Inalillahey wa ina illai hi rajiaon
We come from God, and unto God do we return
Although the local clans didn’t recognise Khader’s standard, they respected its language and intent. Their fierce, belligerent postures remained, however, until Khader, Nazeer, and our Afghan fighters explained to them that the group was travelling with, and under the protection of, an American. When the local pirates had examined my passport and stared hard into my blue-grey eyes, they welcomed us as comrades-in-arms, and invited us to drink tea and feast with them. The invitation was a euphemism for the honour of paying them a tribute. Although none of the pirates we encountered wanted to upset the critically important American aid that helped to sustain them in the long years of the war by attacking an American-sponsored caravan, it was unthinkable that we might pass through their territory without providing some plunder. Khader had brought a supply of baksheesh goods for that very purpose. There were silks in peacock blue and green, with rich interweavings of gold thread. There were hatchets and thick-bladed knives and sewing kits. There were Zeiss binoculars—Khader had given me a pair, and I used them every day—and magnifying spectacles for reading the Koran, and solid, Indian-made automatic watches. And for the clan leaders there was a small hoard of gold tablets, each weighing one tola, or about ten grams, and embossed with the Afghan laurel.
Khader hadn’t merely anticipated those pirate attacks; he’d counted on them. Once the formal courtesies and tribute negotiations were concluded, Khader arranged with each local clan leader to re-supply our caravan. The re-supply provided us with rations while we were on the move, and also guaranteed us food and animal feed at fraternal villages that were under the control or protection of the clan leader.
The re-supply was essential. The munitions, machine parts, and medicines that we carried were priorities, and left us little room for surplus cargo. Thus we carried a little food for the horses—two days’ ration at most—but we carried no food at all for ourselves. Each man had a canteen of water, but it was understood that it was an emergency ration, to be used sparingly for ourselves and the horses. Many were the days we passed with no more than one glass of water to drink, and one small piece of naan bread to eat. I was a vegetarian, without being a fanatic about it, when I started on that journey. For years I’d usually preferred to eat my fruit and vegetable diet when it was available. Three weeks into the trek, after dragging horses across mountains and freezing rivers, and trembling from hunger, I fell on the lamb and goat meat that the pirates offered us, and ripped the flesh half-cooked from the bones with my teeth.
The steep mountain slopes of the country were barren, burned of life by biting wintry winds, but every flat plain, no matter how small, was a vivid, living green. There were wild flowers with red, starry faces, and others with sky-blue pom-pom heads. There were short, scrubby bushes with tiny yellow leaves that the goats enjoyed, and many varieties of wild grasses topped with feathery bowers of dried seed for the horses. There were lime-green mosses on many of the rocks, and paler lichens on others. The impact of those tender, viridescent carpets between the endlessly undulating crocodile’s back of naked stone mountains was far greater than it might’ve been in a more fertile and equable landscape. We responded to each new sight of a softly carpeted incline or tufted, leafy moor with similar pleasure—a deep, subliminal response to the vitality in the colour green. More than a few of the tough, hardened fighters, trudging between the walking horses, stooped to gather a little clutch of flowers so that they might simply feel the beauty of them in their dry and calloused hands.
My status as Khader’s American helped us to negotiate the badlands of the local pirates, but it also cost us a week when we were stopped for the third and last time. In an effort to avoid the little village of Abdul Hamid, our guide Habib led us into a small canyon that was just wide enough for three or four horses to ride side-by-side. Steep rock walls rose up on either side of the canyon trail for almost a kilometre before the funnel opened out into a much longer, wider valley. It was the perfect place for an ambush and, in anticipation, Khader rode at the head of our column with his green-and-white banner unfurled.
The challenge came before we were a hundred metres into the gorge. There was a chilling ululation from high above—men’s voices raised in an imitation of the high-pitched, warbling wail of tribal women—and a sudden tumble of small boulders as a little avalanche spilled into the canyon before us. Like others, I turned in my saddle to see that a platoon of local tribesmen had taken up positions behind us with a variety of weapons trained on our backs. We halted immediately, at the first sound. Khader slowly rode on alone for some two hundred metres. He stopped there, with his back straight in the saddle, and his standard fluttering in the strong, chill breeze.
The seconds of a long minute ticked away with the guns behind us, and the rocks poised above. Then a lone figure appeared, riding toward Khader on a tall camel. Although the two-humped Bactrian camel is native to Afghanistan, the rider’s was a single-humped Arabian camel; the type bred by long distance cameleers of the northern Tajik region for use in extremes of cold. It had a mop of hair on its head, thick and shaggy neck-fur, and long, powerful legs. The man riding that impressive beast was tall and lean, and appeared to be at least ten years older than Khader’s fit sixty-plus. He wore a long, white shirt over white Afghan pants, and a knee-length, sleeveless, black serge vest. A snowy-white turban of sumptuous length was piled majestically on his head. His grey-white beard was trimmed away from the upper lip and the mouth, descending from his chin to nudge his thin chest.
