while others hurried on, or they'd put the damaged truck on a flatbed and were dragging it to a safe place. A safer place.
Oscar returned to his nap. Mike yawned, checked his phone, and went into a flurry of texting. Echo went back to his chess game.
Cleaner light, less yellow, caught my eye. North of the river, dawn painted snow-capped mountains with orange and pink, while night still held the valley. A moment later, when dawn lit our helicopter, I took a moment facing the tail of the plane for silent prayer. No one seemed to notice.
When I looked up, I saw distant lights in the still-dark valley dividing the mountains to the north. City lights. Mehtar Lam or one of the towns on the road there. Mihtarlim, I think it was, on the last map I'd seen. I remembered how the various riverbeds came together at the narrows here. There should be a major bridge, down there in the darkness, unless it had been bombed.
When I'd come here as a teen, everyone told me I had a Nangrahari accent, so I'd come here, to Nangrahar, and from here had been pointed north. I'd walked upriver past the narrows to a series of fords. I followed a herd of nauseatingly odorous fat-tailed gray karakul sheep, figuring that whatever didn't drown them wouldn't drown me, then hitchhiked north to Mehtar Lam. Only to find the city full of Gilzai Pashtun, not my people at all.
They'd still fed me, repaired my shoes, refilled my water bottles, and put me on the back of a truck piled with sugar cane. Not my people, but still Pashtun, still Pakhtun.
The mountains had called me north and east, until I finally found an arch that looked familiar, standing beside a tower that looked smaller than the one I'd climbed on a dare. The mosque with the blue fountain was larger, newer, and the fountain had become a galvanized pipe rising from the dusty rocks, with a faucet at the end of it and a dented bucket chained to it.
My people were not there.
The elders regretfully advised me that the hajji had packed up his khel and left, under Soviet pressure, only days before the Shuravi themselves had left. The elders had known my people for generations, could describe them right down to the nearly blind schoolmaster with his feranghi wife. But no one knew where my people had gone.
New people had come, had made a home in my home.
The helo overflew Jalalabad, this country's Dallas. I couldn't see into the depths of the narrow streets, but I could pick out dark spots and guessed they were the vegetable gardens that fed the city. For every parking lot in Dallas, there's a garden in Jalalabad.
Virtually all of the city is south of the highway, on the side the river isn't on. Between the highway and the river, daylight showed fields and enclosed pasture already green, studded with walled enclosures or clusters of them. Much of the land between the tangled strands of riverbed was also divided into rectangular fields, as was all the green land on the other north of the river, to a clear line where the lush green valley met the rocky, near-barren slope of the mountains.
I felt the need to study the valley, but kept looking north into the khaki-flanked, snow-capped Hindu Kush. My great-grandfather called it the kill zone for soft Punjabis captured in the rich lands to the east. Before finding enlightenment, he'd raided both sides of the Kabul River and both sides of the Khyber Pass. He and his raiders were once caught near here, where the two rivers merged. Rather than be caught like ducks in the river mud, they'd charged into their enemy's face, had thrown a British regiment into full disarray.
He'd stopped raiding during the Second World War, he said, when a voice in the moonlight had sent him to Mecca. He'd given away his fine horses in the sacred shadows there and walked back into the mountains. On his way back, he'd stolen Shinwari horses and a Shinwari wife, and had founded our khel ten days north of her father's walls.
I tapped Echo's shoulder. “Can you get on the net here?
Oscar returned to his nap. Mike yawned, checked his phone, and went into a flurry of texting. Echo went back to his chess game.
Cleaner light, less yellow, caught my eye. North of the river, dawn painted snow-capped mountains with orange and pink, while night still held the valley. A moment later, when dawn lit our helicopter, I took a moment facing the tail of the plane for silent prayer. No one seemed to notice.
When I looked up, I saw distant lights in the still-dark valley dividing the mountains to the north. City lights. Mehtar Lam or one of the towns on the road there. Mihtarlim, I think it was, on the last map I'd seen. I remembered how the various riverbeds came together at the narrows here. There should be a major bridge, down there in the darkness, unless it had been bombed.
When I'd come here as a teen, everyone told me I had a Nangrahari accent, so I'd come here, to Nangrahar, and from here had been pointed north. I'd walked upriver past the narrows to a series of fords. I followed a herd of nauseatingly odorous fat-tailed gray karakul sheep, figuring that whatever didn't drown them wouldn't drown me, then hitchhiked north to Mehtar Lam. Only to find the city full of Gilzai Pashtun, not my people at all.
They'd still fed me, repaired my shoes, refilled my water bottles, and put me on the back of a truck piled with sugar cane. Not my people, but still Pashtun, still Pakhtun.
The mountains had called me north and east, until I finally found an arch that looked familiar, standing beside a tower that looked smaller than the one I'd climbed on a dare. The mosque with the blue fountain was larger, newer, and the fountain had become a galvanized pipe rising from the dusty rocks, with a faucet at the end of it and a dented bucket chained to it.
My people were not there.
The elders regretfully advised me that the hajji had packed up his khel and left, under Soviet pressure, only days before the Shuravi themselves had left. The elders had known my people for generations, could describe them right down to the nearly blind schoolmaster with his feranghi wife. But no one knew where my people had gone.
New people had come, had made a home in my home.
The helo overflew Jalalabad, this country's Dallas. I couldn't see into the depths of the narrow streets, but I could pick out dark spots and guessed they were the vegetable gardens that fed the city. For every parking lot in Dallas, there's a garden in Jalalabad.
Virtually all of the city is south of the highway, on the side the river isn't on. Between the highway and the river, daylight showed fields and enclosed pasture already green, studded with walled enclosures or clusters of them. Much of the land between the tangled strands of riverbed was also divided into rectangular fields, as was all the green land on the other north of the river, to a clear line where the lush green valley met the rocky, near-barren slope of the mountains.
I felt the need to study the valley, but kept looking north into the khaki-flanked, snow-capped Hindu Kush. My great-grandfather called it the kill zone for soft Punjabis captured in the rich lands to the east. Before finding enlightenment, he'd raided both sides of the Kabul River and both sides of the Khyber Pass. He and his raiders were once caught near here, where the two rivers merged. Rather than be caught like ducks in the river mud, they'd charged into their enemy's face, had thrown a British regiment into full disarray.
He'd stopped raiding during the Second World War, he said, when a voice in the moonlight had sent him to Mecca. He'd given away his fine horses in the sacred shadows there and walked back into the mountains. On his way back, he'd stolen Shinwari horses and a Shinwari wife, and had founded our khel ten days north of her father's walls.
I tapped Echo's shoulder. “Can you get on the net here?
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