Magic Bus (22 page)

At nine o'clock, the city, which resonated all day with the sound of bicycle bells and grinding gears, falls silent. The streets become deserted. Even though the Taliban's nightly curfew has been lifted, old habits die hard.

I climb up to the roof of the Mustapha, balancing a tea glass on my notebook, to write under the stars. Around me Kabul appears enchanted; silhouetted houses stepping above the black fastness of the rock, free of dirt, flies, death. I will the clocks to stand still for a minute, to be frozen in time, to let me capture the moment. Of course the vision is a fancy, an evasion of all that wounds and defeats us in daily life. I reach for my pen to put the thought into words when a trembling seizes me, thinking of the real darkness that will descend again on Kabul in the light of morning.

I need to see the Buddhas, or at least the space filled by their absence. The HiAce minibus heads north from Kabul through the Ghorband valley – which Dervla Murphy likened to the Garden of Eden – towards Nuristan, the land of light, then hangs a left over the Shebar pass. Eight dusty, bone-crunching hours grind away covering the 140 miles, rising on fantastic corkscrew roads from the fertile plateau into the frozen splendour of the mountains.

We reach Bamiyan at sunset, flaxen light spilling down its long, lentil-red valley, glancing the sheer sandstone cliffs. A steppe eagle soars above the one-street town. Beyond the lines of silver-barked
sinjit
trees, the cliff face is pitted with myriad caves, once the cells of monks, and my eyes are drawn toward the gigantic gaping alcoves.

Bamiyan was a waystation and pilgrimage site on the Silk Road as well as on the hippie trail. For centuries, Hellenic, Persian, Hindu and Chinese culture were woven together here like an intricate Afghan rug. Buddhism had swept west from India along the same road that the Intrepids trekked east. The two Buddhas, the tallest standing statues ever made of him, were carved from the rock face around the sixth century AD. In 632, the visiting Chinese monk Hsuen Tsung noted the town's ten convents, its one thousand priests and the statues with ‘golden hues which sparkle on every side, their precious ornaments dazzling the eye by their brightness'.

A couple of centuries passed before Islam sent the monks packing from the valley. The great carved figures, their faces covered with gold masks and their niches painted with symbolism borrowed from Greek, Indian and Sassanid art, went largely unmolested for 1,500 years. In the sixties, the Intrepids recognized Bamiyan as the
sanctuary it once had been, sleeping in tents and yurts, swimming in the blue lakes of Band-e Amir, at ease in a meeting point of East and West.

But in March 2001, the ‘un-Islamic' statues were shelled with tank fire and blasted by dynamite on the order of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Afghan soldiers are said to have refused to undertake the demolition and a special contingent of Sudanese, Chechens and Arabs had to be sent from Kabul. But the story has a ring of untruth to me. It will always be difficult for Afghans to accept that the greatest damage to the country was inflicted by themselves.

Robert Byron would not have missed the statues. ‘Neither has any artistic value,' he wrote in
The Road to Oxiana
. ‘A lot of monastic navvies were given picks and told to copy some frightful semi-Hellenistic image from India or China. The result has not even the dignity of labour.' Bruce Chatwin likened the larger Buddha to an upright whale in a dry dock. Carla called them stocky, large-footed and clumsy.

But at dusk, when the shadows are deepest, a trick of the light now seems to trace in their place a refined outline, ethereal and freed of what Byron called their ‘monstrous, flaccid bulk'. The immense
trompe-l'oeil
illustrates the enduring ethos of the valley; the glories that men can create – and destroy – through faith. The Buddhas seem most poignant in their absence.

I wander towards the rubble. A path skirts a ruined tank, crosses a stream, then rises to the gaping holes. A boy soldier takes my hand and leads me by torchlight into a warren of chambers linked by passages and stairways. I'm astonished by the number of caves, as if the mountain's face had been peppered by gunshot, which of course it was. Above the plastered walls and ruined arches no painted ceiling remains intact. The fragments of golden-hued fresco are blackened by smoke.

I climb on to a shale ledge near the top of the niche and remember that Rudy, driver of the Last Silver Dart, often stopped in Bamiyan. Once, he jumped on to the large Buddha's head. In one of the highest cells, Penny indulged in the Bam-bam-bamiyan,
read
Siddhartha
and gazed out from the sheer rockface cut like the end of a loaf of bread towards the spectral peaks.

