Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (19 page)

As always with trips to Afghanistan, the journey was delayed for days before starting in a great hurry in the dawn hours, followed by endless waiting. Before leaving town we changed vehicles five times, which as far as I could see just drew more attention to ourselves.

The sun was setting by the time we ended up in a Mitsubishi Pajero heading out of town, climbing the Khojak Pass. All around us desert mountains rose smudged and Sphinxlike and the road passed back-and-forth tunnels for an astonishing switchback train track that British engineers had built. Apart from us the only traffic was a procession of jingle trucks with gaudily painted scenes of luscious Pashtun beauties and Swiss mountain views on their panels, which hid secret compartments for smuggling, the main local industry in this frontier region.

Our companions were Abdul Razzak, one of Kandahar's leading commanders, known as the Airport Killer for his daring raid on the air base used by the Soviets, and Ratmullah, a chubby junior commander with a bushy black beard and eyes as dark as coal yet twinkling with mischief.

It was almost midnight by the time we reached the border, to be greeted by the red flares of heavy guns from nearby Spin Boldak, which the mujahideen were trying to capture. We drove into a compound, and to my surprise the first thing I saw was a calendar on the wall from which stared out the unmistakable face of Yunus Khalis with his henna-orange beard. I couldn't imagine Karzai and Khalis having much in common. “Parties don't matter here,” explained Karzai.

Several men emerged swathed in shawls and there was the usual long, guttural exchange of Pashto greetings—how are you, how is your father, what about your father's father, and so on. Then a rose-patterned vinyl tablecloth was spread on the dirt floor and the men sat around it, laying down their Kalashnikovs as a young boy brought an enamel bowl of water,
a pink Lux soap, and a grubby pink hand towel for us each to wash our hands. As the only woman, I was served last.

The boy then returned with a large aluminum dish of greasy goat stew swimming in globules of yellow fat and long slabs of stretchy Afghan bread to dip into it. All of it was washed down with curd in iced water, passed around in a shared cup. Wryly I remembered the British diplomat. As we ate the only sound was the appreciative smacking of lips. Silhouettes flickered on the mud walls in the light of the oil lamp.

“Eat well, as I don't know when we will get meat again,” urged Karzai. He was right and I should have listened, but that night I was intent on avoiding the fat.

Over the next few weeks as we traveled to Kandahar, I got used to the fear of mines and helicopters, though everywhere we went we seemed to get bombed—perhaps connected to Karzai's habit of radioing everyone to say he'd arrived despite being on the Soviet hit list. Only when we had a narrow escape in the orchards of the Arghandab Valley did I get him to stop.

But I never got used to the lack of food. Occasionally we would be given shelter in a home in one of the mud-walled villages, which looked like something from biblical times, and villagers would share their meager supplies.

Our destination was a place called Malajat on the outskirts of Kandahar, run by a commander called Borjan. There we switched to Yamaha motorbikes, on which we could travel through the tall green cornfields without being detected. For about ten days we stayed in a small shack with a walled garden. At night I had my own room—actually, it was the ammo store with a curtain separating it from the main room, guarded by a young man called Abdul Wasei, who took his duties very seriously. Occasionally we even got a bucket of water to wash in. But there was nothing to eat except okra fried in kerosene and rock-hard naan and the ubiquitous green tea drunk with boiled sweets as there was no sugar.

Later, when I compared notes with other journalists, I realized how lucky I was I never got sick. I guess years of late-night meals from the Death Kebab van at university had given me a cast-iron stomach. But how I fantasized about the cheeseburgers and cold beer in the American Club!

There was not much to do. Once we went on a crazy late-night raid into the city to try to take out a Soviet guard post; our sortie failed dismally and ended with us running like crazy to try to get back. Mostly we just sat around. Sometimes the mujahideen picked flowers to put in their hair or tie to their guns. One day Ratmullah found a little sparrow, which he tied by a string to a multibarrel rocket launcher. Some of the fighters amused themselves by firing Kalashnikovs near it to make it jump.

Then one night Borjan told us we were going to attack the Kandahar air base where the Russians were stationed. Today it's the base of NATO operations for the south, referred to as K Town and complete with a boardwalk where you can find Pizza Hut, Tim Hortons coffee, and a TGI Friday's featuring surf-and-turf suppers and Elvis posters.

