| The road home to Kabul Telegraph, UK
10/05/2003
By
[Printer Friendly Version]
Returning to Afghanistan after 22 years proved both a pleasure and a pain for Telegraph reporter Hamida Ghafour and her parents
My mother and father still clearly remember the night Kabul fell to the invading Russian forces. It was 1979, television and radio stations stopped programming and the strains of the Afghan national anthem filled the airwaves.
By morning, the life my parents' generation knew had come to an end. Soviet tanks stood at every intersection. Within two years, guerrilla resistance had begun. It was clear that the war would be no short-lived affair and anyone with sense or money was leaving. By the time our turn came, my father, Najib, was 30, and my mother Nafisa was 26, just a year older than I am today. At the time, it meant little to my brother, Ali, or to me at four, but as the aeroplane took off on December 27, 1981, my parents knew they would not see Kabul again for a long time, if ever. Afghanistan's dramatic history - the Russian invasion, followed by civil war, then Taliban rule - has fascinated the world for two decades. For my parents, it has had a very personal dimension. Their siblings are scattered around the world. Many friends and relatives have been lost in the fighting. Although we were among the lucky few, fleeing to Canada, my parents never stopped thinking about the life they left behind. And so, on September 21, they boarded an Airbus aeroplane in Toronto for a 16-hour journey that would take them back 20 years. As the Afghan mountains came into sight, they and a planeload of the Afghan diaspora clapped, laughed and cried because they had realised the dream of all refugees who escape war. "I'm home. I'm home," my father said simply. The Kabul they knew in the late Sixties to mid-Seventies was a thriving city. Newspapers debating the merits of communism, democracy or the Beatles were flourishing. At Kabul University, hip Kabulis were eating a new fashionable snack: hamburgers. But the Kabul to which they returned is very different. Almost broken in spirit, its people look haunted. For those who remained, Kabul is a city of sorrow and fear. But for my parents, each building, each street holds a memory of happier times. In the Kabul they knew, women wore mini-skirts; in the new Kabul, my mother was cursed by a man in the market because her headscarf was too small. In the old Kabul, young courting couples went to the cinema; in the new Kabul, women who do so are considered prostitutes. "There is nothing here. Nothing any more. Our city is in pieces," my mother said as we drove past the Kabul River, which has not seen a drop of water in five years. By any measure, their old life was good. Home was in the upmarket Shahr-e-Now district. A country house in the western Paghman area provided an escape when the city became unbearable. Winters were spent hunting foxes with Afghan hounds on my grandfather's ancestral lands in the eastern Laghman province. But by 1981, life under the Soviets had grown extremely uncomfortable. The Communists confiscated more than 900 acres of my grandfather's land and redistributed it to farmers. My father, a civil servant, and my mother, who had just begun her career at Kabul University, were under pressure to join the Communist party. But they were staunch liberals and royalists. So, on the pretext of a holiday in Bulgaria, Estonia and Romania, we were granted visas to leave for a sort of Grand Tour of the Communist states. Instead, we went to New Delhi and sought refugee status. In India, we waited for our names to be drawn in the great emigration lottery. First prize was the United States; we drew Canada. It took us until 1985 to reach Toronto, where my parents eventually settled into middle-class obscurity. But that clean and ordered life was far from their minds as we set out to visit our old home in the city. In our rented car, and without a moment's hesitation, my father gave directions. "I don't feel I have been away for 20 years," he said. "I feel like I was here yesterday." A family of 10 is currently living, rent-free, in our three-bedroom house. Many refugees are returning to Kabul and reclaiming their old properties, or selling them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The current inhabitants knew that it was our home and that there was the possibility we would return and appeared to take the news graciously. "Please come inside. This is your home," said Roya Shahmahmood, 23. We came into the front yard, overgrown with green chilli plants and a grape arbour. The house is narrow and, in one room, the roof was caving in, owing to an air raid bombing several years ago. My father barely spoke as he looked into his childhood bedroom, which is now the kitchen. "I used to climb on to the roof through this window and play with my kite," was all he said. Shahr-e-Now managed largely to survive the war years because the ruling factions took houses here. Today, the homes are undergoing massive renovation as foreign organisations move into the city. Later, my mother said she wanted to sell the house, which, in the current hot property market, could be worth $200,000. My parents were also keen to revisit the venue of their engagement party, the Bagh Bala restaurant near the InterContinental Hotel. As we walked into the reception room, now dark, my mother said: "I still remember the feeling of walking into this room. My arms were shaking, and your father was holding me steady." My father added: "We were late, and my father-in-law was yelling. I was so scared of him, I forgot to tie my shoelaces and nearly tripped." "There was fun, music, dancing here, do you remember?" my mother asked the guard, Taj Mohammed, who has worked at the restaurant for 26 years. "Yes," he answered. "But, oh God, look at us now." In the Taliban era, Bagh Bala became the living quarters and pleasure den of the city commander, Mullah Razakh. After a hard day's work lashing women for showing their feet or men for listening to music, Taliban soldiers would dine on platters of cooked meat brought from the tandoor oven to a long tablecloth laid out by the poolside. After dinner, they would enjoy a swim. "This country could recover if only three people would die," my mother said, bitterly. "Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [the anti-American warlord], Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar [the missing Taliban leader]. "And if only Pakistan would leave us alone," she said, in reference to the country's sheltering of the Taliban. "I curse that country and all the pain it has brought these people." Yet my parents did not rule out the possibility of returning permanently. "I would perhaps like to come back in four years, if the country is safe and stable, and open a school for children," my mother said. For myself, I felt an instant connection with people in Afghanistan, but it was not until coming to the country that I realised how completely westernised I am. Most Afghanis see me as a western woman, not one of their own, and unlike my parents, I couldn't imagine returning to live. Later, we visited the house in Paghman, 10 miles outside Kabul. It was a disturbing experience. Entering through a broken wooden door, we were greeted by a rooster and a barking dog. The once graceful building with tiled floors was now crumbling. "What happened here?" my mother asked, looking around. "What happened to the trees?" In the garden, dozens of cherry, quince and apple trees once blossomed. Only a few dusty roots survived. Nodding towards several craters, the woman living there now with her husband and six children said the trees were destroyed by rocket fire. She offered us bread and yogurt, but we had to leave to pay our respects at my paternal grandfather's grave. After warning us about land mines in the graveyard, she went back inside. It is a strange piece of family history that my grandfather, Colonel Abdul Ghafour-Khan, was head of the intelligence services under King Zahir Shah. My grandfather warned the defence minister that the king's cousin, Daoud, was planning a coup. The minister, outraged at the suggestion that a member of the royal family would commit treason, ignored his warnings. Of course, the king was overthrown in 1973 and Daoud installed himself as president. The coup set off a chain of calamitous events that was to usher in the Communist revolution, provoke civil war and turn the country into a training ground for the terrorists of September 11. "It is such a small thing," my father said. "But I wonder how the course of history would have changed if the minister had listened."
Other Stories:
|