American Taliban (17 page)

Mahmed’s friends formed a tight circle. Show, show show, they clapped.

John agreed to let Mahmed try, but it became clear in an instant that this grom had never been on wheels. He took a running start, as if headed for a soccer kick, leaped on, and flew indeed. The tight circle, which might have kept him safe, gave way, and the boy fell backward in a heap and howled. Frightened, John hovered over Mahmed, afraid to move him. Run, he commanded the boy’s useless friends. Get a doctor.

The word was magic, because the howling immediately ceased. Mahmed stood. He held his scraped and bleeding arm away from himself as if it were a stranger.

No doctor, he said, and hobbled away.

Behind him, his friends closed rank to save him from the evil Ahm-ree-kee. After which, John was unwilling to take a chance on anyone, definitely no one under seventeen, he told himself. Though some of the older students at the college found his grinding disrespectful to the architecture, to the school, to scholarship, to Islam—Just see how it dirties your shalwar, one serious young man in spotless white stopped to complain—there were also students who dismissed the critics and wanted to try it, begged John to allow them. After repeated warnings that it was harder than it looked, that it required extreme self-balance, John let the persistent get on. One determined petitioner named Abel pushed off with too much confidence, flailed, and landed splayed, his shalwar ripped from his knees to his thighs, where he’d scraped on the concrete. For Pakistanis especially—there were also Indonesian, Bangladeshi, Balinese, Thai, and other Muslims at Islamia—balancing on wheels was a challenge, and John started recommending trying it on grass, but it often took a first fall before they agreed. And after a brief series of tries, of flailing and sprawling, although students continued watching him make it look easy, they lost interest in learning how. No one developed the kind of obsession getting good required. Perhaps it was the heat. High temperatures had a way of sapping intention.

————

JOHN MADE EVERY STUDENT
he met his teacher. Over tea—drinking tea, it seemed, was Pakistan’s national pastime—he asked questions and listened hard to the answers. Thus he learned fast.

Walking across campus with Zaadiq one morning, John felt his companion’s hand slip into his own. He slowed down to see what Zaadiq wanted, but Zaadiq kept walking. Rafael caught up with them and held his other hand. Not wanting to hurt his new roommates, John allowed the handholding and soon found he liked it, though he was also afraid of liking it. It made him feel vulnerable somehow, younger. He wondered what Khaled would say.

Then one afternoon he met Khaled walking hand in hand with a student named Yusef.

Khaled high-fived John Brooklyn style, though in Brooklyn they’d rarely high-fived. You two have something in common, Khaled said, introducing Yusef. Wheels.

Yusef put his hand out to shake John’s, and asked, So what poison’s yours?

Khaled rolled his eyes.

Sorry, Yusef said. I mean what bike do you ride?

He had the dark skin of Pakistanis, but his eyes were strangely light, a pale hazel.

I’m just a skater, John explained, nothing fancy.

No engine, no engine trouble, Yusef said. You’re a lucky man.

Except that he’s really not, Khaled said. He was on crutches when I met him.

They were heading to the campus teahouse and invited John along. Seated on stools at the orange Formica counter, Khaled proceeded to tell Yusef the story of their first joint paper, on struggle versus submission.

A nice literary thesis, Yusef said, but incomplete. Historically, anyway. Submission to the angel was only the Prophet’s first step. Without the struggle that followed, Islam wouldn’t have become a nation. It was a long, terrible jihad. And he died young.

Yusef specialized in history at Islamia. Facts are necessary, he said. To inform your interpretations.

KHALED INTRODUCED HIM
to the streets of old Peshawar. Walking, because Khaled refused to accompany John on wheels, John wondered
aloud why so many street beggars and tramps and even merchants were missing an arm or a leg, an eye or an ear. Even eight- and nine-year-old boys were often damaged. Is it some sort of biblical eye for an eye thing?

Stupid accidents, Khaled said. Most kids experience their first camp retreat before the age of twelve. They’re introduced to target practice and bomb making. Obviously some camps are totally reckless.

They let twelve-year-olds make bombs? John asked, incredulous.

Khaled clapped John on the shoulder. You’ve never been a Boy Scout. It’s actually good for most kids. It toughens them up. They all come out convinced they want to become soldiers for Islam. Who do you think fights in Kashmir? Or Afghanistan?

After which John started seeing recruitment flyers everywhere. At the Internet café he visited, at the teahouses, in the bazaars, in his dorm.

ISHAMEL HAD A RADIO
, which he kept tuned to Radio Shariat, a part Pashto–part English station out of Kabul. In bed, enjoying the lazy breeze of the uneven overhead fan, John listened to stories and statistics of rape and murder in Chechnya and Kashmir and Afghanistan. Every program ended with a call to Muslims to help Muslims.

