precisely I would be working, only that it was a distant but faithful place. The commitment was for one year, and I was also told it would be difficult and expensive to return early. Everyone knew what was meant by these phrases, though when I signed the document, I briefly entertained the notion that I would be going to one of the Gulf States. I also received an advance, representing a substantial fraction of the total remuneration.
For my fellow passengers on the bus out of the country, the advance and the distance was life-changing. This much was apparent from their demeanour and our silence as we wheezed our way through the mountains. Our minder had our ID; our direct interaction with the police at the checkpoints was limited. Hardly a meaningful sentence was uttered until we were ushered out of the bus into the bright sunlight of Kandahar. And there in front of us were our employers, bellowing our names and waving ID tags and passes. Rami Issay had brought a placard, I guess to spare himself the indignity of raising his voice. It had just one name on it, mine: “Mr. Rashid Siddiqui.” If he had tried such a tactic in my place of origin, he would have been trampled to death by like-named respondents.
But I should not be so unkind. If the events of my life had proceeded differently, I would be an engineer by now, and treating men such as him badly. We all have our circumstances and my task is to accommodate myself to my own.
When I approached him, he grinned widely and bowed. Peace was upon us both, and he took me through the process of getting through the camp gate. His combination of imperiousness and ebullience seemed to work well with the soldiers and soon enough, within a few hours, and after a body search of unprecedented thoroughness, we were through. From my first view of the ferenghee soldiers up close, my impression was that they were quite uncomfortably warm. They were English, that day—their uniforms said Royal Air Force regiment—and as pink in the face as pomegranates. They carried their odd, short English assault rifles slung over their shoulders. It was the first time I had seen thosestrange little weapons; in this part of the world, the AK-47 is the way people kill one another. How anyone shoots accurately with those British rifles is beyond me. One hears them called them “bullpups” and the word sounded appropriately silly to me. I couldn’t help smiling at them as these thoughts ran through my mind. But Rami Issay shot me a look and I sobered and glanced down. I thought then about a thousand Pashtun shredded by these toys and the tiny vicious bullets they spit out. I sobered further.
The base at Kandahar Air Field looked like the disaster relief camps they set up after earthquakes. Apart from a few shattered Soviet-era shacks, everything was prefabricated aluminum or canvas. Hardly a structure was more than a couple of years old. Whole building complexes were put together out of shipping containers. Every object not mounted upon an axle was surrounded by blast barriers: ten-foot high fences of sandbags, wire mesh and concrete. The colour was mono-chromatically dun: dun uniforms, dun dirt, dun sandbags. It was early spring and, presumably, about as verdant as things got. By mid-July even the greens of the few eucalyptus trees lost whatever undertones of colour they had possessed and everything was as desiccated as glassblowers’ sand. They call this part of the world the Red Desert and perhaps it is, for a few weeks before and after the vernal equinox. But otherwise it is the colour of fly ash.
Colourlessness in other contexts connotes lifelessness, but so far as humans went, there was nothing lifeless about the airfield. Twelve thousand people worked here—soldiers, mercenaries, maintenance men, cooks, launderers, construction workers. The hurly-burly never stopped. Trucks and combat vehicles were always rumbling around, Chinook helicopters lifting off, Antonov heavy-lift air freighters
For my fellow passengers on the bus out of the country, the advance and the distance was life-changing. This much was apparent from their demeanour and our silence as we wheezed our way through the mountains. Our minder had our ID; our direct interaction with the police at the checkpoints was limited. Hardly a meaningful sentence was uttered until we were ushered out of the bus into the bright sunlight of Kandahar. And there in front of us were our employers, bellowing our names and waving ID tags and passes. Rami Issay had brought a placard, I guess to spare himself the indignity of raising his voice. It had just one name on it, mine: “Mr. Rashid Siddiqui.” If he had tried such a tactic in my place of origin, he would have been trampled to death by like-named respondents.
But I should not be so unkind. If the events of my life had proceeded differently, I would be an engineer by now, and treating men such as him badly. We all have our circumstances and my task is to accommodate myself to my own.
When I approached him, he grinned widely and bowed. Peace was upon us both, and he took me through the process of getting through the camp gate. His combination of imperiousness and ebullience seemed to work well with the soldiers and soon enough, within a few hours, and after a body search of unprecedented thoroughness, we were through. From my first view of the ferenghee soldiers up close, my impression was that they were quite uncomfortably warm. They were English, that day—their uniforms said Royal Air Force regiment—and as pink in the face as pomegranates. They carried their odd, short English assault rifles slung over their shoulders. It was the first time I had seen thosestrange little weapons; in this part of the world, the AK-47 is the way people kill one another. How anyone shoots accurately with those British rifles is beyond me. One hears them called them “bullpups” and the word sounded appropriately silly to me. I couldn’t help smiling at them as these thoughts ran through my mind. But Rami Issay shot me a look and I sobered and glanced down. I thought then about a thousand Pashtun shredded by these toys and the tiny vicious bullets they spit out. I sobered further.
The base at Kandahar Air Field looked like the disaster relief camps they set up after earthquakes. Apart from a few shattered Soviet-era shacks, everything was prefabricated aluminum or canvas. Hardly a structure was more than a couple of years old. Whole building complexes were put together out of shipping containers. Every object not mounted upon an axle was surrounded by blast barriers: ten-foot high fences of sandbags, wire mesh and concrete. The colour was mono-chromatically dun: dun uniforms, dun dirt, dun sandbags. It was early spring and, presumably, about as verdant as things got. By mid-July even the greens of the few eucalyptus trees lost whatever undertones of colour they had possessed and everything was as desiccated as glassblowers’ sand. They call this part of the world the Red Desert and perhaps it is, for a few weeks before and after the vernal equinox. But otherwise it is the colour of fly ash.
Colourlessness in other contexts connotes lifelessness, but so far as humans went, there was nothing lifeless about the airfield. Twelve thousand people worked here—soldiers, mercenaries, maintenance men, cooks, launderers, construction workers. The hurly-burly never stopped. Trucks and combat vehicles were always rumbling around, Chinook helicopters lifting off, Antonov heavy-lift air freighters
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