Most writing on Afghanistan usually becomes a visual story: We encounter victims of war, usually without a limb, set against a backdrop of stunning beauty, rugged mountains, blue lakes, long stretches of sand, and beautiful orchards and poppy fields. The country has been ravaged by war for generations. In the recent past, it was the Soviets who occupied the country for a decade and left landmines everywhere, including plenty that looked like pretty butterflies and wristwatches to attract children. Then came a period of civil war and Taliban rule, when a society was dehumanised, followed by the American invasion of Afghanistan, making a wreck of a country once celebrated in poetry and prose for its grandeur and epic possibilities.
Of late, there have been bestsellers on Afghanistan, both fiction and non-fiction, like Khaled Hosseini?s The Kite Runner or even Rory Stewart?s The Places in Between, but nothing quite prepares you for Nadeem Alsam?s story on Afghanistan, set in present-day Jalalabad and nearabouts but going back and forth in history to map a culture lost through war, rape, torture.
You can?t read it at a stretch, nor can you put it down, there?s so much bleakness in beauty that you often have to pause and wonder why has Afghanistan allowed herself to become what she has, why has the world allowed it to be forgotten?
Aslam?s book is not a historical narrative, though he gives us an explosive novel filled with Afghanistan?s complex realities and its troubled history, it is a story of love and terrible loss. He brings together Russians, Americans, Afghans into the house of an English doctor, Marcus, who made Afghanistan his home long before war became a constant. Each one has a devastating story; everyone?s life ?lies broken at different levels within the rubble? and yet there is ?companionship of the wound?. Marcus has lost his wife Qatrina to the Taliban and daughter Zameen to Soviet soldiers and his hand, in a twisted irony of fate, to the Taliban too for a crime he hasn?t committed.
The Russian Lara arrives at Marcus? house, on the outskirts of Jalalabad and not too far from Tora Bora where the US will wage its war against terrorism, in search of her brother who disappeared during the Soviet war. There?s the American David Town, a former CIA agent, who tries to make up for the difficulties he wrought on people while in secret service.
And there?s Casa, a radical Afghan, caught between love and religion, and Dunia, a young Afghan teacher and perhaps the only symbol of hope.
Marcus too is a symbol of all things beautiful, his home by the lake has paintings on the wall he covers up with mud when the Taliban arrives; his wife Qatrina has nailed their entire book collection to the ceiling, some of them drop in a thud, disturbing the peace. He has a perfume factory at home, now fallen into disuse, where a statue of Buddha bewilders the Taliban so much that they flee. And loses his hand when he can?t explain the 99 paintings Qatrina had drawn with Allah?s name etched in each to the Taliban. His life is a metaphor for hope too because he keeps a vigil for his grandson, certain that if he keeps a watch on all the people passing by his home, he will find Bihzad.
As we have read in Maps for Lost Lovers, Aslam writes an achingly beautiful sentence really well. In The Wasted Vigil too, in between describing moments of great suffering and terrible torture, the view of a Taliban amputation is particularly chilling he fills words with great tenderness, which linger long after you have put the book down.
At one point, he tells us even the air of Afghanistan has a story to tell about warfare. ?It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and, follow it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where the wheat was grown.? The war may be partially over, but the battle?s far from over, too many lives lie shattered in the rubble.
?A native of the faraway St Petersburg, what a long journey she has made to be here, this land that Alexander the Great had passed through on his unicorn, an area of fabled orchards and thick mulberry forests, of pomegranates that appear in the border decorations of Persian manuscripts written one thousand years ago.
Her host?s name is Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman who has spent most of his life here in Afghanistan, having married an Afghan woman. He is 70 years old and his white beard and deliberate movements recall a prophet, a prophet in wreckage. She hasn?t been here for many days so there is hesitancy in her still regarding Marcus?s missing left hand. The skin cup he could make with the palms of his hands is broken in half. She had asked late one evening, delicately, but he seemed unwilling to be drawn on the subject. In any case no explanations are needed in this country. It would be no surprise if the trees and vines of Afghanistan suspended their growth one day, fearful that if their roots were to lengthen they might come into contact with a landmine buried near by. She lifts her hand to her face and inhales the scent of sandalwood deposited onto the fingers by the mirror?s frame. The wood of a living sandal tree has no fragrance, Marcus said the other day, the perfume materializing only after the cutting down. Like the soul vacating the body after death, she thinks.?