The Lunatic Express (18 page)

I
FELT LIKE
I’d been scoured clean, sandblasted by the travel, and that’s when I met Moolchand. I’d seen my first ear cleaner on the Rocket in Bangladesh, and the thought of some street person sticking sharp sticks into my ears horrified me. But I was fascinated by the tens of millions of street entrepreneurs, from ear cleaners to eye washers to shoe polishers to touts, who prowled the parks and railway stations and dusty corners of the world. I wanted to know them, and Moolchand caught me at a good moment.

He knelt beside me on the putting-green-short grass of Palika Park in New Delhi’s Connaught Place and did his best to convince me that, no matter how clean I thought my ears were, they could use his skilled attention. “You will not believe it!” he said. “Pay me nothing and let me do my work and you will see, and then you can pay me. Whatever amount you wish.”

There was something about him. I engaged, deflected, danced, joked “but my girlfriend loves to clean my ears, and if you do it, well, she’ll be unhappy.”

He slapped his leg and howled with laughter. “Your ears need to be cleaned by a professional!”

“Yes,” I said. “But what about my girlfriend?”

“She won’t give you any lucky-lucky if she can’t?”

“Exactly,” I said.

He roared again, pressed his case, and we laughed together, at each other. He had six children, rode the bus, the notorious Blueline, an hour and a half into and out of the city every day. That was it; I’d been meaning to ride the Blueline ever since arriving in New Delhi. A private line of battered buses, it was notorious for high speeds, plowing into people, driving the wrong way, anything to make time and make money. “Let’s ride the Blueline tomorrow!” I said.

“Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll get some chai.”

We met again the next morning. We lurched and jolted through hours of traffic and, to be honest, my Blueline hours were pretty tame. Just crowds of people packed into slow buses. Once a passenger in another bus attacked one in mine through the windows from three inches away; and once we raced a bus going the wrong way up a divided avenue head-on against traffic, a tout hanging from the doorway waving at the swerving, oncoming tide. But we didn’t crush anyone against a tree, run over any bicyclists, kill anyone. It felt good to be plunging into the world again, listening to Moolchand’s life, one so typical in India.

He’d left his village near Khajuraho, a town notorious for its Kama Sutra sculptures, when he was ten, coming to Delhi with an uncle, and started shining shoes in the park. At fifteen his parents found him a bride; she was fourteen. He met her at their wedding, briefly, then returned to Delhi for three more years until she finally joined him. “We slept together and talked for the first time that night.”

He’d been cleaning ears now for twenty years, had four daughters and two sons, had lost one child to starvation. “In my next life,” he said, pressed against me on the bus, “I will not have so many. They are very expensive.” He sent money home to his parents, shelled out 1,000 rupees—about twenty dollars—a month to the police, hustled seven days a week, cleaning the ears of sometimes two people, sometimes none, sometimes many in a day, and somehow kept his family clothed and mostly fed and usually in school.

We ate spicy something with chapattis off the street, strolled through crowded traffic and dust in distant Rohini, and he said, “Is it true that in America people kiss on the street?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I have seen it!” he said. “I have seen tourists do it here!”

Then he asked me about lesbians. Did they really exist? Did women really kiss each other? They did and they did, I said. He was amazed.

We talked about women. He was stumped about something—foreign women, Western women, were supposed to be so easy. They wore tight clothing. They bared their shoulders. They met a guy in the movies and the next thing you knew, clothes were flying off and everybody was doing everything. But he hustled Western women all the time to clean their ears, and every once in a while he angled for a little bit more, but none of them would ever sleep with him. He didn’t understand.

It was almost impossible to explain. As I usually did with questions and perceptions about America’s beauty and bounty and easy riches, I tried to tell him that Hollywood was one thing, reality another. That, yes, it was probably a whole lot easier to sleep with an American woman than an Indian one, but that most women just didn’t let it rip anywhere at any time. “Yes, but why do they wear such tight clothes? Why do they kiss and hold hands in public?” He just couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea.

In the afternoon we headed back to Connaught Place and I told him that I’d be honored if he cleaned my ears.

“Wait,” he said, smiling. He left, then returned with his baseball cap and canvas satchel and tools. Sat me on the grass, the sun streaming into my ears. Gripped my head firmly but gently and went to work. I had, in fact, just gone at them with Q-tips several days before. No matter. He knew his craft, and scooped and scraped—here I will not get too graphic—stuff from my ear canal that he wiped on his hands. And he noticed that my right eardrum was scarred, blown in an old diving accident.

“Doesn’t that disgust you?” I said, as my ear wax collected on the back of his hand.

