The World is a Carpet Read Online Free PDF

Saint, the capital of Northern Afghanistan. The fifteenth-century Blue Mosque looked from space like a stylized lotus flower in the center of a geometric carpet. I closed in on the treeless residential matrix of the northern working-class neighborhood where I had lived while researching this book. There was the unpaved intersection, a few blocks south of my house, where a man on a bicycle had detonated a bomb and killed three children and a grocer, leaving the septic wound of the crater to overflow forever with putrid water and rotting refuse and heartache. The grocer was the father of a teenage boy from whom I had often bought pomegranate juice. The boy had green eyes. I scrolled north a bit. There was the ivory T of my house.
    I scrolled farther north, following an ecru hairline through an expanse of ocher: the unpaved track to the Oxus. To get to Oqa, you took this track for approximately forty kilometers, then ditched it at a nameless spot that absolutely no landmark designated and headed west into the desert for another fifteen kilometers or so. The tan background on the screen ran smooth along the paling road, then became reticulated into uneven quilts of sepia, caramel, mocha. Fields of cotton, winter wheat, okra, and tobacco dealt out at random angles like playing cards. A denser scattering of cards around Khairabad and Karaghuzhlah, the villages nearest Oqa, Karaghuzhlah itself a khaki and deep green drip painting of clay roofs mingling with aisles of almonds and apricots and centennial mulberry trees. Now west, past some brown veins of irrigation canals, to the long vertical greenish double strip of Zadyan. The minaret a pale pinhead. North of here, a perfect waxen square: Kafir Qaleh. To the east, the hazel squiggle of the Hazara Ditch.
    I triangulated. Oqa had to be right here, in this freckled back of beyond just south of the rippled gray surf of sand dunes and north of the last accidental swatches of desiccated fields. I zoomed in and strained at the pixels. Nothing. I zoomed in some more and the pixels blurred out of focus. Nothing at all.
    If one day Oqa were blown away, or a sandstorm buried it under a barchan, hardly anyone outside would know to notice.
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    No roads led to the village, only herders’ footpaths that each rain erased anew. Rains were rare. There was no surface water. Oqa’s two hundred and forty people—knots per square inch—drew their water with yellow plastic canisters tied to lengths of rope from the two wells some previous and forgotten generation had dug by hand. The well on the southern slope of the hummock was for humans. The well on the northern slope, where the Oqans went to relieve themselves behind some large tussocks, was for the animals, but most of the villagers watered their livestock by the southern well because it was easier to make the steep downhill trek to a well only once and because anyway the water was diseased in both wells, with typhoid, cholera, and bacterial dysentery. The water in both wells was seventy-five feet beneath the surface and briny.
    If you approached Oqa from the south—say, coming from Mazar or Khairabad or Karaghuzhlah—you first came to the village cemetery. All the graves were unmarked ovoids of dry clay except for one, which was confined by a mud fence. It was the grave of Baba Nazar’s grandfather. Above it dangled a large ceramic jug impaled upside down on a tall wooden staff, and against the fence leaned a plywood board with three lines inscribed upon it in Arabic in dark green paint. The first line read: “In the name of God, the most compassionate and the most merciful.” The second: “There is no God but God. Mohammed is His prophet.” The third line was illegible, but that didn’t matter, because almost no one in Oqa could read anyway—and certainly not Arabic, the language of the mullahs. No one could tell me who had put the board there.
    The graves came in two sizes: big ones, for adults, and small ones, for