The Places in Between
Read The Places in Between Online
Authors: Rory Stewart
The Places in Between
Rory Stewart
Table of Contents
CARAVANSERAI, WHOSE PORTALS...
COMMANDANT HAJI (MOALEM) MOHSIN KHAN OF KAMENJ
THE INTERMEDIATE STAGES OF DEATH
A HARVEST ORIGINAL • HARCOURT, INC.
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Copyright © Rory Stewart 2004
Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Rory Stewart
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Maps by Susie Knowland, created from original maps by
www.ml-design.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Picador in 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Rory.
The places in between/Rory Stewart.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: London: Picador, 2004.
"A Harvest Original."
1. Afghanistan—Description and travel. 2. Afghanistan—Social life and customs.
3. Stewart, Rory—Travel—Afghanistan. I. Title.
DS352.S74 2006
915.8104'47—dc22 2005032213
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603156-1 ISBN-10: 0-15-603156-6
Text set in Baskerville MT
Designed by April Ward
Printed in the United States of America
First U.S. edition
A C E G I K J H F D B
This book is dedicated to the people of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, who showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible. They were not all saints, though some of them were. A number were greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant, and cruel. Some of them had robbed or killed others; many of them threatened me and begged from me. But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed, and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker, and more vulnerable than me. Almost every group I met—Sunni Kurds, Shia Hazara, Punjabi Christians, Sikhs, Brahmins of Kedarnath, Garhwal Dalits, and Newari Buddhists—gave me hospitality without any thought of reward.
I owe this journey and my life to them.
Contents
Preface
[>]
The New Civil Service
[>]
Tanks into Sticks
[>]
Whether on the Shores of Asia
[>]
Part One
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Chicago and Paris
[>]
Huma
[>]
Fare Forward
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These Boots
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Part Two
[>]
Qasim
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Impersonal Pronoun
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A Tajik Village
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The Emir of the West
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Caravanserai, Whose Portals ...
[>]
To a Blind Man's Eye
[>]
Genealogies
[>]
Lest He Returning Chide...
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Crown Jewels
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Bread and Water
[>]
The Fighting Man Shall
[>]
A Nothing Man
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Part Three
[>]
Highland Buildings
[>]
The Missionary Dance
[>]
Mirrored Cat's-Eye Shades
[>]
Marrying a Muslim
[>]
War Dog
[>]
Commandant Haji (Moalem) Mohsin Khan of Kamenj
[>]
Cousins
[>]
Part Four
[>]
The Minaret of Jam
[>]
Traces in the Ground
[>]
Between Jam and Chaghcharan
[>]
Dawn Prayers
[>]
Little Lord
[>]
Frogs
[>]
The Windy Place
[>]
Part Five
[>]
Name Navigation
[>]
The Greeting of Strangers
[>]
Leaves on the Ceiling
[>]
Flames
[>]
Zia of Katlish
[>]
The Sacred Guest
[>]
The Cave of Zarin
[>]
Devotions
[>]
The Defiles of the Valley
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Part Six
[>]
The Intermediate Stages of Death
[>]
Winged Footprints
[>]
Blair and the Koran
[>]
Salt Ground and Spikenard
[>]
Pale Circles in Walls
[>]
While the Note Lasts
[>]
Part Seven
[>]
Footprints on the Ceiling
[>]
I Am the Zoom
[>]
Karaman
[>]
Khalili's Troops
[>]
And I Have Mine
[>]
The Scheme of Generation
[>]
The Source of the Kabul River
[>]
Taliban
[>]
Toes
[>]
Marble
[>]
Epilogue
[>]
Acknowledgments
[>]
Preface
I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia. The Taliban had banned posters and films, but I arrived six weeks after the Taliban's departure and saw the Herat arcade hung with posters of the Hindi film star Hrithik Roshan standing on a cliff at sunset, his bouffant hair ruffled by the evening breeze. In the courtyard where al-Qaeda men had gathered to chat in Urdu, students were waiting to practice their English on war reporters. I found
The Man in the Iron Mask
among a pile of DVDs on a handcart. It had been touched up for the Afghan market so that Leonardo DiCaprio, as Louis XIV in seventeenth-century dress, brandished a Browning 9mm. Herat—which had been a great medieval market for China, Turkey, and Persia—was now selling Chinese alarm clocks, Turkish sunglasses, and Iranian apple juice.
It was the beginning of 2002. I had just spent sixteen months walking twenty to twenty-five miles a day across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. I had wanted to walk every step of the way and I had intended to cross Afghanistan a year earlier. But in December 2000 the Iranian government took my visa away. They may have discovered that I had been a British diplomat and become suspicious of my motives. The Taliban then refused to allow me into Afghanistan, and the government of Pakistan barred me from Baluchistan. As a result, I had to leave a gap between Iran and the next stage of my journey, which started in Multan in Pakistan and continued in an unbroken line to eastern Nepal.
Just before Christmas 2001, I reached a town in eastern Nepal and heard that the Taliban had fallen. I decided to return by vehicle to Afghanistan and walk from Herat to Kabul and thus connect my walk in Iran with my walk in Pakistan. I chose to walk from Herat to Kabul in a straight line through the central mountains. The normal dogleg through Kandahar was flatter, easier, and free of snow. But it was also longer and controlled in parts by the Taliban.
The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam. All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world's attention.
The country is quite covered by darkness, so that people outside it cannot see anything in it; and no one dares go in for fear of the darkness. Nevertheless men who live in the country round about say that they can sometimes hear the voices of men, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing, and thereby that some kind of folks live there, but they do not know what kind of folk they are.
—The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
c.1360, Chapter 28
THE NEW CIVIL SERVICE
I watched two men enter the lobby of the Hotel Mowafaq.
Most Afghans seemed to glide up the center of the lobby staircase with their shawls trailing behind them like Venetian cloaks. But these men wore Western jackets, walked quietly, and stayed close to the banister. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the hotel manager.
"Follow them." He had never spoken to me before.
"I'm sorry, no," I said. "I am busy."
"Now. They are from the government."
I followed him to a room on a floor I didn't know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.
"
Chi kar mikonid?
" (What are you doing?) asked the man in the black suit and collarless Iranian shirt. I expected him to stand and, in the normal way, shake hands and wish me peace. He remained seated.
"
Salaam aleikum
" (Peace be with you), I said, and sat down.