Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds

– Oh, I don’t know. Is it? I teased him.

It was harder to explain the sado-masochist display we saw in another window. It was simply beyond Mir’s comprehension, and he seemed only mildly reassured when I told him that whips and leather and chains were not to my taste. I coaxed him into a large porn shop. If I was surprised, he was stunned to see that the clientele largely comprised Asian men. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder facing the magazine racks on the walls, shifting their weight awkwardly as they readjusted their erections, their eyes flickering furtively across the lurid pages. It was as quiet as a library but the atmosphere was thick and charged and seminal, and we hastily backed out. Mir looked shocked, and I wondered briefly if I might not have overdone this baptism of fire, but decided that there was no point in trying to protect his innocence. London was London, and if he was going to live here then he needed to know what to expect.

I took him home via a Tesco supermarket in order to buy something for lunch, but by the sliding doors he stopped and gawped at the glittering aisles like Aladdin at the entrance to his cave.

– So much, he said. So much.

I hadn’t anticipated that Tesco’s would confound him. I suddenly understood that in East Ham he must have been buying his food in small shops, or perhaps from the covered market by Upton Park – but that resembled the markets in Islamabad. Mir had never seen anything like this. Deeper inside he moved like a trespasser. He kept a respectful distance from the overpackaged goods on the shelves as though they were tainted, or bombs.

(#litres_trial_promo) I had little idea of what he might want to eat, and he offered no guidance when I asked.

– I don’t know, he shrugged. Whatever you like.

– Are you hungry? Some meat? Should we get some bread?

– It doesn’t matter. As you wish.

– But it’s your lunch, I said, irritated. I want it to be as you wish.

– I don’t know.

I thought the chill-cabinet of microwave-ready meals might inspire him. There was a meals-for-one section, 250g per portion, a range that I knew all too well. Back at home Mir’s meals had been prepared by the women in his family. Afghan men did not cook. But that was going to have to change now that he was alone in London. He scanned the neat packages and the mendacious photographs on their lids, as exotic to him as meals for astronauts. In the photographs the meals were garnished with a sprig of greenery and laid out on a table suggestive of a farmhouse kitchen, a full place-setting glinting in soft candlelight.

– Like in a restaurant, Mir observed doubtfully. They look werry expensive.

– Don’t worry about that. I’m going to pay.

– No, I am going to pay, he said, showing decisiveness for the first time.

– You most certainly are not. You’re my guest and you’re in my country now. Choose something.

But we didn’t buy a ready meal. There was an obvious difficulty about Tesco’s prepared food that I had overlooked: it was not halal. So I steered him instead towards the fruit and veg section, but he remained tentative. The melons resembled the ones found in Mazar, but he was suspicious because they were out of season. He would concede nothing beyond the fact that he quite liked the look of the string beans. With increasing desperation I eventually selected an avocado, pitta bread and a tub of taramosalata. Even in the soft-drinks section he was paralysed by the choice on offer.

– Which one is best? he said simply. There was no Mirinda for him to latch onto here.

– Maybe Tango? I sighed. I think you’ll like Tango.

– As you wish, said Mir.

But back at my flat, he did like the Tango. Once he had established to his satisfaction that it contained no alcohol he slurped it down. He hesitated at the avocado, testing the surface of the peeled flesh with a podgy finger, but he tasted it and immediately declared it werry delicious, like a nut. Nothing could make him try the taramosalata however. He conceded that it was probably halal because it was made from fish roe, but when he asked where the fish had come from, and how it had been caught and killed, there was no answer I could give.

I pondered this Afghan placidly munching on my sofa. There was a pleasing symmetry to guiding and teaching the person who had once taught and guided me. At times in Afghanistan, Ewan, Rick and I had been wholly, scarily dependent on Mir’s interpretation of what was going on around us. Now the boot was on the other foot and I felt a sweet sort of satisfaction, almost like revenge. There was a helpless, childlike quality about him here, as though he had just been born into a new world. If so, then I was the midwife. But I understood also that I had a duty of care towards this young man that went beyond mere technical assistance in the initial asylum process. After all, in Afghanistan I too had stumbled like a child and been selflessly rescued by the people who lived there.

