Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds

Mir was waiting, but a closer look at this market was irresistible. I strolled with my helmet through the stalls, inhaling Central Asia again, feeling like an alien in the city of my birth.

(#litres_trial_promo) Women in saris swarmed around the vegetable stands, bargaining with the stall-keepers, sifting through the foodstuffs with practised brown fingers. Among the recognisable goods were species of vegetation that were new to me – mooli and tindora, papadi and cho-cho, patra and parval, long dhudi, posso, china karella. There were over a dozen types of flour with names like dhokra and dhosa mix, mathia and oudhwa, mogo, raja-gro, singoda. There were packets of moth beans and gunga peas, sliced betelnut and sago seeds. There was a mouth freshener called mukhwas manpasand, and something called red chowrie, that was not to be confused with brown chorie, which according to the label was also known as pink cow peas.

There were implications to all this variety. It spoke of hours and hours spent in kitchens, of women’s lives (because the food shoppers were almost entirely women) in which the preparation of meals loomed far larger than it ordinarily did in the West. I was conscious of how little I knew about food, how little I cooked. The last time I used any kind of flour was in a domestic science class at boarding school when I was ten. I thought of the cling-film-wrapped vegetables I occasionally cooked for myself, steamed broccoli or little packets of pre-washed green beans, always identical green beans that were imported and sorted and chopped to the regulation length: junk veg. They went all right with a pre-cooked chicken kiev or a frozen lasagne, but I really bought them because, like a fast-food burger, their consumption required no thought.

Back outside, I noticed for the first time that it was a match day. Fans wearing the claret and blue of West Ham Football Club were making their way south towards the end of the street, where the floodlights and the tops of the stands of Upton Park stadium were visible. They were mostly working-class white, some of them looking like National Front archetypes with their earrings and shaven heads. According to the tabloid version of modern England this was a classic recipe for a bloodbath, yet there was no sense of racial tension here. I had been to football matches and witnessed at first hand the thuggery that English supporters are sometimes capable of, but these West Ham fans were turning that preconception on its head. They did not look angry or furtive or alienated. There was no nervous cordon of fluorescent-jacketed police. They just shambled along the pavement without a second glance, ordinary people on an ordinary Saturday going to an ordinary late-season football match.

I suddenly saw how easy it was to sit in the white-majority fastness of west London and pontificate about multiculturalism, while it was quite another thing to live as a minority in one’s homeland. It was astounding to find that multiculturalism actually seemed to work. Did the West Ham fans feel their national identity was under threat? Did they sit around in shabby pubs plotting to petrol bomb the modest homes of immigrants, the modern European equivalent of a Deep South lynching? They gave no sign of it. Further along the street was a stall selling paraphernalia in claret and blue, scarves and flags and football shirts with the names and numbers of the team’s heroes on them. The names of the players were not Asian, but some of them were unmistakably foreign – Miklosko, Berkovic, Lazaridis. It was hard to see how a fan could be a xenophobe when he supported a team like that.

The house was in the middle of Mafeking Avenue, an unexceptional double row of Victorian terraces typical of the late-nineteenth-century London housing boom during which they had been built. Avenues named after Ladysmith and Kimberley ran parallel, forming a mini-memorial to a corner of a vanished empire. These street names must have meant little to the neighbourhood’s modern inhabitants. The Boer War was just another imperial milestone, a bitter battle between Afrikaners and the British for control over turf that arguably belonged to neither, a hundred years ago and a distant continent away. And yet London’s success and status in the world owed everything to Britain’s imperial past. The Boer War was about control of South African diamonds and gold, riches that thousands of British soldiers had fought and died for at places like Mafeking. The relief of this obscure outpost in 1900 after a 217-day siege inspired such public jubilation in London that a new verb, ‘to maffick’, was added to the English language.

It was the stuff of history, and it was also the source of the prosperity that had attracted the immigrant scions of the colonised to come here in the first place. Kimberley was one of the greatest diamond mines the world has ever seen, and London is still littered with memorials to the battles by which the Empire was accrued. In the index of my street directory I counted six streets named Mafeking, nine Ladysmiths and twenty-two Kimberleys. The town planners of the early twentieth century were unimaginative: what would they have made of their streets’ present-day occupants? Did they perhaps imagine that they were building houses for returning troops, homes fit for heroes? Were they now turning in their graves?

I wondered if Mir had ever heard of Mafeking. He had been a diligent student, but the late-Victorian scramble for Africa seemed unlikely to have featured very high on the Mazari school curriculum. It was a pity that he had not ended up in that concentration of streets in SW11 that commemorate Britain’s Afghan Wars: Afghan Road, Khyber Road, Cabul and Candahar Road spelled the old-fashioned way. That would have grabbed his attention, for there are few Afghans who do not know the stories from the time of the British.

