The Places in Between (12 page)

I returned to Moalem Jalil's guest room. The village men had just come back from evening prayers and were flushed from the cold walk from the mosque. Three small boys were stoking the iron stove with twigs. It was a large room, laid with fine carpets, and the walls were hung with clocks and prayer rugs. Again I wondered how much Jalil made from his poppy fields. About thirty men were seated against the walls, enjoying the warmth, smoking, and playing cards. It looked from the relaxed progression of the game as though many of the people were here every night—relatives, clients, and allies all dining at Jalil's expense. At the end of the room, in the senior position, was a fat old man in a turban and a faded pin-striped suit. He was sucking on a water pipe, chuckling and singing along to a tune playing on the cassette recorder beside him. I had a friend in Kabul who was from the Pashtun Ahmadzai nomadic tribe of the southeast and I thought I recognized the tune as being Ahmadzai. Jalil confirmed that it was.

I looked around the room, meeting the eyes of the men who were staring at me, following the marks on the mud walls and the borders of the bright carpets and the smoke that seeped from the stove. I could feel my calf muscles and I was grateful to be sitting down. I stretched my bare foot over the rug and dug my toes into the thick wool.

"Where are these carpets from?" I asked, half out of habit.

"That one is from the shrine of Abdullah in Mazar-e-Sharif."

"And the silk cloth on the wall, with the picture of Medina?"

"It was bought in Saudi when my father visited the shrine of the Prophet in 1983."

"The kilim?"

"Is from the mountains east of Chaghcharan."

"And this?" I pointed toward my feet, at a bright red rug with a design of minarets and Soviet attack helicopters.

"From Farah in the south."

The Uzbek and Hazara rugs and the Pashto music suggested a sense of Afghan national identity that transcended their own Tajik province. I was about to ask jalil what he thought of Afghanistan when the old man with the water pipe looked at me and roared, "Hey, American!"

Five or six of the men stopped playing cards and waited for my response.

"I'm not American," I said.

Directly opposite me was the soft-featured, red-lipped man who now in his white turban and prayer robe was unmistakably a mullah. He leaned slightly toward me. "You are an American," he said.

"No, Scottish."

"Foreigners should stay out," he replied.

More people were listening now, including an expressionless Qasim.

"I understand. What do you think of Americans?" I asked an old man by the door.

"We will accept development money from America, but not soldiers."

"Excuse me, I wish to make a statement," said the mullah. He spoke in slow pompous phrases, as though he were at a pulpit. "Unless I am mistaken, you are a British spy."

"No, I am not," I said, turning away from the mullah and addressing the room. "I am a historian, following in the footsteps of Babur, the first Mughal emperor..."

The mullah sat back, muttering, "We know who Babur Shah is."

I ignored him. "He came down this road five hundred years ago. I am walking on foot to Kabul to write a book. I have been traveling in Iran and Pakistan, where I was treated very well because Muslims know how to treat guests."

Various people murmured to each other, "Of course we treat guests well..." "Because we are Muslims..." "We honor travelers."

Jalil said, "I met an Englishman twenty-five years ago in Nimruz, who was doing a journey like yours. He was crossing Afghanistan with a camel. I think he's written about in one of my history books."

"I have a history book," said Qasim. No one paid any attention to him.

"What do you think of your new leader Karzai?" I asked the mullah.

"Good." A pause. He smiled. "Up till now."

"Up till now?"

He shrugged. "Al-Qaeda was good at the beginning." He raised his hands to the sky. "Al-Qaeda was very good at the beginning."

The ewer arrived and I poured the water for my neighbor. As he washed his hands he sighed: "
Al Allah II Allah. Muhammad rasull Allah.
" (There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.) For some, to be a Muslim it is enough to repeat this phrase.

"The Englishman who traveled with his camel could say that phrase. But he was not a Muslim," commented Jalil.

"He will go to hell," said the mullah.

I was grateful when the food's arrival brought the conversation to a halt.

Man with water pipe

CROWN JEWELS

Three small meat dishes were served for dinner: mutton and potato stew, a peppery innard sausage, and some lamb fat. With so many of us present, the meat was minutely divided to provide a hint of flavor with each handful of rice.

