Sent home with an honorable discharge and a four-dollar monthly pension, Sarfraz resumed teaching in Zuudkhan but lasted only a year because of his poor pay and expanding family. He then moved to the nearby town of Gilgit, where he became a minivan driver on the treacherous Karakoram Highway, often driving for thirty hours straight and rarely going home. Plagued by no much success, he moved on to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its commercial center, where he landed a job as a chokidar (security guard) for six months. Then it was north to Lahore, the country’s academic and cultural center, to work in a Chinese restaurant. No much success there either, and by the early eighties Sarfraz was on the move again, this time to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s volatile Northwest Frontier Province, where he worked as a chauffeur, mechanic, and auto broker before deciding, once and for all, to give up on cars. Out of options, he returned home to Zuudkhan—completing a circle that is familiar to millions of men who come from Pakistan’s tribal areas, where the unemployment rate hovers around 80 percent.
By this time, the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan was in full swing. When the Soviets dispatched a squadron of helicopters across the border and into the skies above Zuudkhan, Pakistan’s government responded by declaring the Charpurson Valley a security zone and closing it to all outsiders. Sensing an opportunity, Sarfraz decided to take up trading over the border with Afghanistan by leveraging his family’s connections inside the Wakhan Corridor. (A century earlier, Sarfraz’s ancestors had moved to the Charpurson Valley from the Wakhan, and many members of his extended family remained in the Corridor.)
He spent the next decade as a high-altitude trader. Three or four times a year, he would work his way over the Irshad Pass on horseback or on foot, ferrying rice, flour, sugar, tea, cigarettes, cooking oil, knives, batteries, salt, pots and pans, chewing tobacco, and anything else the inhabitants of the Corridor might need to make it through the winter. These items would be exchanged for butter and animals—mainly yaks and fat-tailed sheep—which he would drive back over the pass. He was also not averse to smuggling the occasional consignment of gemstones or whiskey, though he steered clear of opium and guns.
It was a hard way to make a living, even when it was supplemented with sporadic employment as a high-altitude mountaineering porter on K2 and other nearby peaks. Nevertheless, these experiences imbued Sarfraz with an impressive skill set. He came to know not only the nuances of the terrain and the movements of the Afghan and Tajik military patrols (which he avoided) but also the habits of the wild animals, especially the ibex and the Marco Polo sheep (which he took great pleasure in hunting). In the process, he gradually built up a dense network of business associates within the villages and settlements north of the Hindu Kush. By the end of a decade, his linguistic repertoire had burgeoned to the point where he could speak seven languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Dari, Burushkashi, Pashto, English, and Wakhi.
Those gypsy years that Sarfraz had spent as an itinerant jack-of-all-trades and as an alpine peddler may have been rich in adventure, but when he recounted them before me that night in Zuudkhan, he did not romanticize this no much success period of his life. In his view, his aimless wanderings and his lack of financial success seemed to underscore how difficult it can be for almost any man (or woman) with a streak of independence to find his place within the poor villages and the teeming cities of Pakistan.
For my part, however, I perceived something quite different—and far more valuable.
By now the hour had grown late and the other members of Saidullah Baig’s household had begun dropping off to sleep. When I realized just how much Sarfraz knew about the far side of the Hindu Kush, however, I tossed another clump of dried yak dung onto the fire and told him that I wanted him to give me a crash-course tutorial on the Wakhan. How many people were living there, what tribe did they belong to, and what were their religious and political affiliations?
Sarfraz chuckled and replied that it wasn’t that simple. It was true, he acknowledged, that there were only about five thousand residents in the Wakhan. But inside the Corridor’s 120-mile stretch—which in places is less than twelve miles wide—one encountered three different communities, each with its own distinctive customs, traditions, and ethnic identity, speaking three different languages and adhering to two separate branches of Islam.
