The Places in Between Read online

  The Places in Between

  Rory Stewart

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Preface

  Epigraphs

  THE NEW CIVIL SERVICE

  TANKS INTO STICKS

  WHETHER ON THE SHORES OF ASIA

  Part One

  CHICAGO AND PARIS

  HUMA

  FARE FORWARD

  THESE BOOTS

  Part Two

  QASIM

  IMPERSONAL PRONOUN

  A TAJIK VILLAGE

  THE EMIR OF THE WEST

  CARAVANSERAI, WHOSE PORTALS...

  TO A BLIND MAN'S EYE

  GENEALOGIES

  LEST HE RETURNING CHIDE...

  CROWN JEWELS

  BREAD AND WATER

  THE FIGHTING MAN SHALL

  A NOTHING MAN

  Part Three

  HIGHLAND BUILDINGS

  THE MISSIONARY DANCE

  MIRRORED CAT'S-EYE SHADES

  MARRYING A MUSLIM

  WAR DOG

  COMMANDANT HAJI (MOALEM) MOHSIN KHAN OF KAMENJ

  COUSINS

  Part Four

  THE MINARET OF JAM

  TRACES IN THE GROUND

  BETWEEN JAM AND CHAGHCHARAN

  DAWN PRAYERS

  LITTLE LORD

  FROGS

  THE WINDY PLACE

  Part Five

  NAME NAVIGATION

  THE GREETING OF STRANGERS

  LEAVES ON THE CEILING

  FLAMES

  ZIA OF KATLISH

  THE SACRED GUEST

  THE CAVE OF ZARIN

  DEVOTIONS

  THE DEFILES OF THE VALLEY

  Part Six

  THE INTERMEDIATE STAGES OF DEATH

  WINGED FOOTPRINTS

  BLAIR AND THE KORAN

  SALT GROUND AND SPIKENARD

  PALE CIRCLES IN WALLS

  @afghangov.org

  WHILE THE NOTE LASTS

  Part Seven

  FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING

  I AM THE ZOOM

  KARAMAN

  KHALILI'S TROOPS

  AND I HAVE MINE

  THE SCHEME OF GENERATION

  THE SOURCE OF THE KABUL RIVER

  TALIBAN

  TOES

  MARBLE

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Footnotes

  A HARVEST ORIGINAL • HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  Copyright © Rory Stewart 2004

  Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Rory Stewart

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact

  or mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Maps by Susie Knowland, created from original maps by www.ml-design.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Picador in 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stewart, Rory.

  The places in between/Rory Stewart.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London: Picador, 2004.

  "A Harvest Original."

  1. Afghanistan—Description and travel. 2. Afghanistan—Social life and customs.

  3. Stewart, Rory—Travel—Afghanistan. I. Title.

  DS352.S74 2006

  915.8104'47—dc22 2005032213

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603156-1 ISBN-10: 0-15-603156-6

  Text set in Baskerville MT

  Designed by April Ward

  Printed in the United States of America

  First U.S. edition

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  This book is dedicated to the people of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, who showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible. They were not all saints, though some of them were. A number were greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant, and cruel. Some of them had robbed or killed others; many of them threatened me and begged from me. But never in my twenty-one months of travel did they attempt to kidnap or kill me. I was alone and a stranger, walking in very remote areas; I represented a culture that many of them hated, and I was carrying enough money to save or at least transform their lives. In more than five hundred village houses, I was indulged, fed, nursed, and protected by people poorer, hungrier, sicker, and more vulnerable than me. Almost every group I met—Sunni Kurds, Shia Hazara, Punjabi Christians, Sikhs, Brahmins of Kedarnath, Garhwal Dalits, and Newari Buddhists—gave me hospitality without any thought of reward.

  I owe this journey and my life to them.

  Contents

  Preface [>]

  The New Civil Service [>]

  Tanks into Sticks [>]

  Whether on the Shores of Asia [>]

  Part One [>]

  Chicago and Paris [>]

  Huma [>]

  Fare Forward [>]

  These Boots [>]

  Part Two [>]

  Qasim [>]

  Impersonal Pronoun [>]

  A Tajik Village [>]

  The Emir of the West [>]

  Caravanserai, Whose Portals ... [>]

  To a Blind Man's Eye [>]

  Genealogies [>]

  Lest He Returning Chide... [>]

  Crown Jewels [>]

  Bread and Water [>]

  The Fighting Man Shall [>]

  A Nothing Man [>]

  Part Three [>]

  Highland Buildings [>]

  The Missionary Dance [>]

  Mirrored Cat's-Eye Shades [>]

  Marrying a Muslim [>]

  War Dog [>]

  Commandant Haji (Moalem) Mohsin Khan of Kamenj [>]

  Cousins [>]

  Part Four [>]

  The Minaret of Jam [>]

  Traces in the Ground [>]

  Between Jam and Chaghcharan [>]

  Dawn Prayers [>]

  Little Lord [>]

