Sometimes, if I catch the fresh scent of pine trees or see
a fragment of deep-blue lapis lazuli, it takes me back.
Back to Herat, stamping my feet to keep warm in a dusty
shop crammed with muskets and antiquities, as I watch
Sultan Hamidy, the glassblower, conjure up goblets of
jade-green and cobalt-blue, telling me that for every one
he blows he breathes the name of one who’s died in the
war. Back to Mazar-i-Sharif and the cloud of snow-white
doves swirling round the Blue Mosque, where legend
has it any grey bird will be turned white. Or Kabul, in
November’s pomegranate season, drinking thick juice
from a roadside grinder with a giant wheel or sucking on
ruby-red pips shining like jewels.
I was just 22 the first time I went to Afghanistan and it
turned everything I’d known or valued upside down.
I had no links with the country but had ended up in
neighbouring Pakistan after an unexpected invitation to
a wedding in Karachi. I fell in love with the place and took
a crowded minibus called a Flying Coach up the Grand
Trunk Road to Peshawar, which any Afghan will tell you
used to be part of Afghanistan, and many believe still is.
In my bag was a pack of letters written in black ink by a
Pakistani friend to local contacts and a copy of Rudyard
Kipling’s novel, Kim.
The bus journey ended at sundown in the Old City,
which, it seemed, hadn’t changed very much since
Kipling’s day. Wooden-framed buildings leaning on each
other, streets filled with men wearing black eyeliner
and silver-embroidered slippers with curled toes, rifles
casually slung across their backs.
I soon found my way to the Storytellers’ Bazaar, where
a boy played an accordion and long-bearded elders
sipped green tea and talked about battles as if they’dhappened yesterday. We had a shared history, Britain
and Afghanistan having fought three wars between 1878
and 1919, and they loved to remind me they’d won (well, at
least twice).
Afghanistan lay the other side of the Khyber Pass and
the jagged mountains we could see in the distance. I
began travelling in and out with the mujahideen, who
were fighting the soldiers of the Soviet army, which
had occupied their country. The air was so crisp and
the mountains full of pines, and the villages where we
stayed were the poorest places I’d ever seen. Yet everyone
we met shared all they had — a little tea, dry bread and
occasionally some yoghurt or dried mulberries. I’d never
met people so hospitable, or such storytellers, even
though most were illiterate. It made me realise they had
values we’d forgotten.
I never imagined then that Afghanistan would become
so much part of my life, a place I’d visit frequently over
the following 32 years. Perhaps your first assignment as
a foreign correspondent always has a special pull, like a
first love affair.
When I hear people talk of the country as a ‘dusty
land of men with beards and guns’, it’s true that it’s been
at war for 40 years and that Afghans fight even with
kites and boiled eggs. But it’s also a land of poetry and
pomegranates, and I dream of the day when there’s peace
and I can visit with my son, who’s almost the age I was
that first time.Christina Lamb OBE is the chief foreign correspondent
at The Sunday Times and author of Farewell Kabul: From
Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World, published by
William Collins. christinalamb.netA FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT IS BORN
CHRISTINA LAMB
“ I was just 22 the first time
I went toAfghanistan,
and it turnedeverything
I’d knownor valued
upsidedown.”
IMAGES: ALAMY; RAY MEARS
AFGHANISTANJul/Aug 2020 69THE POWER OF PLACE