Fabulous vignettes in Afghanistan. I am in a bland western hotel in the desert, white tiles, travelers milling about but I am bored, so I leave to walk around outside.
The landscape opens up with fantastic open spaces, green brush, Native American like cave dwellings below, inset in rock formations. The walls are carved with Arabic tooling, like the decorations seen on the window treatments of an ornate vizier’s home; an arch outlined with five half circles. Black and white dots fill the space between the outlines; each arch small with respect to the caves, but repeated horizontally, in sets of three, along light brown walls at floor level.
Miniature entrances to another world.
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A bus comes by and I get on it. And it leads me further along the desert road, and down a slope before arriving suddenly into a town where the locals are.
The town bustles with tented market stalls, noise and dust, black robed people and kids running around. It scares me slightly that I am far from the hotel, a lone westerner in a crowd, in a town clearly unvisited by the hotel.
But it is the real deal.
Kids, shirtless, are laughing at me. I realize how exposed I am by myself, but the commotion and the press of people are exhilarating. And now I am out of the bus, climbing high and looking down on the street scenes. And below, I see the same Middle Eastern arches in the walls of the market.
Later I am in a tunnel. I think it is for cars, but I cannot be sure. It is dark, and kids further along the pathway, the same side of the tunnel, are pointing at me. It feels a little threatening, with only a single green metal guardrail separating me from the cars, the space very narrow between guardrail and wall. My big western body can barely fit through the space.
The kids yell over to a group coming up behind me, signal my presence. I push my hands against the wall, back flat against the rail, trying to stretch the path wider. At first the rail will not yield, and though the group is ignoring the kids I want to move on. Then on my next attempt, the green metal bends, the gap for the path widens, and the iron buckles and stretches into thin molten strands as it is pushed away from the wall.
I am back in the open, squatting down by the side of a street, at floor level, watching people walking, legs coming down the steps. I briefly glimpse another lone westerner in the crowd, he must have taken the same bus. It is comforting that I am not the only one to have ventured from the hotel. And another, a woman this time, a brief glimpse of long curly yellow hair, she reminds me of Carol B, thick ankles, seen from my low vantage point. She is also walking down the narrow street market steps, but she disappears as soon as I see her.
Then I am really high up and out in the open sun, on the platform of a temple, I could be on the top of a Hindu dais. A narrow ledge leads me across the front. I look down below, see the same market streets, and more of the cave dwelling, Arabic tooled, curlicues. Kids to my right, sit on a separate platform, further along the ledge. They stand at the top of a series of steps that include a red metal guardrail leading safely down to the market street. It is very narrow between my platform and the kids’.
Separating us is the same very narrow guardrail that was in the tunnel. I won’t make it through but this time I do not think it will stretch with my weight. And so I decide against trying.
Main photo by Zeledi via Wikimedia Commons
Arch photo by Maite Elorza via Flickr (Picture fewer circles, gold trim and in miniature)
