‘Thank you, sister,’ Karima said. ‘I understand.’ She turned away and started to make her bed.
The other woman touched her arm. ‘Are you in trouble?’
‘Mumkin, possibly. I have killed two of the Rouss, important ones, shuravis, communists …’
‘That is enough. Never mention that to anyone. If you have problems, ask for Inayat, the proprietor’s wife.’
She ran out. A moment later, Maryam saw her through the window, hurrying away, perched on a tiny donkey.
Maryam had a bath, put on her jeans, T-shirt and tank-top, and went in search of information. She found a door marked Daftar, office, knocked and went in.
The owner of the Serai, a huge, middle-aged, muscular frontier man, greeted her affably in his office-cum-sitting-room, bare of all furniture except for a rifle, some rugs and a couple of long sofas. He was sitting in the middle of one, back to the wall. He gestured to the place opposite, inviting her to sit. It was much hotter here than in Kabul, and somehow the whole atmosphere was different. It was Pashtun land.
‘May you not be tired.’ The ancient greeting.
‘May you not be sad.’ The standard answer.
He looked at her without curiosity, like a benevolent brigand, which she was quite prepared to believe he was. Pashtuns usually take people as they come.
‘Dodai – bread?’
He offered her a piece of unleavened bread, torn from a selection of elephant ear-flaps nailed haphazardly on the wooden wall behind him, and gestured towards some cheese and salt. Then cup after cup of sweet green tea, made from water boiling in a huge samovar. Maryam decided to confide in him.
She took a small piece of bread, sprinkled salt on it, divided it into two as he watched, and handed one half to him. He took it at once, held it for a moment as if making up his mind, and then chewed and swallowed it.
‘Very well, we have shared bread and salt. What help do you want, maiden?’
The bread and salt bond was inviolable. From now on, the Pashtun was bound to defend her, even at the cost of his own life. She would have to be treated exactly as if she was of his own family. Namak-haram, unfaithful to one’s salt, was one of the three worse epithets which could be hurled at an Afghan. It ranked just below haramzada, bastard, and just above kafir, infidel. Such an insult could be wiped out only by blood.
The Pashtuns look down on people from effete Kabul, and Maryam’s accent told that she was from the capital. Although the innkeeper had accepted her salt, she would do well to establish an affinity with him too; but obliquely would be the best way.
‘I am from Kabul.’
‘Things are bad there.’
‘That is why I am here.’
‘What do you need?’
‘I need help, to get across the border, to the Pashtuns there.’
‘What is your tribe, and what is your name, and whose daughter are you?’
‘I am a traveller.’ The phrase is used by people in the East to denote a reluctance to explain themselves much further.
The innkeeper was not, however, content to accept the traditional formula.
‘A traveller. Is there purs-o-pal, questioning and searching, for you? And what Pashtuns do you seek?’
‘The Yusufzai, the Joseph-born.’
‘You are of the Yusufzai?’
‘I am of the Bani-Israil.’
‘But, light of my eyes, so are we all. That is what the Afghans are.’
Maryam had laughed, many years ago, when her parents told her that the Pashtun people swore they were the direct and legitimate descendants of the people of Israel. That was when she was about nine or ten. By the time she was fifteen, she had become deeply interested in this history, or legend, or whatever it really was. She had, in fact, done seven years’ study on the question since then, for her own personal interest.
She had started at the Library of the Pohantun, Kabul University, where she had surprised the librarian by asking to see the Jewish Encyclopaedia. She had looked up ‘Afghanistan’, in Volume I of the edition of 1901. There it was: the history of the Pashtuns, according to their own lore.
‘Afghan tradition traces their descent from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. The Tabakati Nasiri says that the Bani-Israil settled in the country of Ghor, south-east of Herat, carried there by Bakhtannasar (Nebuchadnezzar).’
And there were plenty of graves in the area of south-west Afghanistan with Hebrew inscriptions, even if they were later than Nebuchadnezzar. The people had long locks of hair, they named their home mountain range the Sulaiman, Solomon, Mountains, and there were still Jews, practising ones, in Herat and elsewhere in the country.
