Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 12
“Life was hard,” Jamal told Jonathan and Monty about growing up in Afghanistan. They knew only sketchy details from his application as a gay refugee and, particularly Monty, were curious to learn more now that he’d arrived.“My dad was a herder like most other men. We had goats, sheep, yaks, a few horses, cows, donkeys. A few, not many. My dad wasn’t considered a ‘big man.’ Big men had many animals and much more land. But he was respected for his toughness and honesty. Mom was softer, kinder, but she was cautious being an outsider. She’s Tajik, a Sunni Muslim, and intermarriage was extremely unusual. Wakhi people like my dad are Ismaili Shiites, followers of the Aga Khan.”
Monty could listen endlessly to Jamal’s stories about growing up in the Wakhan Corridor, an isolated, sparsely populated, narrow finger of land in the far northeast corner of Afghanistan. The corridor extends out from Badakhshan Province, sandwiched between Tajikistan and Pakistan, and at its far eastern end borders China. Jonathan would listen briefly to Jamal’s accounts of his life there and then excuse himself, saying he was going to his studio to paint.
Coincidentally, Monty knew about the Wakhan Corridor. He’d long been fascinated with an empire that ruled there, as well as ruling all of present-day Afghanistan and much of India—the Kushan. Originally an Indo-European nomadic confederation living in the desert oases on the northern border of ancient China, they thrived by trading jade and horses with the Chinese kingdoms. After being routed by another powerful nomadic people, they migrated down through central Asia and eventually conquered Bactria, the farthest reach of Alexander the Great’s empire. From there the Kushan grew rich controlling the silk routes. Monty tried for years to write a historical novel about their most powerful king, Kanishka, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Hadrian.
From prehistoric times a vital link between China and central Asia, the Wakhan Corridor is a harsh, arid environment with frigid temperatures much of the year. To the south rise the towering Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains, and to the north, the Pamir Mountains. Glaciers, deserts, high meadows, verdant riversides: the land is awesome but forbidding, the narrow valley rising from ten thousand feet in elevation in the west to over sixteen thousand in the east.
“Besides tending the animals,” Jamal recounted, “we did some farming—wheat, barley, millet, apricot, apple trees. We barely grew enough for ourselves. There was no medicine, no government help. Many children died from tuberculosis. Three of my siblings didn’t survive past a year. And opium was everywhere. Many men were hooked on it, though luckily not my father.”
Monty knew from Jamal’s application that he spent his childhood years in that world, working alongside his father, herding animals and eking out a bare living from the land. Later, though, Jamal had been singled out for his exceptional intelligence and attended better schools, ultimately going to university in Pakistan. Having studied English for many years, and then teaching it in Kabul, he had no trouble speaking the language fluently.
I wonder now if it was all a ruse? His whole life story. Everything he claimed in his refugee application. Everything he told us after he arrived and moved in with us. Then all the flirting while I was still with Jonathan. And later, becoming lovers. All a cover so I’d shelter him while he raised money or recruited or whatever it was he was doing for some nightmarish cabal. If that’s what he was doing. How gullible I was.
“What did you live in?” Monty asked. “A yurt, I guess it’s called?”
“No, Kyrgyz people live in yurts higher up in the mountains. They’re seminomadic. We lived in a simple one-room house. The walls were made of stone and mud. We used manure as a kind of cement. There were rough wooden pillars inside, poplar and juniper. They held up wooden beams covered with layers of willow, grass, and more manure to keep out the water. The floor was dirt, but we had some old worn-out rugs. On one side there was a long wood stove for heating. It was very smoky inside. Imagine eight of us crowded into one smoky room, my mother making bread in a tandoor oven. It was so cold outside. It could drop to twenty-five degrees below zero in midwinter, minus fifteen in Fahrenheit. Our skin was always terribly dry, our faces red and inflamed. Rosacea, you call it. To keep warm we drank tea with yak milk, butter, and salt. I miss that taste a lot; you’d probably hate it.”
“No, I’d like to try it,” Monty said. “What kind of diet did you have? I’d love it if you’d make the foods you grew up with.”
