Farishta (26 page)

Everyone who was not working that night had gathered in the pub by eight thirty for the PRT Mazār Grand National spring camel races. The tip sheets were a closely guarded secret, which no one was allowed to see until they were handed out minutes before the first race, when bets were placed. Each race had a title, with detailed descriptions of the competing camels.

I flipped through the booklet, laughing at the descriptions of the camels, each of which referred obliquely to one of the officers or soldiers at the PRT. As the colonel had warned, my “camel” was in the fourth race, The Commander’s Cup. Number 3 : American Beauty. “A solar-powered camel from the United States, descended from the original Irish breed with the stamina to win, but will have to fight since this is her first race.”

Fuzzy’s camel was also in my race. Number 2: Staffordshire Knot. “A huge, well-armed camel, speed unknown, who doesn’t say much, but if you try to pass him will spit bullets at you—and this camel never misses.”

In race number five was Number 6: Davies Delight. “An imported polo camel from the famous Hertfordshire stables in Brunei. A quiet and highly intelligent animal that could sneak up from the outside and surprise some of the favorites.”

The evening was raucous, with Fuzzy and me concluding our tie for last place by pummeling each other with the sponge dice. It was wonderful to see him smiling again. To my great surprise Mark showed up during my race and stayed until the end. He bet twenty dollars on his camel, tossed the dice with exaggerated seriousness, and won, using his prize money to buy a round of drinks for everyone in the pub.

“Strongbow?” he asked, handing me a can.

“Thanks, Mark. Congratulations on your win. You’re the most popular man in the pub right now.”

“A rare occasion for me,” he observed with a wry smile. We chatted about our trip to the Pashtun village and shared our frustration at the lack of reconstruction assistance for the rural people who most needed it. When Mark dropped his guard, he was actually quite pleasant to be around. Although this was the first time I’d seen him totally relaxed, it didn’t last for long. When he finished his beer, he excused himself with his usual formality—more intel reports to write before the morning staff meeting. I was sorry to see him go.

Spring is the time of year when young boys released from the confines of school or field or workshop gallop through the back streets of Mazār-i-Sharīf and every other Afghan city, laughing and squealing as they battle for aerial supremacy with their multicolored kites.

These spring winds, which give such delight to the kite runners, descend cold and heavy from the melting mountain snows and are swept aloft by the warm air rising from the northern steppes and southern deserts. They also pose a serious hazard to aircraft flying low across Afghanistan’s treacherous mountains between the months of March and May.

I had cleared my schedule for two days, anticipating the arrival of counter-narcotics officials from the British and American embassies. They were coming in response to a series of urgent e-mails I had sent reporting that it was already too late to stop the bumper crop of opium poppies expected to be harvested this year in Balkh Province.

I’d been asked to accompany the two men on a helicopter tour of the thousands of acres of poppy fields that had burst into deadly and colorful bloom. They were scheduled to arrive by Afghan Army helicopter—a risky way to travel over the mountains even in the best of times.

“The trip has been cancelled, Angela,” said the operations officer when I entered the vault for our morning briefing. “One of your American choppers went down yesterday in a dust storm in Khost. All survived, fortunately, but the Afghan Air Force have wisely decided not to make the trip north today—if ever. It looks like you have no excuses left to skip the wedding tonight,” he said with a malicious grin. Ahmad, one of our interpreters, was getting married in the largest wedding hall in Mazār-i-Sharīf.

“Great,” I moaned. This was the third wedding I’d been invited to in the past six weeks.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “you’re not the only one from the PRT who’s attending. The colonel, the chief of staff, Major Davies, and several other officers will be joining you.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said with a laugh, “I don’t mind attending, but the other officers won’t really be joining me. They’ll go together to the men’s party while I’ll spend the evening alone in a separate hall with three hundred women I’ve never met.”

He rolled his eyes in mock sympathy.

