The ice cream man came back, but Ramadan is a tough time to make the rounds. Most of his customers are fasting from 4am to 7pm, no food, no water, no chi, and certainly no frozen treats. This cycle of the moon is roza time. It is almost four o’clock on Saturday morning, and I have just sipped my last cup of chi, nibbled my last piece of nan. The Art Party over, I muster the confidence to participate in this revelatory procedure. There is nothing quite like a city high on its bodily reserves. Ironic that poor people strictly adhere to the ritual while the wealthy either buffer their experience with nighttime feasts and all-morning naps, do roza for a day or two, or simply dispense with it altogether. The intention is to remember Mohammed huddled in his daytime hideaway while the authorities hunted him down. It is there, forced to go without sustenance he received the words of God. But also in the Koran is the intimation that now is a time for the wealthy to remember what it is like to be poor.
Why a certain quadrant of humanity is bent on feeling empathy is beyond me. It smacks in the face of survival. Watch a brood parasite crowd out the natural offspring in a nest, or the fate of any weaker unfortunate in nature. Children are not wired to feel empathy, nor can empathy be taught. It is, for lack of a better phrase, an acquired taste. Historically it appears religion has taken the lead initiating empathy. Today in the West it is leveraged through the sanctification of all human life, in the East through the path an individual soul will otherwise be given in the hereafter. Their evolutions reciprocate one another; for one it was once a simple fear of damnation and for the other it had to do with cultural order. I wonder, though, how much empathy strikes the heart naturally. If it does, it certainly cannot be measured and recorded. Maybe it is a stage of development like any other part of the extended infancy of human beings. This too is confounding because, without spending a million dollars on a scientific inquiry I am willing to offer the leaping assumption that half the human race feels no empathy whatsoever. There’s a Greenpeace representative going door to door and those doors get slammed in her face, but reports of a mother whale (named Emily) and her calf struggling beneath the ice summon thousands of dollars, government inquiries, even flowers to the site in Canada where workers toil night and day keeping an air hole from freezing over.
As a child I never really cared so much for people, only characters. Those living I cared about were pets. A shepherd named Sheba and a poodle named Rags. A cat named Colonel Mustard and another named Puccini. There was also a goat named Gretta. Then came Rascal the raccoon, Iggy the iguana, Boa the snake. Three ducks, Winkin’ Blinkin’ and Nod, fish, gerbils, hamsters, even a pet alligator. When I was seven I came within a hair’s breath of disowning my mother for giving away the runt of a litter (named Sylvester). The tightness of a bond between owner and pet is unapproachable. Still, given the treatment of animals everywhere it cannot be said simply having a pet generates empathy.
I never had religion and I was the youngest of five so I never had to sacrifice for my siblings. My parents didn’t hammer the golden rule into me. The extent of their hammering was to finish the food on my plate. I didn’t like it when the bully on the bus picked on the “retarded” girl from Southbury Training School, and once even intervened, but that had much more to do with my distaste for the bully than empathy for Mary Lou. This reality never changed, right up to the moment I stepped on a plane to Kabul. I didn’t much care about Afghanistan or women imprisoned in blue veils or men killing each other over ideology. One person doesn’t make a difference in such matters unless they are thrown into the fabric of it and devote a life to its solution or confronting it head-on, like Frederick Douglass say. I’ve sifted and shaved and shoveled and the closer I look the more I wonder if empathy exists at all, if it is not just an idea with no basis in reality, like freedom.
I’ve gone through all my books of Sufi poetry and the history of “The Great Game”, the rise and fall of empires in central Asia and harrowing biographies of modern day Afghans. In my travels I’ve anticipated with great appreciation the accidental book, the one on a nightstand left by a previous hosteler, the one sitting on a piece of driftwood high up on a beach. This week I was sifting through the books in the orphanage library, looking for something appropriate to teach a thirteen-year old beginning English. In the process I came across a copy of Voltaire’s Candide. I’d read it thirty years ago and only remembered a woman having half her buttocks cut off and eaten by some pirates. It hadn’t forgotten me after all? this journey’s accidental book. I read and chuckled into the night. He had a very sharp wit, this Voltaire, and I have reason to believe our own Mark Twain paid special attention to it. Candide does however disappoint in the end, as do so many of the great efforts. There is a powerful argument against human systems of belief, but then a refusal either to sink into existential pointlessness. In one breath a sage says to our naïve hero:
‘What does it matter whether there’s evil or there’s good,’ said the dervish. ‘When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?’
In the next a very happy and comfortable Turk farmer says to him:
‘I have but twenty acres… I cultivate them with my children. Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.’
Voltaire leans into the second breath, he seems to say that tending a garden is a noble life well lived and for all practical purposes the best we can do. It is lame, as lame as Dostoyevsky settling on (Christian) faith at the end of Crime and Punishment, as if they had set off on a trip to the moon and after chronicling their extraordinary journey all they could say upon their return is the Earth is blue. The world is crumbling before our eyes, as it was crumbling before theirs, and after centuries of thought and hard honest work to rectify the situation the fact is the iceberg was too big, the captain too flawed and the ocean too cold and lonely. If there were a Facebook quiz: which character on the Titanic are you? I’d be the guy blowing the trumpet in the band.
It would be preposterous for me to pretend I will somehow better the Frenchman and Russian in this, my ending. I have nothing greater to say than “blue”. The best I can offer is an attempt to honestly answer two questions: why, my dear Ian, why are you in Afghanistan? More importantly, why are you afraid to leave?
I came here because I have never been named, and I thought perhaps here for once I might earn one. I am afraid to leave because in trying to earn a name I have inadvertently made myself needed. Luckily there are different kinds of need. In choosing to volunteer at an orphanage run by Afghans for Afghans, independent of government and religion, I have foolproofed my either poisoning their operation or creating a dependency. I will go home in the manner I left, eyes agape, somewhat fatalistic but eager to work, and of course nameless.