The plan was to depart at dawn, but we ended up leaving late morning. There were about twenty of us, all on motorbikes. I sat behind Ratmullah, trying to balance without touching his body so as not to offend him, and consequently almost falling off. My turban kept slipping down over my eyes and threatening to unravel.

But it felt good to be outside the shed—until we passed a tractor with the driver's body hanging off the side. His brains had been blown out.

We motored into a mulberry wood, where we stopped and hid the bikes in a branch-covered hole. Then we all passed under a Koran held by Ratmullah. Through the trees we ran and eventually down into one of trenches the mujahideen had built in rings around the city.

In the distance were some hills, and beyond that was the airport. Some men took up positions in the trench while others climbed into a tower, one of many used for drying grapes that are scattered around the south. From
there they began firing rockets toward the airport, hoping to blow up a tank or fighter jet.

A shout went up and I saw Ratmullah's face crease with panic, then he pulled me down to the bottom of the trench. Two Soviet tanks had appeared on the crest of the hill and were rolling down toward us. It was an agony of waiting before they began firing, then there was a dull thud as the raisin tower behind us was hit, sending hot dust and rubble down on us.

Abdul Wasei dragged me into a foxhole in the side of the trench. We could hear the cries of the wounded, but there was nothing we could do. After a while the silence was almost worse.

And the tanks did not go away. All day they stayed there, leaving us stuck in our trenches, not daring to emerge.

We had nothing to eat or drink, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. There were odd pools of muddy water in the trench, which the mujahideen scooped up in their hands and drank. The water was brown with mosquitoes feasting on top, and I couldn't imagine what diseases it might carry. But soon I was too thirsty to care. I too began scooping it into my hands and mouth. Mostly it tasted dusty.

Ratmullah suddenly jabbered excitedly in Pashto and held something up in his large hands. It was a mud crab. He bit into it, making noises of delight. Soon all the others were scratching the ground for mud crabs. Ratmullah offered one to me, but I shook my head. I wasn't sure how starved I would need to be to eat that.

Finally, on the second day, the tanks went away, presumably deciding we were all dead or gone. We ran along the trenches and eventually back out into the mulberry woods. As we emerged into the trees, the first thing I saw was a small boy eating watermelon, juice dripping from his mouth. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life. “Ratmullah, I want that watermelon,” I said shamelessly.

Without hesitation Ratmullah grabbed it from the bewildered child. Nothing had ever tasted so good in my life.

When we got back to the hut, it felt like home. Everyone was talking excitedly. I turned the dial of my shortwave radio to BBC World Service, all static and crackle. Suddenly Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World” came across the airwaves. It was a magical moment that afterward I thought I must have imagined. How would I have got that on the air in remote Afghanistan?

That night, our last in Kandahar, we had rice with a thin gruel crunchy with tiny bits of meat and bone. The next day as we left to head back to Pakistan, I realized that the sparrow had disappeared.

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN

BACK WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN RULED IRAQ, MOST FOREIGN VISITORS
were required to stay at the Hotel al-Rasheed, a concrete-and-glass monstrosity in central Baghdad. It was once a fine establishment, with marble floors and crystal chandeliers, but by the eve of George W. Bush's war the modern facade belied an intolerable interior. You had to bribe the housekeeper for a roll of toilet paper or a bar of soap. The televisions offered just three channels: Baathist agitprop, Iraqi sport, and bad 1970s movies dubbed into Arabic. The in-room surveillance cameras installed by the secret police had long since broken, but nobody knew that then, so female guests took to changing with the shower curtain drawn. But the biggest vexation was the daily breakfast scam. The buffet, served up in the Sheherazade Café, was atrocious: stale bread, cold omelets floating in grease, eggs boiled so long the yolks had turned gray, rotting fruit covered with flies. After two mornings of this horror, for which I had the pleasure of paying sixty thousand dinars a day—about thirty dollars at the exchange rate back then—I told the front desk I no longer wanted to eat breakfast, at least not in their restaurant.

“I'm sorry, sir, but we must charge you for the breakfast,” the manager informed me.

