Their Language of Love (12 page)

Abdul Abbas had recovered his composure and to include
him in the conversation Ruth said: ‘Tell us—what brings you to Lahore?’

‘I am on my way to Kabul.’

‘Can you get there?’ Ruth said, surprised. ‘I thought the border is closed.’

‘For two years, I’ve longed to be in my country, to breathe its air—to stand on its soil—to kiss its earth,’ he said, the melodrama of his words diluted by the palpable ache of his longing. ‘One way or another I will get there.’

Abdul Abbas had been warned by his clansmen that it was too dangerous for him to visit; they could not assure his protection. As guerrilla fighters, the mujahedeen’s lives and the success of their attacks depended on their agility and speed. His presence would endanger their missions. ‘They are as fleet and surefooted as mountain goats,’ he boasted, and Ruth’s tongue flicked at the savour of the word ‘fleet’: it appeared to fit aptly the quicksilver nature of the war being waged by the mujahedeen against their mightily armoured and lumbering enemy. ‘I was like them when I was younger,’ Abdul Abbas added matter-of-factly.

Abdul Abbas’s clansmen had finally given in to his persistence and agreed to escort him to Kabul. ‘My friends,’ he told Ruth, ‘will see me across the Khyber Pass to a designated village on the other side.’

There was nothing in his manner to indicate that he was alluding to Bill and John, but Ruth knew he meant them. ‘Isn’t it too risky?’ she asked, glancing at the Americans in alarm.

Their faces were noncommittal, their boyishness eclipsed. How quickly they reverted to trained roles.

‘Oh dear,’ said Chicks. ‘What’s this? More sourpusses!’

‘More sour pussies,’ said Jasmine, slurring her words and rolling her huge cobalt eyes at the Americans.

Ruth realized they were both drunk.

Bill and John’s faces hardened and turned red. Ruth gauged the steely discipline of their professionalism and turned her face away. This is what had made her keep her distance from men like them—they were trained assassins.

‘The mujahedeen will protect me with their lives once I am in Afghanistan,’ said Abdul Abbas, choosing to ignore the drunk women.

‘My, my! Don’t we look constipated?!’ purred Chicks, turning inquiringly to Ruth. ‘What’s wrong with this party?’ she asked. And all at once her husky voice, vibrant with amusement, rose to hector the public in general. ‘I know what—everyone needs a good dose of castor oil, that’s what!’ she declared, wagging a rebuking finger at the chattering throng. ‘No more booze till you’ve had your castor oil.’

The few people who recognized Chicks’s voice turned with a knowing smile, amused and unperturbed by her antics. Outrageous behaviour was to be expected of Chicks and Jasmine when they were together.

‘Don’t mind Chicks,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s like this when she’s drunk.’

Ignoring the newcomers, the Americans gave Ruth and Abdul Abbas a brief nod, and saying, ‘See ya,’ slipped into the crowd.

‘Oh dear! Look what we’ve done,’ moaned Chicks, clasping her hands and pulling a comically contrite face.
‘We’ve driven the lovely men away.’

‘Who cares,’ said Jasmine. ‘I don’t.’

‘You’re right. Who cares,’ said Chicks and turned her attention to Abdul Abbas: ‘So, tell me—you were a big-shot in Kabul? A really big, big-shot?’

‘Who cares,’ said Jasmine. ‘I don’t.’

‘You were a great big, big-shot!’ decided Chicks.

‘And now he’s a great big small-shot,’ said Jasmine.

Abdul Abbas stared at the women as if hypnotized. He lowered his gaze and stood helpless.

‘A small-shot with a silly goat’s beard,’ Chicks said. And before Ruth knew what was happening, Chicks’s small hand shot out and grasped Abdul Abbas’s neatly groomed beard. On tip-toes, she stood braced against him. ‘Poor, poor fellow,’ she said, wagging his beard. Ruth watched aghast as Chicks’s scarlet-tipped probing fingers locked on Abdul Abbas’s chin. ‘My poor poppet misses his rotten country?’ she murmured, shaking the flesh of his chin from side to side. ‘His eyes thirst to see it?’ her husky, sugary voice mocked. ‘His lips long to kiss its soil? My, my!’

Jasmine closed in and as her slender pale fingers got entwined with Chicks’s chocolate suppleness the ambushed grey hairs of Abdul Abbas’s beard soon stuck out in brittle tufts. Traditional Afghan ways had not prepared Abdul Abbas for an onslaught by women like Chicks and Jasmine. He couldn’t be rough with these sophisticated strangers or force their arms away to deflect their attack. It would be inappropriate and cowardly to grapple with these women.