It’s every Muslim’s duty, Ishmael explained, to help his brother and sister. This station’s broadcast by the Taliban.

Ishmael was planning to volunteer again. This time in Afghanistan. In the fall, he said. After the summer heat.

One evening Mullah Omar was scheduled to deliver a special radio address, and students from the neighboring dorm crowded round to hear him.

Zaadiq translated for John when he lost the thread. Mullah Omar was reporting on the Taliban’s successes in Afghanistan. They were in control of four of the largest cities, including Kabul. They were putting an end to corruption and bribery and usury. To the rape and murder of women and children. To the pornography and blasphemy and drugs and alcohol coming from the West. But they needed more soldiers. At every border, Mullah Omar said, the Northern Alliance armies encroach. In every small border village, corrupt warlords terrorize the local people, and we must come to their aid. We must preserve our borders. It is every Muslim’s duty to join this jihad.

Rafael told John about Mullah Omar’s rise to power. The corruption
in Afghanistan infuriated him, and he acted. In one incident he freed young girls who were being held for sex and hanged the warlord.

He didn’t just send an army, Ishmael added. He was already almost fifty, and missing an eye, and still he led the fight himself.

But John still didn’t understand. Who are the rapists? Why aren’t the mujahideen on the same side?

Ishmael grew exasperated with how much John didn’t know. Read some history. Take a walk outside Peshawar, where the refugees are camped. See their misery. All because of Western occupations.

So John spent an afternoon at the library reading up on the area’s history of foreign occupations, ending in 1834, with the Sikhs who burned most of old Peshawar to the ground, and the disastrous British occupation that followed. He also visited the Bala Hisar Fort’s Regimental Museum near Kabuli Gate to learn the military history of Peshawar and the surrounding frontier. So he came to understand: Every tribe and people hankered for its own homeland. Every Pathan, Wazir, Afridi, and Kashmiri boy grew up with a sense of pride denied. For years, the Kashmiri had been fighting to the death, and thousands had been maimed or killed. Hindus wanted to destroy Muslims. Shia and Sunni Muslims were at each other’s throats. India and Pakistan threatened each other with nuclear annihilation. The grievances and violence went on and on. He wondered how people grounded so deeply in ancient Buddhism and Sufism could fight for so many years over nothing or what seemed to him nothing. He asked Khaled.

Sectarianism is always just a cover-up, Khaled explained. It’s how politicians excite the masses. They call it a holy war, but the fight is for political power, always. True in Kashmir. True everywhere. The Hindus really just want Kashmir’s natural resources, and everyone knows it, but India continues playing its Hindu card and Pakistan its Muslim one, because that’s the way they recruit soldiers. Both governments don’t give a fig for religion. And in the meantime the people, like people everywhere, just want their freedom. Same in Afghanistan.

At the local bookstore, John picked up a book written by an award-winning expert on Afghanistan.
Travels with the Mujahideen
. A Lawrence of Arabia prizewinner with a foreword by Margaret Thatcher, the book raised questions about religion and culture and modern relativism. Which was cool, but the author’s adventures with the mujahideen, whom Ronald Reagan had called freedom fighters, were
the parts John most enjoyed, and he became impatient for his own real adventure.

GRINDING ON CAMPUS ONE DAY
, John came across Yusef at work on his bike and hopped off his board to see what Yusef was doing.

This is the carburetor, he explained. Yusef traveled on a 1960s military model of the 350cc Enfield bullet motorcycle, an early British design specially manufactured for the border patrol in India.

Since the temperature and humidity have increased, the engine is running rich, and I must adjust the air-to-fuel ratio. For every gram of water, octane use decreases by .25 to .35.

John didn’t fully get why humid air runs richer, but Yusef seemed to know such things. With precision, he adjusted the needle valve, then invited John for a ride.

You mean it? John asked.

Yusef strapped John’s board to the back of his bike with a bungee cord, mounted, and instructed John to sit forward and snug behind him.

Hug me, Yusef said, revving the engine. Where to? he shouted to make himself heard.

To Kabul, John said.

Yusef turned to look at him. You’re joking?

John pretended innocence. Is it too far?

They both knew that it was too far, the terrain too difficult and dangerous besides, and that a visa or day pass was necessary.

But I have an idea, Yusef said, allowing the engine to idle quietly. Today I have time only for a quick ride down Jamrud, up Charsadda, but tomorrow afternoon I’m going to Tangi. Want to come?

They arranged to meet at one.

