Opium Nation Read online

  “It was winter 1977 and we were on break from school,” Uncle Rostam tells me. “We went to Mr. Jawan’s house in Herat city and he said he would make sure we got to Iran safe, as long as we could carry a few sackfuls of potatoes and onions for him to Iran. We agreed. The next morning, we all met up and he gave us these big vests to wear over our pirahan tombans, and over our clothes he gave us thick winter coats to wear. The vests felt heavier than anything I’d ever worn. His first wife, Narinji, now deceased, and he sat in front of the American Jeep he owned and we sat in the back on top of the sacks.”

  A few hours later, they reached Ghoryan town center and Mr. Jawan saw the district governor walking along the main road. Mr. Jawan pointed to the teenagers and said to the district governor, “Salaam, these are my cousins.” (They were not his cousins.) “They’re going to Iran. You need something from there?”

  “No, thanks,” the district governor answered.

  But Mr. Jawan insisted. “They’ll bring you some candy.”

  Uncle Rostam said he didn’t understand what the exchange was about then but later realized that the candy was a bribe. Mr. Jawan offered something small such as candy to the man in charge of the government in Ghoryan so that he would not search his vehicle, because the official knew there was opium inside.

  Mr. Jawan drove them to his house in Ghoryan town center and they ate quroti, a soup made from yogurt curd and fried onions. At two PM they jumped in the Jeep again to head to Tirpul, Mr. Jawan’s village. On the way, Mr. Jawan passed another vehicle and stopped and asked, “Is the path clear?”

  The other driver was a fellow smuggler, and he confirmed that it was safe to continue. “I’m not sure if he had a weapon with him,” Uncle Rostam recalls, “but he had binoculars and he kept looking westward through them.”

  After two hours, they reached Tirpul. Mr. Jawan’s relatives greeted them with warmth. They killed a sheep for their guests and made them rice and meat stew. “Then Mr. Jawan told us to take off our vests. We were shocked to find all the insides and pockets of the vests filled with ten to fifteen plastic opium packets.”

  “That’s opium, isn’t it?” Uncle Rostam asked Mr. Jawan.

  “Yes, it’s opium. Don’t worry about it,’ he answered as if Uncle Rostam should’ve known.

  “He sat on the sand cross-legged and ordered his relatives to bring a scale, the kind you weigh wheat with. When the scale came, he took the sacks out of the Jeep and began to take out much bigger plastic bags of opium and started weighing them on the scale and dividing them up into smaller packets. He handed four or five packets to each relative. He didn’t say anything to them. They knew what to do with them.”

  At around six PM, Mr. Jawan told one of his relatives, a demure man named Kaftar, to get ready to leave for Iran. Kaftar took the packets of opium and placed them clandestinely in tea cans, then wrapped the cans in packages and threw the packages into cloth sacks, which Kaftar had to carry. Kaftar hoisted the sacks over his shoulder. “We just carried bags full of our clothes,” Uncle Rostam says. “We were a bit scared, but we knew Mr. Jawan knew his business well. He didn’t even give us the sacks of onions and potatoes we had promised to take.

  “Kaftar told us to lie on the ground if he dropped to the ground. We agreed, not asking any questions. We started walking and walking and walking. We had no donkeys, nothing except our feet. Apparently that was the safest way to get across. We also didn’t have any food or water. As we walked in pitch dark, a group of stray dogs ran toward us barking. That was the biggest danger then, a stray dog mauling you. But Kaftar threw something at one of the dogs, and they all got scared and left. Nobody would get killed by the police in those days. The fear was being jailed by the Iranians. They didn’t hang many people, though.”

  At two am, after walking for eight hours, they crossed the border—there was no marker except electrical poles and wires. They reached a house similar to the one they had had lunch at in Tirpul. Kaftar dropped off his sack at the house and told the boys to rest and that he would take them to Mashad, the closest and largest city to them in Iran. The next day, Uncle Rostam wrote a letter as Mr. Jawan had requested, reassuring him that Kaftar had helped them get to Iran safely. Mr. Jawan stayed in Tirpul until Kaftar delivered the letter, then drove back to Herat city with his wife. Uncle Rostam and Tahir enjoyed their winter holiday in Iran.