Some of my friends in Bombay had called that kind of beard a Wahabi, after the sternly orthodox Saudi Arabian Muslims who trimmed their beards in that way to imitate the style preferred by the Prophet. It was a sign to us, in the canyon, that the stranger possessed at least as much moral authority as temporal power. The latter was emphasised with spectacular effect by the antique, long-barrelled jezail that he held upright, balanced on his hip. The muzzle-loaded rifle was decorated along all of its wooden surfaces with gleaming discs, scrolls, and diamond shapes fashioned from brass and silver coins and polished to a dazzling brilliance.
The man drew up beside Khaderbhai, facing us and within a hand’s reach of our Khan. His bearing was commanding, and it was clear that he was accustomed to a comprehensive respect. He was, in fact, one of the very few men I ever came to know who equalled Abdel Khader Khan in the esteem—perhaps even the veneration—that he commanded from others with nothing more, or less, than his bearing and the sheer force of his fully realised life.
After a lengthy discussion, Khaderbhai wheeled his horse gently to face us.
‘Mister John!’ he called to me, using the first name in my false American passport, and speaking in English. ‘Come here to me, please!’
I kicked backward, uttering what I hoped was an encouraging sound. All eyes on the ground and above us were on me, I knew, and in the swollen, silent seconds I had a vision of the horse throwing me to the ground at Khader’s feet. But the mare responded with a smart, prancing canter, and found her own way through the column to stop at Khader’s side.
‘This is Hajji Mohammed,’ Khader announced. He swept around us with a broad movement of his open palm. ‘He is the Khan, the leader of all the people, in all the clans, and all the families here.’
‘Asalaam aleikum,’ I said in greeting, holding my hand over my heart as a gesture of respect.
Believing me to be an infidel, the leader didn’t respond to my greeting. The Prophet Mohammed adjured his followers to return the peaceful greeting of a believer with an even more polite greeting. Thus the greeting Asalaam aleikum, Peace be with you, should’ve been answered, at the very least, with Wa aleikum salaam wa rahmatullah, And with you be peace and the compassion of Allah. Instead, the old man stared down from his perch on the camel and greeted me with a hard question.
‘When will you give us Stingers to fight with?’
It was the same question e
very Afghan had asked me, the American, since we’d entered the country. And although Khaderbhai translated it for me again, I understood the words and I’d rehearsed the answer.
‘It will be soon, if Allah wills it, and the sky will be as free as the mountains.’
It was a good answer and Hajji Mohammed was pleased with it, but it was a much better question, and it deserved a better response than my hopeful lie. The Afghans, from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kandahar, knew that if the Americans had given them Stinger missiles at the outbreak of the war, the mujaheddin would’ve beaten the invaders back within months. Stingers meant that the hated and mortally effective Russian helicopters could be smashed from the skies. Even the formidable MiG fighters were vulnerable to a hand-launched Stinger missile. Without the insuperable advantage of the air, the Russians and their Afghan army proxies would be forced to fight a ground war against the mujaheddin resistance—a ground war they could never win.
Cynics among the Afghans believed that the Americans refused to supply Stingers, for the first seven years of the conflict, because they wanted Russia to win just enough of the Afghan War to over-reach and over-commit themselves. If and when the Stingers finally arrived, the Russians would suffer a defeat that cost them so much in men and resources that their entire Soviet Empire would collapse.
And whether the cynics were right or wrong, the deadly game did play itself out in exactly that way. The Stinger missiles did turn the tide of the conflict, when they were finally introduced, a few months after Khader led us into Afghanistan. The Russians were so weakened by the war of resistance fought by those very Afghan villagers, and millions like them, that their monstrous, Caligulan empire crumbled around them. It worked, it played out that way, and what it cost was a million Afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history—three-and-a-half million refugees moving through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul.
And I, a wanted criminal, working for a mafia crime lord, impersonated an American and looked those people in the eye, and lied to them about the weapons I couldn’t give them.
Hajji Mohammed liked my answer so much that he invited our group to attend the wedding celebrations of his youngest son. Concerned that a refusal might offend the elderly leader, and genuinely touched by the generous invitation, Khader accepted. When all the tributes were exacted—Hajji Mohammed drove a hard bargain, demanding and receiving Khader’s own horse as an additional, personal gift—Khaderbhai, Nazeer, and I agreed to accompany the leader to his khel.
The rest of our column made camp in a pastured valley with plentiful fresh water. The break in our forced march allowed the men to groom and rest the horses. The pack animals were in constant need of attention and, with the cargo concealed in a protected cave, the unburdened beasts were free to gambol and roam. Our men prepared to feast on four roasting sheep, aromatic Indian rice, and fresh green-leaf tea provided by Hajji’s village as their contribution to our part in the jihad. With the practical business of tributes negotiated and received, the senior men of Hajji Mohammed’s village—like all the Afghan clan leaders we’d encountered on the journey—acknowledged us as fighters in the same cause, and offered every help they could provide. As Khader, Nazeer, and I rode away from the temporary camp toward the khel, the sounds of singing and laughter followed us, echo chasing playful echo. It was the first time we’d heard that lightness of heart from our men in the twenty-three days of the journey.
