Stones Into School (6 page)

Fortunately, we were just about to hire someone who fit the bill--a man whom I refer to as our Indiana Jones.

The Man with the Broken Hand

Mountains can never reach each other,

despite their bigness. But humans can.

--AFGHAN PROVERB

Widow in Kabul, Afghanistan

W
e met in the autumn of 1999 in the village of Zuudkhan, at the far end of the Charpurson, on the night before the Kirghiz horsemen came riding over the Irshad Pass. I had come to Zuudkhan ostensibly to inspect a project we had funded that involved laying a seven-kilometer-long pipe to provide the village with clean water and hydroelectricity. Normally, we don't involve ourselves in things like this, but it was the only way the government's inspector general would allow me into the Charpurson, which had been closed to foreigners since 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The real purpose of my visit, however, was to learn something about the Kirghiz, Wakhi, and Tajik communities just across the border in Afghanistan.

For the past two years I had been receiving sporadic reports that the people on the northern end of the Hindu Kush were desperate to begin educating their daughters. These messages suggested that several tribal leaders in the Wakhan Corridor had been attempting, without success, to get word to me--and Zuudkhan seemed like the most promising place to set up a communications link. In these same reports, I also kept hearing about a man in the Charpurson who might be able to help.

His name was Sarfraz Khan, and the stories that clung to him were both colorful and provocative. Some described him as a mishmash of contradictions: an ex-commando who was skilled in the arts of alpine combat, drove a “Taliban Toyota,” loved music and dancing, and wore a peacock blue, Dick Tracy-style fedora in the mountains. Others hinted at a man with an unusual past: a smuggler of gemstones, an imbiber of whiskey, a trader of yaks. Outlandish claims were made about his marksmanship, his horsemanship, and his dentistry: It was said that he could take down an ibex with a high-powered rifle from a distance of up to a mile; that he could ride like a Cossack; and that when he took part in bushkashi, the violent central Asian version of polo played with the headless carcass of a goat, he did so with such passion and ferocity that his front teeth had been smashed to pieces, then replaced with dentures made of stainless steel.

There were some dark rumors of scandal, too: tales that spoke of a divorce from a first wife and, following on the heels of that disgrace, an even greater one arising from the unthinkable demand that he be permitted to gaze upon the face of his second betrothed before he would consent to marry her. Such a request was an appalling breach of propriety, yet if the stories were true, the request had actually been granted, the first and only time a demand so outrageous had ever been acceded to in the one-hundred-year history of Zuudkhan. What's more, no one could fully explain the reasons why--except, perhaps, as evidence of this Sarfraz Khan's prodigious charisma and his uncanny ability to command other men by bending their will to his own.

Who could say where the truth ended and the legends began? All I knew was that this was someone I needed to meet.

Snow was falling in earnest when I headed northwest from the town of Sost on the only road through the Charpurson. By the time I arrived in Zuudkhan, just before 9:00 P.M., the flat-roofed, mud-walled homes of the village were draped in white and the place looked like a scene out of Doctor Zhivago. I was traveling with Faisal Baig, the CAI's security man, who had been born and raised in Zuudkhan, and we were slated to spend the night with the family of Faisal's nephew, Saidullah, who was running several of our schools in the nearby Hunza Valley.

After ducking through the low doorway into Saidullah's home, we greeted his parents and settled cross-legged on some thick yak-wool rugs, leaning back against walls, which were coated in a layer of blackened soot that had the consistency of hardened molasses. Saidullah's sister, Narzeek, had just served a thermos of hot tea when the door swung open and in blew a man clad in a cavernous Russian tundra jacket who looked as if he had just clawed his way out of bed and run a salad fork through his hair. As he came swishing into the room, he seemed preoccupied with the dial on a plastic radio that was blasting a Uighur rock-and-roll station from Kashgar, in western China. Then he spotted me through the blue haze of the yak-dung fire and promptly forgot about the radio.

“Ah, Doctor Greg, you have arrived,” he cried, flinging open his arms and flashing a wide grin that revealed a row of metallic teeth. “That is baf (excellent)!” He proceeded to wade across the sea of yak-wool rugs and envelop me in a massive bear hug before stepping back to shake hands.