“Hmm, not so sure you would like it. No chili or spices. We usually ate a fried stew of vegetables and herbs and, when we had any, chicken and goat meat. And of course my mom’s flatbread.”
“What did you do for essential things you couldn’t grow or make yourselves?”
“We depended on traveling merchants for a lot of basic staples, especially salt, flour, rice, onions, soap, rubber boots,” Jamal went on to tell Monty. “Later we also bought generators from them. They would enter the corridor each spring, driving over the one nearly impassable road that ran through the corridor along rocky precipices and through deserts. Their trucks would get stuck all the time in ice and snow even though it was spring. Sometimes they had to light a fire under their tanks to defrost the fuel. Can you imagine that? Occasionally a truck would fall over a cliff into a ravine. Some years the trucks couldn’t get through at all, and we’d run out of basics. Life got really hard then. We often went hungry. No Melmac dishes for us. We were happy having any food to eat.”
Maybe I revealed too much of my own story to Jamal, like about my mom’s Melmac dishes and growing up middle class in Los Angeles. Our lives couldn’t have been more different.
“Did you pay these merchants in money?” Monty asked.
“Almost never. It was all barter. We would exchange animals, sometimes cheese, for their goods. It was fun to watch all the bargaining. It was like a game, fierce but friendly in the end. The merchants would pick up the animals on their way heading back from the east end of the corridor, near the border with China. The same guys would come year after year, until they got too old. But even then they’d hire a young driver.”
“Were there any wild animals there?”
“Yes, of course. It wasn’t like the fantasy movieland wild animals you thought a man kept around the corner from you. In the Wakhan there were lots of wolves. We’d see them, but they kept their distance, except for a few tamer ones. But the snow leopards and big sheep with long, spiraling horns—they’re called Marco Polo sheep in the west—we only spotted them occasionally.”
“Wow. Yeah. We sure had different childhoods. It must have been very hard for you.”
“It was the only life I knew. Nothing you could do about it. But I was happy. I had a happy childhood. I was the second oldest. And I was loved by my parents, though I was terribly precocious. Other children were satisfied to live the same life as their parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. But I was curious about everything. I wanted to understand why mountains exist, where the clouds come from, why there’s so much desert, and how humans ended up ruling the earth.
“In the summer I would go with my dad when he took our animals to higher pasture in the mountains. It could take as long as ten or twenty days to get there and back, depending on where the better meadows were that year. We’d ride donkeys or yaks. Yaks are great: they’re like jeeps—they can travel up steep rocky mountainsides and cross icy rivers. But we’d be freezing and totally exhausted by the time we arrived at our destination. And you’d have to be careful in case of avalanches or landslides. Kyrgyz people would be up there too. Wakhi people like us, on my father’s side, and Kyrgyz got along okay. I loved it up in the mountains, so isolated. I’d often wander out by myself for hours at a time. I would talk to the mountains.”
“What? Actually talk to mountains?” Monty asked, his eyes popping open.
“Yes, they were my friends. I looked up at the high peaks and the clouds, and we spoke the same language. The animals, too. They talk. And when we returned home, I would renew my friendship with the river and the trees. Trees are especially talkative. Mountains talk very slowly. You have to be very patient with them. That may all sound crazy, Monty, but it was really true for me.”
“What did you talk about, like with the mountains?”
“Oh, what they could see from such heights. And what they thought witnessing millions of years unfold, hundreds of millions. They would tell me how the land kept changing. Floods, new rivers and valleys. New vegetation. New animal species, right up to us humans—the johnny-come-latelies. (I love using these funny English expressions.) The mountains and tress, they think humans are crazy. Less so about people like us living on the land, but city people especially. The mountains can see all the great cities of the world, and they told me about them—Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Beijing. You must think I’m nuts. But it’s the truth.”
“Do you think other children talked to mountains and trees like you did?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. I was independent compared to other boys, and certainly girls. More than independent, I was a little wild. Very wild. Once my parents sent me away for a year to live with my mother’s Tajik family in another village after my dad found me masturbating two teenage boys. He hit me hard, I remember. That was the only time he hit me like that. I think I was eight or nine.”
