Opium Nation Read online

  The three outfits I’ve packed for my trip are full-skirt knee-length dresses with long pajama-like pants. I take along large head scarves that will not slip and will cover every strand of hair. With my scant knowledge of the Pashto language, it won’t be easy for me to fit in, but the clothes will help me resemble a liberal girl from Kabul. The south has become hostile to Westerners or anyone working with international aid agencies or the media. The news headlines from Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan commonly contain the words killed, kidnapped, bombed, or injured. I must pass through Kandahar by road in order to reach Helmand from Kabul.

  I wear my green outfit with the burqa and sit next to Zabi, a friend from Kabul, who will be my traveling partner for the next eight hours, until we reach Kandahar. I carry a plastic bag containing bottled water, small juice boxes, pistachio nuts, and cookies. We pass dust-covered apple orchards, fields of wheat, and nomads with camels walking along the side of the highway. This is my second road trip to Kandahar and I know the greenery will not last. It is a quick glimpse before the endless desert encroaches on the pleasant view.

  The bus stops at a checkpoint. The counternarcotics police step on board. A woman dressed all in black, a round scarf pulled up above her nose, precedes the men. With her black-gloved hands, she frisks the women, lightly patting their burqas and hand luggage. She sees me watching her. I can tell she is diligent in her job, because she is sniffing as she searches. The smell of opium can be overpowering. Her eyes are dark brown. When she reaches me, she somehow knows I do not fit in. She looks at the old, dusty local sandals on my feet as if to say, “I know those shoes are a front,” and motions me to open the bag holding my laptop case. She is right. Women going to Kandahar on public buses don’t usually carry laptops. Before anyone else can see, she closes the bag and walks to the front to tell her supervisor the women are clean. She seems to understand that I’m trying to fit in and doesn’t want to blow my cover. The passengers go back to what they were doing, and the driver blasts the upbeat Pashto music as loud as it was.

  Eight hours later, the lively streets of Kandahar city greet us: rickshaws, overcrowded buses, donkeys, and horse wagons compete for space with pedestrians. A few women in blue burqas stand out in the crowds. Nearly every man sports a beard and wears the pirahan tomban. It’s spring, but the summer heat has already come to Kandahar. I’m boiling under the polyester burqa. It was this hot in the spring of 1979, when my family lived here during the Communist era. The sight of flies buzzing around a sheep carcass in a butcher shop takes me back twenty-six years.

  Shortly after the Communist coup, the American aid project in Helmand disintegrated as foreign consultants escaped the country and Afghans, such as my father, moved to other locations. He stayed with the fertilizer company but was transferred to Kandahar, where we spent a year.

  We shared a two-family home in the Manzil Bagh neighborhood. The living room windows faced a major thoroughfare and I used to sit on the windowsill to watch the cars pass. There was regular power and running water, but there were no more mixed-gender dinner parties, fishing trips, or dancing. I stayed home with my mother, while Faiza attended high school. She had to wear a chador, and one of my parents had to escort her to the stop where she caught the public bus to reach her Farsi-instruction school. Kandahar offered Pashto-instruction schools with a subject in Farsi, and Farsi-instruction schools with a subject in Pashto. Kandahar has a considerable Farsi-speaking Tajik population—mostly Shiites, who live in relative harmony with the Pashtuns. With few friends and no family, we felt like immigrants in the city.

  “Initially, we could go to the bazaars and visit the shrines and have a normal life,” my mother tells me. “But as the war progressed, it became harder and harder to leave the house.”

  It was in Kandahar where we learned that the secret police had taken my paternal uncle Fazel Ahmed Ahrary from his Kabul University office. He disappeared like thousands of other innocent intellectuals. The secret police rounded up and arrested dozens of people at a time, sent them to Pul-e-Charkhi, and then executed them in the military training fields behind the prison. Some were buried alive. Survivors tell tales of torture and brutality. The first time I saw my father cry was in Kandahar.

