Farishta Read online

  “Great,” I moaned. This was the third wedding I’d been invited to in the past six weeks.

  “Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “you’re not the only one from the PRT who’s attending. The colonel, the chief of staff, Major Davies, and several other officers will be joining you.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said with a laugh, “I don’t mind attending, but the other officers won’t really be joining me. They’ll go together to the men’s party while I’ll spend the evening alone in a separate hall with three hundred women I’ve never met.”

  He rolled his eyes in mock sympathy.

  “I do enjoy the Bollywood music and the dancing, at least for the first hour or two,” I admitted, “but aren’t weddings supposed to come with champagne ? ”

  “All the weddings I go to,” he agreed.

  Since my language skills were still a state secret, I couldn’t tell the ops officer how frustrating it was not to be able to talk to the women at these events when I was perfectly capable of doing so. Listening in on conversations about their hopes for their daughters was fascinating, but there were so many questions I wanted to ask them. It was torture to remain mute.

  Layers of mascara, glitter-encrusted hair, glossy red lips, matching fingernails, impossibly high heels, and floor-length gowns were the standard attire at these events. I was always seriously underdressed, but tolerated as the odd foreign woman at the gathering.

  Almost two hours had past when I spotted Nilofar on the other side of the cavernous room, speaking to a group of young women. Nilofar saw me approaching and ran up, grinning broadly. Her eyes were dark with kohl, and her fitted pale green dress glittered with sequins. She had skipped the customary lacquered coiffure, allowing her lustrous hair to fall loose down her back. I smiled imagining the expression on Rahim’s face if he could see her looking like this.

  “Angela,” she cried, kissing me on both cheeks, “I didn’t know you were coming to this wedding.”

  “And I didn’t know you would be here.” I was thrilled to have my young friend to talk to for the next few hours.

  “Ahmad’s new wife’s mother is my father’s second cousin.” She laughed. “We are Hazara, and that cousin is one-quarter Hazara from my great-grandmother. The rest of her family is Tajik. They don’t like to talk about their Hazara blood, but my father does business with their family, so they had to invite us. All Mazāris are related to one another somehow. That’s why our weddings are so big.”

  Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper as she took my hand and led me across the room to a thick velvet curtain that separated the men from the women. “Do you want to see the men’s party? I have been watching Rahim dance, and now one of your soldiers is also dancing.”

  “But women aren’t allowed to be with the men, Nilofar.” I worried that her impetuous nature would draw attention to her budding relationship with Rahim, which I feared was becoming too serious. The consequences for her if it got out of hand would be far greater than for Rahim. A young man could be forgiven such a transgression. A young woman’s reputation would be tarnished forever, and no man would want her for his bride.

  “Don’t worry; no one will see us,” she said, leading me to a couch that had been pushed against the thick floor-to-ceiling drapes. She nodded at an elderly woman dozing in an overstuffed chair near us. She had been assigned as a sentry, but despite the noise was snoring quietly.

  Nilofar sat on an arm of the couch and poked her finger through a hole in the curtain. “Here it is,” she said, peering quickly through the opening. “Look! The major and Rahim are both dancing!”

  This I had to see. It was hard to picture the straitlaced major doing anything as rash as dancing at an Afghan wedding, especially given his reaction to my little romp around the atrium with the Romanians. I pressed my eye to the narrow slit in the curtain and had a panoramic view of the other half of the hall, where several hundred men were eating, talking, and dancing in clusters.

  At the center of a group of laughing, swaying men was Mark, arms raised over his head, hands clapping. His eyes were closed and his head was thrown back. Rahim, whistling and shouting, was in the circle of men that surrounded him. Mark’s sinuous body in his camouflage uniform swayed to the beat with a wild abandon that even the Romanian soldiers did not possess. Just then, I felt Nilofar’s hand pulling me back.

  “Angela, the old lady is waking up,” she warned as she dragged me away from the curtain. “We have to go back to my table before she sees us. All the girls do this; you just can’t look for too long.”

  “You’re an early riser,” said Mark as he strolled by the rose garden on his way to breakfast at six thirty the following morning. I was waging a losing battle against a massive invasion of aphids.

  “So are you,” I replied. “Did you enjoy last night’s wedding? ”

  His crisp uniform and formal demeanor contrasted starkly with the man I had seen dancing with wild abandon the evening before.

  “It was tolerable,” he said. “I know the interpreters like us to attend, and I don’t really mind.”

  I’ll say you don’t!

  He stared at the bottle of noxious brown liquid I was spraying on the buds and stems of the bushes. There were no garden stores in Mazār, and after the first wave of aphids had attacked my adopted rose garden, Fuzzy, whose mother was the head of her garden club in Nottingham, had suggested removing and boiling the tobacco from a few packs of cigarettes.

  “Is that your famous tobacco tea?” Mark asked with a hint of a smile.

  “It is, but I think the aphids are starting to like it.”

  “Don’t give up, Angela. Never give up.”

