This story, a chapter from an unpublished manuscript I wrote long ago, recounts the difficult process of deciding whether to travel across Afghanistan during my trans-Asia journey in 2003 and 2004.
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
An’ the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
– Rudyard Kipling
The man was Sikh, but as our train snaked its way through still more monotonous fields and suffocating heat, all I could think of was the man on the cover of Ahmed Rashid’s book, Taliban. I was soaked in sweat and once again sitting in the cheapest part of an Indian train, this time traveling from Agra to Delhi. I had just seen what many call the most brilliant example of Islamic architecture—the Taj Mahal, a seventeenth-century Moghul tomb which mesmerizes its guests with graceful curves, meandering floral patterns, cool marble floors, and twisting Arabic script. But now that it was behind me and the train was lulling me into a hypnotic state, I looked ahead and felt a nervous sickness at some other things Islam has built: the Taliban, a reform movement that sought to establish an idealized seventh-century version of Islam in modern Afghanistan, was haunting me.
Everyone in my car was Sikh—the nursing mother with bracelets, the two brothers with bracelets, the fellow who held a sword in his hand. They were heading home to Punjab, several hours to the north of Delhi. One man asked where I was from. My answer sparked a somber-sounding conversation among the passengers in Punjabi, a language I of course couldn’t understand. But I often heard the word “America.” They seemed displeased, and for the next three hours I never saw a smile. I thought the men hated me.
I walked often to the open door and hung my tired body out of the train, offering the breeze and sun the opportunity to comfort me. I thought of the central character in Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist, a boy journeying in pursuit of his Personal Legend. When the boy asks an older man what the world’s greatest lie is, the man replies, “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” I wished that what the old man said was true, but I began to doubt it now. Nearly a year earlier I had planned my route to include Afghanistan, the “crossroads of Asia.” With the date of arrival now only weeks away, unease was building force like a wave about to hit shore, and my gut braced for the approaching crash. I was not excited about going there, but just as a train does not turn off its track, I felt unable to change course. It was as if fate was my guide.
The train took only four and a half hours to reach Delhi, though it felt like days. The monotony broke when two railway policemen boarded the car half an hour before arrival and began slapping a stoned man on the head. Then they turned to another man who had just entered from an adjacent car—a higher class car, I think—and, after searching him for stolen items, began beating him about three feet from my seat. Female relatives dashed forward with desperate pleas for the police to stop, which they did after a final smack or two. Eyeing the foreigner, the police ordered the Sikh across from me to scoot over. “Passport,” one officer instructed me in halting English. He returned the passport and then inspected my neighbor’s sword, unscrewing a part of the handle to look for hidden drugs. “Dangerous!” he said to me, smiling.
By the time the police had boarded, the Sikhs and I, with the mediation of an English-speaking computer programmer, had been communicating nicely. Not only did I learn that they didn’t hate me, they even wanted me to spend the night in their home in Punjab. A distant relative spoke some English, they explained, and they would have him spend the night too.
When the train pulled into Delhi Station shortly before 1:00 p.m., the Sikh gave me his telephone number and clasped my hands in a warm goodbye. I would read later that the Sikhs are famous for their hospitality. This was not true, however, of the one billion people entering the car as I tried to exit. I was swept downstream, deeper into the car, and resorted to shoving old women to regain ground. When my new friend, the smiling policeman, caught wind of my plight, he began throwing people away from the door as though they were empty beer cans.
I stumbled out of the train and into a crush of human flesh and smell that immediately swept me to the left, toward the platform stairs. I took on the spirit of a football player, not just physically but, even more, mentally. This was not a casual disembarking, this was India, and so it required a hardened frame of mind. It took most of ten minutes to reach the street, during which time I knocked into people with no less callousness than they did me. I made it up the stairs, over the flyway, back down into the station lobby, and then into the parking area, where I blocked the oncoming cries of “Rickshaw!” with a hardened, forward-looking gaze.
I continued through choking clouds of exhaust, a thousand horns, balding cows, drifting trash, and the omnipotent heat, moving straight into the clogged heart of Paharganj. It was a pit of a place, a neighborhood where the foreign backpackers live in cheap dives and Indians, as two locals would tell me later, simply struggle to survive. It was here in this maddening density that I would make final plans about Afghanistan. There was much to consider.
