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.