“Hold still,” he said. “It is my work and it is nothing.”

He wound cotton onto the end, swirled it around after the scraping, and rinsed out my ears with something. “Ayurvedic medicine,” he said. And then polished them with mustard oil. “Now your ears are clean,” he said.

Every couple of days I plunked down in the park with Moolchand and the boys. We sat on the grass and drank chai. To look at Palika Park was to see a small and overused urban mound of grass dotted with trash and the red spit of paan chew-ers, full of the kind of sad hustlers that you usually tried your best to avoid, to not even really see.

I knew it well after a couple of weeks. There was order there, an Indian cosmos. Everyone had a job, a trade, and each trade came from the same area. There were the shoe shiners. The ear cleaners. The masseuses. The touts, who earned 100 rupees if you just went into a shop with them, and fifteen percent of your purchase.

The shoe shiners were from villages around Khajuraho—every single one. They knew each other, were born near each other, knew each other’s families. Their wives were plucked from their villages. Ear cleaners all wore a round, red hat from which protruded their sticks and swabs, and they were all Muslims. They were poor, but not alone; they belonged and knew who they were and where they were from. Moolchand wore a red baseball cap. He was an exception—he was Hindu, a shoe shiner, who switched professions, hence the baseball cap, the only ear cleaner from Khajuraho and the only non-Muslim ear cleaner I ever saw. Maybe that’s why I’d liked him. His small stab at difference in a sea of tradition.

In May and June they all would go back to their villages for two months with their families. Moolchand’s family had six acres, “but sometimes the rains come too much and sometimes they don’t come at all. What to do?” Today it was cold and cloudy and the park seemed dirty, as if it really belonged to the crows; no tourists today, they said. What to do?

One of the shoe shiners noticed a broken zipper on my bag. He pulled it between his legs and went to work, with the attention to detail and care of which only a poor Indian seemed capable. I pulled and yanked and always made it worse; he slid and worked with his fingers, greased it with wax from his wooden shoe-shining box, sliced stray strings with a razor blade, and it was as good as new. The park hustler asked for nothing in return.

Moolchand lived in a single room with his wife and six children. “What to do?” he said, and smiled. “Tell your friends here in Delhi,” he said, “that you know a good man for a job. I need a steady job. Cleaning. Washing. One thousand rupees a month.” It was twenty dollars.

I’d been treated so well by so many people, poor people, in the past months. But with people like Moolchand I never knew whether we were really connecting or if their attraction to me, their openness to me, was because I was a white foreigner. Were they just hoping for visas? For jobs? Yet I also knew from my experiences on Buru, for instance, that it wasn’t that alone. Could we ever really be friends across such gulfs of culture and wealth? There was no way to know in the limited amount of time I had; I’d been in Delhi for three and a half weeks, and it was time to go; my Russian visa had finally arrived from Moscow. I said goodbye one morning to Moolchand and the others.

“What to do?” he said. “When are you coming back to India? And what about Nisa?” Moolchand said, his brow furrowed in worry.

“I don’t know,” I said. I would need to deal with things at home before I could consider moving on.

Moolchand was quiet for a moment. “Next time you will come to Khajuraho with me!” Moolchand couldn’t imagine that I might never return.

“Yes,” said the others, sipping their tea and smoking and chewing tobacco, “we will all go to Khajuraho.”

I would like to go, I told them, honestly, and I shook their hands and walked away from a little world that was part of a much bigger one in a tiny park that I had gotten to know just a bit. Sad, a little, that there was still so much to know and that I would probably never get to a village that sent its sons out to be shoe shiners in Palika Park.

What to do! I had been hoping to get home by Christmas, had been saying I would, but because of the visa delay I wasn’t going to make it. And I knew that whatever growing closeness I felt with Nisa, there was nothing I could do unless I resolved my situation, met the challenge of home head on. I had to go. And that meant Afghanistan. On a Saturday I went to the Ariana Afghan Airways offices to buy my ticket for Kabul. It was one tidy room with wooden desks, the walls decorated with posters of Afghanistan as tourist paradise. The shimmering blue lakes of Bamiyan. Rugged and charming peasants. No hint of a country under siege, one of the most dangerous places on earth. “The flight is on Sunday,” said Rajesh Kumar, writing my ticket out by hand after I’d forked over a pile of cash, “but I am writing the ticket for Monday. We don’t know when the plane will leave. Sunday I hope, but I can’t say for sure. There is fog here, fog there.” He shrugged his shoulders, wrote my cell phone number down. “I will call you and let you know.”

“What time does it arrive?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How many airplanes does Ariana have?”