  Frogs [>]

  The Windy Place [>]

  Part Five [>]

  Name Navigation [>]

  The Greeting of Strangers [>]

  Leaves on the Ceiling [>]

  Flames [>]

  Zia of Katlish [>]

  The Sacred Guest [>]

  The Cave of Zarin [>]

  Devotions [>]

  The Defiles of the Valley [>]

  Part Six [>]

  The Intermediate Stages of Death [>]

  Winged Footprints [>]

  Blair and the Koran [>]

  Salt Ground and Spikenard [>]

  Pale Circles in Walls [>]

  @afghangov.org [>]

  While the Note Lasts [>]

  Part Seven [>]

  Footprints on the Ceiling [>]

  I Am the Zoom [>]

  Karaman [>]

  Khalili's Troops [>]

  And I Have Mine [>]

  The Scheme of Generation [>]

  The Source of the Kabul River [>]

  Taliban [>]

  Toes [>]

  Marble [>]

  Epilogue [>]

  Acknowledgments [>]

  Pr
eface

  I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia. The Taliban had banned posters and films, but I arrived six weeks after the Taliban's departure and saw the Herat arcade hung with posters of the Hindi film star Hrithik Roshan standing on a cliff at sunset, his bouffant hair ruffled by the evening breeze. In the courtyard where al-Qaeda men had gathered to chat in Urdu, students were waiting to practice their English on war reporters. I found The Man in the Iron Mask among a pile of DVDs on a handcart. It had been touched up for the Afghan market so that Leonardo DiCaprio, as Louis XIV in seventeenth-century dress, brandished a Browning 9mm. Herat—which had been a great medieval market for China, Turkey, and Persia—was now selling Chinese alarm clocks, Turkish sunglasses, and Iranian apple juice.

  It was the beginning of 2002. I had just spent sixteen months walking twenty to twenty-five miles a day across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. I had wanted to walk every step of the way and I had intended to cross Afghanistan a year earlier. But in December 2000 the Iranian government took my visa away. They may have discovered that I had been a British diplomat and become suspicious of my motives. The Taliban then refused to allow me into Afghanistan, and the government of Pakistan barred me from Baluchistan. As a result, I had to leave a gap between Iran and the next stage of my journey, which started in Multan in Pakistan and continued in an unbroken line to eastern Nepal.

  Just before Christmas 2001, I reached a town in eastern Nepal and heard that the Taliban had fallen. I decided to return by vehicle to Afghanistan and walk from Herat to Kabul and thus connect my walk in Iran with my walk in Pakistan. I chose to walk from Herat to Kabul in a straight line through the central mountains. The normal dogleg through Kandahar was flatter, easier, and free of snow. But it was also longer and controlled in parts by the Taliban.

  The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam. All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world's attention.

  The country is quite covered by darkness, so that people outside it cannot see anything in it; and no one dares go in for fear of the darkness. Nevertheless men who live in the country round about say that they can sometimes hear the voices of men, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing, and thereby that some kind of folks live there, but they do not know what kind of folk they are.

  —The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,

  c.1360, Chapter 28

  THE NEW CIVIL SERVICE

  I watched two men enter the lobby of the Hotel Mowafaq.

  Most Afghans seemed to glide up the center of the lobby staircase with their shawls trailing behind them like Venetian cloaks. But these men wore Western jackets, walked quietly, and stayed close to the banister. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the hotel manager.

  "Follow them." He had never spoken to me before.

  "I'm sorry, no," I said. "I am busy."

  "Now. They are from the government."

  I followed him to a room on a floor I didn't know existed and he told me to take off my shoes and enter alone in my socks. The two men were seated on a heavy blackwood sofa, beside an aluminum spittoon. They were still wearing their shoes. I smiled. They did not. The lace curtains were drawn and there was no electricity in the city; the room was dark.

  "Chi kar mikonid?" (What are you doing?) asked the man in the black suit and collarless Iranian shirt. I expected him to stand and, in the normal way, shake hands and wish me peace. He remained seated.

  "Salaam aleikum" (Peace be with you), I said, and sat down.

  "Waleikum a-salaam. Chi kar mikonid?" he repeated quietly, leaning back and running his fat manicured hand along the purple velveteen arm of the sofa. His bouffant hair and goatee were neatly trimmed. I was conscious of not having shaved in eight weeks.

  "I have explained what I am doing many times to His Excellency, Yuzufi, in the Foreign Ministry," I said. "I was told to meet him again now. I am late."

  A pulse was beating strongly in my neck. I tried to breathe slowly. Neither of us spoke. After a little while, I looked away.

  The thinner man drew out a small new radio, said something into it, and straightened his stiff jacket over his traditional shirt. I didn't need to see the shoulder holster. I had already guessed they were members of the Security Service. They did not care what I said or what I thought of them. They had watched people through hidden cameras in bedrooms, in torture cells, and on execution grounds. They knew that, however I presented myself, I could be reduced. But why had they decided to question me? In the silence, I heard a car reversing in the courtyard and then the first notes of the call to prayer.