The fact was that some ten or twelve million people, many of them bearing Old Testament names – Isaac, Israel, David, Sulaiman and the rest – make up the Pashtun tribes. They form the majority of the people of Afghanistan itself, and to the east their territory extends from Kashmir in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south.
They insist that they are the descendants of one Afghana, commander of the armies of Solomon, son of David. Their oral traditions are recorded in the standard work, The Afghan Treasury. A very large number, probably a majority, of the Pashtuns would cut the throat of anyone who expressed absolute disbelief in their claim.
Since the Bani-Israil descent is rooted in the complex but detailed genealogical charts which show both the origins and the relationships of the tribes, the whole question is still an extremely live issue. To deny anyone’s ancestry is unthinkable – or fatal.
Maryam had read both the Treasury and the many books, often written by Westerners who had served in India, supporting or opposing the theory. Most of these, largely British, writers, were as fanatically for or against the story as the Pashtuns themselves were addicted to it. For Maryam, something which seized the imagination to this extent was in itself a source of wonderment.
‘I am Fazli Rabbi, of the Mohmand Clan, and we are cousins of the Yusufzais. I shall take you myself to the Khan who is a direct descendant of David the King of the Bani-Israil, in the transborder country of the mountains.’
‘Thank you, my name is Maryam, and I seek sanctuary and protection with the people of David. I am oppressed by the Rouss.’
‘Har Firauni-ra Musa, for every Pharoah there is a Moses,’ said the Pashtun, ‘but it is not seemly that we should travel alone, a man and a woman, whatever they may do in Kabul and places like that.’ He disappeared through a door into the rooms which made up his private part of the Serai, and came out again with a tall, handsome woman of middle-age, dressed in a waistcoat, woolly jumper, and baggy trousers with a green skirt over them.
‘This is Inayat, my wife. As you know, “Inayat” means Blessing; and she will be a blessing to you as she is to me. She will teach you the language of the Real People.’ Maryam took her hand, and laughed. The Real People spoke Pashtu, of course. So far, she and Fazli Rabbi had been speaking Dari, which had only a small number of Pashtu words in it. Inayat handed Maryam a silk outfit, like her own.
‘But who will look after the Serai? And how will we get over the Pakistan border? I have no passport.’ Maryam could still hardly believe that all this was happening. She had heard of it, of course, but actually living through it was different. Here was a total stranger, leaving his home and business, breaking the law, to take an unknown person into tribal territory just because she said that she needed help. Maryam shook her head, as if to clear it.
‘Passport – massport!’ He used the Eastern derision-rhyme to show his contempt for small details. ‘I have never even seen one. Never mind about that. Border? We don’t recognize the border, we are a free people, and that British-drawn border cuts the Pashtun land in two. As for the Serai – Serai-maray – I’ll show you.’
Fazli Rabbi put two huge hands to his mouth and shouted ‘O Asil! O Palang!’
Asil and Palang, who came running, rifles in hand and turban-ends across their mouths, were two strapping youths, over six foot tall: Fazli Rabbi’s sons, who might have been
any age from seventeen to thirty. Like their father and mother, they had massive, muscular frames and grey-green eyes. The Mohmand warriors were among the most feared on the whole frontier. Together with the redoubtable Afridi clan, they dominated the Khyber Pass area.
Fazli Rabbi explained that he was initiating his sons into the mysteries of the catering and hotel business, as practised in the Fazli Rabbi Caravanserai on the Jalalabad Road.
3 To the Castle of the Yusuf-Born
The Path of Flight
Smugglers’ Route
Jalalabad to Pakistan
JUNE 9–19
Next morning, when the three travellers set off at dawn, on horseback, Fazli Rabbi relaxed his medieval and Pashtun manner to disclose that he had been planning to visit the Yusufzai leader for some time and also that, in spite of his apparent indifference to affairs other than those of the Serai, he had detailed knowledge of what was going on in the country.
