The Scent of Afghanistan

I’ve started a new job. It’s proving to be a bit of an adjustment as it’s been sometime since I’ve worked in a proper setting in Malaysia or anywhere else for that matter. It’s a deskbound, 8am-4pm kind of job you see. Gone are the days when it took me a second to work – because my office was quite literally at my foot step. Thankfully my new job isn’t with the private sector so I can still run around wearing sloppy cotton tops and sandals.

I’m the kind of girl who likes to make her surroundings as cosy and comfortable as possible (in this case my desk and little corner at work). I usually like putting up photos and a piece of décor or two. So one night I began looking through my still photos which I keep in my bedroom drawers. The first ones I saw when I opened one drawer were the ones I took in Afghanistan. It’s been some time since I looked at them. I would say a good few years. Unlike Sudan, I never came to terms that I had to leave the country. Without going into intimate details, and without placing blame – I was kind of forced to leave due to circumstances out of my control – and in a way because I was naïve and easily manipulated at the time. But I digress.

I find that looking at my photos of Afghanistan and any evocation of memories of my experiences there always puts me in a melancholic mood and brings a tear or two to my eye. The first photo I picked was one of a few children running around in an internally displaced people’s (IDP) camp in Spin Boldak which borders the west of Pakistan. The sky was a bright almost turquoise blue while the ground was terracotta brown. The tents housing the IDPs, already torn from the harsh winds and hot weather were different shades of grey and no bigger than 3x3 meters each. Yet the children were smiling toward my camera – me, a woman trying her hardest to blend in by wearing the local garb – taking their photographs so I could bring home a memory I could look at to remind me of a country I never dreamt I would see in my lifetime.

And yet I hardly look at these photos anymore. It fills me with both a sense of loss and longing. Some aid workers have told me that your first mission is almost like the first love that you could never have. It’s your first experience, you fall in love head over heels with the discovery of a new way of life which may be of some use to others, you get addicted to feeling needed, and yet eventually you have to leave wanting more. My leaving Afghanistan was a break-up I didn’t want to happen. A six months love affair with a world I shared in common with because of my religion yet was a stranger to because of my culture, gender, education and opportunities in life. It was a first love that I was meant by God to meet and yet a love that was rudely disrupted by disapproving eyes. The first thing that hit me when I looked at that first photograph of Afghanistan was the sudden memory of a smell. I remember I was asked during my masters’ degree what I first recall when I entered my first IDP camp. I said the awful strong smell emanating from the camp. I remember that my lecturer wasn’t impressed by my answer. I didn’t mean it to sound degrading. I was stating a fact. I had never been in an IDP camp before, let alone been in a country which had little access to water or had been facing a drought for more than 5 years. Of course it smelt. That’s what made the poverty and stark difference between my life and the IDPs so very deep and wide. It made a major impact on me - an urban child educated in Britain and from the moment I was born lived in a bungalow and stayed in 5 star hotels. Yet…I soon got used to that smell because I stopped noticing it – until I returned home one day for a break and unpacked recently washed clothes from my luggage – and oooph…I couldn’t believe how bad it smelled amidst my Mom’s plush furniture.

Yes, I got used to the smell and moving within confined spaces, and confined times. I got used to having to cover my hair as soon as I left my bedroom because we shared an office and a home with men from conservative Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got used to washing my own clothes and taking them to the rooftop to dry while looking out to the wide plains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I got used to eating hard bread, oily beriyani, getting diarrhea every so often, the security threats, the languages, the beautiful faces of the Afghan men with their hawk like expressions and stances, I got used to the fact I hardly saw women and when I did found how amazingly green their eyes were beneath their burqas.

I began to relish leading a simple life where your only entertainment was talking to your colleagues as you watched the stars from the rooftop. I began to take pleasure in finding the latest Glamour magazine amidst magazines that had glitzy Indian models, finding a beautiful cotton cloth and having it tailored into a salwar kameez (a top and a trouser) at a mere all inclusive price of RM20, I began to have an appreciation for Afghan carpets. I began to discover the value of being one of the few foreigners in a land which most foreigners made assumptions about from a distance without truly understanding the wider context of the country’s history and culture.

I fell in love with a young pretty boy and he with me. I discovered what it was like to have a teenage love affair at the age of 30. Where dates that could have killed us also led us along the beautiful rocky hills, a fair ground that glorifies Pakistan’s first nuclear arm, cheap hotels along dark alleys and stolen moments in any vehicle we could get a hold of – all in a part of Pakistan that used to belong to Afghanistan and which modernization had barely heaved a breath.

And just when I got used to my life there and my forbidden love affair with the boy had ended, and at a moment when I was confident enough to execute projects for the people – it was all taken away from me. Without warning. Without any clear justification except “I did it for your own safety”. An act which to this day I don’t understand and realise that I cannot forgive no matter the good intentions in which it was done.

Afghanistan. A place so many have described as unique, magical, mystical, moving, a place where in most places, time had frozen. The Afghanistan that I knew was filled with moments negotiating with people that looked so much like the man the greater world is still hunting, – moments where I shared their food, their tea, their homes and was given the privilege to sit with their women.

Afghanistan. The land where the weather could become so unkind you sometimes had to stay in for days on end and yet children could walk barefoot while you had on your warmest clothes. A land so barren yet you could find pockets of grapevine trees that could bear fruit to become the best raisins I have ever had in my life. A land so sparse of life that people could share with you the sweetest melons the tongue could taste because there were those few who had enough money to build wells.

Afghanistan, a country known for its extreme laws and yet when you wandered deeper, you would come across fields of pink flowers that looked pretty in the wind and green plants which you were tempted to pluck just to feel the freshness of a mystical herb which could get you hanged at home.

The smell, the sights, the wonder of Afghanistan will never leave my soul. I have been to many places since, seen many things but never are they anything comparable to my Afghanistan. Many a times I thought of returning but either God has His reasons for not opening the path to me or I fear that I may return wanting something I had painted in my head using colors of ignorance, naivety and romance of a life which seemed more real then, than the life I lead now.