Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Yes.

I’m sure they did, he said. Something like: Well done, a very clever name. Now please give us the money. We can discuss this as we go.

Go where?

I want to show you the city.

Outside in the courtyard, Suleiman introduced me to Suaif, the guard. I did not mention that I’d already made his acquaintance. Class and status evidently trumped the seniority of age, but I found it impossible to address Suaif by his first name; I hesitate ever so slightly even now. He reminded me of my father. There was that same lost look my father had, out of place, as if waiting for something. Suaif had been an engineering professor, he explained, at Kabul University.

What happened to your job? I asked.

Oh, it’s still there, but it isn’t worth the money. I am paid more by the UN and these NGOs.

Had I heard distaste in those words, the UN and these NGOs ? So it was with the drivers I came across and with staff generally; the aid agencies had put a bounty on the heads of locals who could speak English. The professional classes had been taken down from university chairs, schools, and offices, and conscripted into the menial service of the newcomers. Wages rose, production did not, so prices had nowhere to go but up.

Suleiman and I took one of the NGO’s Land Cruisers, along with a driver, and drove to a hilltop where the battered Intercontinental Hotel looked out over the city. Outside, we slung the shawls around our necks, puffing condensation from our mouths, moisture that now clung to the cindery dust enveloping everything.

I hear the Four Seasons is coming, said Suleiman.

The hotel?

Yes, replied Suleiman.

How many seasons does Afghanistan have, by the way — or this part of it?

Four.

No less from a long view than at close quarters, fractal-like, Kabul was the picture of a city scarred by war. I had seen many South Asian cities from an elevation, from flat roofs over an undulating ocean of rooftop after rooftop, where sheaves of steel reinforcements still stand, embedded in the protrusions of supporting columns that run the heights of the buildings. Such excess reinforcement, along with foundations of superfluous depth, measures of apparent redundancy, signaled the hope of later adding to the height of a building with time, money, and a growing economy. The books will tell you of Kabul’s storied history; it might even once have had a future. But if the buildings were anything to go by, its recent past was inhabited by a beaten people possessed of the knowledge that the future was not to be trusted.

For crying out loud, what was I doing in Kabul? I was in Dhaka when Emily called. I was practicing law, trying to sue multinationals and public officials for corruption; I was trying to bring about reforms in the procedures of government institutions, such as the Bureau of NGO Affairs. At the moment Emily called, I was in a meeting with a former finance minister of Bangladesh and a senior British government official, the latter flying in from London solely to finalize the British government’s commitment — money — to a project whose purpose was to develop the small business sector, SMEs as they called them, small and medium enterprises. The British government official had felt the two-day trip necessary in order, as was intimated to me, to ensure I would co-head the project; they didn’t trust the ex-politician. The parking bay of the premises of the NGO, an NGO that the ex-politician had set up to give something back to the people , he had said to me, leaving me wondering what on earth he’d have said his political career had been about — that parking bay came up more than once in tales of fat brown envelopes handed over by men stepping out from Land Cruisers just long enough to seal a deal. I took Emily’s call in the parking bay.

I was in the meeting and it was an important meeting — are we not required to think something is important when everyone else seems to think it’s important? — and yet I took the call and stepped out. I never turned the cell phone off. Did I so need to hear from her that I always left it on in case she called? And when she called, I made my excuses — It’s a call from Afghanistan, I remember saying to them, to the sound of oohs and knowing aahs, for that’s all you had to say in 2002: Afghanistan , and the word alone was a conclusive argument. I stepped out into that sullied parking bay of favors bought and sold, and I listened to her voice.

You must come here, she said. You could make such a difference to the lives of twenty-five million people.

Did she think that Afghanistan was the only place that mattered? And did she think that I might be flattered into coming? Worse still, did she believe that anyone could make such a difference ? She did. They all did, this invading force of new missionaries. They were an army in all but name, not the army carrying guns that cleared their path, nor one carrying food or medicine. But they came bearing advice and with the arrogance to believe that they could make all the difference. Yes, they mean well, but the only good that an absence of malice guarantees is a clear conscience. I knew Emily believed in their creed, and when I saw that she did, when I understood that she did, suddenly, as if a wire had been cut inside, I had in me a thought, not yet an intention but a question, one set out in the languages of my childhood and in the perfectly clean lines of mathematics. I had a thought as powerful as an idea born in oppression: Who will stop these people?

I’m in the middle of trying to make some difference, I replied, to a population of one hundred and twenty million, give or take. If you’re telling me, I continued, that I can make five times the difference per person, then I suppose I can’t argue with that.

This was the woman whose call I awaited every moment and yet, on that call, as I stood in the parking bay of an NGO located in Dhaka’s Gulshan diplomatic area, as I listened to the voice of my beloved, I began to feel the heave of something inside me turning over, deep within me, and larger than us, the trifling matter of us. That was why a month later I was in Afghanistan, no more or less clear an answer than the gut opening.

This part of the world was just another chessboard, as I would be just another piece, but that is the way of this history, from one dark stretch of road onto another. Kabul, a city of war, had had its part of British blood and more. There was the First Anglo-Afghan War, itself just one step in the long march of British military colonial hubris — and by British I mean that the officer classes were British; the rank and file were drawn from the Indian populations. On New Year’s Day 1842, at the war’s end, General Elphinstone surrendered to the natives despite the protestations of his officers. Having secured guarantees of safety for the sick and wounded, who were to remain in Kabul, Elphinstone set off on the journey back to India with the rest. But no sooner had the last British soldier left the city than the sick and wounded were slaughtered. As for the departed British soldiers, worn down first by battle and now by the arduous passage in the dead of winter, those sad men were picked off at narrow passes as they staggered knee-deep in snow. Sixteen thousand died. General Elphinstone, in a shamefully un-British display of cowardice, surrendered himself to the Afghans, even as he well knew that none of the soldiers would be spared. One man who managed to reach safety was the surgeon William Brydon, who remarkably survived after having part of his skull shorn off by a sword. Upon arriving in the safety of Jalalabad, when asked where the army was, he famously replied, I am the army. When Elphinstone died in captivity a few months later, his body was sent back to the British garrison in Jalalabad, where he was buried in an unmarked grave.