  “Agha, why are you crying?” I asked him.

  “Because Fazel Ahmed died for nothing,” he said, holding my hand and explaining. “No justice. None.”

  “But we don’t know he’s dead,” I insisted.

  “You’re too young to be exposed to these things. Go play,” he ordered me.

  The government was particularly suspicious of thinkers from Herat because of the first uprising there. During his last semester at the university, my brother, Hadi, was also being watched. When he finished his degree in English literature, he came to Kandahar to visit us and consulted with my parents about leaving the country. The mass exodus of educated Afghans had already begun.

  In December 1979, during Hadi’s visit, the Soviet Union invaded the country. I sat on the windowsill, hugged my legs with my chin perched on my knees, and watched a caravan of Soviet military trucks, tanks, and Jeeps drive by our house for an hour. I was six years old and trying to understand the concept of war and death. I didn’t ask my parents my usual array of questions, but I wondered silently where those trucks were going. My father walked over to me, touched my shoulder, and answered my unspoken question.

  “They’re going to the countryside. They’re not going to bother us,” he reassured me.

  Hadi left Kandahar for Kabul, took two of Uncle Fazel’s sons with him, and they fled to Pakistan, to await asylum in either Europe or the United States.

  “We gave him a carpet to sell and fund his trip,” my mother remembers. “I cried so much when he said good-bye casually, as if he were going back to school. I didn’t know if I would ever see my son again.”

  It didn’t take long before the war reached the city. My sister’s memories of Kandahar are vivid. “During recess time in school, we could go in the shops and have fun, and then come back. There were four of us shopping around and we saw this guy holding maybe a five-year-old girl. He passed by me and the next thing we know, he was shot in the head. I just heard the gunshot. We hid in a stationery store for a while and then got out. Everybody was running. When we looked behind us, some men were running after us as if they wanted to hurt us. They didn’t catch us because we were way ahead of them. We ran to school and the school had a lockout.”

  On the day the war broke out in the city, my father and his colleagues at the fertilizer company heard that rioters were attacking anyone working for the government. They left work immediately to seek refuge in their homes. They jumped in a company car but didn’t make it far before they were under attack. The rioters threw sticks and stones at their car. My father ducked and ran into a residential home. His hosts, complete strangers, gave him a pirahan tomban and a turban to wear. (His slacks and collared shirt would have made him a target, since that was the style of dress for civil servants.) He rode the bus home and frightened my mother. “I was cooking and suddenly I could see a man appear from the corner of my eye,” my mother says. “I thought he was there to attack me. I screamed and your father took off his turban and smiled. I had never seen him dressed in traditional clothes before.”

  Shortly thereafter, my father requested a transfer back to his birthplace, Herat, where the uprisings had been crushed and the war had reverted back to the countryside.

  Kandahar city had become a front line.

  The afternoon sun fades with evening prayer time and I can feel a light draft sneak in through the closed window of my room. I’m staying at an Afghan NGO that is helping farmers maximize their incomes. The management is taking a big risk hosting me—if the locals find out there is a single Afghan woman without a mahram inside a house full of men, they might attack the NGO. They allow me to stay here because I’ve asked for their help. Afghan NGOs offer the same hospitality the Afghan people do. I can see a colorful garden through the mesh o
f my burqa, but I am not allowed to sit outside. They give me a room facing a wall and send a Farsi-speaking engineer named Kazi to watch over me. He is dreadfully scared that protecting me will cost him his life.

  “It’s very unusual for me to come here and talk to you like this. It’s dangerous,” he says.

  “You can leave if you’re more comfortable,” I respond.

  “I can’t do that. I’m responsible for you here. I’m not sure whether you’re brave or stupid for coming here like this, without any guards or family.”

  When I speak on the phone in the room, he warns me not to laugh too loud or speak English too loud, because the people on the street might hear my feminine voice.

