Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds

The exchange was disquieting. Although I could understand and even approved of his decision to move out of Mafeking Avenue, it was far from certain that Mir was capable of surviving on his own so soon after his arrival. The tenacity with which he clung to his Pashtun principles was surely an indication of how much he still had to learn about his adopted country. Money, meanwhile, looked as if it could quickly become a serious problem. The bus boy job was far beneath his capabilities, and £24 for a twelve-hour day was a truly desperate wage for London. He would never manage to save anything at that rate, especially if he insisted on giving it away. He had set his sights on a medical conversion course at the Newham College of Further Education, and savings of some sort were going to be vital if he was serious about enrolling there. Surely better employment could be found for him without too much difficulty. Anything was better than £2 an hour. And so it was that a few days later I took him to my parents’ house in Kensington. There was a day’s work that needed doing in the garden, for which my father was prepared to pay him a respectable £5 an hour.

– Hohh, you live in a palace, Mir said with infinite satisfaction as he came inside.

Mum and Dad’s house was certainly different from the cramped terraces replicated around Mafeking Avenue. It had four floors, seven bedrooms, a large garden with a garage at the end and off-street parking for three cars. Here at last was the Western affluence of Mir’s dreams. And yet the houses in our street were not so very different from the developments in the East End. They had been built in the early nineteenth century, at the beginning of the same explosion of urban expansion that had swept through the parish of West Ham.

(#litres_trial_promo) A hundred yards away stood a red granite memorial to Victoria, Empress of India. The Great White Queen, born at Kensington Palace just up the road, looked sternly down on our house with bulbous eyes above sagging jowls, one of the capital’s many celebrations of the colonial conquest that had made London’s expansion possible and turned it into the greatest city in the world. Perhaps the Queen would have been amused after all by this unlikely visitation, an Afghan in the Royal Borough of Kensington.

The heavily burglar-alarmed drawing room was large and light and filled with pretty paintings and delicate antiques. An ornate grand piano that my father liked to improvise on in the evenings gleamed in the corner of the room. Mir stroked its silky rosewood surfaces as though it were a cat.

– It is beauuutiful, he crooned.

It had stood there all my life, an object so familiar that it had become practically invisible to me. Now I reexamined the intricately painted cherubs and garlands that curled around its polished sides, and saw that Mir was quite right.

My father came in, and immediately looked dubious. The travelling clothes that Mir had arrived in, still practically the only gear that he owned, were starting to show their age. The sole of one of his scuffed leather shoes was coming away, and his cheap nylon raincoat smelled strongly of eau-de-cologne. Mir knew he looked out of place, which only added to his clumsiness in front of my father, whom he treated with the toe-curling deference that is always shown to a paterfamilias in Afghan society. Routinely asking after the well-being of the extended family was another social tradition back home that didn’t quite fit in a west London drawing room.

– And how is your wife? Mir enquired politely.

– Er, fine thanks, said my father, startled.

– And your other children?

– Umm, I think they’re fine too.

– Allah be praised, Mir beamed.

Then the dog Biscuit came in. She was a small, neurotic terrier bitch with the awkward habit of snarling at all young children, uniformed officials and foreigners. Even in the back of the car on the way to the park she used to go berserk at the sight of a black man passing along the pavement. Mir backed away in terror, another common Muslim trait that I had forgotten about. Dogs are used for hunting and herding in the Islamic world, but are considered fundamentally unclean and are seldom kept as pets. Biscuit was hastily spirited away to another room.

– Thank you. Sorry, said Mir as his panic subsided. I hate dogs. When they bark the angels fly away.

In the garden my father showed him the garage that needed tidying, and the potting shed and the tools he should use. He pointed out the ivy that needed stripping from the garage walls and the weeds that choked the flowerbeds, Mir nodding politely all the while. I had an editing shift on a newspaper that day and was already late, so once I was satisfied that he really did know what he was supposed to be uprooting I left him to it.

This was a mistake. I phoned in the afternoon to find that Mir had already gone. My father sounded perplexed and a little indignant. He reported how Mir had laboured all day in the garage and garden, thoroughly enough but with excruciating slowness, my father anxiously checking on him from time to time to make sure he wasn’t pulling up the roses. My mother had offered him tea and something to eat but he refused it all. He only paused once in his work, when he requested a quiet corner of the house in which he might pray. There were a few circumstances in life that could interrupt Mir’s devotional schedule, but weeding a garden in Kensington was certainly not one of them. My father told him he was very welcome to use the drawing room. Mir thanked him profusely but indicated that the drawing room would not do. The dog had been in there, so the carpets were unclean. It was regrettable, he said, but there would undoubtedly be dog hairs tangled in the weft.

– So I put him downstairs in the library, Dad explained. The dog’s been in there too, of course. The dog goes everywhere. But it seemed best not to tell him that. I mean, there are limits. And then he wanted to know which direction Mecca was in, so I pointed him south-east, towards Earl’s Court. Do you think that was about right?