A few months previously, on my second visit to Afghanistan, I had been lost in the Salang Tunnel, a showcase of Soviet engineering eleven thousand feet up in the Hindu Kush. A lack of helicopters and time had forced me to return overland to Mazar from the Panjshir Valley, a two-day trip that for complex reasons I was forced to tackle alone. It was still winter, and the mine-lined road up to the pass was blocked by snow for several miles at either end.

The tunnel itself was two miles long and pitch-dark. Half a mile in, my torch batteries went flat. The surface of the tunnel floor was badly decayed, full of slippery rocks and deep holes filled with freezing slush and ice.

(#litres_trial_promo) I was already tired from the journey, and after what seemed like hours of cursing and floundering in this terrible place, my legs soaked, my knees and shins bashed and aching from countless falls, I felt badly demoralised. Just then an unseen presence reached out of the darkness and took me by the hand. Friend or foe? There wasn’t a chink of light by which to tell, and the hand’s owner never said a word. Instead, he or she began pulling me gently but firmly along the tunnel. This person seemed to know the topography of the worst rock-falls and how to avoid the deepest pools. Even so, it was another half an hour before we rounded a gradual bend and a pinprick of light revealed itself.

As the rocks and ruts of the tunnel floor took form I released the hand and stole a glance at my saviour. He was a man of about my age, with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of a Hazara. The tatty clothes and sandals he wore indicated that he was a porter, a regular passenger through this tunnel. At the other end I had passed men like him bearing jerry-cans of diesel on their backs. This one wore a Burberry scarf around his head.

When at last we reached the full-beam dazzle of the tunnel’s exit he put on a pair of battered pink sunglasses and marched ahead without changing pace. I kept up with him, smiling and waiting for him to communicate, but he trudged on without once speaking or raising his eyes from the ground. So it went for another two hours, the road winding gently down between peaks as crisp and white as a toothpaste advertisement. Below the snowline we heard an engine. A smart Toyota Landcruiser rounded a corner and stopped when it saw me. The driver wound down the window and the man in the passenger seat leaned across him, looking me up and down.

– Need a lift? the passenger asked mildly, in flawless English. I was exhausted, and thanked him from my heart as I scrambled in, leaving the door open for my silent tunnel guide. But as the guide moved to join me, the driver barked something in Dari, stopping him dead, and leaned back over his seat to slam the door shut. I pleaded with the English-speaker, but he shook his head, unmoved.

– No room, he said, untruthfully. As the truck turned around I looked guiltily out at the man who had delivered me from the tunnel. He had propped his pink sunglasses on his forehead and stared sullenly back, his shoulders slumped, stock still at the side of the road.

– Here, said the English-speaker, producing a flask of hot sweet tea. Drink.

The Landcruiser was already turning around for the descent down the hill. The decent thing to do would have been to show solidarity with the porter by climbing back out, but I was too tired and the Landcruiser was too comfortable, and the moment was quickly lost. My rescuer was the mayor of the next town down the road. He said he came up this way each evening to monitor the pedestrian traffic and to help anyone in need. I looked back, but my guide was already out of sight. I realised with an awful pang that I had neglected even to pay him for his help. I never saw him again, but the tea, as I cautiously sipped it in the back of the lurching vehicle, tasted like elixir.

Tony Banks’s intervention with the Home Office was masterly. A month after our surgery visit Mir rang to announce that he had received a letter granting him Indefinite Leave to Remain. He sounded pleased and relieved to be on the road to full refugee status so soon. ILR status meant he was eligible for all kinds of benefits not conferred on those with ELR. For instance, he could apply for an education grant to continue his medical studies, begun in Mazar. The Home Office would also issue him with new identity papers, blue ones instead of brown, that were almost as good as a passport because they permitted their holder to travel abroad. And in five to seven years, if he was still here he could apply for full British citizenship and a passport the same colour as mine: Dieu et mon Droit and all that. In the short term ILR was a valuable psychological fillip for Mir, who had some other exciting news to share: he had secured his first job, in a West Ham restaurant. Would I care to come and visit him there? He wanted to speak to me, he said, as well as to show me some proper Pashtun hospitality.

