KABUL, 12 August — The past is littered across Kabul airport. Most of the planes are broken neatly, snapped like twigs by a giant. Only a few look as if they have been subjected to a searing torture that had defeated their forms and mangled their innards.
On one decisive night in October, a giant, the United States, took each machine in the service of the Taleban regime, civilian or transport, apart with the laser precision that modern bombs can deploy against squatting ducks. The wreckage across the field has a surreal, museum quality to it, a memory of war, anger and deadly revenge.
Salvage would not do justice to such wreckage. For some unknown reason a line from Macbeth echoes in a recess of the mind: How much blood was there in the old man! How many planes were there in the old regime!
The only military plane I saw, a MiG, was intact, and parked like a stuffed trophy on a banner outside the airport, on the fork of a road turning toward the city. To which war did this MiG belong, to which jehad? It had not been bombed, even by mistake. It was a dead survivor. They exist in countries like Afghanistan.
The live survivors, American helicopters and gunships, sit in obedient rows amid the art deco of what is surely the world’s only airplane graveyard. The present lives, if uneasily, between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s wars.
Our craft ovalled twice in the air, following the route of a racetrack, before landing on a patch in the valley. From the air, Kabul looks flat and flattened. Brown is the color of this world, of mountain, earth, habitat and man. Even rock seems to be made of mud, like the homes that cling to their sides. Nothing rises higher than the second floor, except for nature. Occasional flashes of green in the fields seem like lipstick and nail polish, pretty but marginal.
A Turkish crescent barely stirs above the control tower of the airport. Turkish troops are in charge; the security of a renewed nation has been handed over to brother Muslims from the edge of Europe after Britain slipped away and America decided to concentrate on the search for an enemy, the Taleban and Al-Qaeda, that is probably sitting elsewhere. The door opens and we see a swarm of people who have come to welcome the external affairs minister of India, Yashwant Sinha. Paradoxically, warmth rather than discipline creates the straight lines out of a dispersed welcome.
Yashwant has arrived on a magic carpet; in the first of the three Airbus-300s that India has gifted to the Afghan national airline, Ariana. Cake is served with cold drinks. Speeches are made against the backdrop of most glorious flowers. The Afghans are emotional. The external affairs minister is elegant. A gift has been given with grace and received with hope.
What do you call a traffic jam that does not have too much traffic? A traffic butter? This was more of a traffic jalebi, a squiggle that turned upon itself ignoring the wide space around its internal snarl. We wormed our way through curiosity, with authority; we shot past the American Embassy, a fortress crowned by a forest of technology.
The Radio Afghanistan building looked distraught; the Afghanistan Films office forlorn. Shops began to appear, from Khayate Abdullah, mardana (or men’s) tailor, to Popolana, offering Italian food in a dhaba; to Milad Computer Service, Shafaq English and Computer Agency, D. Butcher’s Market and Sharif Market Japani. (You can take Japan out of a market but how can you take a market out of Japan?)
The star of the growing show is Sikander the Barber, now proudly displaying his profession without fear or favor. Just a year ago he would have been whipped for daring to snip the beard of a man. The clean faces of Kabul suddenly strike you. A year ago the Taleban punish anyone who dared to shorten a beard. Liberty has had a close shave in Afghanistan.
Is wizened an Afghan word? It should be. Name one country with more wizened faces. The most wizened of them all was the face of my driver, whose beam became broader with each helpless gesture. Sample: Morning, and the clean, dry sun is already 30 degrees hot. We ask him to put the air conditioner of the car on. He swivels the button of the AC switch twice to show how useless it is, then winds the windows down with a broad smile.
The one moment I did not immediately recognize him was when, most solemnly, he sat beside me at the general banquet for the two delegations at the Palace where President Hamid Karzai works and King Zahir Shah, the Baba-e-Qaum lives. There was complete lack of social distinction at this formal lunch. Everyone involved in the two delegations took a seat at the table, including the police outrider and the driver of hired vehicles. Everyone was an equal at the table. The one difference was that my driver beamed even more after roast meat, pilao, bread, brinjal, beans, salad and melon.
While Yashwant served the nation with exemplary zeal (10.10, hand over plane; 10.45, meet foreign minister; 11.30, meet finance minister; 12, call on Baba-e-Qaum; 12.30, talks with Karzai; and so on), I took my wizened driver toward Baagh-e-Babar, the last garden and final resting place of Babar. My driver had some difficulty finding out where Karzai lived, but he had no problem taking me to where Babar lay dead.
The beauty of this garden ascends on you. The rise is deceptive. War and the ignorance of the Taleban have left it desolate, but there were lush grass lawns, beds of hovering flowers and a straight line of playing fountains once. Some of the flowers have returned and foreign restorers have brought their instruments of alignment to begin rejuvenation, but this beauty’s scars will take time to heal.
We walk, helped by half a dozen steps every once in a while, without discerning the gradual slope that is taking us toward the breast of the mountains. We reach the first building, a pavilion, and look back upon what once must have been a natural delight enhanced by man’s art. The pavilion is a shock. Bullets and mortar have ripped it apart. The mosque above has not been spared either, its tiled roof tumbling out of control.
The grave is small and simple; the obituary elegant and factual. From the high point of the grave, the meaning of war becomes terribly clear, both in the immediate and in the extended view.
Below us lies a devastated area of Kabul, hectares of homes and roads that have been smashed by shell and wrecked by the fire of the fiercest battles. This is the famous road to Kabul University, the dividing line between forces of the Taleban and those of Ahmed Shah Masood, leader of the Northern Alliance. Masood, the Lion of Panjsher against the Russians, lost out to the Taleban and was marginalized, along with Gen. Abdul Rasheed Dostum, to Mazaar-e-Sharif where he remained in the fight as leader of the Northern Alliance. Destiny was cruel to Masood. It gave him his hour after Sept. 11; but it took him away a minute before the hour struck. Masood was assassinated by two suicide bombers who fooled him into giving an interview by posing as European journalists. They are building a portrait of Masood on the Great Masood Road, which is what the principal artery of Kabul is now called. The honor will dominate Kabul; at least until the next war.
Well Come, says the sign at the gate of the Kabul Intercontinental. English can go to the devil in these circumstances; I feel welcome. Even the Turkish soldiers who check me out do it with a smile. We drive through the gate and past a hall that says what it was rather than what it is: BALLROOM. The hotel reopened after the defeat of the Taleban; the carpets are as frayed as the uniforms; there is one local soap in the bathroom and it makes more sense to wait till the evening brings the temperature down than complain about air-conditioning. But I feel at home.
From the Drug Store Cum Antiqu (sic) Shop in the foyer, owned by Yak E. Bood and Yak E. Naboo, come the strains of "Aa jao tarapte hain armaan, ab raat guzarne wali hai," which is soon followed by "Ghar aaya mera pardesi, pyas bujhi mere ankhiyon kee." Across the hall from the shop is the Powder Room. I blink. I have not seen a Powder Room being called a Powder Room — ever! Ballroom. Powder Room. Queen Victoria is alive and in Kabul.
The portrait of Ahmed Shah Masood looks down upon us. But he doesn’t mind, really. Where else would a Hindi song meet Queen Victoria except at an Intercontinental in Kabul?