Now I sit on the edge, my feet dangling two hundred feet above the ground, thinking not of what I've seen but what I couldn't see on my trip: Penny's imaginary candles, the stars behind the new moon, the museum's pulverized Bodhisattva, the vanished Buddhas.

In my shoulder bag is Penny's
Siddhartha
. In my hand it falls open to a marked paragraph. ‘When someone is seeking,' I read as she read, ‘it happens quite easily that he sees only the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.'

As the sun sets behind the Hindu Kush, an Apache helicopter flies overhead and I hear singing.

Only now do I notice that the cliff's lower flanks are not deserted. A dozen families are living in the caves, poor refugees scraping out an existence on half-measures of rice and a couple of chickens. Boys scavenge firewood on the plain to feed glowing cooking fires. A girl lays out her father's prayer mat by a mud doorway. A grey-moustached elder exudes an aura of dignified old age as he scoops trickles of water for his ablutions.

I step toward them, beating a path along the hillside with the soldier, not wishing to intrude but anxious to find the source of the singing. I've heard no live music since leaving Turkey.

Over an arm of scree I see the boy. He is sitting quite alone in the dirt, drawing stones toward him. I watch as he gathers them into a square of walls. When he finishes, he places a threadbare toy figure inside his building. Then he knocks it down with sudden violence, scattering the stones across the rough slope.

I crouch beside the boy, who is no more than five or six years old, as he begins again to collect the stones. For a moment he ignores me.

‘What do the words mean?' I ask the soldier. The song has a curious ring of familiarity.

‘Words are English,' the soldier replies. ‘You not speak English?'

The singing is phonetic, a feat of memory, and I don't recognize a single word.

‘But what is he building?' I ask the soldier.

‘Hose,' the boy answers me. ‘Cookie hose.'

‘Cookie house?' I say.

In Kabul I heard a story about a child who became terrified of aircraft after the Coalition bombardment. Every time a plane passed overhead he raised an imaginary gun and pretended to shoot at it. To ease his fear his mother told him that aircraft now dropped sweets instead of bombs. But cookies?

‘Cookie hose on TV,' the boy adds unexpectedly.

An hour later, at my one-room hotel-restaurant the owner braises kebabs, dropping an egg and meat pieces into a sizzling metal platter set on the coals. With blackened fingers he serves the oily
kadai
to my table-cum-bed. A bullet round has pierced its frame, leaving a flower of torn metal at my elbow.

‘TV?' he says when I relate the story of the singing, housebuilding child. ‘You talk to Sanjar. He make TV. You want more chips?'

In the morning I search out Sanjar, which doesn't take long. His electronic shop lies across the road. Behind the dusty window are stacks of televisions, both new and prehistoric, as well as tinny transistors and a rental library of Bollywood epics. On the wall are Sony schematic diagrams and fading pictures of Ahamd Zahir, the Afghan Elvis. Beyond a curtain is the studio.

Sanjar is Hazara, a tall and stringy young man without an ounce of fat on him. His light-brown hair is curly and, behind his dark glasses, his hazel eyes are optimistic. He never stops moving, yet he radiates a calmness, a kind of peace that can't be touched. In the shop – while upgrading a CD machine into a DVD player – he tells me that he is a trained engineer, which means he worked one winter in a relative's shop in Peshawar. He is probably all of twenty years old. Survival in Afghanistan depends on resourcefulness, on rising to the occasion and on the occasional lie.

A couple of months ago, an aid worker stopped by the shop
with a small, broken video camera, he tells me. Sanjar hadn't been able to repair it – at least he said he couldn't do it – and, as the model was outdated, the foreigner gave it to him. Over the next few evenings, he managed to fix the camera, checking it out by recording Bamiyan's street life: his fellow shop-keepers, the rheumy-eyed beggars, kids playing in the ruins of the bazaar.

The repair was fortuitous, but even more rewarding for Sanjar was the excitement of neighbours seeing themselves on screen. The valley, with a population of 50,000 souls, has no local TV station. There is a radio operator – the upstart Radio Bamyaan – but Sanjar decided the town needed community television. So he set to work to build it.