“So you knew you were gay from such an early age?”
“I never thought of it that way. It felt natural, playing with other boys like that. Just like talking to the mountains and trees.”
Doesn’t seem plausible that he had so readily accepted his sexuality in that culture. Probably another lie—a lie that he’s homosexual at all. Though he sure convinced me. I’m still convinced. It’s even conceivable he was recruited, if he was, for the very reason that he is gay, or bi. Maybe they, whoever they are, thought it could prove useful. Clearly it did. And all that stuff about talking to mountains … come on.
“I saw your homeland once from the China side,” Monty told Jamal two years later, after they became lovers.
“I remember you mentioned that to me before, after I first arrived here.”
“It was when I traveled there in ninety-five—did I tell you that too?—and I asked my driver to take a detour right up to the border where China touches the Wakhan Corridor.”
Monty fancied the coincidence hinted at something preordained in their meeting, as if they were two quantum-entangled particles running on parallel tracks, light-years apart. It was an absurd thought, he knew. Sure, I’d met Jonathan after three serendipitous encounters. But he and I hitched up—the words I used—literally overnight. But with Jamal, I developed a deep rapport during the two years before we consummated our relationship. And we had strong chemistry from the time he arrived. “Don’t you remember? I waved at you from over the border in China,” Monty added. Silly besotted me.“Hah. You told me that too. But I was teaching in Kabul by then,” Jamal retorted. “No way you could have waved at me. Maybe at some other handsome Afghan boy.”
“Now you’re teasing me. But seriously, I wanted to get a feel for the land there firsthand. Of course I didn’t cross the border and go into Afghanistan, but the land on the China side is virtually identical. I wanted to see all this because of my interest in the nomadic people who formed an empire there.”
“You’re talking about the Kushan again, right?” Jamal said.
“Yes, them. Maybe you’re related to their great emperor Kanishka,” Monty said in jest.
“Of course I am,” Jamal replied in the same tone. “In fact I am Kanishka. I’m immortal. You know I converted to Buddhism and endorsed its practice in my empire. And I sent Indian monks to China to introduce Mahayana Buddhism there. And of course my mentor was Ashvaghosha. You know him, right? He wrote the first biography of Buddha and was the twelfth in the direct line from Buddha’s disciple Mahakasyapa to Bodhidharma, who brought your Zen to China.”
“Okay, okay. I give up,” Monty said, covering his face. “I guess you know everything.”
“Well, I know the history of my country backwards and forwards. The Wakhan was home to one of the five Kushan clans. The Kushan controlled the silk route, many routes actually, and much more than silk was traded. Like lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, my home province, the world’s only source of that blue stone. Marco Polo passed through the Wakhan to get to China, if you believe his book. Centuries later, the Wakhan Corridor was set as the boundary between Russian Turkmenistan and British India, in their so-called Great Game, when they competed for control of central Asia. I’ve learned about world history too.”
His mind was like a library; it took my breath away. Hard to believe he’d picked up all this being groomed by his handlers. I mean how could he know so much detail about the history of Buddhism, more than I did, in fact? I was dazzled by his worldliness given his origin. I shared more with him intellectually than I ever did with Jonathan all those years. Jamal took an interest in my academic work. We’d discuss American history for hours. We watched science programs on PBS and talked about physics, biology, the environment. I introduced him to Western classical music. Even before we were a couple, he asked me to teach him Zen meditation, and we practiced together. He was grounded like a shepherd boy and yet sophisticated and urbane. It made me fall deeper in love with him. And, admittedly, the sex was phenomenal. Better than I’d ever experienced with anyone. More intimate. Playful. Passionate.
“I’d be curious to know more about your time in Kabul, after the Taliban took over,” Monty asked. “It must have been terrifying. Especially considering what they did to your boyfriend.”
“I really don’t want to talk about that, Monty. I’d prefer you don’t ask about it.”
“Okay, sorry.”
But it wasn’t okay, I know now. He was hiding something. But what exactly? Maybe something to do with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Oh, Jamal, who are you really?