More baffling still, when Mir had finished in the garden he had adamantly refused payment.

– He said he couldn’t possibly take monies from the honoured father of his esteemed friend, or words to that effect. And then he left. It was awful.

I groaned inwardly, imagining exactly the deferential murmur with which this little homily would have been delivered, one hand on heart, the head tilted in a respectful bow. Mir’s notions of debt and service might have been old-fashioned and charming, but they were hopelessly misplaced. He had defeated the entire point of the gardening exercise. I thanked my father for his help and promised to pass on the £40 he had tried to pay Mir. Actually I intended to do rather more than that, and to give him a severe talking-to. He would have to adapt or even abandon his Pashtun principles if he was ever going to survive in this city.

Taking Mir home to my parents seemed to ratchet up the bond between us by several notches. From that moment on, every single encounter with him was prefaced by a lengthy enquiry after the health of my family. It made no difference if I was in a hurry or the topic of our conversation was urgent. The ritual simply had to be gone through. But with time I learned to tolerate and even to respect this tradition, for it was more than just a silly social formality. Mir spoke often about his own family, whose continued well-being was his first and greatest concern. His parents, two brothers and two sisters, not to mention a distant orphaned cousin, his wife and three children who also lived with his family, had all stayed behind when he fled Mazar the year before. He had spent the whole of his short life with this extended family, in a pleasant compound just north-east of the great shrine. Like most Afghans he had never anticipated or wished for any other kind of existence, not even after marriage. The wrench he felt at finding himself alone in a distant country at the age of twenty was naturally enormous. Unlike typical Westerners he had not been raised in the expectation of being ejected from the parental nest on reaching adulthood. Instead he had been trained to live with his parents forever and to support them as they grew old. Filial duty demanded it. In the traditional Afghan family the father is the centre around which the rest of the family revolves, its unquestioned decision-maker as well as its financial comptroller and moral and spiritual guide. And Mir’s judge father had brought up his boys very traditionally indeed. Mir therefore instinctively put the interests of his family above his own. It was hard for him to comprehend that an entirely different formula operated here in the West, where the interests of the individual are generally considered paramount. His assiduity towards my family was thus an instance of the most heartfelt transference.

I knew that he was homesick, that the very thought of home was sustaining him through the lonely days and nights of his new life. He could ill afford it, but he was spending a lot of money in the telephone bucket-shops that dot every East End High Street in his efforts to glean news from home. Connecting to Afghanistan’s shattered telephone system is challenging at the best of times, but it was worse now. Afghanistan was in chaos. An earthquake hit the north-east of the country, the second to strike in three months. Nine thousand people were killed. Then in August the Taliban managed at the second attempt to capture and hold Mir’s home town, and all resistance was quashed.

Four thousand Hazaras were massacred in revenge for the debacle the previous year. Eleven Iranian diplomats in their Mazar consulate were also murdered, an act so heinous that Tehran considered it a casus belli and began to mass 200,000 troops along the Afghan border. Meanwhile Osama bin Laden was being held responsible for the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, prompting Bill Clinton to order a Cruise missile attack on his training camps in Jalalabad and Khost. Direct phone links to Mazar remained down, so Mir’s ability to communicate with his family depended on their ability to borrow a sat phone. There were few of these in Mazar, and fewer still that worked. More often Mir would receive messages passed on by third, fourth or even fifth parties that were always confused and several days out of date. The news was sporadic, but when it did get through it became more and more alarming.

The men of Mir’s family’s incarceration in a Hazara jail had been traumatic, but it hadn’t lasted long. Not all the Hazara Shi’ites were evil, and Mir’s father had used his connections in the community to obtain their release. The eventual fall of Mazar to the Taliban in August should have spelt deliverance for a Pashtun family like Mir’s, but it seemed that the opposite was the case. First Mir learned that his older brother Habibullah, an orthopaedic surgeon, had been press-ganged into operating on the Taliban’s war wounded, and was virtually imprisoned in one of the military forts to the west of the city. Then he received a garbled message that his father, younger brother and cousin had been arrested by the Taliban on charges unknown.

After that there was an ominous silence. Mir was unable to reach Mazar by sat phone or to discover anything at all about what had happened to them. Weeks went by and there was still no news. I was concerned for them, particularly for Musa, the younger brother who had acted as Mir’s stand-in interpreter on a brief trip I had made the year before to inspect the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Mir kept me informed of developments, or the lack of them. His voice over the telephone was audibly tense, but there was little I could do other than offer sympathy. Apart from anything else, as 1998 progressed my career as a freelance journalist had at last taken off. I landed assignments in the Caribbean, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Bosnia, even Taiwan. I was busy writing and travelling, and it was early autumn before I saw Mir again.