  I tell him the truth about my reasons for traveling to the south, but few others know. My official story is that I am going to Helmand in search of my cousin Darya, whose mother has lost touch with her and wants me to reestablish contact. If I admitted that Darya’s not related to me, then I would have to reveal more details, which would endanger both of us. I decide that maybe a hotel room in a quiet part of the city would be safer than the NGO.

  The staff at the hotel where I’ve relocated knows I’m headed to Helmand the next day. One of them stops me on my way to my room. “Hamshira, this week the Taliban killed five Afghan aid workers who were trying to get rid of opium in Helmand,” he warns me. “Then they killed six other men who were driving the body of one of the men killed in Helmand to Kabul for burial. They ambushed their car and just shot them on the way in Zabul province. I don’t think you should go.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I reply coldly. “I have to go.”

  “The Taliban will kill you if they find out you’re a journalist,” he insists, trying to convince me. “Whatever it is you want from there, it’s not worth it.”

  “Yes, it is, very much so.”

  I walk into my room and shut the door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Through the Mesh

  The taxi driver, Samay, will not look at me, even in my burqa. But Imran, my guide, is more than eager to look. The three of us are driving across a rugged desert, over thorns and pebbles. I look for red painted rocks, a marker of mines, but I don’t see any. We pass the shrine of Malalai, an Afghan heroine who died in battle against the British in the nineteenth century. The men in the car speak Pashto together; I can make out that it is small talk. They do not know each other, but they have one goal on this trip: making sure I come back from Helmand alive.

  Samay has five children and one wife. A diminutive man in his thirties, he was recommended to me by a couple of local journalists in Kandahar who said I could trust him with my life. Apparently Samay’s loyalty to his passengers is unmatched in the city. He is also a cheap ride compared with the other drivers catering to foreigners. I’ve convinced him to drive Imran and me for five hours on the rough desert to the district of Sangin, in Helmand, for fifty dollars a day. Other drivers would charge at least double that.

  Samay knows the road well. I cannot figure out how he knows which direction in the desert to go. Each way looks the same, with endless sunny skies, rocks, and sand. The only signs are the tire tracks along which his yellow Toyota chugs as fast as it can, at speeds of thirty to forty kilometers. He doesn’t smoke hashish on the drive like the last driver I hired in Kandahar, and he keeps his eyes on the road instead of in his rearview mirror to peek at me.

  Imran is my friend’s relative. He is from the district of Grishk, Helmand. When my friend insisted he become my guide, he left his family business, wife, and children in Grishk and rushed to Kandahar to assist me. His family is prosperous from running a soft drink business. They are part of the minority of Farsi-speaking Shiites who have survived in the south over hundreds of years. I am amazed at how the Taliban, who disapprove of Shiites and believe they are infidels, have allowed this community to survive. Imran’s religious sect and language may be different at home, but in public he fits in with other men, minus the turban and beard. Instead, he sports a mustache and talks like a businessman—a bit too smooth for my taste. He stares at me, not for sexual interest but to read me. He keeps asking me the same question in roundabout ways.

  “Why are you really here? I mean, what’s the real reason you’re looking for this girl?”

  “I’m obeying her mother’s wishes to find her, and I care to know how she is,” I say.

  That response isn’t good enough.

  “Rasti [really]?”

  His suspicion is clear, so the fact that he continues to take this risk for me is puzzling.

  The unforgiving desert wind blows the flowing fabric of my burqa through the open window and I feel relief from the breeze. I have a photocopy of Haji Sufi’s picture in my bag. First Imran is going to visit the contacts he has and show them the picture. The photo is of a man sitting on a mat drinking tea, his legs crossed, his turban looking too big for his head. He looks into the camera lens uncomfortably, as if this picture will be used against him at some point. This photo of Haji Sufi is the only clue I have to finding Darya. Her mother told me she lived in Sangin district, in a home located on an orchard near the homes of Haji Sufi’s two other brothers.

