The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [37]
“You have lived over here long enough,” he admonished me from his hospital bed. “You know Afghans. You know the culture. You know you need to come see me.”
“I also have to work,” I said. “It’s kind of the reason I’m here.”
“Work. You’re always working.”
Even the surgery didn’t calm him. “This green tea is awful,” he complained from his bed. “Bring me some new tea.”
Eventually, after helping sort out his tea and his visa, I sent my driver to take Sabit to the airport to fly home. But he was annoyed because I did not ride along. Over the winter, I heard rumors that Sabit was upset with me. “She’s a bad friend,” he told an official at the U.S. embassy. I called Sabit from India repeatedly, and he repeatedly hung up on me. When he finally answered, he sounded as hurt as a spurned lover.
“I am so angry at you!” he said, more than once. Sabit often talked in exclamation points. “You are a very bad friend!”
But he eventually forgave me. And our uneasy acquaintance had payback. Sabit had turned into my eccentric grandpa. When I arrived in Afghanistan in March 2006, Sabit sent a VIP bus to pick me up. A few days later, he said he wanted to shoot guns with me. He liked guns. Most places I visited him—work, home, a Turkish restaurant—a gun leaned against some wall. He kept guns like other people keep plants. I accepted his invitation, as shooting guns in Afghanistan sounded like a fine diversion from work. Sabit’s new driver picked me up one afternoon in March—his driver was actually his secretary, who had been drafted into driving because Sabit had fired seventeen drivers in the previous year. We picked up Sabit from his office. Sabit had two guns with him, a .22 and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The driver drove the SUV out of Kabul, south for about thirty minutes, toward the edge of Kabul Province and Sabit’s home village.
“Watch the road,” Sabit told the driver.
“There’s a pothole,” Sabit told the driver, pointing at a black dot on the beige horizon.
“You’re going too fast.”
“You’re a horrible driver.”
“Slow down.”
“Speed up!”
“Be careful over the pothole! You’re an idiot!”
The driver/secretary said nothing. He knew better.
“Pull the car over,” Sabit demanded after one poorly executed pothole. The driver, white-knuckled, thin-lipped, and staring straight ahead, pulled over on the side of the road.
“Get out,” Sabit hissed. “I bet Kim could drive better than you.”
This was an amazing insult—the idea that a woman could drive better than an Afghan man, let alone a Pashtun Afghan man, was beyond offensive. Only a handful of Afghan women drove, so few that they were celebrities, that Afghan men actually knew personal details about them. But Sabit followed through on his threat.
“Kim. Drive.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I haven’t driven a car in almost two years.”
“But you know how to drive, right? It’s the same side of the road as the U.S. Just drive. I’m sure you’re better than this idiot.”
I got out. The driver got out. “I’m not even supposed to be the driver,” he whispered, as we walked past each other on the side of the highway. “I’m the secretary.”
I jumped into the driver’s seat, a watchful Sabit next to me. I hit the gas and pulled back onto the highway.
“Watch the pothole!” Sabit barked. I slowed down. “See, she is a better driver than you,” he told his secretary/driver, now slumped in the backseat.
“Turn here,” he demanded.
I turned right off the paved road, onto a dirt road, into a large expanse of dirt that Sabit planned to turn into a fruit orchard. Sabit’s servants waited for us. This was just outside his home village, an area where Sabit was also a tribal chief. Here, he was king. His servants had laid out carpets in the dirt for us to sit on, along with a pot of green tea and bowls of chewy fruit candies and almonds covered in a sugary paste. The men