Kabul 25-7-03 Farewell tour 1: teashop
26 Jul 2003
[817w]
My last day in Kabul, a Friday and so a day off. A colleague and I took a stalling rattler of a Landcruiser and went out to drive at random. First we zoomed up to the Intercontinental Hotel. It sits in a saddle between Kabul proper and the suburbs of Afshar, Silo and beyond. Good views from the hillock above the car park. On the west side we saw the Loya Jirga tent where Hamid Karzai was ratified as President and where more deliberations on a new constitution will happen soon - one hopes. It's really a marquee, which was disappointing; I'd envisaged something more romantic.
Then we circled round through Karte Se, once the wealthiest of suburbs much caressed by Embassies, then rocketed beyond habitability, now coming back a bit. One big concrete building knocked down on its knees but structurally sound in part, which I remember as a shell in 1998 now has a woodstore in part of the ground floor and a family extemporising a home with bricks and tarpaulin further up. And in fact parts of Karte Se look just nice, with flower shops and straw yards and life bursting out all over.
One thing that bothered me about Karte Se, which troubles me a lot about the rest of Kabul too, is that very many of the business offices one sees are BONGOs. Here’s some stuff about BONGOs and why they bother me. Although the one that caught my eye in Karte Se was pretty harmless. HAPPCO stands for Help for Afghan Poor People Cultural Organisation. This is philanthropy that protests too much, whilst the infelicitous terminal “CO” gives the game away without meaning to.
Anyway, on the Darulaman road there are signs for Fedex and Siemens now, so things may be looking up. Not that I think Afghanistan needs international businesses. They managed without for ages. But a country that has a Siemens office may be one with a better chance of prosperity, and certainly has been judged by careful Germans as less likely to break down in civil war, than one that has not.
Onward. We drove through the old town and round the Bala Hissar, the historic fortress of Kabul where Cavagnari and the Guides were put to the sword in 1879, now much battered but still grand. Behind the Bala Hissar there’s a huge rambling informal cemetery. It’s all up the side of the hill, patches of varying sizes and opulence, just as people needed them. Roads wind up through them. We drove on one. At the top there’s a Mosque and just down hill several impromptu tea shops pitched in tents among the graves.
Maybe you think there’s something weird about a tea shop in a grave yard. The one we went to had an awning rigged from gravestone to gravestone with guys sitting under it chatting. There were two urns, narrow drums with braziers underneath and a chimney running up inside and out the top. A tap at the bottom lets the old codger running the shop fill an enamel teapot. He gives us each a glass with about half an inch of sugar in the bottom. We pour and sip and relish and watch the monster ants.
Other men come and take, perhaps for payment, plastic jugs of warm water. Off they go behind walls and among gravestones and squat down. I don’t know if this is ritual washing – the thing of it is, prayers are over, and it’s just one or two guys from time to time. And they squat down so you can’t see them. And they’re not Hazaras (who have distinctive features – more like Chinese); and Hazaras are the only Shi’ites. So they’re Sunnis. Well, see, Shi’ites wipe and Sunnis wash. That’s the tradition as I collect it. So I’m not inquiring into what the guys are off to do with the water jugs. (I apologise to anyone who knows better, if this is a cheap shot. My very limited knowledge of Muslim practice is compatible with the need, for example, for ritual washing before visiting the grave of a relation. On the other hand they did all go behind trees.)
On the whole though, even if you might think this last an even odder use for a grave yard than making it into a teashop, it seems pretty nice. I’d like to think when I die people would come and sit around where my mortal remains remain and drink tea and crack jokes and ease their bowels. In that rich earth, a richer earth concealed. Getting richer day by day. Then we were ready to go, and the teashop man refused payment – no urging would suffice. This happens a lot in Afghanistan. It’s not practical or commercial at all; it’s nobility.
Next stop the brickworks.
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