The novelist James A. Michener visited Afghanistan in the 1950s and was entranced, calling it an “exciting, violent, provocative place.” Writer Bruce Chatwin traveled there as well, pleased to have gone “before the Hippies wrecked it.” And in the year before the 1979 Soviet invasion, almost 100,000 tourists had visited, a statistic that hardly resonated with my mind, which came of age after the country had commenced its steep descent into two decades of war.
But with the fall of the Taliban in 2001, hope sprang anew in Afghanistan, and a trickle of intrepid travelers began to return with their cameras and guidebooks. They were an unusual sort, undaunted by Taliban remnants, and I was not convinced I should join their ranks.
Risk is sometimes necessary; stupidity is not. The difficulty was that as I considered Afghanistan, the difference between the two blurred. I felt like a nearsighted man who had not only lost his glasses but had lost them at the worst possible time. For months I had done research and been in contact with people who could give me educated advice on whether and how to travel the country by land. While the advice was never consistent, this much was clear: the stretch of road from the Pakistani border to Kabul, if I were to take it, would be the most dangerous 140 miles of my Asian journey.
During these dark hours of brooding in Delhi, I searched out places of retreat. The McDonald’s in Connaught Place was one. The air-conditioning, the Western and Hindi music videos, the English-language newspaper, the employee studiously wiping handprints off the windows—all these things offered a brief respite from the gruesome images I had begun to develop. So did a visit to the U.S. Embassy, where I went for no other reason than to simply walk as near my country as I could now. I wandered like a lost puppy around the air-conditioned consular services lobby and gawked at Americans processing visa applications behind glass windows. Dr. Pepper and Three Musketeers, neither of which I had seen in almost a year, were available for purchase in the lobby, and I stared at them for some time, utterly dumbfounded that innocuous candy and life-ending violence are both within our grasp. I was too cheap to buy the candy bar that I so desperately craved, yet I was preparing later in the week to part with $30 for a visa to a place that was giving me nightmares. I looked with tenderness toward the Three Musketeers much as one might look at the face of a loved one he fears he’ll never see again. I wanted to hold it, maybe even cradle it, but nobody here would have understood. Even I wouldn’t have completely understood. So instead I left the embassy, increasingly ill at ease with the mystery of the human spirit and its fragility.
I wasn’t too thrilled with my room either. In the past ten months I had slept in 144 beds and learned that most were exactly the same: the place where memories haunt or please; where you are finally still and see how alone you are; where, despite all the neat things of the day, there is so little to touch or smell, no other person to hear. This was never truer than in Delhi. Paharganj grew quiet by midnight, just as my thoughts grew loudest. I liked to think I prayed in these hours, but it is perhaps more accurate to say I simply stared at God. Or was it Afghanistan I was looking into? It was a black hole, horrifying, untamed, and completely callous toward human longing.
And it led to visions of my funeral. Who would attend? What would they say? Would people assume I treated risk lightly, and speak condescendingly behind my back—beyond my very life? I shook at the thought. For years I had understood the future as a point in time I would share with others. But now I saw that I had defined it poorly, as the young tend to do. The future owes us nothing.
To consider solo overland travel in Afghanistan, then, was to see that there is a stream called Death, which twists and turns and, in the end, sweeps everyone into its flow. It was to carefully weigh the value of sitting in a room with Christmas lights, warm food, and family, to nearly weep at the thought of smelling the Florida salt air, to imagine once again gripping the wheel of my Honda Civic and driving down the highway on a sunny afternoon. It was to physically convulse before the stream, and to hate its presence in our world.
In The Alchemist, the boy is advised, “Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.” When I first read these words months earlier in Thailand, they sounded wise. That was because I was on a beach drinking fruit shakes. But now I mocked them and thought, I don’t want eternity, I merely want Christmas, which is just four months away. Ten months into the trip, feeling wafer thin and already dying, I had no reserves with which to face the present. I didn’t know which was worse—the occasional nights of fever or the consistent nights of raw fear—but together they steadily drew from me so that in Delhi death not only seemed real, it felt like it was already happening. They drew from me just as surely as a nurse draws blood from a patient. They drew and drew and drew, not for a moment, but for days on end. I was being unmade.
