BEYOND THE HINDUKUSH
A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri
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| The author (extreme left) and colleagues at the northern mouth of the Salang Tunnel |
Northern Afghanistan is a little different! It is separated from Kabul by the Hindukush mountains, and from ex-Soviet Central Asia by the Amu Darya River. The main cities are Kunduz, a mainly Tajik city from where the Taliban ruled the north, and Mazhar – e – Sharif, home to the Uzbek Rashid Dostum, now on the wane but at one time the only warlord in the world to have his own air force. Afghan Tajiks and Uzbeks share linguistic links with their respective ethnic brethren across the border but cultural commonalities are few. Some official cross border trade happens along the bridges across the Amu Darya, but this is dwarfed by unofficial trade – mainly opium making its way from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to markets in Russia and the West.
Faizabad is the headquarters of the northeastern province of Badakhshan, one of the few parts of Afghanistan never to have been ruled by the Taliban. This was thanks in part to the province’s remoteness and to the Northern Alliance (Ahmed Shah Masood and Co.) policy of blowing up bridges and roads. It is only now that a road connecting Faizabad and Kabul has been rebuilt, and bus services between the cities (about 500 km and 10 hours) have resumed. I used the road to travel between Faizabad and Taloquan, but unfortunately could not go further because of travel restrictions on foreigners (read – Taliban in control of the road around Kunduz).
Faizabad is a sleepy little place, with the Kokcha River separating the old town from the new. I got to relive long forgotten pleasures such as roaming up and down the bazaar, speculating upon the wares of the chador clad women I passed. I made the discovery that masks and covers are minor barriers to signalling that you are beautiful – the choice of perfume, the cut of your salwar, the sway of your chador, the use of stilettos on a stone and mud street – there are subtler indicators than face and figure. As you can imagine, a fair bit of spare time was spent ostensibly looking for gifts for relatives.
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| The author along the Kokcha River |
Badakhshan is famous for three reasons. The first is its mines – it is the source of lapis lazuli, a blue stone that is distinctively Afghanistan. The second is the Wakhan Corridor, a geographic relic of the Great Game that provided a neutral territory between the old British and Russian Empires. Wakhan is a narrow 250 km eastward extension of Afghanistan that separates Pakistan from Tajikistan and connects the Karakorum, Hindukush, and Tianshan ranges right up to the Pamirs (and China) in the east. The ‘Wakhan Walk’ up this remote valley to where the Amu Darya begins its 2400 km journey to the Aral Sea is considered the gold standard in machismo in the international trekking circuit. And the third is the game of Buzkajhi, played on horses with a goat carcass acting as a ball, which originates from this region.
How does one judge a place? I use three indicators – the opulence of its scenery, the beauty of its women, and the taste of its food. Northern Afghanistan scores high on all three fronts. The landscape is a sparsely populated desert surrounded by snow covered mountains, with harsh long winters and short but pleasant summers. The food is light and meaty, with Palau that is slow-cooked so that the taste of the meat seeps deep into the rice. The meat is soft and well cooked, and peals off the bone without effort. The vegetables, mainly cauliflower and lady’s fingers, are oversized and lightly cooked, settling well into one’s stomach. I also got to eat naan and kebabs in the market some evenings, where one pulls the meat off skewers with naan and washes it down with green tea. Having said this, I must confess that I returned to Kabul and eschewed Afghan food for heavily masala-ed mattar paneer and dal made especially for south Asian taste buds.
And regarding the women – I met a few in the course of my work and checked out more the old fashioned way, by hanging around the bazaar. ‘Easy on the eye’ would be an understatement. The women I worked with, mostly provincial government employees and local NGO workers, dumped their chadors as soon as they entered the office campus to reveal lovely faces, some of them with make-up, and sedate but fashionable dresses. All of them had obtained an education the hard way, and most had a thirst for learning (a trait shared with the men) that made teaching a pleasure. One of them, a smashing young redhead working in the anti-narcotics department, insisted that I visit her home for a meal, which I (and my interpreter) did. It was my first visit to an Afghan home, and we were given a treat of a meal washed down with salt tea. We did not, however, get a glimpse of the young lady who invited us, or any other women, and were instead entertained by her father and other male members of the extended family – tall bearded men who looked like they had launched a missile or two. I also saw a father’s pride in his intelligent daughter – he had encouraged her studies, kept all her certificates carefully (which he showed us much like recently married people show wedding photographs), and revelled in her responsible government job. I also saw a lot of young, beautiful, educated, single women around, and learned that Afghans do not pay dowry and there is no stigma attached to having daughters.
Yes, to those who are asking the obvious question, there is an active insurgency in north Afghanistan and had I not looked as Afghan as I do I would probably not have been able to hang around in public areas as much as I did. Some of my travel was curtailed, and one of the field visits we had planned could not happen for security concerns. After another field visit to a village in Kalafgan district, a group of middle-aged men came up to me and made conversation in Urdu, speaking like Kabuliwallahs in old Hindi films. It turned out that they had learnt it in camps in Mirpur (in Pakistani Kashmir) and had visited Srinagar and other parts of Indian Kashmir. It was a friendly conversation, and they were mostly looking to practise their Urdu, but we did stay away from topics such as ‘what exactly were you doing there?’
I got the impression that people were more frustrated with the administration than with the insurgency. Warlords were in control of government, corruption was rampant, doors were open only to those with connections, and an inherently egalitarian society was turning into one with a deep schism between haves and have-nots. My trainees expressed their frustrations to me, young engineers who joined the government to contribute to nation building, the management graduate from Kirgizstan who returned to Taloquan to marry the man she loved, the young women looking for any way to get out. And yes, foreigners were seen as a part of the problem, not the solution.
As I hope is obvious to the reader, I both enjoyed myself and was made very welcome in northern Afghanistan. It may not be every traveller’s cup of tea, but I do recommend it to those looking to go where footprints are fewer.
