Kandahar

'That will not bring back the things we loved: the high, clear days and the blue icecaps on the mountains; the lines of white poplars fluttering in the wind, and the long white prayer flags; the fields of asphodels that followed the tulips; or the fat tailed sheep brindling the hills above Chagcharan, and the ram with a tail so big they had to tie it to a cart. We shall not lie on our backs on the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We shall not read Babur’s memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way round the rose bushes. Or sit in the peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh.

We will not stand on the Buddha’s head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes-the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields; the sweet resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or a whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet.’

---Chatwin.

~~~

The long view.

For a brief moment you can imagine the vague light, the crackling fires, the poor people huddled around it,warming their hands, as not so different from a scene depicted by Brueghel.

It is strange to think just how deep-rooted the instincts for human settlement and the great desire for regularity are? Habits and habitat. A phrase from Smith has always struck you: "habitual reflection". When does freedom become our second-nature?

~~~

In your darker moments you sometimes think Pakistan will go the way of Afghanistan. Certainly we've been pulled to the frontier and coupled with the influence of the towel-heads things have really deteriorated. But, on the other hand, there must be at least 5,000 women in this city who wake up and put on some lipstick before 11 o'clock-for work or the sheer pleasure of it; and tens of thousands who get their kids ready for school. That must count for something in the long run.

We tend to see things from the perspective of our own lives, the narrow time-horizons of a human life. It is difficult to imagine that others before us suffered the same wounds, were touched by the same rapture and joys. And yet that sense of strangeness is not so different from how we think about the lives of our contemporaries in far-flung places. The fundamentalists may be very different from us, but the fundamentals still apply..."a kiss is still a kiss.."