Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

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СКАЧАТЬ names must have meant little to the neighbourhood’s modern inhabitants. The Boer War was just another imperial milestone, a bitter battle between Afrikaners and the British for control over turf that arguably belonged to neither, a hundred years ago and a distant continent away. And yet London’s success and status in the world owed everything to Britain’s imperial past. The Boer War was about control of South African diamonds and gold, riches that thousands of British soldiers had fought and died for at places like Mafeking. The relief of this obscure outpost in 1900 after a 217-day siege inspired such public jubilation in London that a new verb, ‘to maffick’, was added to the English language.

      It was the stuff of history, and it was also the source of the prosperity that had attracted the immigrant scions of the colonised to come here in the first place. Kimberley was one of the greatest diamond mines the world has ever seen, and London is still littered with memorials to the battles by which the Empire was accrued. In the index of my street directory I counted six streets named Mafeking, nine Ladysmiths and twenty-two Kimberleys. The town planners of the early twentieth century were unimaginative: what would they have made of their streets’ present-day occupants? Did they perhaps imagine that they were building houses for returning troops, homes fit for heroes? Were they now turning in their graves?

      I wondered if Mir had ever heard of Mafeking. He had been a diligent student, but the late-Victorian scramble for Africa seemed unlikely to have featured very high on the Mazari school curriculum. It was a pity that he had not ended up in that concentration of streets in SW11 that commemorate Britain’s Afghan Wars: Afghan Road, Khyber Road, Cabul and Candahar Road spelled the old-fashioned way. That would have grabbed his attention, for there are few Afghans who do not know the stories from the time of the British.

      Nor are stories the only things that are passed from generation to generation. I once visited the Panjshir Valley in a bid to interview the late Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. On an exploratory walk along the valley road I came across a twelve-year-old boy shooting ducks on the river. The antique gun over his shoulder was almost as tall as him, and I asked with the help of sign language if I could examine it. The boy seemed pleased by my interest and I handled the gun admiringly, feeling the balance and heft of it. The cellophaned stock was decorated in the Afghan taste, with a gruesome colour photograph of someone undergoing open heart surgery taken from the brochure of some Western aid organisation. The metalwork was worn but had been carefully oiled and polished. Decorative tassels and a small felt pouch of gunpowder dangled from the trigger guard. It was obviously old, a heavy matchlock muzzle-loader from the era that preceded cartridges and bolt-action loading, more musket than modern rifle. Turning it over, I found an inscription on the sideplate that read VR 1840: Victoria Regina. I was holding a relic of the First Afghan War.

      The weapon had in all probability been taken from one of the unfortunates who died on the legendary 1842 retreat. A general of quite breathtaking incompetence called William Elphinstone (Elphinstone Court SW16; Elphinstone Road E17; Elphinstone Street N5) tried to lead his force ninety miles back to Jalalabad in the middle of winter. Some twenty thousand people set out from Kabul, including barefoot Indian sepoys and several thousand women and children camp followers. Their tents were lost in the confusion of departure. Snow lay a foot deep on the ground, and at night the temperature dropped to -24°C. According to legend only one European survived the retreat, a surgeon named Brydon who straggled into Jalalabad on a donkey. Those who did not freeze to death were picked off without mercy by tribesmen armed with long-barrelled jezails who ambushed them in the high passes. Hordes of ululating women descended on the dead and dying and emasculated them with knives. There is an account of a redcoat who rounded a corner of the mountain path to find an Afghan boy of six attempting to hack off the head of a dead comrade. Without hesitating he hoisted the child on his bayonet and pitched him out into the abyss. The retreat was the worst military disaster the British Empire had ever known.

      The gun’s new owner let me fire it. He tipped in powder from the pouch, then a handful of gravel snatched up from the road, before ramming it all home with a rod that slotted into a bracket beneath the barrel. He pointed down to the river where half a dozen wooden decoy ducks were moored in the current, crudely fashioned silhouettes like targets at a funfair. I squatted on my haunches and rested my elbows on my knees for balance as the boy indicated. The recoil was tremendous, the bang even more so. The sound bounced off the rocks and steep cliffs, reverberating far up and down the valley for long seconds before the echo died. The silence that followed seemed unnaturally still, and the boy and I grinned guiltily at each other, co-conspirators in shattering the Panjshir’s peacefulness – 160 years of Anglo-Afghan history captured in a single gunshot.

      Outside the house in Mafeking Avenue a black man was sitting in an old white BMW, revving the engine to clean out the carburettor. The spluttering noise masked the sound of my bike’s engine, but Mir was on the lookout and came onto the street the moment I arrived. It was several weeks since we had waved goodbye to each other through a taxi window in Islamabad. I hadn’t forgotten the look on his face, hopeful and anxious at the same time, no doubt wondering if a foreigner would really deliver on a promise to help him. I could see it was no easy thing for him to relinquish the lifeline that I represented for him, even temporarily. Now in Mafeking Avenue the anxiety was gone. He beamed, and fell on me with unaffected joy, hugging me and slapping my back.

      – I am here, he said at last, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. I am here.

      – Welcome to London, I replied, smiling – because in the end his presence here was improbable. I had stepped into this person’s life and with a simple letter to the British High Commission in Islamabad had turned it upside down, altering its direction forever. It was an act of the purest existentialism, as though Mir and I had colluded outrageously to upset the natural order of things.

      He looked the same: a little less chubby-cheeked than I remembered, maybe, but with the same shambling, flat-footed gait that made me laugh. He was wearing the same clothes I had last seen him in, a washed-out navy blue shalwar qamiz, the uniform of a zillion Pakistanis. I wondered what other clothes he had, but quickly veered away from the thought and asked him how the trip had gone.

      – Hohh, he said, his dark eyes wide with unironic amazement.

      – Go on – what was it like?

      – It was…strange to start. This plane is werry big. And fast.

      He made a jet taking off with the flat of his hand and, leaning back, stared straight ahead in imitation of the unexpected G-force as he accelerated down the runway at Islamabad. I had forgotten that his previous flying experience was limited to military helicopters.

      – But after, it was nice, he added equably. Specially the food. And the women: hohh.

      I had insisted that Mir fly British Airways, reckoning on balance that a BA aircrew would be more sympathetic as well as better informed about the immigration rules in the event of some disaster en route. But I hadn’t told him about the air hostesses he would meet on board, their dyed hair uncovered, their legs clearly on view beneath their uniforms. They may look unexceptional to Westerners, but to an untravelled Muslim they must have constituted a preview of paradise. Mir had begun arriving in the West from the moment he stepped from the tarmac at Islamabad. I could tell he was still high from the experience, still processing all the new and unexpected things he had already seen, his dislocation no doubt heightened by jetlag.

      – Is this your motorbike? he asked.

      I told him to climb on. It was a tired old Honda trail-bike, covered in EBC brake-pad stickers and oily from a cracked sump, but he sat astride the machine making vrooming noises, trying it out for size, his eyes as shiny as a schoolboy’s.

      – Hohh, he laughed. James Bond.

      Eventually СКАЧАТЬ