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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Kabul: end of the trail |
Current rating: 0 |
by FREDDO DIRK
(No verified email address) |
27 Oct 2001
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Nostalgia for better times |
Thirty years ago I lived in Afghanistan, in Kabul, at Ziggy's Hotel on Chicken Street. In those days the city was full of travellers heading either down the Khyber Pass to India, or westwards to Persia and Istanbul.
On Chicken Street you could buy opium from a little man in a red turban, or sell lost travellers' cheques at the money market. There were a dozen restaurants in the hippy suburb called Sharenou all serving their version of foreign food.
There was a king and a royal family. The biggest shop in town was the Russian supermarket. You could buy a turban there for a dollar with five metres of cloth in it and get it twisted upon your head to keep the dust out.
Embroidered wolf skin vests were all the rage with the hundreds of hippies who lived in hotels scattered around the suburb. Kabul was a hub of business and had been so since the time of Alexander.
The eight-year-old kid selling paperbacks on a blanket on the pavement could out-bargain you in six languages. Cab drivers tried to give you change in roubles, and the best hashish in the world came from Mazari Sherif, in the mountains not far away.
The government buildings stood alone in a huge square. They were built of granite and were weathered almost black. Inside offices with high ceilings, men in turbans wrote visas in your passport with fountain pens.
Outside in the dust, camel trains assembled for journeys across the mountains. Kabul was a staging point for the Pashtu caravans that travelled to Russia and China in the summers.
The British embassy stood at the end of a long, dusty road lined with wrecks of buses and cars brought overland from Europe and abandoned. The embassy was right out of Rudyard Kipling, a beautiful, old Victorian mansion with a garden conservatory, complete with servants dressed in white.
Down by the river in the evenings hundreds of men, dressed identically, ate rice and meat with their right hands in restaurants hacked into the side of the riverbank.
At the end of Chicken Street was a small open space that looked like a building site. It was a park and what trees it boasted were saplings with hardly a leaf on them. Men from the desert would stand there sometimes admiring the tiny amount of greenery growing out of the mud.
In the summer, it was so hot that you could forget the water was poison and give yourself cholera with one unwise drink. In winter you could freeze your face walking across the square to American Express to see if anyone had sent you enough money to get out of the place.
The kids flew kites from every rooftop in the evenings doing battle with each other. The American Children of God had a church where they fed road people and tried to baptise them into the cult.
You could buy the Herald Tribune at the Kabul hotel where the rich travellers stayed, and eat peaches and yoghurt for breakfast while you read it.
The Afghan army wandered the streets in pairs holding hands and wearing serge uniforms from the Kaiser's time. Kabul was colorful, but it always had a hard edge.
IN the Grand Bazaar an old man had a black bear with a chain choker around its scrotum. When onlookers bet enough money, he would whack the creature with a stick to see how high it would jump.
In the main square, the camel drivers would light fires under the hindquarters of their beasts in the mornings to get them on their feet.
The carrot juice seller on the street corner kept his coins under a glass of wasps in full view of his customers, braving stings to give you change. In Afghanistan there is an indifference to suffering, an acceptance of fate like nowhere else in the world.
I wonder how it's changed these days, with Chicken Street in ruins and that icy wind from the steppes still blowing. What's happened, I wonder, to the guy at the poste restante who found your letters for you? And the professor at the university who would take the time to tell you the history of his people?
I wonder if Afghanistan would have been better off with the old king who was smart enough to play the Americans off against the Russians. Then today the Russian supermarket might be full of tourists spending dollars, and the tigers in the zoo down by the river might still be alive and famous all the way to Delhi.
And most of all I wonder if any of those times rubbed off. Perhaps on someone, somewhere, out in that desert where the bus just stops in the middle of nowhere and the tribesmen walk off into a red nothing that would faze a koori tracker.
I wonder if out there, in a tent quietly at night, where the Taliban can't hear, an old tribesman about my age listens softly to Janis and remembers better times in the land.
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See also:
http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/2001/10/02/FFXIS5ELASC.html
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Re: Kabul: end of the trail |
by freddo dirk
freddo.dirk (nospam) telstra.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
31 May 2004
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i got lots more stuff about the hippie days if anyone's interested |