By now he had extracted himself from the clutches of the ex-tour guides and was installed in his own bedsit in Kitchener Road, a ten-minute walk from Queen’s Market and the West Ham football stadium.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a warm evening and it was pleasant to stroll past the shops on Green Street. I had been back in the country for less than twenty-four hours, so that familiar things seemed somehow marvellous, almost poetic in the way they represented London and home. I heard music in the squealing brakes of a black cab; a polystyrene coffee cup skewered on the wheelnut of a Routemaster bus made me wish for a camera. But the shops along the pavement were as unfamiliar as ever. They were trading in a socio-economic bracket wholly alien to me, while the variety of races and creeds they represented was repeated nowhere else that I had ever been.

Yet there were intelligible clues to the immigrant history of this place. In the faded telephone numbers that the shopfronts carried, the countless newcomers who had washed the long shores of east London’s High Streets had left tidemarks. As all Londoners know, the telephone-number prefix for the capital changed with annoying frequency during the 1990s. Businesses were required to change their stationery or the sides of their delivery vans three times in ten years, from 01 to 071 or 081, then to 0171 or 0181, finally to 0207 or 0208. However, West Ham’s shopkeepers either couldn’t afford or couldn’t be bothered to make the necessary adjustments. For instance, Place Victoire (African cosmetic produits, exotic food & CD video), Bindia (Specialists in wedding sarees, suites and lenghas) and Farha Fashion (Wedding accessories, beauty cases, Sherwani & Kabuli) all advertised 0181 numbers. Their owners had clearly arrived here before the 0208s such as Al-Madina (Islamic goods, videos, ahrams, hijabs and Islamic clothing), Bismillah (Gent’s hairdressers) and Malik Hairstylist (& International call box) – but after the 081-prefixed Good Luck Restaurant (Chinese takeaway) – while Carlos, the eponymous owner of a unisex hairdressing salon still displaying an 01 number, must have regarded the whole lot of them as irritating parvenus. Meanwhile Duncan’s, a Dickensian-looking institution selling traditional East End pie, mash and eels (jellied and stewed), was sandwiched between an 0208 halal butchers and the 0181 Rana Food Store (purveyors of green bananas and minicabs), and was so old and established that it didn’t deign to carry a phone number at all.

I felt I had discovered an intriguing new sociology, and arrived at Mir’s new address quite pleased with myself, but his appearance at the door checked me. His face looked grey and he had lost weight. He ushered me into a sour-smelling hall and up a dingy staircase, a worse place by far than the Mafeking Avenue house. His room was tiny and he was paying a Rachmanite Pakistani landlord £40 a week for it, no deposit or advance required. He had cleaned it thoroughly, but damp still seeped into the corner of one ceiling and the frame of the curtainless window looked rotten.

He sat me down in the only chair and himself on the mattress on the floor and began to relate the latest news from Mazar. He had managed to speak to an uncle who had a farm fifteen miles west of Mazar, near the ancient ruined city of Balkh. His father, younger brother and cousin had somehow managed to get out of prison and were now in hiding nearby. It seemed the Taliban had accused them of being traitors and spies, of hoarding boxes full of dollars and gold, and of much else besides. It was trumped-up nonsense, and I knew that Mir’s earlier collusion with Western journalists was largely responsible. His younger brother Musa had been tortured, left hung upside down for days. The jailers had beaten his feet so badly that there was some question as to whether he would ever walk properly again, while their father had been forced to listen to his screams from a neighbouring cell in a bid to extort a confession, or money, or both. His father was old, and the weeks in prison had gravely damaged his health. Mir said he could no longer sleep at nights. He was in despair, and didn’t know what to do. Squatting there on the mattress, his pitifully few possessions neatly arranged around him – a cheap alarm clock, a copy of the Koran – he suddenly looked small and sad, as though someone had punched him, the loneliest person in the world.

I questioned him about his fellow tenants. He replied that two Pakistanis, a Malaysian and an Iranian also lived there, all of them men. The Malaysian was all right. He worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, three or four miles to the east. But Mir strongly disapproved of the Iranian, who for asylum purposes was pretending to be an Afghan, the con trick that Aaron Stein had mentioned. The two Pakistanis mostly kept themselves to themselves, although Mir suspected that one of them, too, was an illegal immigrant. They shared the downstairs sitting room that had been partitioned into two bedsits, leaving just a small kitchen as the only non-bedroom living area. There were two bathrooms, but the loo in one of them was permanently blocked and so smelly that the room was unusable. Mir said he spent much time cleaning and sprucing up the other bathroom, but that here too he was fighting a losing battle. A newly installed shower curtain had already been torn, and no one had owned up to it.

We went down to the kitchen to make tea. The surfaces were squalid and the carpet was stained and greasy with trodden-in food. There was a bench along one wall and a single broken chair by a rickety round table. Mir, explaining that they mostly cooked eggs and rice, was crestfallen to find that someone had been into the fridge and stolen the milk he had bought especially for my visit.