At the far eastern end were the Kirghiz nomads, who move with their herds along the alpine pastures above twelve thousand feet. Descendants of the horsemen who founded the Ottoman Empire, the Kirghiz are Sunnis who speak a cognate of Turkish—attributes that differentiate them from their Wakhi neighbors directly to the west. The Wakhi people, Sarfraz explained, are ethnic Tajiks who trace their ancestry back to the Persian Empire in modern Iran. They are sedentary farmers who grow barley, buckwheat, and potatoes along the river valleys at altitudes considerably lower than those where the Kirghiz dwell. The Wakhi speak a cognate of Persian, and they belong to the Ismaili sect of Islam. Finally, at the far western end of the Wakhan, where the Corridor spills into Badakshan, the northernmost province of Afghanistan, one finds a third community. Like the Wakhi, they are ethnic Tajiks. But instead of Ismaili, they are conservative Sunnis, and their languages, Tajik and Dari, are separate cognates of Persian.
When Sarfraz saw that I was struggling to make sense of these overlapping religious and linguistic characteristics, he seized a notebook, tore off a sheet of paper, and declared that he was going to draw a special map that would cut through the confusion. Like everywhere else in Afghanistan, he intoned, geography is far less important than relationships. If you want to understand the way things work in the Wakhan, the locations of the villages and the rivers and the roads really don’t matter all that much. What does matter is who swears allegiance to whom. This is the key to grasping the way that power flows, he declared, and when you comprehend the dynamics of power, everything else falls into place.
Then he drew three circles across the page—left, right, and center—and in the middle of each circle he wrote a name. The Kirghiz were represented by the circle to the right (the east), and the name he wrote inside it was that of Abdul Rashid Khan. This was the headman who had refused to participate in the Last Exodus to Turkey in 1982 and elected instead to remain in the High Pamir with a small group of followers. The name inside the center circle (which represented the Wakhi people) was Shah Ismail Khan. His headquarters, Sarfraz explained, were in the village of Qala-e-Panj, halfway through the Corridor, and he took his orders from the Aga Khan, the supreme leader of the Ismailis. The left circle (the Tajiks) bore the name of Sadhar Khan, a mujahadeen commander who had spent ten years fighting the Russians and another five years fighting the Taliban.
Power flows from west to east, Sarfraz explained. The Tajiks have more money and better weapons than the Wakhi; the Wakhi are more productive farmers than the Kirghiz; and the Kirghiz have huge herds of sheep and yaks whose wool and meat are coveted by everyone else. Even though Sadhar Khan is the strongest leader in the entire Corridor, the civil affairs of the Wakhan hinge on a delicate balance between him, Shah Ismail Khan, and Abdul Rashid Khan, each of whom acts as a kind of supreme commander within his respective sphere of influence. Nothing takes place inside the Corridor that does not escape the knowledge of these three “big men.” No new venture unfolds without their permission.
When Sarfraz had finished laying all of this out, he plunged into a topic that held far greater interest for him than the human dynamics of the Wakhan. “And now we will discuss horses,” he announced, growing visibly animated. “Because for the people of the Wakhan, nothing is more important!”
As the night wore on, we talked of serious equine matters: the beauty of horses, their capacity to elevate the status of those who can master them, the importance of the violent games that the men of this region play on horseback in order to demonstrate their courage and prowess. By the time we had exhausted this topic, it was nearly dawn. Before breaking off for the night, however, Sarfraz said he had a suggestion to make.
br />
“If you are truly interested in the Wakhan,” he said, “then tomorrow let me take you to the entrance to Irshad Pass, and you will be able to see the route that leads into the Corridor.” And with that, he bid me good night and slipped out the door to return to his home.
That was the first of what would eventually become an endless string of conversations between Sarfraz and me. At the time, I now believe, he regarded me as nothing more (and nothing less) than an eccentric American with a lust for adventure who offered the chance for him to earn some cash. What I saw in Sarfraz, however, was a man who possessed energy, ambition, and a rather flamboyant sense of his own theatricality—and who seemed to be genuinely intrigued by our last-place-first approach to building schools, perhaps because it mirrored something in his own soul.