For example, right up to the moment we started the Art Party it threatened to be a failure. Farzana Nori lost a grandfather the day before, and there was no replacing her in the play or the recital of the Nadia poem. We were going to have to use a wheelbarrow as a cart for Mother Courage, since no real cart could be had in this city of a hundred thousand carts. In the midst of Ramadan and Jumma it was doubtful any guests would appear, the sun blazed too brightly through the un-curtained windows to see the slide show and Nabila was being so temperamental about not getting a bigger part in the play she threatened not to sing Blowin’ in the Wind, then stomped away from dress rehearsal in tears. Half the kids in the program are doing roza so while the other half were bouncing off the walls with excitement the roza kids walked around like paling zombies. Alas, in true Afghan fashion and in accordance with Afghan Time Farzana turned up willing and determined with her family’s blessing to go through with the show, the light from the windows was blocked out with paper, guests battled their schedules to be in attendance and at the very last minute Yasin showed up with a fruit cart he’d rented from a boy in Kabul’s grand market. It still would have been a partial collapse if Nabila had not tapped on my shoulder; there she was in her pretty red sequined dress, ready to sing. Maybe it’s because I’ve been so thoroughly immersed on this one little piece of khawk, or maybe it’s because my pretension to control has softened if not aged, but I’d accepted that at a certain point I had done what I could do and the Art Party would be what it would be. It was beautiful.
Many times I have wondered in my life if I had done what I could do. To prevent that buddy from driving drunk, to serve my father properly, to help my mother stay alive longer, to keep my wife from falling out of love. In my work, too, I’ve wondered. There is no limit to that dark alley. I contrast these individualistic ponderings with the widely disseminated accusation in 1969 that if a person witnessing the television images of war in Vietnam did nothing to stop it, that person was as criminal as the war itself. In the end, I am confused as anyone on a ship that seems to be going down, a ship that is widely historically biblically believed to be unsinkable. Thus the trumpet, thus the song.
All of this to say I realize I have no basis from which to ask you (or someone you know) to become a sponsor of one of these kids. But I must. Many people have stopped their sponsorship. The war has dragged on, and the economy’s tailspin created hard choices. There is the vital problem of housing, as the yearly lease for property in Kabul just keeps going up exponentially, a rent only a few can afford. If it were a simple issue of shelter and food, there is no shortage of agencies that could provide for thousands of kids and those kids will certainly live another year. At stake here is this orphanage and these kids. The Mehan and Sitara children are keenly aware how fortunate they are, like a miraculously selected dalai lama each has been given a path to making a real difference in their very troubled homeland. All they need is the will, and of that there is plenty. I know Mahbooba will one day walk into her village and in one sweeping year the sickness of her people and their weary prejudices will be discarded as easily as a lizard’s tail. I know Maria will one day stand in front of a class in graduate studies, teaching the intricacies of civil engineering. I know one day Farid Gul will lead a properly trained regiment of soldiers to protect a united and democratic Afghanistan, and Ulfat will improve the conditions in which the mentally ill and traumatized are treated. And without compunction I say that Farzana will one day be thrust onto the national stage not by her own ambition, but by the force of nature. She is just that special. What is nurtured here is character in concert with a culture deeply rooted in family. The talons of government, extreme fundamentalism and racism are left behind to die of their own accord. In Mehan and Sitara there are no such fires to burn, only chi, and school books, and working together, and picnics, and every once in a while an Art Party. If the last sponsor discontinues support, if the country collapses yet again, this vision will not disappear. In another year you will hear of a new AFCECO orphanage popping up. In Jalalabad, in Herat perhaps, if not in Kabul. What I am encouraging you to do is to get involved. You will see how suddenly your reading list changes, the way you watch the news, the things you talk about at lunch.
It is almost four in the afternoon now. Twelve hours since I had nan. I am quite thirsty, but my stomach seems content and my head is clear. I have been writing this entry all day. Every so often a few of the girls come into my room. They either go on about my participating in roza or start crying and demand that I don’t leave, or at the very least they go with me back to America; not to stay, but to make certain I come back. Sahar, Sadaf, Adila, Frishta… Maria has returned from Italy. She is so happy and so mature in that cute way adolescents sometimes try so hard to be. She needed to change her password on Gmail. Fatima wanted to read a page of the Frederick Douglass book. Other than that the girls have left me alone. They know today is Ian’s “writing” day. Frishta is the only one brazen enough to march in here and pull the laptop from my hands, the earphones from my ears, tug on my arm and demand I go with her to take a picture of her new earrings. I close my laptop. I take the picture.
What, I wonder, is the whirling Rumi spoke of that we belong to and that belongs to us? Afghanistan is a crossroad where, whatever that whirling is, it seems to have touched down upon the earth. There have been countless stories told about such places. Bargains made with the Devil, roads not taken. So many have passed through, few have stayed. The whirling cuts life short, and yet offers in any given moment a strange sense of eternity. When Razia takes hold of my hand, when Masuda smiles and asks, “Ian-jan, oh shit, what in English, very very happy, very very love?”
Joy?
“Joy? Yes! Joy.”
Maria brought me a letter from Farzana who will remain in Italy for a year. Inside is a red card with a picture of a Christmas tree capped with a gold-yellow star. Inside of that is another letter. She reminds me that home is never where I am, but where I am going to. If it is possible for home to be the wind, or the mountains beyond the mountains, or the loving eyes of an orphan, I will for the rest of my days be safe in knowing I will soon be there.
Video from Art Party at the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiPOLmbdU3E