It was then that I noticed the claw. Three of the fingers on his right hand had bent back on themselves in a manner that resembled the talons on a bird, and when we shook, he squeezed my hand with only his forefinger and thumb. I was curious about what could explain such an injury, but he had already performed an about-face, whipped back out the door, and disappeared into the night.

A moment later, however, he was back.

In his arms he carried an expensive red blanket from Iran that was apparently reserved for honored guests, and he insisted that I wrap myself in it. After I had settled the blanket around me, we shared our first cup of tea and I began to learn his story.

For the better part of the past forty-two years, Sarfraz had been, by his own testimony, “no much success.” His first marriage had failed--a considerable embarrassment in Muslim culture--and his second marriage was approved only after he had lied to his prospective in-laws about not having children from his first marriage (in fact, he had two daughters) and then shocked them with the demand to see the face of their daughter prior to the wedding. He had also drifted through a series of marginal business dealings in locations stretching from the Karakoram to the Arabian Sea without managing to establish either a home or a solid future for himself. Most important, perhaps, he had failed to find a calling that drew out his innate abilities as a leader and an agent of change.

Born and raised in Zuudkhan, he would never get more than an eighth-grade education--acquired in a village at the opposite end of the Charpurson Valley that took five days to reach on horseback. The boarding expense at this school was a considerable burden for his father, Haji Muhamad, who drew a modest income as a border patrolman collecting customs levies. Nevertheless, Haji Muhamad and Sarfraz's mother, Bibi Gulnaz, were committed to their eldest son's education because an eighth-grade graduation certificate would qualify him to work as a primary-school teacher.

In accordance with this plan, Sarfraz finished his studies and duly went to work teaching first grade in Zuudkhan's very first elementary school. In good weather the students met outside, and in bad weather they gathered in the kitchen of the communal jumat khana (the Ismailis' place of worship). Within a year, Sarfraz had realized that he detested teaching and decided to enlist in the army, where he served as a commando in the Punjab Regiments' elite mountain force. Posted to Kashmir in 1974, he was wounded twice during a firefight with Indian troops. The first bullet grazed the side of his upper right arm, while the second passed directly through the palm of his right hand. The military doctors failed to repair the hand properly, and as paralysis set in, three of his fingers folded permanently around themselves to form the distinctive crook that is now his trademark. (Despite the impediment, he retains the ability to hold a pen, shoot a rifle, and manipulate the steering wheel of a speeding Land Cruiser while gabbing on his cell phone.)

Sent home with an honorable discharge and a four-dollar monthly pension, Sarfraz resumed teaching in Zuudkhan but lasted only a year because of his poor pay and expanding family. He then moved to the nearby town of Gilgit, where he became a minivan driver on the treacherous Karakoram Highway, often driving for thirty hours straight and rarely going home. Plagued by no much success, he moved on to Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and its commercial center, where he landed a job as a chokidar (security guard) for six months. Then it was north to Lahore, the country's academic and cultural center, to work in a Chinese restaurant. No much success there either, and by the early eighties Sarfraz was on the move again, this time to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's volatile Northwest Frontier Province, where he worked as a chauffeur, mechanic, and auto broker before deciding, once and for all, to give up on cars. Out of options, he returned home to Zuudkhan--completing a circle that is familiar to millions of men who come from Pakistan's tribal areas, where the unemployment rate hovers around 80 percent.

By this time, the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan was in full swing. When the Soviets dispatched a squadron of helicopters across the border and into the skies above Zuudkhan, Pakistan's government responded by declaring the Charpurson Valley a security zone and closing it to all outsiders. Sensing an opportunity, Sarfraz decided to take up trading over the border with Afghanistan by leveraging his family's connections inside the Wakhan Corridor. (A century earlier, Sarfraz's ancestors had moved to the Charpurson Valley from the Wakhan, and many members of his extended family remained in the Corridor.)

He spent the next decade as a high-altitude trader. Three or four times a year, he would work his way over the Irshad Pass on horseback or on foot, ferrying rice, flour, sugar, tea, cigarettes, cooking oil, knives, batteries, salt, pots and pans, chewing tobacco, and anything else the inhabitants of the Corridor might need to make it through the winter. These items would be exchanged for butter and animals--mainly yaks and fat-tailed sheep--which he would drive back over the pass. He was also not averse to smuggling the occasional consignment of gemstones or whiskey, though he steered clear of opium and guns.