I also knew that I was in the presence of a proud, innovative, frustrated, and immensely competent man who seemed to be conducting his life as if it were an endless bushkashi match. In short, I recognized a spirit that was not kindred to my own so much as its complement. In ways that neither Sarfraz nor I fully understood at the time, each of us seemed to round out and finish off something inside the other.
And so it was that our conversation on that snowy evening in Zuudkhan marked the beginning of the greatest friendship of my life.
The following day, after the elders of the village had taken me on a tour of their new water pipe and the hydroelectric generator whose construction the Central Asia Institute had financed, Sarfraz and I clambered into his cherry red Land Cruiser and drove north on a horrendous road whose surface was coated with a gelatinous soup of ice, mud, and loose boulders. Our destination was Baba Gundi Ziarat, a small hexagonal shrine at the edge of Pakistan’s northern border, on the threshold of the Afghan frontier.
It took an hour to complete the fifteen-mile trip, which took us through a barren landscape of treeless, rock-strewn hills that resembled the surface of the moon. The bleakness of the Charpurson (which translates to “place of nothing” in Wakhi) was hardened even further by the weather, a frigid mixture of sleet and snow that was periodically turned horizontal by the strong gusts of wind coming off the Hindu Kush.
As we drew near the shrine, we spied a herd of roughly twenty yaks, tended by five men on horseback. A group of Kirghiz had apparently just come through the Irshad Pass for a final trading session before winter set in.
These men were Sarfraz’s friends and acquaintances, so after a round of introductions had been made, we gathered up several yak-wool blankets and spread them on the wet ground. It was while we were sitting there drinking salt tea that the squadron of fourteen Kirghiz riders, the men who had been sent out by Abdul Rashid Khan to find me, abruptly thundered around the corner at the entrance to the pass.
Their leader was Roshan Khan, the oldest son of Abdul Rashid Khan, and when we had finished exchanging pleasantries, Sarfraz leaped into the back of his Land Cruiser and presented the Kirghiz with forty bags of flour as an early celebration of Id (one of the two biggest holidays on the Islamic calendar). When the cargo was unloaded, we headed back toward Zuudkhan, surrounded by the horsemen.
We were back at the village by early evening and converged on Sarfraz’s mud-walled home. While the Kirghiz dismounted and tended to their horses, Sarfraz selected a fat mai (sheep), dropped it gently to the ground with its head pointing southwest toward Mecca, said a quick blessing, and drew a knife across its throat. When the animal had finished bleeding out, Sarfraz’s wife, Bibi Numa, removed the skin from the carcass and set about preparing the meat.
By nightfall, nearly forty people had crammed into Sarfraz’s one-room, sixteen by twenty-foot home and arranged themselves with their backs to the walls. The Kirghiz sat cross-legged in their enormous boots, from which they pulled out their riding knives to serve as silverware. (It is generally forbidden to wear shoes inside someone’s home, but Sarfraz had given the Kirghiz a special dispensation because if they removed their boots, their feet would swell up as a result of the high-altitude crossing they had just completed, and it would be almost impossible to get their boots on again.)
Most of the mutton had been boiled in a large pot, although a small portion had been fried into kebabs in a pan. The real delicacy, however, was the dumba, the blubberlike fat from the animal’s tail and its hind end. This was placed on a platter in the center of the room, where it sat quivering like a hunk of golden Jell-O.
The Kirghiz inhaled this feast with the harrowing relish of men who had been subsisting on rainwater and chewing tobacco. They scooped up the fat with their fists, they stripped the meat from the bones with their riding knives, and they snapped the bones in half and sucked the marrow into their mouths with moist slurping sounds. Everything was consumed—the head, the testicles, the eyeballs—and when they were through, the men took their hands, which were now slathered in grease, and carefully smeared them over their faces, their hair, and their beards.
