The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [28]
“There are men outside, watching me,” Chris told me.
“It’s India. There are always men outside watching you.”
“Yeah, but they also know what I’ve done. And they’re watching your computer.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you drunk?”
“No. I was. Now I’m fine. I erased all the incriminating files on your computer.”
“What files? What are you talking about? You did what?”
“The proof,” he said. “They were watching me. They were scanning your computer.”
“You erased my computer?”
I was confused. Chris had never displayed any sign of mental illness before. He told me he had put up notes saying “Think of Kim” and “Remember Kim,” and that they were the only thing keeping him together. In other words, yellow Post-its were holding him in place. I told him to go to sleep, to get some rest. I called my office manager and asked her to check on him. This was getting messy. Then Chris called the U.S. embassy help line, asking for help. Someone called back and heard my work answering machine; someone else figured out my e-mail address and wrote me, asking what was going on.
“He’s a friend,” I wrote back, embarrassed to have my personal life enter my professional one. “He’s off his medication.”
I worried. For months, I had vacillated on whether to break up with Chris, but if anything happened to him, I would never forgive myself. He had never behaved like this before, but he had never spent this much time in India before, never been alone like this. India was a series of challenges wrapped in a mystical blanket covered in an existential quandary. I often thought that all the gods—maybe three, maybe three thousand in Hinduism—made it easier in India for there to be three thousand answers to a question that should have had only one. India was colorful, fabulous, energizing. India was a Chinese finger puzzle. India made you scream at people like a Hollywood diva for the smallest of reasons. India was a crazy football coach. It could break you if it didn’t make you stronger.
Chris was broken. He wouldn’t leave India without seeing me. I couldn’t leave Afghanistan in the middle of an election. I tried to throw myself into work and to avoid thinking or talking about my boyfriend. The guilt I felt had actual weight—I felt the responsibility of him moving halfway around the world for me, of me failing him, of fears about what was happening to him. I cried in front of Farouq and Nasir on a road trip. Farouq worried.
“I just want you to be happy,” he told me.
“Too bad I don’t have an eligible cousin,” I said.
Maybe the fortune-teller was right. An old friend, a photographer I hadn’t seen in more than a year, told me that I seemed angry and bitter. Overseas for longer than me and world-weary, she warned me that maybe it was time to move back to the States, that many things were more important than the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. Night after night, I lay in the Gandamack room that smelled like my childhood because of the wild marijuana plants outside my window. Night after night, I couldn’t sleep.
The construction next door didn’t help. Work started at 6 AM and often stopped at 1 AM. As with everything else in Afghanistan, no laws regulated noise or construction. Every night the pounding would be our dinner music. Every night the tenants of the Gandamack would try to make it stop.
Sean, the British journalist who was working on a documentary about female Afghan drivers, was particularly annoyed. I had met Sean with Farouq months earlier, in the garden of the Gandamack. It was a sunny day, and we were sitting outside in the garden beneath a large umbrella. A man approached us, said hello to Farouq, and thanked him for his advice. He was expansive and obnoxious, attractive and repellant, all in one package. He sat down at another table. I introduced myself, slightly defensive, worried about the man’s familiarity with Farouq.
“Call me