It was a hard way to make a living, even when it was supplemented with sporadic employment as a high-altitude mountaineering porter on K2 and other nearby peaks. Nevertheless, these experiences imbued Sarfraz with an impressive skill set. He came to know not only the nuances of the terrain and the movements of the Afghan and Tajik military patrols (which he avoided) but also the habits of the wild animals, especially the ibex and the Marco Polo sheep (which he took great pleasure in hunting). In the process, he gradually built up a dense network of business associates within the villages and settlements north of the Hindu Kush. By the end of a decade, his linguistic repertoire had burgeoned to the point where he could speak seven languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Dari, Burushkashi, Pashto, English, and Wakhi.

Those gypsy years that Sarfraz had spent as an itinerant jack-of-all-trades and as an alpine peddler may have been rich in adventure, but when he recounted them before me that night in Zuudkhan, he did not romanticize this no much success period of his life. In his view, his aimless wanderings and his lack of financial success seemed to underscore how difficult it can be for almost any man (or woman) with a streak of independence to find his place within the poor villages and the teeming cities of Pakistan.

For my part, however, I perceived something quite different--and far more valuable.

By now the hour had grown late and the other members of Saidullah Baig's household had begun dropping off to sleep. When I realized just how much Sarfraz knew about the far side of the Hindu Kush, however, I tossed another clump of dried yak dung onto the fire and told him that I wanted him to give me a crash-course tutorial on the Wakhan. How many people were living there, what tribe did they belong to, and what were their religious and political affiliations?

Sarfraz chuckled and replied that it wasn't that simple. It was true, he acknowledged, that there were only about five thousand residents in the Wakhan. But inside the Corridor's 120-mile stretch--which in places is less than twelve miles wide--one encountered three different communities, each with its own distinctive customs, traditions, and ethnic identity, speaking three different languages and adhering to two separate branches of Islam.

At the far eastern end were the Kirghiz nomads, who move with their herds along the alpine pastures above twelve thousand feet. Descendants of the horsemen who founded the Ottoman Empire, the Kirghiz are Sunnis who speak a cognate of Turkish--attributes that differentiate them from their Wakhi neighbors directly to the west. The Wakhi people, Sarfraz explained, are ethnic Tajiks who trace their ancestry back to the Persian Empire in modern Iran. They are sedentary farmers who grow barley, buckwheat, and potatoes along the river valleys at altitudes considerably lower than those where the Kirghiz dwell. The Wakhi speak a cognate of Persian, and they belong to the Ismaili sect of Islam. Finally, at the far western end of the Wakhan, where the Corridor spills into Badakshan, the northernmost province of Afghanistan, one finds a third community. Like the Wakhi, they are ethnic Tajiks. But instead of Ismaili, they are conservative Sunnis, and their languages, Tajik and Dari, are separate cognates of Persian.

When Sarfraz saw that I was struggling to make sense of these overlapping religious and linguistic characteristics, he seized a notebook, tore off a sheet of paper, and declared that he was going to draw a special map that would cut through the confusion. Like everywhere else in Afghanistan, he intoned, geography is far less important than relationships. If you want to understand the way things work in the Wakhan, the locations of the villages and the rivers and the roads really don't matter all that much. What does matter is who swears allegiance to whom. This is the key to grasping the way that power flows, he declared, and when you comprehend the dynamics of power, everything else falls into place.

Then he drew three circles across the page--left, right, and center--and in the middle of each circle he wrote a name. The Kirghiz were represented by the circle to the right (the east), and the name he wrote inside it was that of Abdul Rashid Khan. This was the headman who had refused to participate in the Last Exodus to Turkey in 1982 and elected instead to remain in the High Pamir with a small group of followers. The name inside the center circle (which represented the Wakhi people) was Shah Ismail Khan. His headquarters, Sarfraz explained, were in the village of Qala-e-Panj, halfway through the Corridor, and he took his orders from the Aga Khan, the supreme leader of the Ismailis. The left circle (the Tajiks) bore the name of Sadhar Khan, a mujahadeen commander who had spent ten years fighting the Russians and another five years fighting the Taliban.