Later, when everyone had pronounced himself sated, Chinese thermoses filled with salt tea were brought in, followed by large bowls of arak, fermented mare’s milk. Then it was time to prepare for bed, and as blankets were brought to Sarfraz’s home from all over the village, the guests stepped outside to perform final ablutions.
By this time, the wind was settled, the snow had subsided, and the sky was littered with a spray of constellations so dense and so bright that the milky glow of the heavens defined every inch of the ridgelines along the peaks surrounding Zuudkhan. As the horsemen squatted in the starlight cleaning their teeth with matchsticks or the tips of their knives, Roshan Khan stood beside me for a moment, looking up at the night sky. Then, with Sarfraz translating so that I could follow, he said that he had a message from his father that he needed to recite:For me, a hard life is no problem. But for our children, this life is no good. We have little food, poor houses, and no school. We know you have been building schools in Pakistan, so will you come and build the same for us in Afghanistan? We will donate the land, the stones, the labor, everything that you ask. Come now and stay with us for the winter as our guest. We will take tea together. We will butcher our biggest sheep. We will discuss matters properly and we will plan a school.
I replied that I was honored by this invitation, but I could not possibly return over the Irshad Pass to camp out with Abdul Rashid Khan for the next five months. First, I had no formal permission to enter Afghanistan—and the Taliban, who ran the government in Kabul, weren’t exactly handing out visas to U.S. citizens. More important, my pregnant wife was expecting me home, and if I did not return soon, she would be deeply upset. Surely the Kirghiz could understand the seriousness and the magnitude of a wife’s displeasure?
Roshan Khan nodded gravely.
However, I continued, I would definitely come to visit them when I got the chance, and when I arrived, I would do my best to help them. In the meantime, I needed some information. Could Abdul Rashid Khan perhaps give me a rough sense of the number of children, ages five to fifteen, who needed education?
“No problem,” Roshan told me. “Soon we will give you the name of every single person inside the Wakhan.”
This seemed a bit far-fetched. In the region that these men had just ridden out of, there are no phones, no faxes, no e-mail, no postal system, and no roads. Moreover, thanks to the snow and the storms, the area was about to be sealed off from the rest of the world for seven months.
“How in the world do they propose to get this information to us?” I asked, turning to Sarfraz. “And when it comes time for us to enter Afghanistan and make our way up to the Wakhan, how can we tell Abdul Rashid Khan when we’re coming?”
“No problem, we do not need to tell,” Sarfraz replied airily. “Abdul Rashid Khan will find a way of getting us the information. And he will know when we are coming.”
Having no other alternative, I shrugged and took him at his word.
Now Roshan Khan and I enacted a ritual that I recognized from six years earlier, when Haji Ali had stood in the barley f
ields of Korphe and asked me to provide an assurance that I was coming back to him. The leader of the Kirghiz horsemen placed his right hand on my left shoulder, and I did the same with him.
“So, you will promise to come to Wakhan to build a school for our children?” he asked, looking me in the eye.
In a place like Zuudkhan, an affirmative response to a question like that can confer an obligation that is akin to a blood oath—and for someone like me, this can be a real problem. As those who work with me in the United States understand all too painfully, time management is not my strong suit: Over the years, I have missed so many plane flights, failed to appear at so many appointments, and broken so many obligations that I long ago stopped keeping track. But education is a sacred thing, and the pledge to build a school is a commitment that cannot be surrendered or broken, regardless of how long it may take, how many obstacles must be surmounted, or how much money it will cost. It is by such promises that the balance sheet of one’s life is measured.
“Yes,” I replied. “I promise to come and build you a school.”
The next morning by five o’clock, they were gone. It would be five years before we saw each other again.
CHAPTER 3
The Year Zero
But it was the women who burned the eyes with tears. The Taliban had hated them.
—COLIN THUBRON, Shadow of the Silk Road
Girls’ school bombed by Taliban in Baujur, NWFP, Pakistan