"Is it true that Queen Elizabeth travels by carriage?" asked Jalil, when he had finished eating.

"Yes, she does."

"Why does she not have a car?"

"England is a desert," said the mullah.

"No, it rains a lot in England," I replied.

"Perhaps I am thinking of Australia."

"True, Australia is a desert."

"What is your currency? The euro or the dollar?" asked the fat man with the water pipe.

"It's a hundred yen to the dollar in Japan," interrupted the old man by the door.

"The pound."

"Mr. Pound," shouted the mullah, "do you have kerosene lamps, and rice and green tea in England? Do you grow rice? Is it green like Mazandaran in Iran?"

Everyone was talking at once. I had learned my Persian through repetitive conversation in villages. This discussion tested my vocabulary. I must have missed a quarter of what was said. But what I heard proved this remote place was much more aware of foreign geography, monarchs, and currencies than I had imagined.

"Where," asked the fat old man, "is the Koh-i-Noor diamond the English stole from Afghanistan? When are you going to give it back?"

"When I was in the Indian Punjab, people asked me to give it back to them," I said.

"But you took it from us..."

Babur's diary is the first credible report of the Koh-i-Noor. It was almost certainly the diamond he captured at the siege of Agra, and he describes it as worth "half of the daily expense of the whole world." According to Babur, it had first been acquired by the Delhi Sultan at Malwa in 1304.

There is no certainty about where it was before Malwa. Little evidence supports the
Indian Sunday Tribune's
claims that the Koh-i-Noor was seized by Alexander the Great at the battle of Jhelum in the Punjab in 326
B.C.
, and then owned by the great Buddhist ruler Asoka.

Babur gave the diamond to his favorite son, Humayun, who probably carried it into exile in Persia and presented it as a gift to the Shah of Iran, who in turn sent it to his liege-king in the Deccan. On July 8, 1656, the diamond was presented to Babur's great-great-grandson Shah Jahan at Agra, where Babur had first seized it.

In 1739 Nadir Shah, the ruler of Iran, acquired the diamond from Shah Jahan's eventual heir and carried it back to Iran across Afghanistan. He called it "Koh-i-Noor,"
Mountain of Light.
It was then about 186 carats and common belief held that whoever owned it would rule the world, provided it was worn by a woman. Nadir's son subsequently gave it to Ahmed Shah Durrani, his Afghan Chief of Horse and the founder of modern Afghanistan.

Ahmed Shah kept the Koh-i-Noor in his capital at Kandahar as the central symbol of Afghanistan's independence from Persia. His grandson then carried it back across Afghanistan to exile in India, where he was persuaded to give it to Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab. In 1849 Ranjit's heir gave it to the East India Company in a tin box as indemnity for the Sikh wars. Sir John Lawrence lost the diamond in a garden shed and when he found it, presented it to Queen Victoria.

The Queen put it in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The public were not impressed by its lack of glitter. A distinguished committee decided to cut the stone and a patent steam wheel was imported from Amsterdam. The Duke of Wellington started the engine and Prince Albert laid the diamond to the drill. After a month of work by the Dutch team it was reduced to a "brilliant" shape of 106 carats, its historical shape wrecked.

I was in India during the Queen's visit of 1997 when, on the basis of the Koh-i-Noor's time with Ranjit Singh, Sikhs demonstrated for the return of the diamond to the Punjab. Three years later, twenty-five Indian parliamentarians demanded its return to New Delhi on the basis of Babur's ownership. When I was in Iran, the Taliban demanded its return to Afghanistan on the basis of Ahmed Shah's possession. In April 2002, a
Guardian
leader—with no reference to the claims from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran—supported the Indians. I last saw it lying on top of the Queen Mother's coffin in Westminster Hall.