“I do enjoy the Bollywood music and the dancing, at least for the first hour or two,” I admitted, “but aren’t weddings supposed to come with champagne ? ”

“All the weddings I go to,” he agreed.

Since my language skills were still a state secret, I couldn’t tell the ops officer how frustrating it was not to be able to talk to the women at these events when I was perfectly capable of doing so. Listening in on conversations about their hopes for their daughters was fascinating, but there were so many questions I wanted to ask them. It was torture to remain mute.

Layers of mascara, glitter-encrusted hair, glossy red lips, matching fingernails, impossibly high heels, and floor-length gowns were the standard attire at these events. I was always seriously underdressed, but tolerated as the odd foreign woman at the gathering.

Almost two hours had past when I spotted Nilofar on the other side of the cavernous room, speaking to a group of young women. Nilofar saw me approaching and ran up, grinning broadly. Her eyes were dark with kohl, and her fitted pale green dress glittered with sequins. She had skipped the customary lacquered coiffure, allowing her lustrous hair to fall loose down her back. I smiled imagining the expression on Rahim’s face if he could see her looking like this.

“Angela,” she cried, kissing me on both cheeks, “I didn’t know you were coming to this wedding.”

“And I didn’t know you would be here.” I was thrilled to have my young friend to talk to for the next few hours.

“Ahmad’s new wife’s mother is my father’s second cousin.” She laughed. “We are Hazara, and that cousin is one-quarter Hazara from my great-grandmother. The rest of her family is Tajik. They don’t like to talk about their Hazara blood, but my father does business with their family, so they had to invite us. All Mazāris are related to one another somehow. That’s why our weddings are so big.”

Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper as she took my hand and led me across the room to a thick velvet curtain that separated the men from the women. “Do you want to see the men’s party? I have been watching Rahim dance, and now one of your soldiers is also dancing.”

“But women aren’t allowed to be with the men, Nilofar.” I worried that her impetuous nature would draw attention to her budding relationship with Rahim, which I feared was becoming too serious. The consequences for her if it got out of hand would be far greater than for Rahim. A young man could be forgiven such a transgression. A young woman’s reputation would be tarnished forever, and no man would want her for his bride.

“Don’t worry; no one will see us,” she said, leading me to a couch that had been pushed against the thick floor-to-ceiling drapes. She nodded at an elderly woman dozing in an overstuffed chair near us. She had been assigned as a sentry, but despite the noise was snoring quietly.

Nilofar sat on an arm of the couch and poked her finger through a hole in the curtain. “Here it is,” she said, peering quickly through the opening. “Look! The major and Rahim are both dancing!”

This I had to see. It was hard to picture the straitlaced major doing anything as rash as dancing at an Afghan wedding, especially given his reaction to my little romp around the atrium with the Romanians. I pressed my eye to the narrow slit in the curtain and had a panoramic view of the other half of the hall, where several hundred men were eating, talking, and dancing in clusters.

At the center of a group of laughing, swaying men was Mark, arms raised over his head, hands clapping. His eyes were closed and his head was thrown back. Rahim, whistling and shouting, was in the circle of men that surrounded him. Mark’s sinuous body in his camouflage uniform swayed to the beat with a wild abandon that even the Romanian soldiers did not possess. Just then, I felt Nilofar’s hand pulling me back.

“Angela, the old lady is waking up,” she warned as she dragged me away from the curtain. “We have to go back to my table before she sees us. All the girls do this; you just can’t look for too long.”

 

 

“You’re an early riser,” said Mark as he strolled by the rose garden on his way to breakfast at six thirty the following morning. I was waging a losing battle against a massive invasion of aphids.

“So are you,” I replied. “Did you enjoy last night’s wedding? ”

His crisp uniform and formal demeanor contrasted starkly with the man I had seen dancing with wild abandon the evening before.

“It was tolerable,” he said. “I know the interpreters like us to attend, and I don’t really mind.”