  "Let's go," said the man in the black suit. He told me to walk in front. On the stairs, I passed a waiter to whom I had spoken. He turned away. I was led to a small Japanese car parked on the dirt forecourt. The car's paint job was new and it had been washed recently. They told me to sit in the back. There was nothing in the pockets or on the floorboards. It looked as though the car had just come from the factory. Without saying anything, they turned onto the main boulevard.

  It was January 2002. The American-led coalition was ending its bombardment of the Tora Bora complex; Usama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar had escaped; operations in Gardez were beginning. The new government taking over from the Taliban had been in place for two weeks. The laws banning television and female education had been dropped; political prisoners had been released; refugees were returning home; some women were coming out without veils. The UN and the U.S. military were running the basic infrastructure and food supplies. There was no frontier guard and I had entered the country without a visa. The Afghan government seemed to me hardly to exist. Yet these men were apparently well established.

  The car turned into the Foreign Ministry, and the gate guards saluted and stood back. As I climbed the stairs, I felt that I was moving unnaturally quickly and that the men had noticed this. A secretary showed us into Mr. Yuzufi's office without knocking. For a moment Yuzufi stared at us from behind his desk. Then he stood, straightened his baggy pin-striped jacket, and showed the men to the most senior position in the room. They walked slowly on the linoleum flooring, looking at the furniture Yuzufi had managed to assemble since he had inherited an empty office: the splintered desk, the four mismatched filing cabinets in different shades of olive green, and the stove, which made the room smell strongly of gasoline.

  The week I had known Yuzufi comprised half his career in the Foreign Ministry. A fortnight earlier he had been in Pakistan. The day before he had given me tea and a boiled sweet, told me he admired my journey, laughed at a photograph of my father in a kilt, and discussed Persian poetry. This time he did not greet me but instead sat in a chair facing me and asked, "What has happened?"

  Before I could reply, the man with the goatee cut in. "What is this foreigner doing here?"

  "These men are from the Security Service," said Yuzufi.

  I nodded. I noticed that Yuzufi had clasped his hands together and that his hands, like mine, were trembling slightly.

  "I will translate to make sure you understand what they are asking," continued Yuzufi. "Tell them your intentions. Exactly as you told me."

  I looked into the eyes of the man on my left. "I am planning to walk across Afghanistan. From Herat to Kabul. On foot." I was not breathing deeply enough to complete my phrases. I was surprised they didn't interrupt. "I am following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India. I want to get away from the roads. Journalists, aid workers, and tourists mostly travel by car, but I—"

  "There are no tourists," said the man in the stiff jacket, who had not yet sp
oken. "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is midwinter—there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?"

  "Thank you very much for your advice. I note those three points." I guessed from his tone that such advice was intended as an order. "But I have spoken to the Cabinet," I said, misrepresenting a brief meeting with the young secretary to the Minister of Social Welfare. "I must do this journey."

  "Do it in a year's time," said the man in the black suit.

  He had taken from Yuzufi the tattered evidence of my walk across South Asia and was examining it: the clipping from the newspaper in western Nepal, "Mr. Stewart is a pilgrim for peace"; the letter from the Conservator, Second Circle, Forestry Department, Himachal Pradesh, India, "Mr. Stewart, a Scot, is interested in the environment"; from a District Officer in the Punjab and a Secretary of the Interior in a Himalayan state and a Chief Engineer of the Pakistan Department of Irrigation requesting "All Executive Engineers (XENs) on the Lower Bari Doab to assist Mr. Stewart, who will be undertaking a journey on foot to research the history of the canal system."

  "I have explained this," I added, "to His Excellency the Emir's son, the Minister of Social Welfare, when he also gave me a letter of introduction."

  "From His Excellency Mir Wais?"

  "Here." I handed over the sheet of letterhead paper I had received from the Minister's secretary. "Mr. Stewart is a medieval antiquary interested in the anthropology of Herat."

  "But it is not signed."

  "Mr. Yuzufi lost the signed copy."

  Yuzufi, who was staring at the ground, nodded slightly.

  The two men talked together for a few minutes. I did not try to follow what they were saying. I noticed, however, that they were using Iranian—not Afghan—Persian. This and their clothes and their manner made me think they had spent a great deal of time with the Iranian intelligence services. I had been questioned by the Iranians, who seemed to suspect me of being a spy. I did not want to be questioned by them again.

  The man in the stiff jacket said, "We will allow him to walk to Chaghcharan. But our gunmen will accompany him all the way." Chaghcharan was halfway between Herat and Kabul and about a fortnight into my journey.

  The villagers with whom I was hoping to stay would be terrified by a secret police escort. This was presumably the point. But why were they letting me do the journey at all when they could expel me? I wondered if they were looking for money. "Thank you so much for your concern for my security," I said, "but I am quite happy to take the risk. I have walked alone across the other Asian countries without any problems."