“But I'm not eating your breakfast,” I protested.

It did no good. “It is the rules,” he said.

Then he leaned toward me and let me in on the secret. The fifty-dollar-a-night room charge went directly to Saddam's treasury. The only way for the hotel to pay its employees was by gouging us in the mornings. “Without breakfast,” he said, sotto voce, “we cannot survive.”

I tried to stomach the buffet, but after another two mornings I concluded that there was no way I'd survive in Baghdad with that breakfast. I raised the matter with Khalid, my enterprising driver, who kept a Shakira tape on continuous playback in his royal blue Chevy Caprice. He had boasted to me that he had an illegal satellite dish at home, and friends with an even more verboten Internet connection. Did he know of somewhere else I could eat breakfast?

In those days, food was hard to come by in Baghdad. Most families subsisted on government-issued rations of wheat, sugar, and rice. The few restaurants that catered to foreigners served only lunch and dinner. Khalid said he'd make some inquiries, but he made no promises.

A few days later, he beckoned me toward his car and said, “Mr. Rajiv, let's go for a drive.” We headed west toward Mansur, the neighborhood filled with imposing mansions inhabited by Saddam's apparatchiks. He barreled down the main drag and pulled off near a small row of shops. Khalid pointed at one. The sign read Al-Malik Market. “Go in there,” he said. “You will find what you need.”

Malik was a culinary smuggler's dream. There was Heinz ketchup, Kellogg's corn flakes, Campbell's soup, and Ritz crackers. Seemingly everything you'd find in an American Safeway was packed into this little store—and several items even had Safeway price tags. I later learned that the owner's son traveled to Jordan once a week, where he filled up three taxis with a few of everything off the shelves at the Safeway in Amman. In twelve hours, after a couple of well-placed bribes to customs inspectors at the border, the food was for sale in Baghdad. Chilled, smoked Norwegian salmon? Yup.
Philly cream cheese and a bottle of capers? Sure. They had frozen pork bacon and tinned hams, which, in the predominantly Muslim Republic of Iraq, were about as forbidden as pornography. I even saw a Butterball turkey in the freezer. “
Aliseesh
,” the owner said, teaching me the Arabic word for it. Who, I asked, buys turkeys in Baghdad? Nobody, he said. His son picked it up on spec, and it had been sitting in the cooler for a year.

Malik existed because, despite the UN sanctions that restricted oil sales, there still were thousands of Baathist cronies who had grown rich through smuggling and had dollars to blow. And unlike their neighbors, Iraqis of a certain age and class had traveled to Europe and America back in the 1960s and 1970s, before the wars with Iran and Kuwait, when one dinar was worth more than three dollars. They had a taste for Western food, for French cheese and Danish cookies. But like so much else in their country, these were luxuries out of reach to all but a few.

I shopped like a glutton. Wedges of Brie, fruit preserves, muesli, mango juice—more than I could fit in the mini-fridge back in my room, and more than I could consume before it would all spoil. Malik soon became my little escape from the chaos of prewar Baghdad. When I grew tired of Saddam's fulminations, the orchestrated protests we were obliged to attend, the UN weapons inspectors running from one installation to another, the maddening arguments with the Ministry of Information about their draconian rules, I headed back to the market, fished a few hundred-dollar bills out of my wallet, and filled up a basket with comfort food.

Soon after U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad, I headed back to Malik. I was in charge of the
Washington Post
's bureau, and my responsibilities included ensuring that a half-dozen colleagues didn't go hungry. We had been subsisting on military rations and cans of beans and tuna fish that we had squirreled away before the invasion. Our supplies were running low, and I was yearning for slightly more gourmet provisions. But like so much else in Baghdad at the time, Malik had been gutted by looters. There were some
broken jars on the floor, but everything else had been taken, even the freezer case and the turkey inside.

I despaired for a moment, and then it came to me:
I'll just do what the owner's son did
. I had a colleague visit a supermarket in Amman and fill up a GMC Suburban. The result, unfortunately, was more tuna and two cases of Cheez-Its. There was, thankfully, also a case of Pinot Grigio, and the realization that with a proper shopping list we could sustain ourselves without Malik.