Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

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СКАЧАТЬ like Ruzi, while the BBC man was just a foreigner; why was he doing this? Then the gunmen stepped back from their still protesting prisoner, flicked their Kalashnikovs to automatic, and killed him instantly in a spray of bullets. Before the noise of the gunfire had died away the crowd had fled in all directions, leaving behind a shoe or two, bits of loot from the guesthouse, a hastily abandoned bicycle.

      It was time for the foreigners to leave, but even now they had to wait. Lionel, in deep shock from what had just happened, recalled playing an uncomfortably symbolic game of Risk in the trashed but re-secured guesthouse, while a friendly mechanic reinstalled the camshafts of two decommissioned UN Landcruisers parked around the back.

      Two hours later the cars were ready and the foreigners reassembled, trying hard not to look at the pool of coagulated blood in the dust across the street. Mir offered to travel with them, but the convoy organisers thankfully dissuaded him: he would never be allowed to cross the border, and Hairaton would be desperately dangerous for him once the foreigners were safely out of reach in Uzbekistan. Even in his home town he knew it was only a matter of time before the relatives of the dead Hazara came looking for revenge. A big crowd had witnessed the execution, and Mazar’s grapevine was highly developed. All the town would quickly know of his involvement in the killing.

      He didn’t wait around to wave goodbye. As the foreigners finally rolled northwards he already knew that this day marked a major turning point in his life, and in all probability in the lives of his family, too. He would have to abandon his home town. The alternative was to die in a vengeful hail of bullets just as the camera thief had done.

      

      I barely slept the night of Mir’s touchdown in London, one year on. By the following morning I had almost convinced myself that I had been duped. His promise to call me on arrival had meant nothing after all: he was just another crafty Afghan who had taken the opportunity to exploit another gullible foreigner. But when at last he did call with the explanation that he had ‘forgot’, I was too relieved to be angry, as well as a little ashamed for thinking ill of him. The Heathrow immigration officers had been friendly and had done everything by the book. His processing had taken less than an hour, and when he emerged Hamid was waiting for him as arranged.

      Two mornings later, a Saturday, I headed east by motorbike to the address Mir had given me, a house in Mafeking Avenue, London E6. According to my street directory this was the postcode for East Ham, in the borough of Newham. I had lived in west London all my life, and my knowledge of most districts east of the financial centre was uncertain, so my journey was punctuated by frequent stops for a look at the map. Mafeking Avenue is beyond the most easterly suburbs that even many Londoners have heard of. Almost everyone knows that West Ham has a football club. Some people know of Plaistow from the song by Ian Dury. But what is there to say about East Ham, or the communities of Plashet, Wallend or Manor Park? And these are still places with ‘proper’ London postcodes. Out beyond the eastern arc of the North Circular ringroad the capital straggles on for another five miles at least, through Barking and Dagenham, barely thinning through Hornchurch and Upminster to the limits of the street directory. The immensity of the city was sobering. I had not expected my involvement with Mir to be broadening my horizons again so soon – certainly not this horizon, the eastern edge of my own home town.

      On the A13 approach road some wag had prefixed a ‘T’ to a road sign marked Urban Clearway, but I was still unprepared for what I found. By the time I arrived it felt as though I had travelled out of London altogether and come to another city; or another continent. The street that ran past Upton Park tube station resembled more closely than seemed possible a Pakistani street bazaar. At first sight the crowds milling along the pavements appeared almost entirely Asian, many of the men in shalwar qamiz beneath tatty Argyle sweaters or bulky down jackets, the women in saris and headscarves. The crowds were thickest outside Queen’s Market, a cacophony of stalls close to the station.

      I pulled in, switched off the engine, and stared. The stalls stretched far back into impenetrable darkness beneath a low concrete roof, the shoppers mostly chattering in Urdu as they hurried to and fro with bags of groceries. The stall-keepers were hawking the same exotic fruits, the same halal meat, the same plastic tat and £2 watches and bolts of primary-coloured cloth that are the stock-in-trade of the Saddar Market in Peshawar, treats for magpies. The place even smelled the same, a spicy-sweet mustiness that was two parts curry house and one part poverty.

      Mir was waiting, but a closer look at this market was irresistible. I strolled with my helmet through the stalls, inhaling Central Asia again, feeling like an alien in the city of my birth.^* Women in saris swarmed around the vegetable stands, bargaining with the stall-keepers, sifting through the foodstuffs with practised brown fingers. Among the recognisable goods were species of vegetation that were new to me – mooli and tindora, papadi and cho-cho, patra and parval, long dhudi, posso, china karella. There were over a dozen types of flour with names like dhokra and dhosa mix, mathia and oudhwa, mogo, raja-gro, singoda. There were packets of moth beans and gunga peas, sliced betelnut and sago seeds. There was a mouth freshener called mukhwas manpasand, and something called red chowrie, that was not to be confused with brown chorie, which according to the label was also known as pink cow peas.

      There were implications to all this variety. It spoke of hours and hours spent in kitchens, of women’s lives (because the food shoppers were almost entirely women) in which the preparation of meals loomed far larger than it ordinarily did in the West. I was conscious of how little I knew about food, how little I cooked. The last time I used any kind of flour was in a domestic science class at boarding school when I was ten. I thought of the cling-film-wrapped vegetables I occasionally cooked for myself, steamed broccoli or little packets of pre-washed green beans, always identical green beans that were imported and sorted and chopped to the regulation length: junk veg. They went all right with a pre-cooked chicken kiev or a frozen lasagne, but I really bought them because, like a fast-food burger, their consumption required no thought.

      Back outside, I noticed for the first time that it was a match day. Fans wearing the claret and blue of West Ham Football Club were making their way south towards the end of the street, where the floodlights and the tops of the stands of Upton Park stadium were visible. They were mostly working-class white, some of them looking like National Front archetypes with their earrings and shaven heads. According to the tabloid version of modern England this was a classic recipe for a bloodbath, yet there was no sense of racial tension here. I had been to football matches and witnessed at first hand the thuggery that English supporters are sometimes capable of, but these West Ham fans were turning that preconception on its head. They did not look angry or furtive or alienated. There was no nervous cordon of fluorescent-jacketed police. They just shambled along the pavement without a second glance, ordinary people on an ordinary Saturday going to an ordinary late-season football match.

      I suddenly saw how easy it was to sit in the white-majority fastness of west London and pontificate about multiculturalism, while it was quite another thing to live as a minority in one’s homeland. It was astounding to find that multiculturalism actually seemed to work. Did the West Ham fans feel their national identity was under threat? Did they sit around in shabby pubs plotting to petrol bomb the modest homes of immigrants, the modern European equivalent of a Deep South lynching? They gave no sign of it. Further along the street was a stall selling paraphernalia in claret and blue, scarves and flags and football shirts with the names and numbers of the team’s heroes on them. The names of the players were not Asian, but some of them were unmistakably foreign – Miklosko, Berkovic, Lazaridis. It was hard to see how a fan could be a xenophobe when he supported a team like that.

      The house was in the middle of Mafeking Avenue, an unexceptional double row of Victorian terraces typical of the late-nineteenth-century London housing boom during which they had been built. Avenues named after Ladysmith and Kimberley ran parallel, forming a mini-memorial СКАЧАТЬ