his eyes shifting around like spiders in the web of lines years of murder have etched on his simian face. I have a sudden urge to sneak off and sit with the girl on the hill. We could sit there and leave the overwhelming task of the world below us. All the speeches would drift away in the wind and float up the valley and disappear, leaving us with only the mountain and the river and the sound of clean water flowing down into hollow stone. Maybe if we were to sit quietly enough, these men would leave, too, following their words, and when peace returned to this hillside we could recall again the mullah’s song. We would think about why such songs are sung and where praise belongs. We would sit with our chins in our hands, our heads cocked to one side, and remember things that most men forget, things that should not be forgotten.

When the ceremony is finally over and all the elaborate farewells said, we leave the village and drive back to Faizabad under the falling sun. In Afghanistan the light of dusk changes the landscape from a tumble of rocks into a glowing kingdom. The houses catch gold on the hillsides and the river is a shining ribbon rolling through the valley. It is late spring, almost summer, the season of nomads, the Kuchis, who drive their flocks up to the summer pastures in the mountains. We pass endless rivers of sheep with shepherds in leather boots and green turbans, their faces as dark as earth, their cries as old as the world. Their camps sprawl along the river with great spreading brown tents and tethered camels standing frozen with one leg cocked or lying like mountains on the grass. Strange children play amongst the baggage and peek from behind the embroidery. From the dust of the road and the dusk the final column appears, with an escort of warriors on horseback, turban tails wrapped around their faces and rifles slung from their saddles. High on the backs of camels are the women, swaying on velvet saddlebags with gold tassels. They are covered with the purple cloth of queens, their faces hidden like the blank faces of dolls, empty of features and full of mystery. Veils billow out behind them with the rhythm of camel trot and evening wind, catching the light and sparking the fevered imagination of men with rumours of unthinkable beauty.

“I thank God that I was not born a Kuchi,” someone in the car says. “Without a home.”

“Yes, but aren’t we all that way?” I say. “Looking for a country of our own?” But I say it quietly, and maybe only the passing nomads understand. Maybe they, and the little girl still up on the hill with her head cocked to one side, after everyone else has gone.

Twilight, Halfway To The Other Side Of The World

twilight, halfway to the other side of the world

the shamaal winds excite the leaves
like flags of prayer,
then –

high on the hill, three figures –
no, six –
three of them are sheep and
they are going the wrong way

so, one man leaves silhouette behind, runs
rolling downhill
a small white pebble

the sheep, the three double back, disappear
behind the trees,
until only the sun is left

to fall

to turn the sky all the colours of the ocean at dawn

a chill, a loss of light, music that awaits me
by my bed,
another world beyond this paling one