“Six,” he said. “They are very old. But do not worry about their airworthiness, sir!”

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening and into the night with Nisa. We walked. We talked. We ate. We roamed across Delhi on foot and in rickshaws. We drank chai in a room piled with marigolds in Old Delhi and too much wine on a rooftop terrace and could figure nothing out. She had a job in India. I had a family 8,000 miles away, wanted to be there for them. I could promise nothing and neither could she. “When you leave, let’s not talk again,” she said. “Unless. Unless we can. I’d rather risk everything we have now to have the possibility of what could be.”

And the next morning we hugged briefly, barely—we were on a streetcorner in India, after all—and I climbed into a taxi and she a rickshaw and a second later I was alone again.

Four armed assailants kidnapped a German aid worker dining with her husband at a restaurant in Kabul in a bold midday attack, as the Taliban said negotiations for the release of 19 South Korean hostages have failed. Meanwhile, a suicide car bomb attack killed 15 people and wounded 26, including several women and children, in Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar
.

—Denver Post,
August 19, 2007

TEN
Scariana

N
IGHT AND DARKNESS
, the airport dim, nearly empty. Outside I could see nothing but blackness. No cars. No buildings. No signs or streetlights or life. A driver from the hotel had been supposed to meet me, but no one was there and the airport had emptied out quickly. I was alone in Kabul, Afghanistan, unconnected to any organization, and I was scared. I tried to call the hotel, but my phone wouldn’t work. I went into the darkness and got hit by cold, something I hadn’t felt in ten months. Stood there a moment, trying to get my bearings. No taxis. Nothing. Just a huge, empty square paved in concrete. I went back into the airport, but a soldier with an AK-47 stopped me. “Taxi,” I said. He didn’t understand. We pantomimed a few minutes and he got it. Out there, he motioned. Just go. I had no choice. I couldn’t believe it, though; the thought of arriving in Kabul and getting kidnapped right from the airport seemed ridiculous but also more possible than any Peruvian bus plunging off a cliff or Bangladeshi ferry sinking. I took a few paces, rifled though my bags, found my Indian knife, and slipped it up my right sleeve, the handle in the palm of my hand. A quick left-handed slash across the face, followed by the power shot with my right—that should bring an attacker’s hands up, at least—and break his leg with my right foot, then run; I played the scenario out in my mind and walked on. And then felt foolish: a wall surrounded the airport, with a gate in it; beyond it waited a handful of figures in the darkness and a man yelled, “Taxi!”

I said “Gandamack,” the name of my hotel. He had a beard, wore a black leather jacket, grabbed my bag, and led me to a Toyota minivan. I got into the front seat, said “Gandamack” again, and he nodded. But I knew nothing that night and I couldn’t see much from the car. Brokenness. Dim streetlights. Sandbags and blast walls and razor wire and roadblocks manned by machine gunners. We stopped outside of a high concrete wall, a small steel gate. “Gandamack,” he said.

I stepped out. A three-inch window slid open in the gate. Words in Dari. A steel bolt slid, the door opened into a walled enclosure. Two men, both holding AKs, one with a 9-millimeter strapped to his thigh. Twenty feet later, another steel door. It buzzed, and I passed into a concrete room three feet square, facing another steel door, a man holding an AK watching me through a window. When the first door shut, the other one buzzed, and I slid into a world of Christmas lights and the warmth of Kabul’s parallel universe, a world of expat journalists and aid workers and diplomats drinking wine behind walls and guns.

I
FELT EXHAUSTED AND ANXIOUS
. The Ariana flight had been two hours late, the plane an aged Boeing 727. It felt crazy coming to Afghanistan. The country was in turmoil, the Taliban regaining power every day; they were said to be encircling Kabul itself. And Ariana’s nickname was “Scariana.” It had a deliciously checkered history, and in college I’d read Robert Byron’s 1937 travel classic
The Road to Oxiana
, in which he’d written, “I’d left England in August with two hopes: one, to see the monuments of Persia; the other to reach this town,” this town being Mazar-i-Sharif. It was one of those names that stuck in my memory—exotic, far away, the epitome of romance. I’d wanted to get there ever since, and it lay in the north, traditionally anti-Taliban territory from which the assault after the September 11 attacks had been launched by the Northern Alliance with the help of the U.S.