By midnight I was determined to sleep, so I lay down in the corner while the men continued smoking and playing cards. The oil lamps were extinguished an hour later. It was a difficult night. Abdul Haq had poisoned himself with the ditch water and had stomach cramps; Aziz's painful cough now sounded tubercular. I woke at dawn and went out to the vineyards to relieve myself. Walking around a corner, I found Moalem Jalil squatting on the ground and wiping his bare bottom with gravel. I had been surprised that when I was shown to the fields in Afghanistan I was never given a pitcher of water with which to clean myself. The Afghan technique was now clear and I could see why Qasim and Abdul Haq so proudly displayed their toilet paper.

At breakfast, which was very sweet black tea and dry bread, the old fat man who had dominated proceedings the night before behaved as though he were drunk, probably because of what was in his water pipe. Usually Afghans sit still, revealing little with their faces or bodies. But this man, who was the headman of a neighboring village, engaged in long heroic perorations, with melodramatic whispers, crescendos, and histrionic gestures, which I found difficult to follow. His large body rocked back and forth, his hands waved through the air, and he kept thrusting his turban back at a steep angle on his head. Every few minutes, he would twist his head to one side like a cockatoo and stare unblinking at me for five seconds, then straighten his head and launch back into his speech.

It concerned various groups who intended to kill us on the road to Obey. Qasim, who had been quite relaxed the previous day, was frightened. When the headman had finished, Qasim told me that to walk the next ten kilometers would be suicide. "The young Commandant of Obey, Mustafa, is planning to kill us. We must travel to Saray-e-Pul at least by vehicle. We cannot do it on foot."

I refused. I was determined to walk all the way. I had been fine in Nepal, where people had warned me of similar dangers. Finally Qasim insisted that Moalem Jalil accompany us to Obey. Again we waded through the cold water on an overcast day, Abdul Haq carrying Qasim and Aziz on his back in turn.

This was our fifth day of walking together. We had moved only 140 kilometers east of Herat, sticking to the gravel plain beside the Hari Rud. The short-cropped grass and boulders under a dark sky reminded me of the Scottish battlefield of Culloden. On the far bank of the river stood two black wool tents of the nomadic Pashtun Kuchi people. Traditionally the Kuchi moved south with their flocks at this time of year. But either the politics or the climate had kept them in the Hari Rud valley for the winter.

Walking ahead of the others, I felt the familiar liberation of escaping the men in the claustrophobic guest room and being outside, moving in the open air, on foot.

We were approaching Obey, which was in Babur's time ruled by Zulnun Arghun:

Zulnun Arghun ... was madly fond of chess; if a person played at it with one hand; he played at it with two hands ... He played without art just as his fancy suggests. He was a brave man. He distinguished himself above all the other young warriors in his use of the scimitar ... His courage is unimpeached, but certainly he was rather deficient in understanding The Sultan conferred on him the government of Ghor ... With but a handful of men he bravely vanquished and reduced large and numerous bodies of Hazara ... these tribes were never so effectively settled and kept in order by any other person. Zulnun rose to very high rank and the countries on the Damenkoh [skirts of the mountains] of Herat, such as Obeh and Chaghcharan, were given to him.

Shortly after Babur's journey, however, Zulnun convinced himself that a warrior supported by Allah was invincible. Like others since, he was wrong:

Though a man of courage, he was ignorant and somewhat crazed. Had it not been for his craziness and ignorance he would not have made himself the dupe of such gross flattery and exposed himself to scorn in consequence ... When he was Prime Minister several sheikhs and mullahs came and told him that they had had intercourse with the spheres and that the title of Lion of God had been conferred on him; that he was predestined to defeat the Uzbeks and make them all prisoners. He, implicitly believing all this flattery, tied a handkerchief round his neck, and returned thanks to God ... He did not put the fort in a defensible state; did not prepare ammunition and warlike arms; did not appoint either an advance or pickets to get notice of the enemy's approach, nor even exercise his army, or accustom it to discipline, or battle-array, so as to be prepared and able to fight when the enemy came ... When the Uzbek leader fell upon them ... Zulnun ... relying on this prediction ... kept his ground against fifty thousand Uzbeks with a hundred or a hundred and fifty men. A great body of the enemy coming up took him in an instant and swept on. They cut off his head as soon as he was taken.