July 29, 2009 After 5 months in Kabul, I returned home to Washington, DC in May. I am back in the fold of family and friends, starting up newspaper subscriptions, going to my Sunday Farmer’s Market, and sorting out next steps. I miss Afghanistan. I miss bumping down Street #3 in Ansari Watt to get to my office on Street #6 in Taimani. I miss Habib’s scrambled eggs with onions, Ali’s fried chicken, and Mantoo and Ashak at the Safi Landmark Hotel. I miss struggling to speak Dari with Qader and Sayed Mohammed, my drivers. I miss the gleeful feeling of understanding something they have said to me in Dari. I miss Mirwais, Rashid, and Zaher, my beloved bodyguards, fighters from Panjshir province. I miss choclets in glass dishes, Nan at every meal, carrots the size of a Louisville Slugger. I miss café latte and tuna melts at the Cabul Coffee House. I miss the smell of baking bread floating up and down the street. I miss it all.
Afghanistan became home for me, and, indeed, it felt like home from the moment the armored car that claimed me at the Kabul Airport on January 1 drove out onto the main road leading to the city. Looped barbed wire on top of concrete walls. Wedding halls as big as a city block festooned with neon palm trees and brides and grooms. Roadside stalls, donkey carts, Humvees. Adobe houses and ruins of adobe houses. And dust. Lots of dust. I took it all in and with my first breath, Kabul felt like home.
There is home and there is home. In May, I came home to my beautiful daughter who met me at the airport early on that May morning. I had not seen her for 5 months. I can’t begin to describe the feelings that overcame me when I spotted her on the other side of Customs. Tears and more tears and then a fierce hug. This is home to me: my children.
Two days later, my daughter and my aunt and I drove north to my son’s graduation from Wesleyan University. We were joined there by my brother and one of my best friends from high school – my son’s godmother – and her daughter – my goddaughter, and a dear friend from high school and her partner. More home. Marking my son’s huge accomplishment was a thrill, a passage into a new cycle of life.
With a wonderful Commencement behind us, I set off for California to visit family and friends. My niece, Sophia, charmed me with her soulful manner. My nephew, John, left me in the dust, a bundle of boyish energy. Time with high school friends – sisters to me – was precious. We have been together, first as boarding school classmates and since then as friends, for almost 50 years. And we always pick up where we left off. Was Mrs. H. really having an affair with Mr. H? Why did Mrs. Berry insist on calling the Filipino staff “The Boys” when not one of them was a day under 50? Why, when four of us were caught smoking 6 weeks before graduation, did Mrs. Bill ask us, “Whatever possessed you to smoke on May Day?”
On to Napa Valley and a dreamy party in a dear friend’s backyard. This is a friend with whom I share a birthday and so much more. Decades of sharing, caring, and laughing. Many cherished friends came to that dinner. I sat in a circle of loved ones and talked about Afghanistan. My friend, Faith, the photographer, arranged the burka I brought from Afghanistan as if it was lounging on a hammock and declared it a “burka-lounger!”
Now I am back in DC looking ahead to next steps, reconnecting with family and friends, settling in at home. Not a day passes that I don’t think of Afghanistan and long to return. In my pocket, I carry the tasbeh (prayer beads) given to me by Qader. I puzzle the agate surface of the ring I bought in Afghanistan with my thumb. I look at the framed photo of my friends Ali, Tamim, Mojib, Sayed Mohammed, Rashid. Zuhal, Kamila, Modera, Meena, and Parwana. I miss them.
Home is a corner of my heart where I tuck memories and images. The days my children were born. Their birthdays. School graduations. Athletic events. School plays. Notes they have written me. Funny things they have said. Holidays together. Home is wherever my children are. I am home now and I am happy. And, yet, my other home beckons. I long to see the mountains ringing Kabul, to bump along those rutted streets, to visit Abdul Qadeer’s carpet shop on Chicken Street. I miss Afghanistan. I miss my kind, generous Afghan friends. I long for the smell of Nan baking in a streetside oven.
I am drawn again and again to James Michener’s Caravans, published in 1964, the story of a young diplomat assigned to rescue an American girl who has disappeared in Afghanistan. Michener writes:
I’ve been told that diplomats and military men remember with nostalgia the first alien lands in which they served, and I suppose this is inevitable; but in my case I look back upon Afghanistan with special affection because it was, in those days, the wildest, weirdest land on earth and to be a young man in Kabul was the essence of adventure.
The city of Kabul, perched at the intersection of caravan trails that had functioned for more than three thousand years, was hemmed in on the west by the Koh-i-Baba range of mountains, nearly seventeen thousand feet high, and on the north by the even greater Hindu Kush, one of the major mountain massifs of Asia. In the winter these powerful ranges were covered with snow, so that one could never forget that he was caught in a kind of bowl whose rim was composed of ice and granite.
I will be back, Afghanistan.