Hissing: ‘Stop it, you two! Stop it!’ Ruth moved from one to the other trying to pull them away. They proved surprisingly resilient. Engulfing Abdul Abbas with insulting baby talk they simply shrugged and elbowed her away.

Abdul Abbas’s arm appeared to grope randomly for a chair behind him as, thrown off balance, he awkwardly staggered backwards. A hand reached out to steady him and he collapsed in a chair hastily positioned there by an alert guest who had been watching the alarming scene. Chicks promptly planted herself on his lap and Jasmine removed his cap.

The women caressed his ears and stroked the stubby hennaed hairs on his shorn head. The few people who were near enough to notice them and hear their giggles and cooing assumed Chicks and Jasmine were indulging the elderly Afghan with their usual buffoonery. Their feckless ferocity had earned Chicks and Jasmine a special dispensation and they got away with behaviour that would be unacceptable in other Pakistani women. This was only partly because of the incorrigible persistence of their misdemeanours. Chicks and Jasmine, the one a Bengali and the other with a European mother, were not considered proper Pakistanis and, as such, their behaviour was condoned and often indulged, even as they were subtly marginalized and slighted. Although the same shortcomings, if she could call it that, applied to Ruth, she had realized that as an American, she had a different stature which reflected her country’s might. And her pale blonde looks were too exotic to be marginalized in the same way—in fact, she was treated with deference and lionized.

The little tableau on the chair was abruptly disrupted by
the return of burly white presences. It happened very fast. Bill lifted Chicks off Abdul Abbas’s lap and held her as if she was a baby while the other grinning special operations clone drew Jasmine to his massive chest in a gentle embrace. As she nestled in his arms he unceremoniously nuzzled his face in her hair. Bill disappeared with Chicks. Thank goodness the young Americans had no compunctions about touching unrelated women, thought Ruth, as John drew up a chair to sit protectively with Abdul Abbas.

Ruth, too embarrassed to face Abdul Abbas after what had just occurred, quietly slipped into the crowd. The fragrance from grilling lamb kebabs and chicken tikkas seeped into the hall from the marquee-enclosed space outside and feeling the need to be with friends, Ruth sought out Nasira and Sherry.

Ruth had a lot to tell Rick when he returned from his tour. She told him about running into Abdul Abbas at the party and the way Jasmine and Chicks had behaved. She was soothed to see Rick’s face flush darkly at the outrage.

About a month after Rick’s return, when Ruth climbed into bed and settled down to read, Rick casually remarked, ‘Abdul Abbas is back from Afghanistan.’

‘Oh?’ Ruth asked surprised. ‘You met him?’

‘No,’ Rick said. ‘But I heard about it. The mujahedeen he was with were trapped and on the run in a narrow gorge … when the situation became too dangerous for him they tied him to a mule and sent him packing. They do that mostly to save their women and children.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Ruth said, turning to her husband and putting her book aside. ‘Tied him to a mule?’

‘It’s true. No matter what happens to their charges, dead, alive or wounded, the mules are trained to carry them across the border to the refugee camps in Pakistan. They’re sure-footed animals; they use routes inaccessible even to the mujahedeen.’

A few days later, Rick was off on another tour. As always, Ruth saw him off at the airport. ‘I’ll miss you,’ Ruth said. ‘Please be back soon.’

Rick was taken aback. She was not in the habit of saying such things. He looked at her keenly, and was touched by the look of sadness that etched new lines on her face. ‘I love you,’ she said and he was concerned to see his normally composed and cheerful wife looking so lost and forlorn.

‘Anything I should know about? Are the children all right?’ he asked kindly.

‘They’re fine; don’t worry,’ she said, moving her eyes away from him. She was suddenly swamped by images of their life together, of the way Rick had stayed awake nights when the children were teething … and later when they started school he helped nurse them through bouts of flu and frighteningly high fevers—and an almost unending series of colds till they outgrew them.

Her face was flushed and she appeared on the verge of crying. ‘You were a good dad,’ she said.

‘I’ll come back as soon as I can, darling,’ he said. The
gentleness in his voice and his use of an endearment he had all but forgotten the use of, caused the tears brimming in her eyes to slip down her cheeks. She was acutely embarrassed, knowing there were many curious eyes on them. As foreigners they were accustomed to being stared at, but Ruth’s flaming face and demeanour was attracting more notice. ‘I’m sorry, making a spectacle …’

‘Don’t be,’ Rick said, handing her his handkerchief. ‘I miss you too when I’m away.’