A medieval rack was designed to pull apart the physical body, and I saw that the act of making certain choices can do the same to the soul. England outlawed the device in 1628, deeming it too cruel, but there is a rack stored within which laws cannot ban and which operates still. Why was I putting myself through this? I looked back to a journal entry dated July 11:
I just reread parts of the last chapter of Chris Hedges’ War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Three days ago it brought tears to my eyes, quite unexpectedly. He writes of love, “Love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life.” Love does not mean we will survive violence, but love, in its mystery, has its own power.
I hope I am able to visit Afghanistan. I think if I do some of my best writing will emerge from there. This past month, now that my focus is increasingly directed to the countries between India and Turkey, I think about Afghanistan daily. And so I think about death daily. I want to enter a place where so many have died in my lifetime, but I feel uneasy that it may swallow me too. So why go? Am I drawn to “risk?” Do I find meaning—do I seek to fill a void—by stepping into a lawless country? How easy it is to walk down a street in this world and be slaughtered by one’s fellow man! More than usual, I do not want to die now. I don’t want to stray from the shallows—I fear what lurks in the deep. No, more than a search for meaning my interest in traveling through Afghanistan is born out of commitment, wanting to stick to a plan to travel Asia overland. I hate the thought of looking at a map one day and seeing a spot I jumped over in an aircraft. To travel in and out of Afghanistan would be an incredible experience I would not regret…but only if I do indeed travel both in and out.
Love—the key to being human, the balm for the wounds of war, the reality that, in its mystery, has its own power.
I will go to Afghanistan….But I will not go there in search of meaning, for meaning is not to be had in a mere crossing into chaos, danger, and political boundaries. Meaning comes in loving.
After some days in Delhi, I was beyond thinking objectively. I was so tangled in the soul’s own complexities, so sick and frail, so lonely. What I wrote weeks earlier in Nepal I could not have written now. The rack had been notched up since then and my soul was at its breaking point. One writes differently depending on the degree of torture applied.
Only with the help of music would I fall asleep each night. One song was Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” It stirred up rich images, both good and bad, and somehow made it bearable to step into the unknown, to even risk giving up Christmas. And so at night I would eventually fall asleep, having concluded it made sense to go to Afghanistan. But then the sun would rise and all the hours of reasoning would evaporate more quickly than dew. Things would look differently in the light, fear would rush back in, and, without fail, I would find myself back on the rack.
One morning, tucking away my emotional wreckage and physical exhaustion as best I could, I took an auto rickshaw to the Afghan embassy. The first thing I saw was the guard post outside the gate, and it was not impressive. The sand bags around the post looked like they had endured years of war, or at least a little pillaging. The top layers were ripped open and their contents stained the bags below.
The embassy offered no sign to tell of its hours of operation. Nor did it instruct the visitor where to go and what to do. So I stood before the bare metal gate and knocked. When the gate swung open I was face-to-face with a smiling, humble Indian man wielding a metal detector. He held it like a child might hold a toy he has no interest in. Having unzipped my bag a hundred times this year for security checks, I did so again now. He dipped his wand into the backpack for only a moment, not so much for security purposes but because, I sensed, he wanted to respect the time I had just spent in unzipping my bag.
I entered the open door to the lounge, where about a dozen Indian men and women sat silently in a room that had the feel of a morgue. They looked like they had been here a very long time. A wall fan spat hot air around the room and its rotating rattle offered sound to an otherwise quiet place. Faded tourism posters hung on the wall. One showed the Minaret of Jam, the second tallest minaret in the world at 213 feet. All the posters were once bright but now yellowed, and I wondered if these advertisements had been in their prime in the 1970s, before the Soviets arrived.
A secretary sat at a desk to one end of the room. At least I assume that this is true—I never actually saw the secretary. A framed photograph of President Hamid Karzai watched over us from above the desk, his eyes peering out from beneath his karakul hat, which I had read is made from the skin of a sheep fetus. Karzai’s face looked shell shocked, as if the photo has been taken just seconds after an assassination attempt. But he certainly looked better than the Taliban leadership, which Ahmed Rashid described this way: “Mullah Omar lost his right eye in 1989 when a rocket exploded close by. The Justice Minister Nururddin Turabi and the former Foreign Minister Mohammed Ghaus are also one-eyed. The Mayor of Kabul, Abdul Majid, has one leg and two fingers missing. Other leaders, even military commanders, have similar disabilities.”