AFTER PRAYERS THAT EVENING
, John stopped at the Internet café just off campus on Jamrud.

Attar, our man of the hour, someone announced when he walked in. He was clapped on the shoulder, ushered to a screen whose connection had frozen, put to work. And he liked it: the warm welcome, the community. Muhammed, who worked behind the counter, brought John a limongaz on the house, since he was serving as the café’s computer pro.

It’s all right now, Muhammed announced, we’ve got the Ahm-ree-kee
on the case, and the café returned to its usual working hum, the clicking of keyboards, the shifting of chairs, the quiet static of minds concentrating.

He was good at this, problem solving. He knew how to coax screens and connections back to life, how to download necessary software, retrieve lost files, unfreeze screens. And he performed with the calm authority of someone who knew he could. After rebooting and testing, he settled down to receive and send his own e-mail. He wrote, he realized, mostly to the women in his life: To Barbara, who of course reported to Bill. To Katie and Noor. Sometimes to Sylvie or Jilly. Since he’d moved to Peshawar, his only contact with women had been via e-mail, which was strange for someone whose friends, at least until now, had been largely female. In his e-mail to Noor, he mentioned the absence of women. Even here, he wrote, in this café designed for Internet use, girls are rare, though there must be plenty of Muslim women who want to go online. When one does stop in, usually at midday, and never in the evening, she keeps herself concealed in her headscarf, which means you hardly see her face. Or anything else, really.

WHAT’S IN TANGI?
John shouted into Yusef’s ear.

Wait and see, Yusef shouted back, picking up speed and leaning into the wind.

John hugged Yusef’s back, holding tight. As soon as they were out of town, the tents and temporary settlements appeared, refugees from Kashmir and Afghanistan camped along the roads of northern Pakistan. You didn’t live a day in Peshawar without hearing about their misery. Pakistanis didn’t forgo a single opportunity to blame the West, including the United States. As a Westerner, John was beginning to agree, especially as a wealthy oil-guzzling American, he was awash in guilt, stood accused of swaths of shameful history, and not just guilt from the past, because it wasn’t over.

But Yusef had something other than a misery tour in mind for this afternoon. They rode through the green Peshawar Valley, past miles of peaches and apricots, then long, wide fields of sugarcane, tobacco, and rice.

In Charsadda, they stopped at a petrol station to refill. Vendors everywhere displayed their produce, and John wanted peaches.

They’re excellent, but try the apricots, too, Yusef said.

A few of both then, John said. Though he was paying, he let Yusef negotiate.

His first peach was just right; the sweet juice dripped down his chin, and without a napkin handy, he had to use the sleeve of his white shalwar.
Yusef laughed. Somehow he’d managed to eat without a single drip.

After Charsadda, the road grew steep and steeper, and the bike climbed slowly. On their right, the Swat River. Up ahead, the mountain peaks were icebergs. In the summer. Though in the valleys the orchard trees were heavy with fruit, in the higher elevations pines were still covered with snow.

They approached the town of Tangi, passed the sign marking it as one of eight towns in the Hashtnagar of the Union Council of Charsadda District, altitude three hundred twenty-seven meters. Ahead, John saw, glinting in the sun, the green dome of a shrine, or it might be a museum, but Yusef turned off the main road, onto a dirt one, and detoured away from the town center. He took turns, doubled back onto obscure unpaved dusty byroads. The landscape grew browner with fewer signs of life, until finally they pulled up to a camp sited under the hard shadow of the Margalla peaks. John would later remember what he’d noticed first: the absence of color and smell. Traveling with Barbara and Bill, he’d formed what Bill called his unfortunate rating habit. He categorized and rated every city and country by its predominant color and underlying smell. Some smells were obvious: gray New York stank of bad bus smog, brown Brooklyn of the stinking drip from sanitation trucks. The surprises: Bangkok was orchid pink and smelled of fish sauce; Hong Kong was silver and briny. The places he’d visited. Islamabad, he’d found, was too white, too new, and too clean for smells. Peshawar, on the other hand, was a large overripe melon. On the outskirts of Peshawar, at roadside cafés, the spicy smoke of grilled goat mingled awfully with rotting fruit and even sewage. But this camp outside Tangi smelled of nothing live, or smelled of dust and gunpowder, unadulterated by odors of food or cooking or life or human waste. It was dusty; it was drab, a colorless monastic olive, a monk’s camp but without the glory of ancient structures and stupas, without great old monasteries, without the tiers of distinguishing stonework, the phases of development. This camp was new and bare, a setting without history, with nothing cast in stone. It was new; it was modern; it had no history, though it was born of history.