The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [8]
We drove down the roads, such as they were, bumpy and indifferent, like someone started paving them and then decided “why bother.” As usual, I stared out the window as everyone outside stared in at me, both of us watching an equally odd zoo exhibit. The old men wore impossible turbans and had faces etched like a topographical map. Faceless women in dirty blue burqas knocked on our windows, shoving penicillin prescriptions toward us with henna-stained fingers, holding dirty swaddled babies with kohl eyeliner, demanding money. Blue bottles, other journalists called them. It was easy to depersonalize them because these women had no faces, easy to avoid looking at them, to avoid their pleas. But it was tough to ignore the children and the old men, even if we rarely paid out, tough to say no to someone looking you in the eye.
Throughout the capital, evidence of war was still everywhere. The most solid buildings were the squat, rambling concrete apartment complexes and Kafkaesque government ministries left as parting gifts by the Soviets, the tallest of which was the foreboding Ministry of Communications at a mere eighteen stories. Many of the mud buildings were crumbling, and others were pocked with bullet marks or destroyed by rockets. In places, Kabul looked like someone had shaken a giant box of crackers and dumped them out. Traffic lights didn’t yet exist. Cops directed traffic around crowded roundabouts. Convoys of foreigner-filled SUVs jockeyed for position with wooden carts pulled by people and donkeys.
Yes, it was good to be back—even if everything in June 2004 was different than before. Farouq could not work with me for a while because he was getting married the next day, which was also his twenty-eighth birthday. The newspaper no longer had a house—we had given that up because the Afghan conflict was no longer seen as big enough to justify the expense. And this overseas gig was no longer a once-in-a-while adventure. Now, I lived here.
Nasir and Farouq dropped me off at a guesthouse, the Gandamack Lodge, named after a famous Afghan battle that the British had lost more than a hundred and sixty years earlier, a sprawling Dr. Seuss–influenced two-story building where one of Osama bin Laden’s wives once lived. There was no “Green Zone” in Kabul, no place where all the foreigners lived, protected by walls and men with guns. Instead, foreigners stayed anywhere, in guesthouses like the Gandamack, or in shared houses, which like all Afghan houses were compounds protected by high walls from prying eyes, most likely so women had some privacy. Some foreigners hired security guards. Others didn’t.
Farouq, panicked and sweaty over juggling a wedding and me, started making phone calls and eventually found me a fill-in translator, Ajmal Naqshbandi, a sweet, shy, dumpling of a man with a slight mustache, probably because that was all he could grow, who translated every interview like a romantic poem. I liked Ajmal’s poetry. I missed Farouq’s English skills. Later I would wish I had given Ajmal better advice. I would wish I had told him he was too sensitive for journalists and too brave for his own good, and that news reporting was no profession for a poet.
The next afternoon, Farouq stopped by the Gandamack briefly, and I asked him what I should wear to the wedding. He looked me up and down, at my green baggy Afghan shirt, my baggy black pants, my dusty black tennis shoes.
“What you’re wearing is