The Storyteller's Daughter

It is hard to put into words the feelings I have watching events unfold in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As Pakistan descends into the pit of war and as Afghanistan continues to dig its pit yet deeper, my feelings of hopelessness over these places grows deeper.

Since my brother is still in Kabul, each piece of news is so very personal and real. We wait for news from him after each major attack. We wait and we pray.

I used to keep a piece of shrapnel and a shell (the kind used in war, not the kind found on beaches…) on my dresser so that I would never forget Afghanistan while it was at war. For a brief time, I put them away. The Taliban had fallen. Karzai was in power. Things were looking good. But those days are gone.

From the time we were forced to leave in ’79, it seems I have spent my life praying for and crying over Afghanistan. I was reluctant to ever love Pakistan because I always felt it was a place of waiting – to get back to Afghanistan. But then Pakistan, too, found its way into my heart.

I have just finished reading “The Storyteller’s Daughter” for the second time. I highly recommend it to all Americans to understand a bit more about the Afghan mentality from a mostly-western perspective. It is fabulously written and incredibly insightful. I know all the places the author talks about in the book. She was in Peshawar at the same time we were there in the late 80s. I can picture the people, places and events as if they were somehow real again.

And that is a problem I have. Sometimes my childhood seems so far away and wild that I am not sure I myself believe it.

Inspired by the book, I sat down with the girls last week and began telling them stories. I told them of how Afghanistan came to be in this sad state – its third war since 1979. First the Russians, then themselves, then two great towers fell and now my very own country is fighting my very own country. I told them of the wild Afghans and Pushtuns, firing guns up in the air for no apparent reason and swaggering around in their unkempt turbans and laughing at death itself.

I told them our family’s stories. Tales of traveling in the most beautiful place in the world – the Himalayan Mountains, of glacier crossings, boulders crashing in landslides, hiking for hours in monsoons, of being escorted into the fronteir by truckloads of soldiers, feeling the shudder of impact as bombs landed just over the border, frequent security threats, playing “Russians and Afghans” with my little friends, the day my father met the king of Afghanistan, of how he trained the current presidential hopeful, Abdullah Abdullah, in ophthalmology, of riding camels and the very top of trucks and roof racks, of my brothers pushing our cars up the mountains of Turkey, of water shortages (1/2 bucket bath a week), of raiding the boys by sneaking at night through a mile of woods whose tales of panther and snow leopard sightings kept our hearts beating wildly, of my brothers trying to get into Afghanistan by banding up with Mujahedeen, who, for one crazy night of stallion fighting kept their horses in our backyard, of my brothers crossing mountain passes into the interior of Afghanistan, of listening to monkeys roll down our roof which they used as a slide, of riding down the Kabul Gorge on bikes, of watching the wildly wonderful horseback game of buskashi – racing to get out of the way as the horses stampeded in our direction, of very reluctantly sitting on a camel for our family's Christmas picture (above), of seeing the rise of the red flags of communism, of the hundreds of people that came to our door for food and soap handed out by my mother, of the weight my father bore treating thousands of the war-wounded, of walking through refugee camps whose inhabitants endured unimaginable horrors and who now struggled to survive in the blazing heat or freezing cold, of amazing hospitality and generosity … and sneaking to the border of Afghanistan through tribal territory, fully veiled, just to catch a glimpse of my beloved country.

Did all that really happen? Or am I just imagining it? It all seems so far away and hazy. The girls sit, spellbound – their food not even reaching their mouths.

They don’t ever want to visit. It all seems too scary. How can I explain to them the pull of these places… the incredible love for the country of my birth? Just as in the book, Afghanistan and our lives there all seems like a myth - a fairytale of a place once beautiful and magical.

Someday I'll read them my father's book about all this and more - but in the meantime, they'll have to listen to me, the storyteller's daughter.