  I looked up from my spraying to reply, but saw only the back of Mark’s uniform and his dark short-cropped hair as he headed for the officers’ mess.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  June 9, 2005

  In early June, Nilofar and I began slipping quietly out of the PRT compound under our burkas to demonstrate my solar ovens at a nearby Hazara displaced-persons camp. It was only a few blocks from the PRT, but so well concealed by the towering mud walls of the family compounds in our sector that I had not been aware of its existence until she mentioned it.

  Nilofar had heard about my solar-cooking experiments on the roof of the PRT from Rahim, and had come at lunchtime several weeks earlier to see what I was making. On the day of her visit, I was preparing a traditional Afghan dish using ingredients I’d purchased in town.

  “This is incredible!” She wiped her lips and laughed with delight as I spooned more of the tender spiced lamb and rice onto her plate.

  While we ate, she told me about a Hazara camp near the PRT, which she had visited a number of times with her classmates from law school. They were helping the refugees document their land claims against Governor Daoud’s Tajik followers. Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

  “Angela-jan, Rahim is Tajik, but he is a good Tajik. Did you know that there are many bad ones who hate the Hazara people? They call us dogs. I even heard bad things being said about us at Ahmad’s wedding.”

  “Yes, Nilofar, I do know,” I replied, avoiding her eyes and growing silent. I didn’t know what to say about this absurd prejudice, which was forcing these two young Afghans to hide their love for each other.

  We ate for a few more minutes without speaking until Nilofar grabbed one of my solar ovens and lifted it into the air. “Angela, you must show these amazing boxes to the Hazara women in the camp,” she said before scraping the final bits of qabele palau from her plate.

  “I would love to,” I replied. “I’ll see if Sergeant Major will let us have a vehicle tomorrow.”

  Nilofar objected immediately to my plan. She was certain that arriving at the Hazara camp with a British military escort would frighten the women.

  “Angela, let’s put on burkas and walk over without the soldiers,” she said with a conspiratorial grin. “It’s very close to the PRT and no one will notice, I promise you. I will tell Rahim
to let us in when we return.”

  Inside the PRT, I enjoyed an extraordinary amount of freedom. Officially, I reported to no one, not even the colonel, although as a courtesy I consulted with him on almost everything I did. No one at the embassy in Kabul had the slightest interest in what I was doing on a daily basis. My weekly reports and an occasional memo were all they wanted.

  This level of independence was restricted to life behind the mud walls that surrounded our compound. For good reason, no one was allowed to leave camp without a security escort. Despite the relative calm in the north, and even with the required force protection, we were still exposed every time we went out the gate to the possibility of suicide bombers, ambush, or IEDs.

  I knew that some of my male diplomatic colleagues assigned to NATO PRTs elsewhere in Afghanistan had given up trying to get military escorts for their trips outside the wire. At least one, who had grown a beard and occasionally carried a weapon, drove himself to meetings, alone and unescorted—not a viable option in this country for a female diplomat.

  It would be a risky move to leave camp on my own. I certainly couldn’t ask anyone’s permission. But it was just too tempting. I agreed to Nilofar’s suggestion and met her at the gate the following morning.

  We pulled the burkas over our heads while still hidden inside the covered archway and stepped into the street carrying the solar ovens in burlap bags. Unable to see anywhere but straight ahead through the tiny square of netting, I immediately stumbled into a large pothole. Nilofar laughed and helped me up. Although I always took my burka on overnight patrols, I would only put it on for my bathroom breaks. Walking along a dirt road, carrying a large bundle, and trying to keep up with my young friend while draped in this shroud turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined.

  Nilofar assured me that when we left the PRT carrying parcels with our faces and bodies concealed under the burkas, the Afghan guards and the British sentries in the watchtowers would all assume we were the laundry ladies and ignore us. She was right. It was as though we were invisible.

  Our first demonstration was met with astonishment by the women whose children wandered daily through our neighborhood scrounging for fuel.

  We cooked a pot of rice and answered their questions.

  “How long will it take to cook the rice? ” asked one of the women.

  “One hour,” I replied as Nilofar translated.

  “That’s too long,” shouted another, who was sitting in front of her tent.

  “How long does it take your children to gather fuel for your cooking fires every day?” I asked.

  “It takes all day, but they are children. What else can they do?” she answered.

  “They could go to school,” I said as I watched her six- and seven-year-old daughters depositing scraps of paper and bundles of twigs in piles near her makeshift tent.

  Each time we arrived in the camp, a few more curious women would gather to watch us cook and demonstrate the construction of the cardboard-and-aluminum-foil boxes. Everything needed to make a solar oven was available in Mazār-i-Sharīf, except for the aluminum foil.

  In April, I had mailed a check to my brother, Bill, who purchased forty-five rolls of heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap and mailed them to my APO address. With a huge supply of foil stashed under my bed at the PRT, I inaugurated what I called Operation Sunshine, taking solar ovens on every patrol I accompanied and giving demonstrations whenever we stopped in a village. Enthusiastically supported by the colonel, who remained unaware of my clandestine visits to the Hazara camp, I recruited a few of the soldiers to help me build more solar ovens in the atrium a few nights a week. My unauthorized day trips with Nilofar would remain secret for a while longer.