  Mr. Jawan’s days of safe trafficking and candy bribes ended with the 1978 coup. Many of Ghoryan’s men joined the resistance, and hundreds of its families fled to Iran. Ghoryan fell to the mujahideen. Farmers in the country turned their wheat fields to poppy fields to make money. The mujahideen cleared the paths to trafficking wherever they had control. The traditional traffickers began to carry more dangerous weapons, supplied by the mujahideen, and many became leaders of the resistance movement. Mr. Jawan’s relatives died by the dozens fighting the Soviets, and those who survived moved to Torbat-e-Jam, the Iranian border town where his son Kamran lives.

  My daily routine in Ghoryan begins at sunrise in Saber’s home. I’m awoken by the crowing of roosters from a nearby yard. The weather is becoming too hot for us to stay inside—all of us sleep on the porch, on thick mats inside mosquito nets. Saber’s wife, Tarana, a stout, square-faced woman with coarse hands, pumps a pail of cold water from the well, transfers it into a plastic water can, and summons me to the garden in the courtyard. She hands me a bar of cheap soap and pours the water on my hands as I lather them. I cup my hands to hold the water and splash my face. Then I brush my teeth. The dirty water from my hands and face wets the drying plants and sunflowers in the garden. No one wastes water here.

  Saber’s sister Tina calls us to breakfast. The dozen of us sit around a white tablecloth on the floor, drink green tea, and devour Afghan bread, a flat, elongated, chewy wheat staple that tastes sweet and salty at the same time. At six thirty, Saber and I head out to the desert with a driver. The drivers keep changing, depending on who’s available on a given day. We endure the endless miles to more than two dozen speckled villages, which can be spotted from a distance. Ghoryan’s dozens of villages make up the sixteen-thousand-square-kilometer district. The villages all look similar: wells for water, outhouses for bathrooms, hurricane lamps for light, children playing outside, shepherds tending flocks, tents or mud-brick homes, a cemetery. About a hundred families live in each village. As I meet more people and hear their stories, their various plights begin to echo one another.

  We have few men left in this village because our men died in the wars or transporting opium on the border. The women are in debt. The men left behind are too old to work, and the boys are too young to make money or they are addicted to drugs. The women are left in charge to take care of their household.

  One tribe, which has long been part of Ghoryan’s opium smuggling tradition, personifies the transformation of the drug trade. The Soltanzi traveled the hills and deserts of Ghoryan for seven generations, and no one—not other smugglers or Iranian border guards—dared to stop them. But as Iran toughened its anti-drug laws and various mafias took control of the opium market during the Soviet invasion, the clan lost its authority and income.

  In Gandomi Soltanzi’s three-room mud house a few miles from Saber’s on a corner street, one room is locked. It has no windows. When the door creaks open, the light shines on a row of photographs nailed high on the wall. There is no carpet on the floor, and dust blows about, fogging the view of the pictures. Gandomi introduces the people in the photographs.

  “On the left is my husband, Shayan, and my son Baitullah, both executed in prison in Iran eleven years ago. My oldest son, Tanai, died in a battle against the Soviets. My son Noman was captured by the Iranians and has left me with a huge opium debt. My other son, Wais, is a drug addict on the streets of Iran,” she says nonchalantly, as if reciting her grocery list.

  Gandomi is in her fifties with a large black mole on the side of her mouth; long curly hair down to her waist, jet black with no gray strands, tied together by a
rubber band; and small sunbaked brown hands with well-defined veins. Around her neck is a silver talisman case that normally holds a Quranic verse, to cast away the evil eye, but now the case is empty; Gandomi took out the folded paper one day to clean the silver and doesn’t remember where she put it. She wears a faded red dress with black loose pants, her chador draped over her head even at home. When she tells her story, she wavers between the past and present, forgetting the details that connect events. Yet, with a patient listener, she becomes a lucid thinker and poignant storyteller.

  Gandomi and Shayan were paternal cousins when they married. They made a living from sheepherding, farming, and smuggling. During the Soviet invasion, Shayan and their first-born son, Tanai, joined the mujahideen. The rest of the family—Gandomi, the three younger sons, and two daughters—moved to the Khaf Mountains in Iran, where the government initially donated coupons for food and fuel. Shayan and Tanai spent half the year fighting in Afghanistan and the other six months living with the family in Iran. Then the first tragedy struck.