The restaurant was a busy diner just up the road from the football stadium on Green Street. Dun-coloured curries bubbled cheerfully beneath hot-lamps along a stainless-steel counter, but it still seemed an unwelcoming place. It smelled and sounded alien, acoustic clatter bouncing from its linoleum floors and utilitarian walls. I slipped into a formica-clad booth, conspicuous among the other customers, who were exclusively Asian, and waited for Mir to make an appearance. The laminated menu was in Urdu, and non-speakers were invited to select from photographs. Whatever they were, the dishes on offer were absurdly cheap by west London standards, further evidence that a virtual parallel economy operated in this part of the city. I ordered what looked like a chicken tikka masala and a glass of lassi. I had assumed Mir was a waiter here, but the grubby dishcloth slung over his shoulder when he finally crept in from the back indicated that as yet he was no more than the bus boy. He asked permission to join me from the manager, who looked at his watch before reluctantly agreeing.

– The boss. Paki bastard, Mir muttered mischievously as he slid in opposite me.

He seemed happy but tired, and it soon became apparent why. He had been washing floors and dishes in this place for twelve hours a day all week.

– It’s no problem, he said. I don’t have to work these hours. I can work for as long or as short as I wish, and the money is good.

But it wasn’t good. Mir was being paid £2 an hour for his labours, cash in hand and no questions asked. Here at last was hard evidence of the fabled immigrant black economy. No one really knew what jobs like Mir’s cost the country in lost taxes each year, but sections of the press and certain politicians were fond of suggesting it ran into billions.

– The money is not the problem, said Mir. I have heard of some people who are paid £1 an hour. The problem is Hamid. He is a bad man. I need to move somewhere else.

It wasn’t just the fact that Hamid sometimes smoked chars or drank alcohol that was troubling the teetotal Mir. His host was a Pashtun like him, but he was a hypocrite who lived in flagrant breech of Pashtunwali, the code of honour that was supposed to govern the social behaviour of their tribe. Mir had explained the four pillars of this code in detail in Afghanistan. The first was badal, meaning revenge, and the obligation to exact it. Such Old Testament thinking was not confined to Afghanistan’s Pashtuns – the persecutors of Mir’s family in Mazar were Hazara, after all – but the language of vendetta was one that Mir understood. It was the threat of badal that had prompted his flight to Britain. The second pillar was nanwatai, the obligation to show humility to the victor in a fight or dispute. Nang, meanwhile, meant honour, especially the honour of family and clan and the obligation to defend it. It applied particularly to the women of the family and could be enforced if necessary by a lashkar, a sort of tribal raiding party. A recent horror-story in the Western press told how a lashkar had gang-raped a woman from a rival family to avenge the insult of an unapproved liaison. Such things were not uncommon among the Pashtuns, particularly in the tribal areas of north-west Pakistan. It was an example of the application of nang gone mad. Finally there was malmastia, the obligation to show hospitality to all visitors, even to one’s enemies, and to do so selflessly and without expectation of recompense.

But as Mir had discovered, there was little selflessness about Hamid’s conduct in London. He had lost no time in guiding Mir to the local social security office in order to apply for the emergency housing benefit to which he was entitled. Mir’s gratitude had turned to astonishment when Hamid told him in terms none too equivocal that he expected him to hand over that and any other money he might possess without delay.

There was worse. It took some prompting– as a Pashtun, Mir was touchingly reluctant to betray almost any personal confidence – but over the chicken curry he eventually confessed that Hamid was more than just a secret tippler. He made a comfortable living from his job as a dispatch driver, about £400 a week, much of which Mir reckoned he spent on drink; and his friend Isa was even more profligate.

– They sound unhappy, I suggested.