This was news to Ruth and she searched his face.

‘If you feel this way I’ll arrange for us to return home … I’ll ask to be transferred back.’

‘Don’t do that,’ Ruth said, alarmed. ‘I like it here—I love the adventure you have brought into my life … only don’t leave me alone so much.’

‘I’ll arrange for Allen to travel more … he’ll like that.’

Ruth did something she never would have in public—she stepped closer and lay her head on his chest. She was grateful that instead of being embarrassed, Rick placed a protective arm around her.

Eventually, as always, Rick received a new posting, this time to the increasingly important Middle East, and Ruth’s time in Pakistan ended. Even in the years following her departure—through the Middle East, and her eventual return to America—Ruth still felt a strong imprint of her time in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The memories lingered,
and she would find herself dwelling on the magnificence of the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram mountains, the highway that followed the old Silk Route along the Indus into China. She would think sometimes of Raj and the ways in which he had enriched her life, of the tunnel beneath the temple where she had transcended herself; and of Abdul Abbas lashed to his mule, escaping across the Afghan border to a refugee camp and back into exile.

In 2001, when those remote areas intruded upon the American consciousness, it was not in any way to give satisfaction. The surreal manifestation of airplanes flying smack into the Twin Towers on 9/11 awakened Americans to a confused awareness of other parts of the world and to the danger lurking in the anger that was boiling at perceived American meddling in the affairs of their countries to advance American interests.

During their tenure in Washington DC, Rick joined the Brookings Institute and Ruth settled into the role of a DC housewife. She joined the Friends of Pakistan Women’s Association, and occasionally forayed into the intricate world of the DC think-tank, with whom Rick often worked as an adviser.

Her and Rick’s continuing interest in Afghanistan took them one day to a think-tank conference earmarked as ‘Prospects for Afghanistan’s Future; Accessing the Outcome of the Afghan Presidential Election’. During the talks, her attention was briefly caught by a clean-shaven man sitting with the panel on the dais: he looked oddly familiar. When he walked up to the mike to speak, she became breathless—
engulfed by a feeling of déjà vu that transported her to the dinner for the visiting polo team at the Punjab Club in Lahore, when, from a distance, she had glimpsed Abdul Abbas.

This man spoke in fluent English with an American accent and a faint inflection that Ruth recognized as Afghan. It occurred to her that by now Abdul Abbas would be much older than this man at the mike. Confident and assertive, he sounded the panel’s voice of doom, saying that the US Embassy in Kabul was running around without a plan; that the Taliban held at least 40 per cent of the country and matters were getting worse. When he finished speaking, the crowded hall was so stunned by his pessimistic outlook that there was a moment of dead silence before the applause.

When, after a brief Q&A session, she and Rick walked up to the man, his resemblance to Abdul Abbas was so striking that she was sure he was his son.

He was. His name was Zalmai. After they had introduced themselves, he said: ‘My parents mentioned you. They wondered where you were—they would have liked to meet you.’

The use of the past tense alarmed Ruth. She wondered if one or both of them had passed on; they would be old by now.

‘How are Abdul Abbas and Nabila?’ she inquired hesitantly.

‘They’re doing okay, considering their age,’ said Zalmai. ‘Father had a minor stroke, but he is quite recovered.’

‘I’m so glad he’s well. Is he still in New Mexico?’

‘He was able to return to Kabul. But our house there was
completely destroyed,’ Abdul Abbas’s son went on to explain. ‘My parents and Abdullah, my oldest brother, returned to reconstruct the house … after that, they decided to live permanently in Kabul.’

‘Has the house been restored? Is it safe?’

‘It’s looking better than ever … Yes, Kabul is safe, for the moment at least.’

‘They invited us to dinner at the house,’ Ruth said. ‘We even visited your ancestral fort.’

She became aware that a knot of people had gathered about them, bubbling with impatience to claim Zalmai’s attention. Rick glanced at Ruth: ‘I think people are waiting to speak to the guest speaker, dear.’

Ruth knew he was right, that she should step back, but she lingered. ‘Do you think we could visit them … go to Kabul again?’ she said wistfully, glancing at Rick.

‘I suppose we could,’ said Rick slowly. Then, as the prospect of revisiting a more adventurous and rewarding period of his life soaked in, he said: ‘It’s not as if we don’t have the time—Abdul Abbas was a dear friend … I would like to see him and Nabila.’