On the coffee table before me sat several issues of India Today, filled with mobile phone and other ads that suggested progress, connectedness, hope. Someone was clever to put them here.
I approached the application window and told the kindly old gentleman humped over an antique typewriter that I wanted to apply for a visa. “A tourist visa?” he inquired calmly, as if this were a routine procedure, as if it were normal for people to picnic beside Death. “Yes please, a tourist visa,” I replied. He silently reached across his desk and pulled out two copies of a one-page application, instructing me to fill out both. I looked hard at the pieces of paper I now possessed. One simple, poorly photocopied page—this is how easy it was to enter a difficult place, I thought, a place that has swallowed nearly two million lives in the last twenty-five years. It was so easy, in fact, that I felt an urge to either laugh or cry. But instead I just filled in the blanks. In the lines under the heading “Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan,” I was asked for (misspelled) things like “Date of Birt” and “No. & Type of Passosrt.” I attached a black and white passport photo. It was one taken four years ago, the day after I had been mugged in Istanbul. It seemed fitting to use a photo that showed me cut and bruised.
I turned in the application and said I would return tomorrow to pick up the visa. To this the gentleman, still humped over his typewriter, replied, “I’m sorry. This will not be ready for at least two days, maybe more—the foreign minister arrived this morning from Kabul and so the Consul General must be with him at all times until he leaves Delhi.”
“But just yesterday I spoke with the consular officer himself and he told me to come today and he would have it ready by tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied, “this simply is not possible now.”
“Well, when will the Foreign Minister leave Delhi?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “We cannot know these things.”
The Consul General was out indefinitely, and once I returned to Paharganj and checked my email I read a discouraging security update for the road to Kabul. I was scheduled to travel it the week preceding Afghanistan’s historic election, and I already knew it was a week that observers were expecting a marked increase in violence.
Later this night, I left Delhi for Rishikesh, a town five hours away on the Ganges River. It was here that the Beatles hung out in the summer of ’68 and found inspiration. I went and just got sick with fever, but in the town’s relative peacefulness I was well enough to analyze the extent of my physical and emotional exhaustion. When I returned to Delhi some days later I was prepared to make the tough decision.
I would not enter Afghanistan.
Several weeks later, having crossed the Khyber Pass and reached the border gate that marked the end of Pakistan, I looked longingly into a space I would not enter. It was Afghanistan. There was a tremendous gravitational pull, one that, if I had a visa, likely would have sucked me straight across the border and down the road to Kabul. Michener was smitten once in the country; I was smitten merely at the sight of it through the gate.
Here I could see what was not so visible in Delhi. That is, I saw the Afghan people. Guards with big sticks chased children away from the gate. Children chased old tires they pushed along for fun. Other Afghan children, wearing orange prison-like suits and backpacks, returned home after a day of school on the Pakistani side of the border. Burka-clad women carried small loads on their heads, and men leaned into carts weighted down with goods. There were cripples on carts, a billboard that warned of unexploded ordnance. Pepsi was on sale.
Sometimes we grasp onto principles in the abstract but let them go when we are confronted with reality. But we can also do the inverse. Having grasped fear in Delhi and been ravaged by it, I was now quite ready to cast it away and cross the border because I was confronted with the land itself and the people who walk within its borders. I knew that on the other side of that gate Death had swallowed millions and wasn’t yet done feasting. But now I saw the people and came alive and wide-eyed with the remembrance that there are compelling reasons to approach streams, even when they are called Death. The reason is people, the reason is our neighbor. The reason is that the craziest things make sense when you love more than you fear.
I squinted toward the dusty horizon and imagined what might have been. And I wondered too what might still be. This was the eve of Afghanistan’s elections, and tomorrow the gate would shut. It would remain locked for several days, bringing all border movement to a halt. I stared earnestly into the clouds of dust, the rivulets of people, and the mountains of solid rock that baked in the sun, and saw that there would be something about life I would not understand until I ventured into Afghanistan. One could say this about any place he has not been, but never had I felt it more strongly than here.