INGULFED
(Notes for the Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah)Archive for July, 2011
My Day at Osama Bin Laden’s House — رحلتي الى بيت أسامة بن لادن
Very long story short: it seemed like the right time to go. Once, in the romantic glory days when Osama had just been killed and we all saw the world through rose-colored sniper scopes, daytrippers from the capital or from Lahore would come in to Abbottabad (EPP-ta-bad) to pose for pictures in front of the ex-warlord’s house. It is not as big as it looks on TV. Now, men in camouflage weave through the grass holding rifles and eyeballing everything that moves. Dozens of cellphones have been smashed, and, on the first day I was supposed to drive north to Abbottabad, five “CIA Informants” were arrested by the Pakistani government for cooperating with Americans. Still, it’s a very pretty town. Nice hills.
[My apologies, this story has been submitted elsewhere and cannot honorably be published here. Until we can give up on “honor”, I can offer only the poor summary above. To read the full story about my tea party with Osama and the long games of bridge we played while I waited for Seal Team 6 to do the honors (maybe — you’ll have to find out!): send an email with a sentence including the words “Boca”, “curry”, and “fuckface” to INGULFED at GMAIL dot COM]
The Karakorum Highway starts here.
Abbottabad Hills.
Cricket in Abbottabad.
Country home.
Pakistani Suburbia.
More pictures from pakistan here.
Mixed Blessings — كراتشي
The town of Karachi is made of many things. For three days, I was one of them — a rare Jew in a the world’s third largest city where almost everyone can style themselves a minority in some way. There are those that seek to destroy everything “different” from themselves — the sadly frequent bombings and killings. Except for them, everyone is awesome, every corner of the city has its own new secrets.
There are Catholic churches, Sikh shrines, Hindu temples, the memory of a synagogue, and Zoroastrian fire temples, not far from the Towers of Silence where the dead are left to decompose naturally in focused sunlight.
[Annoyingly, this story has been submitted elsewhere and cannot be published here in good conscience. Until we can give up on “conscientiousness”, I offer only a poor abridgment below. In order to read the full story with everything you ever wanted to know about Karachi but didn’t know to ask (unless you know things to ask): send an email to INGULFED at GMAIL dot COM with a sentence including the words “fondue”, “Pakistan”, and “Sammy Davis, Jr.”.]
Hindu Temple
Tower of Silence
Old Tower of Silence, 1849
St. Patrick's Cathedral
Sikh Shrine, Abudullah Shah Ghazi Mazar
The Lunar Eclipse
— with USA, — rush Israel?
More pictures from pakistan here.
A Day in Lahore — يوم في لاهور
Lahore was blisteringly hot.
In a white shalwar kameez, I adopted the look of the bluer collar, while two men escorted me across the city. The driver wore traditional clothes too, but the man in the back joking loudly in Punjabi had on slacks and a neat collared shirt. He worked for the father of a friend of a friend of a friend, the president of the oldest and largest university in Pakistan. In Pakistan, with the right start, hospitality is easier found than Kevin Bacon. (Bacon, however, isn’t served anywhere.)
You can’t get far without hearing Lahore nahin dekha tou kuch nahin dekha, “If you haven’t seen Lahore, you haven’t yet seen the world.” The city is peppered with gardens and architecture left by the Mughal Empire and parallel kingdoms. The Shalimar gardens are green even in June, and families picnic and sit by the fountains. A couple of couples nap in piles. Through the Masti Gate in the north of Lahore’s Walled City, the Begum Shah Mosque is mostly hidden behind market walls and a rind of scaffolding. Like most of Lahore’s antique facade, the seventeenth century walls are baked red with delicate patterns painted in yellow and green and bright colors. The Begum Shah (which I translate poorly as “Mrs. King”) was Mariam uz-Zamani, mother of Emperor Jangehir, (“conqueror of the world”).
Shalimar Gardens
At night, this Shahi Mohalla (“Royal Neighborhood”) is better known as Heera Mandi, “the Diamond Market”. You might say it’s why Lahore is called that — it’s the city’s longtime red-light district, thinly guised with music and dance. But recent crackdowns have imposed stricter laws on the dancing, and lady’s of the night have become lady’s of the early evening. What once began only after midnight now ends at eleven p.m., and at dinner at a rooftop cafe down the street, we heard only the sounds of sitar wafting up from below. Some things had modernized in the name of convenience. “It’s all delivery now,” my host said.
A Berry, Good Trip
(*not including all the photo ones)
The road to Kunduz, the last city stronghold of the Taliban, before they fell in 2001.
Afghanistan: Epilogue
After four hours on our way back from Bamiyan, we took a detour at a car wash/berry stand for a detour into the heavenly Panjshir valley. We had just passed a convoy of military trucks and emerged from the dirty, windy roads of Taliban territory onto smooth highway. Gull, my guide and the founder of the new Rah-e-Abrisham tour agency, looked infinitely happier. We waited while two boys meticulously sprayed and scrubbed the car back to white, and looked out at the road ahead: the road to Panjshir was safe, controlled only in parts by mafias — those who dealt in drugs, not people — and most of them could be bribed.
The berries were outside the town of Charikar, and we ordered them from the mechanic by claiming a woven dish of many thousands of white, pink, and purple fruits that resembled mini raspberries, and popping them into our mouths with scientific precision. The darker berries were the sweetest, sometimes too much so. The whitest were tart, and the pink and multi-colored could be anywhere in the middle. Gull and Ali Akbar, our fearless driver, were experts. Flitting across the surface with their fingertips, they avoided the mushiest and would put together a cocktail of two or three berries of different colors to toss back in the cup of their palm. Only I ever put four together or had one alone. After half an hour, in the pile wider than a large New York pizza, we had made respectable damage and returned the basket to its roadside table, where it waited under the shade for the next hungry travelers.
There is a checkpoint somewhere along the silver Panjshir river. The jagged walls of the gorge shoot up almost vertically, and a guard waved from a booth chiseled into the rock face for me to display my passport. There are small towns along the road, or by the wrong turns we took, but most of this detour is uneventful. For brief moments, with early afternoon light just right, wide open fields are golden with grain. But the big pay-off comes suddenly, right around one final turn…
If you are drinking tea…
Full story over at The Express Tribune.
They invited me in for tea, six Patan engineers and construction workers and an older man, to their gated compound. We talked about the Taliban, Judaism, Islam, and guys from Kandahar and why they like little boys so much. We made lots of butt jokes. We had dinner. Now we’re friends on Facebook.
Be sure to check out the videos from Afghanistan here: VIDEOS!
All the photos from Afghanistan are here: PHOTOS!
A slideshow of the men from Bamiyan is below —
Rocks and a Canon — الصخور في كانون
Afghanistan: Part Five
[This story has been submitted elsewhere and cannot ethically be published here. Until we can give up on “ethics”, I offer only a poor abridgment below. In order to read the full story complete with Bamiyan political history and portraits of kids: send an email to INGULFED at GMAIL dot COM with a sentence including the words “Rebel”, “aperture”, and “iPhone”.]
My guide had looked at me like I was crazy to walk around on the streets of crepuscular Bamiyan for no reason. Not because it was dangerous, just because… why? I was hoping to take some pictures of people — and I got everything I was hoping for. A dozen children ran and played and strangled each other (quasi-jokingly) and when they refused my offer to photograph them, I gave them my Canon Digiital Rebel XT — certainly the first time any of them had held a camera of any kind. It was their weapon. The tides turned.
The following link is the 97 pictures they took. (View as an automatic slideshow or just click through — these pictures span 5:57—6:07 p.m. on June 12, 2011.)
Pictures, here!
The camera was left on Aperature Priority, so that when they turned a particular dial they underexposed the pictures almost completely to black. Many of them still had information that could be recovered by squeezing the RGB levels. These ones look pretty darn cool. I’m almost positive that’s what the kids had intended.
Below, and at this link, is the video of their exploits, filmed with a concealed iPhone on Sar-e-Aasyab Street in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
This photo and the following were taken by the children.
See all the photos from Afghanistan here, including more of the photographers themselves.
أفضل نزهة في آسيا الوسطى — The Best Picnic in Central Asia
Afghanistan: Part Four
[The following are adapted excerpts from an article that has been submitted elsewhere. To read the full story with a blow-by-blow of the drive from the central Afghan hub of Bamiyan to the perhaps the most beautiful lakes in the whole Caucasus, send an email to INGULFED at GMAIL dot COM with a sentence including the words “picnic”, “caucasus”, and “dragon”.]
If you’re not doing anything later, you might like to check out Band-e Amir, Afghanistan’s one and only national park. Six sapphire-blue lakes 10,000 feet up in the Hindu Kush Mountains provide what may be Central Asia’s Number One picnic spot. Entry costs fifty afghanis (one dollar).
The Buddhas of Bam(i)yan — بوذا باميان
Afghanistan: Part Three
بت های باميان
[The following are adapted excerpts from the much fuller account of the town of Bamyan. For the complete story (with history! and emotion! and the account of the world’s oldest oil paintings!): send an email to INGULFED at GMAIL dot COM with a sentence including the words “Buddha”, “kebab”, and “space shuttle launch”.]
Once, the world’s tallest buddha stood in Bamyan, along the Silk Road at the foot of the Hindu Kush. In 2001, the Talbian drilled the many statues hewn from the sandstone cliffs with holes, razing them completely with dynamite. Eight months later, the Taliban regime fell.
Breakfast with the Taliban — تناول الفطور مع الطالبان
Downtown Kabul, past the largely expat Wazir Akbar Khan and distinctly expensive Shar-e Now neighborhoods, is a friendly place to stroll. Nestled deep in a high valley and lined with sandstone cliffs two-hundred and forty kilometers northwest, Bamiyan is even calmer. But for all the paving efforts that have made it among the smoothest in the country, and despite the stunning backdrop of jagged, dusty hills rising up through cooler and cooler air, the road in between is not so nice.
Seven days before we took our chances on this route from Kabul through the Shibar pass, head of Bamiyan’s provincial council Jawad Zahak had been pulled out of his bus by the Taliban. Three days later, he was beheaded. A fellow passenger pointed: “Right there.”
Half an hour outside of Kabul, we entered an ethnically Pashtun area. The land now controlled by the Taliban across Pakistan and Afghanistan is almost entirely Pashtun, and this stretch, as had been made tragically manifest days earlier, was within their territory. My foreignness was a danger not only to myself but to the four other Afghans in the beat up white Nissan. They should have kept me hidden inside the car. But we all wanted kebabs.
The video below is taken from my phone in a particularly dangerous stretch. In retrospect — not sure it was worth all the fuss.
[Dear readers: I am submitting this story to something, and cannot ethically publish the rest of this post however loosely I interpret the word “publish”. This doesn’t mean it’s any better than other posts. But if you’re still looking to read this nail-biter about the kebabs the Taliban eat, send an email with the words “breakfast”, “Taliban”, and “Dominique Strauss-Kahn” used in one sentence to INGULFED at GMAIL dot COM.]
All the pictures from Afghanistan here.
Firsthands On — مباشر من كابول
Afghanistan: Part One
The dispatcher at the taxi stand was confused; I was a paradox. “But… you’re wearing Pakistani clothes!” And yet, I had the Urdu skills of a wooden chair. At the airport, my looks earned me little but… was it discrimination? The metal detector security guard merely grunted and poked, assuming a man in my dress would be unable to understand words in any language. I thanked him in an Arabic unaccented by any South Asian phonology… American maybe… maybe French. Eyes widened.
Deep down, I think the entire week’s travels were underwritten by a mantra burning under my tongue at all times: Stereotype this, fuckers! To Pakistanis in Abu Dhabi, I was at first fellow Pashtun but soon an idiosyncratic western tourist; to Arabs I was a laborer… with an American passport; sitting in the airport terminal, I was at first look a resource to Afghans searching with questions in Pashto for their gate, but soon just Lebanese, for that was what I told them. To me, Afghanistan was half war-zone, half news imagery, half quotes and impressions, observations and assertions disconnected from their footnotes. The other half was blank. When I landed in Kabul in Afghan shalwar kamees and Pashtun sandals, I joined the files of other men in the same clothes, in similar chappal, with comparable skin tone — I wanted to be blank, too.
Sharp brown mountains and splashes of greenery flowed toward the capital as the plane landed. A small group in western clothes with boxes of gear mixed with the passengers in hats, vests, colors boisterously disembarking. Military planes roosted along the runway; a pair of helicopters kicked up dust. Commercial budget airlines are all parked mixed up together like parents’ cars out on a suburban street, waiting for kids at a bar mitzvah.