  THIRTY-SIX

  June 29, 2005

  “Sir, eleven trucks filled with men and equipment have just pulled up in front of the PRT. There’s an American bloke at the gate says he wants to speak to you.” The duty NCO was out of breath after running from the ops room, through the bullpen, and into the colonel’s office. “Our internal phone lines are down again, sir.”

  “Damn, I wasn’t expecting them until next week,” groaned the colonel. “Take the American to the officers’ mess and give him a cup of coffee. I’ll be over in a minute.

  “Angela, would you come in here, please?” called Colonel Jameson after he had dismissed the sergeant.

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t discuss this with you earlier,” he apologized, “but I was under strict orders from our headquarters in Kabul to keep it close hold. I had planned to tell you before they arrived since your government is funding this activity.”

  “What activity would that be, Colonel? ” I asked dryly. I walked over to his window and gazed down at the long line of white trucks idling in the road.

  “Poppy eradication,” he said with a sigh.

  “It’s a little late for that,” I replied. “The biggest poppy harvest in Balkh’s history has been under way for the past month.”

  It was not surprising that a U.S.-funded operation of this scope was about to take place in my area of responsibility and I knew nothing about it. The embassy was well aware of my objections to the poppy eradication program. Perhaps Plawner had decided not to tell me ahead of time because he knew I’d lodge a protest.

  I felt embarrassed and betrayed to have been left so completely out of the picture by my own embassy. “There are thousands of hectares under cultivation, although it doesn’t matter much at this point where they go since a good portion of the opium paste has already been scraped from the bulbs and packaged for transport. All this will do is piss off the locals.”

  “You’re right, Angela, but it’s out of our hands.”

  “Why won’t those idiots in Kabul listen to reason? ” I fumed. “Isn’t there any way to stop this? ”

  “No, there isn’t,” the colonel said grimly. “I know full well the danger this presents for our boys. We’ll just have to keep the MOTs out of the eradication areas for a while. We’re not expecting much violence, but there are certain to be some very angry farmers.”

  On the second day of the operation, I approached the liaison officer for the eradication team after dinner. He was bunking at the PRT. “How are you determining which fields to destroy? ” I asked.

  “Ma’am, I don’t decide what gets cut, and I am not at liberty to discuss my activities with you. My head office said you should send your questions to the people in your embassy who are managing this contract, and they’ll relay the questions to my supervisor.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he added as he headed into the pub for a beer and left me standing alone in the dining hall, wondering if I should even bother to report this.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  July 2, 2005

  Any time there was a lull in my increasingly busy schedule, I would haul a few hundred more pages of my predecessor’s outdated but still confidential reports and cables into the basement of the main building, feed them into the shredder, and grind them into confetti. I resented having to waste my time disposing of classified material that Brooks should have chucked as soon as he read it. But it was now my responsibility, and I was determined to complete this task before the end of the month.

  “Destroying more state secrets? ” Mark asked as he exited the ops room, which was always kept cool to protect the communications equipment. His uniform was crisp and he carried a steaming cup of coffee. I was in jeans, sandals, and a tank top—and drenched in sweat. It was at least 110 outside and more than 90 degrees in the open hallway outside the ops room.

  “I can’t answer that question, Mark, or I’ll have to kill you,” I shot back with a grin, dropping another bundle of paper into the howling maw of the shredder and brushing my hair out of my eyes.

  “Angela,” he said as he made a discreet sweep of my dripping torso, “I could ask one of the men to help you with that.”

  “Thanks, Mark, but I’m responsible for cleaning up the mess left by Mr. Brooks.”

  “Why are you to
rturing yourself?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded as I pulled another sheaf of papers from the folder.

  “Well, look at you,” he began, “you’re never . . .”

  “Yes, look at me,” I interrupted, shoving so much paper into the shredder that it shuddered to a halt.

  “I’ve been shredding these damned papers for months, and I’m still at it. No one in Kabul is responding to my reports, and I’m still lying to the one person in this place who respects me and who I really care about.”

  I threw the shredder into reverse, showering us both with a hail of torn paper.

  “You mean Rahim?” asked Mark as he stooped to gather up the scattered remains of Mr. Brooks’s documents.

  “Yes. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand it, Mark,” I said, still avoiding his gaze. “I’ve attended meetings with all the terps, filed endless reports stating that their translations are accurate, and my embassy still insists I keep my Dari a secret.”

  “Angela, Rahim is not the only person at the PRT who respects you,” he said softly.

  “Thank you for saying so,” I replied, clenching my jaw and raising my eyes to meet his.

  “It’s just that Rahim and I have developed a real bond, Mark.” I took a deep breath and continued. “I’m sure you know that I’m a widow.”

  He nodded, unsmiling.

  “I lost my husband when our embassy in Beirut was bombed years ago, but I was also pregnant. The concussion from the bomb caused me to lose the baby a few days later. My son would be twenty-three now—Rahim’s age—and Rahim has told me several times that he thinks of me almost like a second mother. Yet here I am still spying on him and lying to him.”