‘Just like in
ET
,' he tells me. ‘I collected stuff together and start to send messages.'

With two cycle rims, a discarded satellite receiver, a pair of VCR recorders and twenty-five transistors, Sanjar launched his backroom station. Behind his shop curtain he set up a table with a world map as background and two 250-watt bulbs for lighting. He updated a vintage Soviet military transmitter, which had been discarded by the state broadcaster, then carried a battery-powered TV set around town to test its reception. Additional condensers and diodes increased its range from a hundred metres to almost three kilometres.

Every evening, Sanjar broadcasts two hours of programming, except on the occasions when his generator breaks down. Local traders are given free air-time, as is the town's doctor, to disseminate information on physiotherapy and iodine deficiency. Village
maliks
air public announcements. Spare air-time is filled by popping any convenient DVD into the player.
Friends
,
Rambo
and all of Sanjay Khan's films are perennial favourites. Plans for a phone-in programme, offering viewers somewhere to turn to for advice outside the family or mosque, are on hold until more people have telephones.

He tells me the most popular spot by far is
We Are Bamiyan
. With his hand-me-down Panasonic, Sanjar wanders the valley's lanes and orchards, filming the harvest and first day of school,
quizzing locals about their hopes and demands. In his hurried yet calm manner he draws out men – and women – by asking them how, if they were the mayor or a government minister, they would solve this or that problem. Back at the shop he edits the tapes, adding titles and background music. His aim is both to make television a friend of the viewer and, borrowing a phrase, to encourage truth and reconciliation.

‘For twenty-seven years, people were just surviving,' he tells me. ‘Now they see the newest DVD movies and want to have a kind of Western life. This brings new pressures and problems.'

Sanjar also includes children in his programme. Most young Afghans have only ever known war. By one calculation, two-thirds of children have witnessed the killing of a relative, friend or neighbour. The legacy of loss, compounded by displacement and poverty, has scared millions of vulnerable hearts and minds.

To encourage young people to talk about their experiences, Sanjar arranged and recorded a
kishranu jirga
, or junior assembly. He brought ten boys together and asked one of them to lie on the floor on a large piece of paper. Sanjar drew a line around the body, then instructed the boys to decorate that outline with crayons and chalk.

When they finished, Sanjar – his running camera mounted on a recycled machine-gun tripod – pointed at the drawing's eyes and asked each of them in turn, ‘What do you like to see?' and ‘What don't you like to see?' He wrote down their responses on the sheet of paper.

Next he pointed at the ears, then the nose, asking again what the boys liked and didn't like to hear and smell. He carried on with other parts of the body; the mouth for eating and speaking, the hands for doing, the feet for going, the head for thinking, the heart for feeling.

‘I don't like tasting bad water,' said one boy. ‘I like the smell of the mosque on Friday,' reported another. ‘I cried seeing my father die,' responded the smallest boy.

‘Where do you feel pain?' he then asked, and each child told a story about their fears and the family or friends who helped them
to cope. All the children's ideas were recorded on the sheet around the life-size drawn figure.

The next morning, he hung the drawing in the town office to stress its importance. Only one neighbour thought the
kishranu jirga
was a waste of time. ‘If we beat children with a stick,' he said, ‘it helps them to understand everything.' The next day, Sanjar repeated the exercise with ten girls.

‘This is what I do,' he tells me simply, humbly, not pausing while he drafts the day's news. ‘A good Muslim should help his community. God chose me to bring television to Bamiyan.'

He has no operating licence, which irritates the state broadcaster RTA. Twice, Sanjar went to Kabul to try to reassure them that his little station benefits the community. The local warlord also threatened to shut him down, arriving in person at the shop with half a dozen armed bodyguards.

‘Of course I must modify my content from time to time,' he admits. ‘Afghanistan was ruined by Pakistan, by Russia, but most of all by ourselves. We are left with only one set of clothes, one mouthful of food, one last chance. Islam says that everyone carries their own burden. You can't be damned by Adam and you can't be saved by Isa – your Jesus. We each must make our own life now.' Sanjar smiles, then looks at the clock. ‘Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.'