I was building an image of two depressed and dislocated men who had been seduced and corrupted by the temptations of the West. In turning their backs on the Islamic principles of home they had badly lost their way. Perhaps they ought even to be pitied. But Mir didn’t feel pity for them – he merely disapproved of them, although their behaviour also mystified him. For instance, Hamid’s friend Isa had a wife and children in Pakistan, and he had been in the UK long enough to have earned the right to bring them over to join him, yet he had chosen not to, opting instead for a seedy bachelor half-life that was no kind of substitute in Mir’s eyes. Isa had replaced his wife with a girlfriend of sorts, a poor lost Mexican student whom Mir had met once or twice at the house on Mafeking Avenue. Isa was in the house often, Mir said, because the shared bedsit he rented nearby was so small and uncomfortable. Isa never introduced or explained the Mexican, who spoke little English and appeared not even to like her lover very much. It was Mir’s theory that the girl was essentially homeless, and sometimes stayed at the house or at Isa’s bedsit only because she had nowhere else to go. No wonder Mir hated it there.

The final straw had come the previous week, when Isa had brought Mir along to a crowded bedsit party on a housing estate in Forest Gate. Homesick and keen for fresh company, Mir had been looking forward to the evening but was appalled by what he found there. The ex-Kabul tour guide’s friends were a mixed bag of Afghan men, Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks. One of them described himself as being in the motoring trade, but Mir soon realised he was really just a small-time car thief. Like some of the others he had entered the country illegally via the Channel Tunnel, hidden in the back of a truck. His identity papers were naturally false. As far as the authorities in Britain were concerned he simply did not exist. From the way Mir wrinkled his nose it was plain that he had found the bedsit squalid, the people squashed into it morally contaminated. Like Isa these people had developed a taste for sex and alcohol and drugs; they were bad Muslims who had let themselves go.

– They are crazy people, he insisted. This thief. He keeps bullshitting. He says he wants to buy a gun so that he can shoot people, pow, pow!

The party had begun amicably, but as the second vodka bottle circulated they began to discuss domestic politics and the gathering grew fractious. A Pashtun man swore his undying support for the Taliban. A Tajik lost his temper and threw a punch, at which point Isa stepped into the fray. Somebody toppled back hard into a table, splintering it. Then a knife was pulled and suddenly a new front in the Afghan civil war had broken out in London E7. It was fortunate that an irate neighbour had already called the police, who arrived just in time to mediate a ceasefire. They ordered the partygoers out into the street, where they were frisked, but no drugs or weapons were found. Either the search was too cursory or the Afghans were too crafty for the officers, who responded by cautioning them with a little lecture. If they caught them misbehaving again, they said, they would speak to the housing authorities, who at their command would instantly disperse them to different cities around the country. It seemed a weak sort of threat to Mir, and the dreaded demand for identity papers never came. He assumed that disturbances among the immigrant community of Forest Gate were so common that the police had developed a local policy of lenience. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t be bothered with the extra paperwork that arrests that evening would entail.

Either way, the partygoers felt great relief – except for Mir, who mostly felt just anger. He had not escaped the summary justice of Afghanistan in order to get into trouble here. Spreadeagled against the cold council estate wall, he determined to speak to the local housing authorities himself as soon as possible in order to escape the world inhabited by the likes of Hamid and Isa. This was not a decision he took lightly, for these were still the only Afghans he knew in London; but for the sake of his spiritual well-being and integrity he was ready to cut himself off from their company and to make his way alone. He would never succumb to the decadent pleasures of the West, he wanted to assure me. London was his land of opportunity, and he was not about to blow it. Success, insha’allah, would surely attend the good Pashtun who kept to the path of righteousness with piety and iron discipline. I knew he had already located his nearest mosque in West Ham and was still rigorous about praying five times a day. I heard the conviction in his voice and gave him a silent cheer.

The curry was barely finished when Mir’s manager sternly tapped his watch from across the room. Mir smiled unctuously back, and grimaced privately at me. I produced some coins but he closed his hand over mine and insisted that it was his turn to pay. Lunch had cost all of £4.20, small change to me but a sum representing two hours and six minutes of drudgery to him. The ensuing pantomime of protest and counter-protest did not end when I slapped the money down and headed smartly for the door. He chased after me, sweeping the coins from the table and fluidly stuffing them back into my jacket pocket.

– Mir, it’s different here, I began. You can’t afford such generosity in your situation. You need this money to survive.

– This is the Pashtun way, came the inevitable reply. He retreated triumphantly to the dark regions of the diner and I was forced to leave.