He stared at the bottle of noxious brown liquid I was spraying on the buds and stems of the bushes. There were no garden stores in Mazār, and after the first wave of aphids had attacked my adopted rose garden, Fuzzy, whose mother was the head of her garden club in Nottingham, had suggested removing and boiling the tobacco from a few packs of cigarettes.

“Is that your famous tobacco tea?” Mark asked with a hint of a smile.

“It is, but I think the aphids are starting to like it.”

“Don’t give up, Angela. Never give up.”

I looked up from my spraying to reply, but saw only the back of Mark’s uniform and his dark short-cropped hair as he headed for the officers’ mess.

In early June, Nilofar and I began slipping quietly out of the PRT compound under our burkas to demonstrate my solar ovens at a nearby Hazara displaced-persons camp. It was only a few blocks from the PRT, but so well concealed by the towering mud walls of the family compounds in our sector that I had not been aware of its existence until she mentioned it.

Nilofar had heard about my solar-cooking experiments on the roof of the PRT from Rahim, and had come at lunchtime several weeks earlier to see what I was making. On the day of her visit, I was preparing a traditional Afghan dish using ingredients I’d purchased in town.

“This is incredible!” She wiped her lips and laughed with delight as I spooned more of the tender spiced lamb and rice onto her plate.

While we ate, she told me about a Hazara camp near the PRT, which she had visited a number of times with her classmates from law school. They were helping the refugees document their land claims against Governor Daoud’s Tajik followers. Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

“Angela-
jan,
Rahim is Tajik, but he is a good Tajik. Did you know that there are many bad ones who hate the Hazara people? They call us dogs. I even heard bad things being said about us at Ahmad’s wedding.”

“Yes, Nilofar, I do know,” I replied, avoiding her eyes and growing silent. I didn’t know what to say about this absurd prejudice, which was forcing these two young Afghans to hide their love for each other.

We ate for a few more minutes without speaking until Nilofar grabbed one of my solar ovens and lifted it into the air. “Angela, you must show these amazing boxes to the Hazara women in the camp,” she said before scraping the final bits of
qabele palau
from her plate.

“I would love to,” I replied. “I’ll see if Sergeant Major will let us have a vehicle tomorrow.”

Nilofar objected immediately to my plan. She was certain that arriving at the Hazara camp with a British military escort would frighten the women.

“Angela, let’s put on burkas and walk over without the soldiers,” she said with a conspiratorial grin. “It’s very close to the PRT and no one will notice, I promise you. I will tell Rahim to let us in when we return.”

 

 

Inside the PRT, I enjoyed an extraordinary amount of freedom. Officially, I reported to no one, not even the colonel, although as a courtesy I consulted with him on almost everything I did. No one at the embassy in Kabul had the slightest interest in what I was doing on a daily basis. My weekly reports and an occasional memo were all they wanted.

This level of independence was restricted to life behind the mud walls that surrounded our compound. For good reason, no one was allowed to leave camp without a security escort. Despite the relative calm in the north, and even with the required force protection, we were still exposed every time we went out the gate to the possibility of suicide bombers, ambush, or IEDs.

I knew that some of my male diplomatic colleagues assigned to NATO PRTs elsewhere in Afghanistan had given up trying to get military escorts for their trips outside the wire. At least one, who had grown a beard and occasionally carried a weapon, drove himself to meetings, alone and unescorted—not a viable option in this country for a female diplomat.

It would be a risky move to leave camp on my own. I certainly couldn’t ask anyone’s permission. But it was just too tempting. I agreed to Nilofar’s suggestion and met her at the gate the following morning.

We pulled the burkas over our heads while still hidden inside the covered archway and stepped into the street carrying the solar ovens in burlap bags. Unable to see anywhere but straight ahead through the tiny square of netting, I immediately stumbled into a large pothole. Nilofar laughed and helped me up. Although I always took my burka on overnight patrols, I would only put it on for my bathroom breaks. Walking along a dirt road, carrying a large bundle, and trying to keep up with my young friend while draped in this shroud turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined.