As is usual for me, I started up a conversation with the chauffeur, who seemed shocked to learn that I was from India. While he had been driving Indian journalists around, none had been female, he said. Most of them were TV reporters who had come to cover ‘the war’.
However, he was happy to show me around, and for a short while I did not feel like a reporter sniffing for news but like a tourist trying to amalgamate into the surroundings as my taxi – a Toyota sedan – sped through the capital city. But as we drove deeper and deeper into the city, I began to sense the depression lingering in the air. This was nowhere a ‘world-class’ city, as some in Delhi had made me believe. The poverty, the blocked roads . . . the eerie sense of invisible eyes following you . . . grip you with unease. Kabul, at that moment, looked like something straight out of the pages of a historical dystopian novel, where everything seemed to be in an existential crisis.
I asked my chauffeur, who knew good English, ‘Do you think Kabul will fall?’ and pat came the reply: ‘Yes, soon. But nothing to worry, ma’am. You enjoy Kabul.’ Of course, I didn’t expect to hear that, but just as I was framing my next question he asked, ‘Will India give me a visa if I apply?’, and there was palpable fear in his voice. I had no answer.
We then took a turn near the Arg Palace. The walls had monstrous portraits of the then president Ashraf Ghani, who would soon become a fugitive, former president Hamid Karzai and the legendary Afghan fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud. For a second these men seemed to me to be nothing but a bunch of narcissists.
There were men and children lined up the roadside begging for food; some people sold boiled eggs and bottled water to passers-by at the traffic signals. The traffic was reckless.
I tried to roll down the windows, but my driver warned me that someone could snatch my phone; and by someone he meant the children on the roads, who looked hungry but had such wonderful smiles on their faces as they ran around the pavements in their little phirans that they stole my heart the minute I saw them. Just as I was soaking all these sights in, the car came to a screeching halt in the middle of a busy road, and before I knew what was happening I was told I was under arrest.
We were stopped by the Afghan police, who looked like cops straight out of a Hollywood flick, dressed exactly like American soldiers, with helmets, well-fitted uniforms, goggles and night-vision glasses sitting atop the helmets in a fanciful manner. After a few minutes of altercation with my driver, one of the policemen began to shout at me and my driver began to tremble. I sensed that something really serious had happened. While the 6-foot-tall policeman was yelling at me in Pashto, which I was still learning (thanks to Google!), I could only make out one word – ‘Pakistani, Pakistani!’
I shook my driver from the backseat so he could regain his mind and translate what the policeman was telling me. Of course, as a Delhiite, I was used to people yelling on the roads, but this was something beyond that – the policeman was pointing his AKM 7.62 mm assault rifle at me. My driver could finally muster up the courage to tell me that the policeman thought I was a Pakistani. That I was clicking photos near the ‘sensitive ’ Arg Palace was proof that I was a spy. I was dressed in jeans and a shirt and had covered
my head and upper body with a dupatta. There was nothing to definitively indicate that I was Indian.
The policeman asked me to delete the photos. I deleted two that he wanted erased and then told him I was a journalist from India. But he still kept looking at me angrily. I then said, quite at random, ‘I am a fan of Shah Rukh Khan.’ In seconds, to my great surprise, that fierce look turned into a smile and he let me go.
That was quite a smile!
This excerpt from The Fall of Kabul: Despatches From Chaos by Nayanima Basu has been published with permission from Bloomsbury India.