  Tanai died on the battlefield fighting the Soviets.

  I ask Gandomi how it felt to lose her oldest son.

  “Like my heart was cut in half,” she responds. “But with every child I lose, the pieces of my broken heart turn more numb.”

  Shayan minimized his time on the battlefield but he continued to travel between his country and Iran to traffic opium. He recruited his youngest son, Baitullah, to join him.

  “As long as I can remember, my family transported opium,” Gandomi says as she spins yarn with her fingers. “We didn’t make much money in the old days. For a kilo the men took across the border, they got a sack of flour. Now the stakes are higher, and so is the cost to your life.”

  One day in the early 1990s, the father and son were riding a motorcycle in a bazaar in Torbat-e-Jam in Iran when the Iranian police arrested them for smuggling. They were in the Torbat prison for three years.

  “Informants in our own tribe turned them in. The police came to search our home and found nothing. I went to visit them once in the prison. They were crying for me to find three million toman [$3,750] to bail them out. They knew they would die. I didn’t have the money. Ten days later, they were executed and the Iranian government sent us a letter that both of them had been hanged. We asked for the bodies, but we never got them.”

  After fourteen years as refugees in Iran, the family repatriated to Afghanistan in 1993, during Ismail Khan’s first term as the governor of Herat province. Gandomi still had two sons and two daughters left. She had become one of the million war widows in the country.

  When the Taliban arrived in 1995, her son Noman, twenty-four, became a well-known drug dealer recognized for his ruthless behavior. Like Darya’s father, Noman sent the younger shepherds to cross the border, and many of them died on the way.

  “I wanted him to stop and convinced him to get engaged,” Gandomi says. “The bride’s family demanded a four-thousand-dollar bride price. Noman wasn’t making much money; in fact, he was in debt at the time. He decided to make the dangerous trip to Iran to earn the bride price and pay off his debts. That was it. Then he disappeared.” Her stoicism falters and she begins to cry.

  Noman was gone for three years when Gandomi received news that the Iranians had caught him alive with three dead cohorts and three Kalashnikovs. A relative brought an Iranian newspaper clipping and read it to her. “[Noman] told the reporter that he was in Iran to avenge his father’s death,” Gandomi says. “He talked to them from jail, I guess.” She believes her son is dead, executed by Iran like his father and brother.

  For Gandomi, Noman’s loss was not just another tragedy—it was a calamity. He had borrowed $6,000 from drug smugglers in Helmand and from a local drug lord in Ghoryan named Haji Sardar, to buy narcotics in the hope that he could triple the money once he sold the drugs in Iran.

  Now the debt fell on his mother, but she had nothing to give his lenders.

  “They were Taliban and they came and took the carpets, the motorcycle, the prayer rugs, and the land. Haji Sardar sent his cronies and left me with nothing. And they’re still coming,” she says, weeping.

  In the room where her family photos hang on the wall, two of her children’s pictures are missing. She did not put up pictures of her daughters, Tooti and Aabi, because it’s not proper to display women’s photos in Ghoryan. But she brings her younger daughter, Tooti’s, photo in a clear plastic bag with a death certificate from the local hospital. Tooti was pronounced dead two years ago, from severe burns on her body. She poured cooking gas on herself and lit a match. The seventeen-year-old lived for two months, moaning from the pain, before she died, joining the increasing number of women who self-immolate to death in Herat.

  “Tooti’s husband was killed carting opium on the border,” Gandomi explains. “Her two brothers-in-law both wanted to marry her, according to tradition, but she refused. The in-laws accused her of wanting to remarry for a bride price. The in-laws beat her until they tore her eardrum, and locked her up in the house. They would not let her family see her. She kept a knife under her pillow when she slept, afraid that her brothers-in-law would rape her. One day Tooti lost hope.”

  Tooti’s mother—left with only her other daughter, Aabi, also a widow and with two small sons—is losing her mind. As she sits on the floor weaving wool into yarn, she is not able to articulate a thought without changing subjects and time spans. I prod her to focus on one story at a time, and she tries.