‘There is a very large Russian military force quite near here,’ he said. ‘Their headquarters is at Jalalabad City, and they come from the two hundred and first Soviet Motorized Rifle Division. They support what is left of the Eleventh Afghan Infantry, most of whose men have deserted to the Muhjahidin. Recently, the Nikolais called in helicopters to pursue some guerrillas into Pakistani territory, over there,’ he waved his hand in the direction of the frontier, ‘and the Pakistanis shot two of them down. Now the Rouss are quieter. They used Hind helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. That reminds me. Don’t pick anything up from the ground. The Rouss drop explosive grenades designed to maim; may dogs defile their graves!’
Fazli Rabbi’s interest, and his very detailed facts, even the numbers of the divisions and the data on the aircraft, made Maryam realize that this was no ordinary Pashtun, or even innkeeper. ‘Hind’, for example, was the code-name used by NATO to denote the Mi-24. They were called that in Western short-wave news broadcasts.
Inayat, also, had a sharp eye for weaponry, and she once said, ‘SAM-7s are the medicine for those,’ as a Russian helicopter passed overhead. Even Maryam only dimly remembered from the radio that the SAM-7 was a shoulder-launched rocket. ‘They are heat-seekers, you know,’ continued Inayat, ‘with a device for locking onto the exhaust of a hostile aircraft. They are useful against tanks, too.’
On the other hand, she worried more than her husband did about ‘the boys’, left to look after the Serai. ‘You know,’ she said to Maryam as they rode side by side into the hills, ‘Fazli Rabbi insisted on calling them Asil and Palang. That means “Noble” and “Leopard”. He is fond of leopards, and thinks that they are noble. But are these the right names for people who will run a business? Many people believe that people try to follow the meaning of their name. What do you think?’
‘I am sure they’ll manage all right,’ was all that the girl from Kabul could think of, so she said it.
‘Well,’ said Inayat, ‘I suppose they will be all right. After all, “Zabardast”, my husband’s surname, means “violent”, or “powerful”, and yet he has made a very good thing of the Serai since we took it over ten years ago. Before that, he was in the Army, you know.’
North of sub-tropical Jalalabad, with, for mountainous Afghanistan, the amazing sight of palm trees and citrus fruits growing, the road follows the Kunar River, the ancient Choaspes, flowing down from the snow-capped mountains of Kafiristan, land of the Infidel.
Fazli Rabbi led his party northwards, at first, following the route probably taken by Alexander the Great on his Indian campaign. Through smiling fields, past ancient Buddhist monuments, into walled towns with medieval forts to guard them, this was, at last, the real land of the Pashtuns. Everywhere they went, herdsmen with flocks of fat-tailed sheep, farmers opening their irrigation channels for the day’s watering, children hurrying to the Mulla’s school, called out the inevitable ‘Starai ma she, may you not be tired!’ Those with more time to spend would invite the travellers into a teahouse or a walled garden, where soft fruits – peaches, apricots, plums – grew. ‘Are you strong?’ ‘Are you happy?’ ‘May faith be thy daily bread.’
Every man carried a gun, some of them the long, muzzle-loading jazails, handmade perhaps a century or more ago, others perfect replicas of British Lee-Enfield .303s, made in the trans-border armouries of the Afridis. They were perfect copies, even to the stamp ‘G VI’, King George the Sixth. The empire which owned more than a quarter of the surface of the earth had struggled, ineffectively, to add this territory to it, when the Pashtuns had declined the honour.
As Maryam and her escort moved deeper and deeper into tribal territory, there were Kalashnikovs, rockets and the new Soviet grenades. When he can, the Pashtun warrior tries to keep up with developments in weapons technology. Once Maryam saw, silhouetted against the evening sky, a huge clansman on a horse, his grenade-launcher on his back, scanning the darkening sky for helicopters. Behind him on a donkey, like the squire of some knight of long ago, came his disciple, a boy of perhaps ten, carrying a back pack of the latest Russian rockets, ready to hand them to his master the moment there was action.
The international border, the Durand line, had been drawn through the middle of the tribal lands. On one side was Pakistan, inheritor of the British Raj, on the other Afghanistan, master, until so recently, of its own destiny. As the party moved further northwards, the going became harder, the trail passing north and east through stark mountains, where beetle-browed warriors of the Tarklanris saluted them gravely with an upraised hand, then went back to their ploughing, rifles slung across their backs, more often than not with a red rose stuck in the long ringlets behind their ears.