The flight itself didn’t scare me, although I’d heard nothing but horror stories from people who’d taken it. It was banned from flying into the European Union, and thus forbidden to most contractors and UN personnel even within the country. As the plane throttled up and the captain said over the PA system, “We wish you a pleasant flight to Kabul,” I hoped it would be as easy to get out of Afghanistan as it was to get in. There was no turning around, no turning back; in a way I felt like I was for the first time really keeping some macabre promise about traveling to meet danger. It was a short flight, a leaping of time and space, from the chaotic but warm swirl of India to the extreme hardness and violence of a medieval state in the throes of a war, India green and fertile at takeoff, Afghanistan pure unadulterated brown and snow-swept, serrated mountain ridges, all in two hours. As I settled into my room and its cozy bed with down comforter behind layers of walls and guns and razor wire in a city where lived men who would slit my throat in an instant, I was alone but not lonely, for the first time in a long time. My phone pinged; an incoming text from Delhi: “Don’t be sad. Be excited. You have adventure to find.”

I had no idea what the future held for me. But I had a growing sense that I would know soon, and that it was this journey that was pointing me in the right direction. That clarity was in my power to have, and that I knew there was, in fact, an other side and I could get to it, find it.

I
WASN’T SURE
what the security situation was in Kabul, whether it was safe to walk around or not. In Delhi I’d had dinner with a woman who worked for the UN, who’d said she was forbidden to walk anywhere in the city; she had to be driven to and from work. Only months ago the five-star Serena hotel was attacked, gunmen running amok, spraying bullets. Around the corner from my hotel, two Americans working for DHL had been gunned down.

I taped my knife onto my right forearm with a slender piece of duct tape, the handle just protruding from my sleeve, grabbable, and walked out. Brightness of a cloudless blue sky, the high mountains of the Hindu Kush covered with snow surrounding the city. Choking smell from car exhaust and the diesel generators that lined the sidewalk of every storefront. Men wearing salwar kameezes, with keffiyehs around their necks; gnarled faces and beards, ancient-looking, as old and weathered and of the earth as trees, hills, mountains. Roadblocks. Brand-new green Toyota pickups carrying police with machine guns. I pieced together what I’d read about kidnappings: a car, always a car. Guns probably. Time: you had to be spotted, your location known, while the men and the cars and the guns came together. People were abducted from restaurants, from their cars at roadblocks or on routes they drove daily that had been scoped out over days. So I walked fast, crossing the street every hundred yards or so, switching, changing constantly. Kept my back to walls as much as possible. Walked against traffic in the street, so no car could overtake me from behind. I scanned constantly, like Nasirbhai. Plunged into the market of downtown Kabul, past ministries sheathed in high blast walls and razor wire, got nervous when I went into a store to buy an Afghan SIM card for my phone. The salesman had to copy my passport, fill out forms; the minutes ticked by. I stood in the corner opposite the door, my back to the walls, watching the door, my left side forward, my left hand by my right, with the knife. I figured there would be a gun; but I was worth more alive than dead, wouldn’t be expected to resist, and was likely dead if I was taken, anyway. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe it would never work, but I was ready, ready to explode in violence: a fast and hard kick to the knees to bring their hands down, a vicious slash across the face, and go. There could be no delay—that was the first rule of self-defense. The moment one or more men came close enough to touch me—and I knew I’d know by their eyes—the moment that I saw a weapon or that a hand reached for me, that was the moment to seize the initiative and strike, like two cocks coming together in a cockfight, like a rattler lunging the second its threat is in range. A bomb was another matter. Bombers liked crowds and crowded marketplaces. In that case, there wasn’t much to be done. Again, I just had to keep moving.

Crowds filled the streets, mostly men, but women in blue burqas ambled by and every now and then a woman in blue jeans and headscarf. But there were no other westerners; I didn’t see a single one. In the throngs, among the storefronts selling cell phones and computers and office supplies, I could almost forget where I was. But the moment I looked up, a wall of brick and mud houses rose steeply up a hillside behind the road, a world without running water, power, or heat beyond coal-and wood-burning stoves. I walked for two hours; I wanted to stop and drink tea and sit and just watch, but I couldn’t. The city felt simmering, anxious, waiting, fingers on triggers everywhere.

Christmas dawned bright and blue and cold, and that evening alone in my room I called home, watching my family open Christmas presents—a bundle of which I’d sent from India—through the wonders of the Internet. My computer’s camera wasn’t working, so, in a telling metaphor, I could see them and they couldn’t see me. I was there and I was not there; I felt part of the morning, got to
ooh
and
ahh
at the presents and laugh and shriek, but then with a push of a computer key I was gone, a world away, alone again, missing them and wondering and hoping that once that screen went black I wasn’t forgotten. And I knew that for all of my efforts to send gifts and call home and be there, I wasn’t, and that was no one’s fault but my own.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I met Najeeb, a fixer meeting with a photographer in the hotel, and asked him about taking a bus across the Salang Pass and northern Afghanistan to Mazar. He wore a tweed sport jacket and slacks, looked like a professor. He thought a long time in silence. “I think it is possible,” he said, speaking slowly. “Maybe a seventy-five-percent chance you will be safe. But this is a serious question and I have to give you the right answer. The question is the driver. If you find the right one, who works for a good company, then they will guarantee your safety. If not, sometimes the driver will call their friends. And the Salang Pass is full of snow right now; last week people were stuck there for three days.”