  I will find Darya. I have to. Her quavering voice echoes in my head: “Please don’t let him take me.”

  If I find her, at least she will see that I cared enough to come back; she will know that she matters and isn’t a slave. I want her to know that she can fight back and change her life. Most important, I want her to know that there’s someone out there who will listen to her and who is concerned about her. I also want to know her more: What is her favorite subject in school? Does she like to dance? Does she resent her father for what he did to her? What does she want to be when she grows up? Is she anything like me?

  We finally arrive in Sangin. It is a district with high mud walls, colorful metal doors, and a silence that reminds me of the Taliban years. There are no women outside, only men with kohl-lined eyes and black-and-white-striped turbans. They look at the taxi with suspicion, not with the usual welcoming smile I encounter in villages. I was told to be as I am, a visitor, and not to pretend to be anything else. I have the same strange sense of empowerment wearing the burqua as I did during the Taliban years, when I first returned to Afghanistan—that I can see them and they cannot see me.

  Imran and I walk to the village bazaar, which is made up of mud huts with small wooden doors. It looks like any other Afghan village bazaar, except that instead of selling rice and cooking oil, most of these tiny shops look empty and dark. Karzai’s government has no presence in this village, as far as I can tell, but the official ban on opium seems to have taken the sale of narcotics underground. This isn’t like Badakhshan, where the shopkeepers sat between a scale and bags of heroin with crisp dollar bills in their hands. I ask Imran what these shops sell.

  “Opium,” he replies as if I should know better than to ask.

  “Is there a storage space they put it in, because the shops are empty?”

  “No, they just make the deals here and then, if someone wants to buy, they bring it from their homes or wherever they have it stashed.”

  I asked why it is so secretive when no one here is opposing it.

  “These people are former Taliban and they think they’ll be attacked at any point, so they cover their tracks.”

  We arrive close to noon, when families are preparing lunch. Imran orders me to stay at his aunt’s house while he shows the picture of Haji Sufi around. Inside the courtyard, the women and children in his family welcome me, bringing tea and fresh bread. This familiar kindness relaxes me a little. They want to know why I am here, where my mahram is, and how I am related to Imran.

  “Imran is a relative of a friend, and I am searching for my cousin Darya.”

  “I know a girl from Herat married to an old man. Do you have a photo of her?” Imran’s aunt asks.

  I kick myself. I do but I didn’t bring it. I did not want to put Darya in any kind of danger. When Imran returns, he looks d
efeated, until his aunt tells him to try a couple of blocks up their street.

  “I showed several shopkeepers, but they do not know too many people by the name of Haji Sufi. That’s a generic title. What’s his real name?”

  I am dumbfounded. I didn’t realize he lied to me about his name. When I spoke to Darya’s mother about him, we referred to him as the girl’s “husband” and nothing more.

  Imran sees the disappointment in my face. “People say he looks familiar, but they don’t know where he lives or what his name is.”

  I join him in Sameh’s taxi as we stop at each door. Imran goes out under the sweltering sun and repeats the same question.

  “Have you seen this man? He’s a relative we want to visit.”

  When he asks a young boy, the boy runs off, probably fearing we might be kidnappers. Only men open doors, and most of them shake their heads when they see the photo. The family that Imran’s aunt told us to visit has no Herati girl married to an old man.

  Two hours later I end up in another house with womenfolk. Imran stays for a few minutes, then leaves to chat with the men. I am welcomed by the women and barraged with the same questions. They see the concern on my face and ask me why I am here. I try to explain. The wife and mother-in-law speak only Pashto, but we manage to get a few ideas across. I want to ask them how their life has changed since the Taliban left. Are the men in their family opium vendors? Do they know Darya? But I am deprived of words. Learning Pashto has never been a goal of mine, but now I realize how important it is to be Afghan and know both Farsi and Pashto.