Afghanistan and remembrance I

The woman from Kabul

When I saw the two-minute silence being observed by British soldiers in Afghanistan yesterday, I thought of the young woman from Kabul who entered our lives, then disappeared just as strangely.
     She fled her native country soon after the Taliban arrived. How she managed to escape with her husband and two small children, and how the expedition was financed, I never discovered; such details were conversationally off-limits. They arrived at Heathrow early one winter's morning, looked out, and saw that it was snowing. They were interviewed at the airport, satisfied the authorities that they were who they said they were, and then taken to a place outside London where asylum seekers stay until they are dispersed.
     Some weeks later, they were put on an overnight bus, told only that they were going to some unidentified city in the north and found themselves in Glasgow; not that they knew it was Glasgow. But they sensed it was Scotland (they saw a sign for the Bank of Scotland) and they had heard of Scotland. Back home, on the radio, they had heard a comedy programme satirising Scottish thrift. They were given the keys of a flat on the 14th floor and a £20 note to tide them over. The young woman's husband boarded a bus to go shopping, put the note in the machine, and was told by the driver that there would be no change; exact fare only.
     After this first exposure to Scottish thrift, the young woman and her family settled down to life on the 14th floor, where the neighbours were invisible, men living alone. They expected they would be here for a few months while their application for leave to remain was processed. The months passed and became years; applications were rejected, appeals launched, fresh papers awaited, and we heard pessimistic reports about their chances, reports we did not pass on. The husband, an educated man, a bookseller, did not adapt well to his new circumstances in a strange country; he hated doing nothing, being reliant on state welfare; it was explained to us that this was inconceivable in Kabul, where there was a culture of work; when they came to Britain they had not realised that, as asylum seekers, they would not be allowed to seek employment.
     Time passed; still no determination of their case. The young woman feared the dawn raid, the removal to Dungavel, the flight back – to what? They had no home left in Afghanistan; no possessions; their closest relatives now lived in Scandinavia; they feared for their very lives. But a sort of normality was possible even in this agonising limbo. The children, both girls, went to school for an education which the Taliban would have denied them, the education of women being forbidden. The girls acquired Glasgow accents; their mother sent us photographs of them in their school uniforms. Meanwhile, she somehow secured a place at a Scottish university, one of the very few asylum seekers ever to do so.
     With her permission, I took the calculated risk to publicise her case, through this magazine and through the programmes we run for young people. I worried that such exposure might alienate the authorities, but there was also the hope that it might hasten a positive conclusion.
     The waiting simply continued.

If you want to understand the psychology of Afghanistan and its people, the book to read is not a history of the country, or a discussion of its politics, but a masterpiece of travel writing, the account of a journey undertaken partly on horseback in 1927 by an Eton and Oxford scholar, Robert Byron, still in his early twenties, who went in search of its glorious Islamic architecture. There is quite a lot about architecture in the book – I wonder how many of those shrines and temples have survived the ravages of modern warfare – but there is much more about chance encounters, improvised situations, and moments of time captured with wonderful exactness.
     Here is a Punjabi in the Afghan medical service:
     'It is bad time to be here, sir, in Afghanistan. There will be trouble now King Nadir Shah is murdered. In one month there will be trouble. Or perhaps in the spring, when the tribes can move better in the mountains. But I think in one month. Do what you want here, sir, quickly. See what you want. Then clear out, double time. I go on leave now. When I can arrange lorry, I and my family go. We go to Kandahar, and then to my home in Lahore. This is a bad country, sir. I hope I will not return ever.'
     Do what you want here, sir, quickly....the advice resonates across 82 years, across centuries before it, across invasion and counter-invasion, until it hovers in the air over an Armistice Day silence.
     Robert returned in the spring. There was no trouble in the spring. There was a new car in Herat ('dear old Herat'), a dark blue Chevrolet, 1933 model. Fewer people were carrying rifles, though everyone grasped a rose, or had one in his mouth. Perhaps, Robert speculated, roses had displaced rifles. But not for long. In Afghanistan, there was always trouble around the corner, if not next month, if not in the spring, sometime. But they loved roses, and Chevrolets, and jazz. When Bruce Chatwin returned in the 1960s, Duke Ellington was touring the country, his last big tour, and Chatwin found him in the company of Prince Daud, the King's cousin, an old Mussolini blackshirt, later to be murdered in the palace.
     For Robert Byron, Afghanistan was 'Asia without the inferiority complex'. He was struck by how everything boiled down to an inevitable nationalism, a desire for self-sufficiency, a wish to cut a figure in the world and 'no longer be called interesting for lack of plumbing'.

I discovered that these qualities were personified in the young woman from Kabul. She had a fierce pride and self-belief; even on the 14th floor she never lost it. She wished to have an education for herself and her children. She would have stayed in Afghanistan under the Taliban, worn the burka, endured the silly privations, had it not been for the prohibition of education for women. She finished her university course in Scotland and sent me the dissertation for any last-minute corrections of her English. Few corrections were necessary. She was awarded an honours degree. Still, of course, she could not work. Then, to our great surprise, we learned that she was no longer in Glasgow, no longer in Scotland, but had moved to London, and that she had been granted leave to remain in this country. I could not quite understand why she had uprooted the children from a school where they were settled and happy. We have not heard from her again.
     Robert Byron, a brilliant, meteoric talent, a man who despised appeasement, died at the age of 36 when his ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean in 1941.
     So, yesterday, he was remembered too.

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