Najeeb had a friend, he said, who might be able to go with me, and an hour later Khalid Fazly showed up. He was young, twenty-five, with alert, bright green eyes, spoke perfect English, wore striped slacks and a long black peacoat. We drank tea outside in the cold under a warm winter sun, as Blackhawks and old Russian Mil helicopters clattered and thumped overhead.

You should not have walked so long downtown, he said. “It is too long to escape attraction. A German was kidnapped one month ago from where you were.” In Afghanistan I was less a man than a big jewel, a glistening diamond, almost unimaginably valuable. “Don’t take any taxis,” he said. “The driver might call a friend and betray you.” Khalid said he’d ask around, suss out the safety, and get back to me. Which he did, a couple of hours later. “I think it’ll be no problem,” he said. He’d talked to a bus company, felt it was safe. But, he said, I had to get a salwar kameez, a local Afghan costume. I could not stand out. We’d leave in two days.

M
EANWHILE
, I
WAS CURIOUS
about Ariana, so I called its president. And got through to his assistant, who scheduled a meeting the next morning, and I ended up in a labyrinth of security, totally lost. A soldier with green eyes flecked with gold led me down dirt roads, a canyon between concrete walls topped with coils of razor wire and sandbagged gun positions, to a dilapidated three-story concrete building painted a once-bright but fading blue. Guards frisked me and didn’t find the knife, now strapped to my leg, and I went through an unheated hallway staffed by an old man with a tattered blue notebook. Up three flights of stairs lay a doorway that said
PRESIDENT
.

Inside, sofas full of waiting men in suits, carpets, warmth. A tall Afghan in a brown corduroy suit and an electric orange tie stood up, introduced himself. Mohammed Omar, the president’s assistant. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I tried your mobile many times. The appointment has to be postponed until eleven; President Karzai called and he could not refuse.”

I hung around in the dust and cold outside for an hour, returned, and Mohammed ushered me into a spacious office with a big map of the world on one wall. Oriental carpets covered the floor. Moin Khan Wardak’s desk was the size of a car, covered in glass and piles of paper. Wardak wore a blue three-piece suit. He was big, burly, clean-shaven, with short-cropped black hair. A servant brought trays of raisins and almonds, cups of hot tea. The story of Ariana mirrored the story of Afghanistan. Once upon a time Kabul had been a city on the rise, and Ariana had been partners with Pan Am, beginning in the 1950s. It had a fleet of DC-3s, DC-9s, Boeing 727s, a big DC-10, routes to Paris, London, Frankfurt. But things turned ugly as civil war broke out and Ariana flights had a habit of being hit by rockets or crashing into mountains. The Northern Alliance captured a plane in Mazar and sold it to Iran. An insurance company grabbed a plane that had been hit by rocket fire. In 2000, to escape the Taliban, two brothers hijacked a 727 with 180 people aboard, which ended up in London, after stops in Tashkent and Moscow. The U.S. bombed three 727s and a Russian-made Antonov. By the end of the Taliban era, Ariana had no planes left. None. “We lost everything!” he said. India donated three aged Airbuses to restart the airline, and now Ariana had five Boeing 727s flying and one leased Airbus based and maintained in Germany, allowed to fly to the EU. The phone rang.

“You are asking for five lakh and ten lakh; how much in dollars? If you kindly send me the invoice I will transfer the money, but you need to release the engine! I will pay, I promise!” He hung up, shook his head. “We have an aircraft stuck in Ankara and it needs an engine and we have a deal with Air India but they won’t release it!

“Inshallah
, we are growing day by day.” He’d been a pilot for twenty-four years, had flown with a beard “down to here,” he said, holding his hand by his chest, during the Taliban years. “There were no nav-aids in Afghanistan, not a single one. Now I have an instrument landing system in Kabul and runway lights in Kandahar.” Pilots had flown with handheld GPS units. Which was scary, considering Kabul was surrounded by 13,000-foot mountains. And even now, he admitted, “Kabul is a very dangerous airport, especially at night and in bad weather, and the runway is only 6,000 feet long.”