  Despite her mental state, she is physically active and able to support the entire family. As she talks, Aabi plays with her sons in their front yard, which consists of dry earth with no greenery. The boys, Hatam and Maqsud, laugh and stick their hands in the dirt. When they get bored of the game, they throw their arms around their mother in a bear hug, then run over and kiss their grandmother. Gandomi pushes them away but cracks a faint smile, the first I’ve seen since we met.

  For work, Gandomi and Aabi spend a dollar to buy four kilos of wool, then weave it into yarn used for carpets. It takes them ten days to finish the job. They sell the yarn for two dollars. They spend a dollar a day on expenses, which include their daily diet of onions, bread, and dried yogurt curds. They have egg soup if their hens lay eggs. Gandomi, in her chador and tattered pair of shoes, searches for thorns and hay in the desert every morning. She makes a few cents selling them to the shepherds to use for fuel and animal food. She also owns a small plot of her father’s land, which the drug lords are trying to seize from her to settle Noman’s debt.

  In 2002, Ismail Khan, then the governor of Herat, announced that all opium debts for widows of martyred mujahideen were forgiven, yet Gandomi’s lenders keep coming—some of them are members of the police, she says.

  Gandomi and her daughter are illiterate. (Only 12 percent of females fifteen and older can read and write in Afghanistan.) They have no clock or calendar in the house and do not keep track of time. Neighbors tell them when it’s Friday, the Islamic holy day, and Gandomi grabs her chador to go to the cemetery. A ten-minute walk from her house are several grave sites, mounds of stones with no identification. She squats in front of two of them—the graves of her dead children Tooti and Tanai the freedom fighter—and howls for fifteen minutes. She wipes her tears on her dust-covered clothes and walks swiftly into the desert in search of thorns.

  Back at Saber’s home, I watch the shooting stars through my white mosquito net and think about Gandomi. How does she cope? How can she still sit there and work? Has she ever attempted suicide? These questions trouble me. Her story is one of hundreds I’ve heard, but her tragedy is greater than most. I find hope in her spirit, her resolve to live. Gandomi’s resilience is not uncommon among Afghans who have endured decades of war. The average life span in Afghanistan is forty-five years, but Gandomi has managed to survive beyond that. It consoles me to know that she has her daughter Aabi and Aabi’s two young sons living with her. She’s not alone. But then I think of Darya, the bartered bride, and my anger a
nd frustration build up. I can feel my eyes welling with tears. Darya’s only twelve and has no future ahead of her. Once her husband takes her away she will become a slave. But then, maybe not. Maybe he’s a nice man who will take good care of her, who will encourage her to go to school and buy her shoes and books and let her be free-spirited. “Wishful thinking,” I say out loud in English.

  “What did you say, Fariba Jan? Did you need something?” says Tina, Saber’s sister, who sleeps next to me. Amina has assigned Tina to meet my every need. I smile at her and shake my head. She is observant, kind, and beautiful. Her large black eyes mirror those of the women in Persian miniatures. She rarely ever sits down to relax. She and Tarana take turns with the housework. They are in charge of cleaning, cooking, doing the laundry, ironing, and answering the calls of the elders and the males in the family. The sisters-in-law work graciously, joking and laughing with each other throughout the day. If one is feeling tired, the other takes over her chores. I never hear them complain.

  “Why do you look so sad?” Tina asks.

  “I was just thinking of Darya, the opium bride. It’s sad that she will be taken away to a place where she doesn’t speak the language and knows no one. She’s a child still.”

  “Fariba Jan, my mom married at nine, and my father will probably do an exchange with me [giving her to a family who will offer a daughter to one of her brothers] next year, and I’m only fifteen. That’s the destiny of girls here. I wish I were a boy,” she adds, sighing. “Dokhtar mala mardoma [a girl belongs to strangers].”

  “I know that’s a famous Farsi saying, but do you really believe that?”

  “Does it matter what I believe? I don’t really have a choice,” she says, sighing again. “I like that star. It’s the brightest.”

  I look up into the night sky. “That is called Sirius. I don’t know what it’s called in Farsi. But it’s beautiful, just like you,” I tell her.