On the whole, the Pashtuns were magnificent specimens, which some attributed to the fact that infant mortality was very high, and only the toughest survived. They were darker than the average Afghans, usually tall, with hooked noses and long, often straight black hair and eyes which varied from grey to deepest black. Again and again, as if from nowhere, sentries would appear and seek the travellers’ credentials, usually by a brief exchange of words:
‘Peace on thee.’
‘And on thee peace.’
‘Where from and where to?’
‘From Jalalabad to the Yusufland.’
‘With faith in God. May thou become great.’
‘I entrust you to God. May thou be blessed.’
Without the deep valleys cut into the mountains by the rivers flowing here for uncounted millennia, it would have been impossible to get through these mountains. Fazli Rabbi and the two women crossed the international border without knowing it. Both the Afghans and the Pakistanis, following tradition, left the tribal people to their own devices. If they had tried to put up fences or barbed wire, they would have been torn down. This was the Rahi-Gurez, the Path of Flight, used by refugees and smugglers moving between the Indian sub-continent and Central Asia.
They stopped, the first night, at the fort of Malik Miskin Khan, a friend of the innkeeper from Jalalabad. He was all of six foot seven inches high, an ancient warrior chief who commanded nine thousand fighting men. He was allied, by blood, to the Yusufzai innkeeper, and he proudly showed off his family tree, mounted on the wall of his bare reception hall in the clay-brick fort. It traced his family back to the great Qais, of the Bani-Israil.
‘Lady,’ he said to Maryam, ‘we Pashtuns have three parts to the code of the Pashtun, called Pashtunwali. They are: hospitality, safe-conduct and “exchange”. The last means that we exact a life for a life, insist on requital for misdeeds. But,’ he drew himself up and gulped some green tea from a china cup, ‘in practice, ancestry is the most important thing for the Bani-Israil. It is so important that it is not mentioned in Pashtunwali, in fact. It is taken for granted.’
The following morning, when they were about to leave, Maryam made the mistake of offering to pay for the night’s hospitality. The old chief at first bristled, looked as if he was going to do something violent, and then laughed. ‘It pleases the Pashtun to know that he can outdo others in
hospitality,’ he said, ‘and so I am glad that I can teach you something.’ He illustrated this double-edged compliment with a tale, which he insisted on telling, even thought it meant delaying the start of the day’s march.
‘You will know,’ he began, ‘that there is now in Kabul the presence of the Rouss, the eaters of filth. Not long ago, a Pashtun notable of the Musa-khel, the Moses tribe, who hailed from the far south of here towards Baluchistan, was turned out of his house. His name was Ibrahim Khan, and his house was wanted by the Rouss for the family of one of their officials. As you also probably know,’ he made a gesture of contempt, ‘Kabul people do not help their neighbours, and they have little or no clan feeling. So Ibrahim had nobody to support him against the tyrants, and thus he became, in his old age, destitute. He had to sell shish-kabobs in the street.’
The ancient stroked his beard. ‘Among us, even though we are warriors, commerce has no stigma, in fact it is a blessing: for all the prophets engaged in trade of one sort or another.’
He paused for a long time, and then looked at the travellers, as if seeking encouragement.
‘What did Ibrahim Khan do?’ asked Maryam, genuinely interested.
‘Ah, what could he do? He sold kabobs, and he waited. Then, one day, someone shot the Russian who had taken his house. Perhaps it was Ibrahim Khan; perhaps word had got back to his people, who sent someone for badal, “exchange”.’
‘So he got his house back?’ Maryam asked.
‘Patience, child. That is not the point. My intention is to tell you about nobility of spirit, about honour and taking things from women.’ The old man made everyone sit down and called for tea.
Then he resumed. ‘Although the Russian was dead, his wife still lived in the house. Ibrahim could not touch her, for it is sharm, a dishonourable thing, to harm a woman. He waited for a chance to show his Pashtunwali, his chivalry.
‘It so happened,’ said the old man, gazing into the blue haze of the mountainside where the track which Maryam would ascend ran, far into the distance, ‘that one day the wife of the Russian came upon Ibrahim Khan selling kabobs in the street.