Nor are stories the only things that are passed from generation to generation. I once visited the Panjshir Valley in a bid to interview the late Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. On an exploratory walk along the valley road I came across a twelve-year-old boy shooting ducks on the river. The antique gun over his shoulder was almost as tall as him, and I asked with the help of sign language if I could examine it. The boy seemed pleased by my interest and I handled the gun admiringly, feeling the balance and heft of it. The cellophaned stock was decorated in the Afghan taste, with a gruesome colour photograph of someone undergoing open heart surgery taken from the brochure of some Western aid organisation. The metalwork was worn but had been carefully oiled and polished. Decorative tassels and a small felt pouch of gunpowder dangled from the trigger guard. It was obviously old, a heavy matchlock muzzle-loader from the era that preceded cartridges and bolt-action loading, more musket than modern rifle. Turning it over, I found an inscription on the sideplate that read VR 1840: Victoria Regina. I was holding a relic of the First Afghan War.

The weapon had in all probability been taken from one of the unfortunates who died on the legendary 1842 retreat. A general of quite breathtaking incompetence called William Elphinstone (Elphinstone Court SW16; Elphinstone Road E17; Elphinstone Street N5) tried to lead his force ninety miles back to Jalalabad in the middle of winter. Some twenty thousand people set out from Kabul, including barefoot Indian sepoys and several thousand women and children camp followers. Their tents were lost in the confusion of departure. Snow lay a foot deep on the ground, and at night the temperature dropped to -24°C. According to legend only one European survived the retreat, a surgeon named Brydon who straggled into Jalalabad on a donkey. Those who did not freeze to death were picked off without mercy by tribesmen armed with long-barrelled jezails who ambushed them in the high passes. Hordes of ululating women descended on the dead and dying and emasculated them with knives. There is an account of a redcoat who rounded a corner of the mountain path to find an Afghan boy of six attempting to hack off the head of a dead comrade. Without hesitating he hoisted the child on his bayonet and pitched him out into the abyss. The retreat was the worst military disaster the British Empire had ever known.

The gun’s new owner let me fire it. He tipped in powder from the pouch, then a handful of gravel snatched up from the road, before ramming it all home with a rod that slotted into a bracket beneath the barrel. He pointed down to the river where half a dozen wooden decoy ducks were moored in the current, crudely fashioned silhouettes like targets at a funfair. I squatted on my haunches and rested my elbows on my knees for balance as the boy indicated. The recoil was tremendous, the bang even more so. The sound bounced off the rocks and steep cliffs, reverberating far up and down the valley for long seconds before the echo died. The silence that followed seemed unnaturally still, and the boy and I grinned guiltily at each other, co-conspirators in shattering the Panjshir’s peacefulness – 160 years of Anglo-Afghan history captured in a single gunshot.

Outside the house in Mafeking Avenue a black man was sitting in an old white BMW, revving the engine to clean out the carburettor. The spluttering noise masked the sound of my bike’s engine, but Mir was on the lookout and came onto the street the moment I arrived. It was several weeks since we had waved goodbye to each other through a taxi window in Islamabad. I hadn’t forgotten the look on his face, hopeful and anxious at the same time, no doubt wondering if a foreigner would really deliver on a promise to help him. I could see it was no easy thing for him to relinquish the lifeline that I represented for him, even temporarily. Now in Mafeking Avenue the anxiety was gone. He beamed, and fell on me with unaffected joy, hugging me and slapping my back.

– I am here, he said at last, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. I am here.

– Welcome to London, I replied, smiling – because in the end his presence here was improbable. I had stepped into this person’s life and with a simple letter to the British High Commission in Islamabad had turned it upside down, altering its direction forever. It was an act of the purest existentialism, as though Mir and I had colluded outrageously to upset the natural order of things.

He looked the same: a little less chubby-cheeked than I remembered, maybe, but with the same shambling, flat-footed gait that made me laugh. He was wearing the same clothes I had last seen him in, a washed-out navy blue shalwar qamiz, the uniform of a zillion Pakistanis. I wondered what other clothes he had, but quickly veered away from the thought and asked him how the trip had gone.

– Hohh, he said, his dark eyes wide with unironic amazement.

– Go on – what was it like?

– It was…strange to start. This plane is werry big. And fast.

He made a jet taking off with the flat of his hand and, leaning back, stared straight ahead in imitation of the unexpected G-force as he accelerated down the runway at Islamabad. I had forgotten that his previous flying experience was limited to military helicopters.

– But after, it was nice, he added equably. Specially the food. And the women: hohh.

I had insisted that Mir fly British Airways, reckoning on balance that a BA aircrew would be more sympathetic as well as better informed about the immigration rules in the event of some disaster en route. But I hadn’t told him about the air hostesses he would meet on board, their dyed hair uncovered, their legs clearly on view beneath their uniforms. They may look unexceptional to Westerners, but to an untravelled Muslim they must have constituted a preview of paradise. Mir had begun arriving in the West from the moment he stepped from the tarmac at Islamabad. I could tell he was still high from the experience, still processing all the new and unexpected things he had already seen, his dislocation no doubt heightened by jetlag.