Hajji Mohammed’s village was in celebration when we arrived. His profitable, bloodless encounter with our column of armed men had added to the gathering thrill of anticipation for the wedding. Khader explained how the elaborate rituals of Afghan matrimony had been unfolding for months before we’d arrived. There’d been ceremonial visits between the family of the groom, and the family of the bride. In every case, small gifts such as handkerchiefs or scented sweets had been exchanged, and precise courtesies were observed. The bride’s dowry of extravagantly embroidered cloths, imported silks, perfumes, and jewellery had been publicly displayed for all to admire, and was then held in trust for her by the groom’s family. The groom had even visited his bride-to-be in secret, and he’d presented her with personal gifts as he spoke to her. According to custom, it was strictly forbidden for him to be seen by the men in her family during that secret visit, but custom also required him to be helped by the girl’s mother. The dutiful mother, Khader assured me, had remained with the couple while they spoke to one another for the first time, and had acted as their chaperone. With all that achieved, the couple was ready for the culmination of the marriage ceremony itself, to be held in three days’ time.
Khader took me through the finest details of the rituals, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of urgency in his normally gentle, teacher’s manner. At first I guessed—rightly, I think—that he was reacquainting himself with the customs of his people, after his five long decades in exile. He was reliving the scenes and celebrations of his youth, and he was proving to himself that he was still Afghan, in all that his heart knew and felt. But as the lessons continued through the following days, and the intensity of his attention to them never failed, I finally realised that the long explanations and histories were for my benefit more than his. He was giving me a crash course in the culture of the nation where I might be killed and where my body might be laid to rest. He was making sense of it—my life with him, and my possible death—in the only way that he knew. And understanding that, without ever speaking of it to him, I listened dutifully and learned everything I could.
Kinsmen, friends, and other invitees streamed into Hajji’s village during those days. The four main houses of Hajji Mohammed’s fortress-like men’s kal’a, or compound, were tall, square, mud-brick buildings. High walls surrounded the kal’a, and one large dwelling stood in each of the four corners. The women’s kal’a was a separate set of buildings behind even higher walls. In the men’s compound we slept on the floor and cooked all our own meals. It was already crowded in the house that Khader, Nazeer, and I joined but, as new men arrived from distant villages, we all simply squashed in further. Sleeping in our clothes, we top-and-tailed across the whole floor, each man sleeping with his head beside the feet of the next. There’s a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex—a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-Palaeolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of Afghan nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerrilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would’ve frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.
During the day, the same men prepared complex food dishes for the Friday wedding. Those dishes included flavoured yoghurts, piquant goat’s or sheep’s milk cheeses, oven-baked cakes made with corn flour, dates, nuts, and wild honey, biscuits baked with richly churned goat’s milk butter and, of course, a variety of halal meats and vegetable pulao. While the foods were being prepared, I watched as men dragged a foot-operated grinding wheel into an open space, and the groom devoted a tense hour to putting a razor’s edge to a large, ornate dagger. The bride’s father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man.
‘The groom has just sharpened the knife that the bride’s father will use on him, if he ever mistreats the girl,’ Khader explained to me as we watched.
‘That’s a pretty good custom,’ I mused.
‘It is not a custom,’ Khader corrected me, with a laugh. ‘It is his idea—the bride’s father. I have never heard of
it before this. But if it works, it might become a custom.’
Each day the men also rehearsed ritual group-dances with the musicians and singers who’d been hired to complement the formal, public celebration. The dancing gave me the chance to see a new and completely unexpected side of Nazeer. He hurled himself into the whirling chorus line of men with grace and passion. Moreover, my short, bow-legged friend, whose bulky arms seemed to jut outward from the tree-trunk of his thick neck and chest, was by far the best dancer in the entire assembly, and quickly earned their admiration. The whole secret and invisible inner life of the man, his full creative and spiritual endowment, was expressed in the dance. And that face—I’d said, once, that I’d never seen another human face in which the smile was so utterly defeated—that scowl-creased face was transfigured in the dance until his honest, selfless beauty was so radiant that it filled my eyes with tears.
‘Tell me once more,’ Abdel Khader Khan commanded, with a roguish smile in his eye, as we watched the dancers from a vantage point beneath a shaded wall.
I laughed. When I turned to look at him, he laughed as well.
‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Do it to please me.’
‘But you’ve heard this twenty times from me already. How about you answer me a question instead?’
‘You tell me once more, and then I will answer your question.’
‘Okay. Here goes. The universe began about fifteen billion years ago, in almost absolute simplicity, and it’s been getting more and more complex ever since. This movement from the simple to the complex is built into the web and weave of the universe, and it’s called the tendency toward complexity. We’re the products of this complexification, and so are the birds, and the bees, and the trees, and the stars, and even the galaxies of stars. And if we were to get wiped out in a cosmic explosion, like an asteroid impact or something, some other expression of our level of complexity would emerge, because that’s what the universe does. And this is likely to be going on all over the universe. How am I doing so far?’