– Is this your motorbike? he asked.

I told him to climb on. It was a tired old Honda trail-bike, covered in EBC brake-pad stickers and oily from a cracked sump, but he sat astride the machine making vrooming noises, trying it out for size, his eyes as shiny as a schoolboy’s.

– Hohh, he laughed. JamesBond.

Eventually he led me up the path by the house’s front garden. This had been left to weeds and was littered with household rubbish and the scurf of the street. Inside the door he flipped off his shoes with an ease that had long ago become automatic and that made me feel clumsy in my unAfghan lace-up boots. He called out for Hamid, who emerged from the back of the house and shook my hand solemnly in the traditional Pashtun way, bowing almost imperceptibly as he placed his right hand on his heart, muttering an inaudible welcome. He was thin and unhealthy-looking compared to Mir. His cheeks were pockmarked and he wore Western clothes, jeans and a cheap leather jacket. He was older than Mir, in his thirties perhaps, and he did not seem entirely pleased that I was there. But Mir ignored him and ushered me further into the house with something like pride. I was his VIP, the honoured guest, and he was as eager to please as ever.

He led me up the narrow stairs, and I could see he had been at work. Beds had been carefully made. A mildewed bathroom had recently been doused in bleach. But no amount of tidying up could mask the pervading smell of damp, the threadbare carpets, the grubby wallpaper that bulged in places, a broken windowpane that had been replaced with cardboard. The place was as dire as I had expected. The tour was short, and finished in the front room. Cheap armchairs lined the walls, their springs and stuffing showing. A second-hand television burbled in the corner, the picture hopelessly fuzzy. A coffee table was loaded with little cut-glass bowls full of boiled sweets, pine-kernels and sugared mulberries, just like at home. Mir bustled out and reappeared carrying a large rolled-up carpet.

– For you, he declared, spreading it out with a practised flourish. I could hardly believe he had brought it with him on the plane. But as he searched my face anxiously for a reaction, it was clear that this was more than just a gesture: it was an expression of family debt.

– I spoke to my father, he explained. He said I should bring you this. Do you like it?

It was impossible not to like it. The carpet was a beautiful thing, a rich black and orange asymmetric swirl, the patterns interspersed with figurative flowers and minarets, the ends finely tasselled. I thanked him formally and he nodded his satisfaction, serious for a moment. It was certain that this exchange would be relayed back to Mazar somehow.

I had brought my own welcoming present, but hesitated now before presenting it because I realised it wasn’t really suitable. It was a single bottle of designer lager spontaneously bought in Oddbins called Freedom Beer. It was intended as a joke for the teetotal Mir, a symbol of the moral confusion and temptation that he would surely find in the West. He took it and placed it with solemn reverence in the centre of the mantelpiece. It was hard to tell what he really made of it. His face was a mask.

Hamid came in and sat down in an armchair opposite, silently studying me. I had not been mistaken: he was uncomfortable with my presence here. And there was something more, a jaded, beaten quality in the way he walked and sat, a certain unhappiness in the set of his mouth and the deep lines on his forehead. The light in his eyes had been somehow deadened.

– This is a nice house, I said to him. Is it yours?

– It belongs to a friend, he replied evenly.

– Hamid is a tour guide, said Mir brightly.

– A tour guide? Really? You must know London well.

Hamid looked at Mir and laughed hollowly.

– Not is, he said. Was. Now I drive a van. I am a dispatch driver in London.

– You were a tour guide in Mazar? What, before the war?

It seemed unlikely: he was surely too young to have worked in Afghan tourism, an industry that had effectively died with the Russian invasion twenty years before.

– Hamid’s father was a tour guide, Mir explained. It was his family’s business. Hamid was taught everything about Mazar history, but the tourists never came back.

It was a sad example of an all too common story in Afghanistan, where war had spoiled the lives of so many people in surprising, incalculable ways. Hamid’s no doubt long apprenticeship had been utterly pointless.

– When did you come here? Have you been in London for long?

– Years, Hamid snorted, swatting angrily at an imaginary fly. He didn’t want to expand.

– Hamid has a best friend here who was once a tour guide in Kabul, added Mir. His name is Isa.

– Isa, Hamid snorted again. A stupid bastard.

Mir looked momentarily put out by this, but recovered quickly.

– Isa had a bakery in…another city here. With a Moroccan man. But the Moroccan man was bad and took all Isa’s money and went back to Rabat.

Hamid silenced Mir with a hard look. There was obviously more to this story, and when Hamid went to the kitchen to fetch tea, Mir leaned forward and began speaking in a breathless stage whisper. It seemed that Isa had spent the previous night at Mafeking Avenue.

– This Isa. He is very bad. James, he smokes a lot of chars! Hamid also. They are both…hash-heads. And Isa has a girlfriend. From Mexico!

He began to speak more quickly, clasping my arm as something clattered in the kitchen.