Poetry and premonition (part two)

It’s poetry evening at the Afghan embassy in New Delhi. Ambassador and Mrs. Khalili are hosting envoy counterparts from Mexico, Poland and Slovakia – all men of letters – as well as the city’s top French journalist. Dinner done, we’ve adjourned to the grand salon for some serious versifying. While at table we all spoke English, with good will and much curious inflection.

Not anymore. Lingua franca may be sufficient for chit-chat, but poetry is sacred stuff. Now each of us recites in his native tongue.

Nobody, in this Babel mode, understands everybody else. Khalili is at the greatest disadvantage because, of all our languages, his Persian is least widely shared. Even so, he’s the star – in part on account of Khalili himself (poet son of a master poet), in part because of Persian.

Governed but also empowered by conventions of rhythm and rhyme – like American poetry before Walt Whitman – Persian verse can resonate within non-Persian speakers, literally entrance those who don’t comprehend a word. Forget what the poetry “means.” When recited by a deep “lion voice” like Khalili’s, the sounds become ends in themselves.

Between poems we shift back to English. “Who was the greatest Persian poet?” asks the Slovakian ambassador (whose own work is currently being translated into Hindi and Urdu). Khalili answers immediately.

“Hafez,” he says, “who lived in Shiraz [Iran] six centuries ago.” Pause. “Commander Masood and I were reciting Hafez six hours before the blast.” Pause. “Our picture is there on the table behind you.” The photograph shows Ahmad Shah Masood, Afghanistan’s martyred hero, together Khalili in full 1980s Holy War regalia: loose Afghan clothes, AK-47s, and black beards. They’re somewhere in the northeastern mountains where Masood, with Khalili’s help, preserved his country against all comers for 23 years.

“Before the blast” means pre-9-9-01 – two days before America’s disaster – when Arab suicide bombers killed Masood and severely wounded Khalili. Blind in one eye and full of shrapnel, he’s still recovering. His survival astonishes doctors on three continents. Local folklore speaks of miracle and divine favor. No less mysterious, indeed “mystical,” is the story of his last hours with Masood. The details, many published here for the first time, combine modern politics, classic Muslim poetry, and pre-Islamic beliefs of premonition.

In early September 2001 Masood had sat-phoned Khalili at the Delhi embassy, requested that the ambassador come at once to Afghanistan. There’d been no explanation, and Khalili was puzzled. Masood, his friend remembers, always had a reason. Khalili flew first to Tajikistan, and, since there seemed no specific rush, considered staying a few days to bolster ties with the Tajik government, one of the handful (America notably absent) then supporting Masood’s northern alliance against the Taliban.

But suddenly Masood appeared in Tajikistan. He’d come by helicopter to meet Khalili, to make sure his friend would continue onward immediately. Khalili resumes the story: “So you must have some important matter,” I said to the vommander. “Go ahead. You’re going to tell me anyway. Just tell me now.”

He told me, “Really, it’s nothing serious, nothing grave. I simply wanted you to be with me in these days.” It was the evening of Sept. 7, 2001.

Next day they flew Masood’s helicopter back into Afghanistan. We saw the Oxus River beneath us, landed on the Afghan side, and sat on the bank for half an hour. It was so beautiful. The river moved in one slow, enormous sheet of water from its birthplace in the mountains towards its distant grave. Sounds affected? Hyper-poetic? Not to Afghans.

Sitting together on the Oxus Bank, Khalili told Masood a story of inter-faith miracle. An old Hindu woman in Delhi was desperate for the release of her wrongly imprisoned son. Born in what now is Pakistan and displaced by the 1947 Partition of India, she remembered a Muslim shrine from her childhood in Lahore and, at telepathic long distance, said a Hindu prayer to its Muslim saint. The son was suddenly released.

Khalili again: Then Commander Masood asked me to tell him more of India. I took him – in what we would call “the mind’s eye” – from one shrine to another in Delhi. He wanted to know about Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs. What they believed and how they lived their lives. So I told him, and he began to cry. He had always been such a strict Muslim, but now the tears poured from his eyes. They streamed down his face, like a river, and reached his shirtfront. His collar and even the part below were all damp from his tears. Here was a man who never cried, at least not in public. People were saying that he’d never cried that way before. Now it was after noon on Sept. 8.

What remained of that day was spent mostly on “business”: the endless, back-to-the-wall details of struggling to survive. Triumphant after 14 years of anti-communist struggle, the Northern Alliance had taken power in 1992 but then lost Kabul to the Taliban four years later. Mullah Omar and his militant Islamist extremists – powered by Pakistan and tolerated by American policy makers hoping for an oil pipeline deal – then swept north across the Hindu Kush. Masood and his followers were squeezed into Afghanistan’s northeastern corner.

Already bad, things had recently gotten worse. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida began calling the Taliban shots. In February 2001 they defied the world by demolishing priceless Buddhist statues. With America indifferent, Masood and Khalili went to France that summer to plead for European Union assistance. They received, in diplomatic parlance, “expressions of sympathy.” Meanwhile the Taliban squeezed harder.

Come late summer, the northern alliance was just getting by. Meager handouts from Iran, Russia, and India had to be delivered, with much delay and corruption, via Tajikistan. Fall was in the air. As dusk fell on Sept. 8, it looked like a cold, hard winter.

Still Masood and Khalili persevered. They couldn’t know that final night – at least not consciously – that mightier forces were about to break loose, that the world would soon be turned upside down, that in less than a month America would ally itself with the Northern Alliance, that this long overdue cooperation would quickly lead to victory in Kabul…and that Commander Ahmad Shah Masood, with exquisitely cruel irony, had less than 24 hours to live.

Death’s particulars – when, where, how – are mercifully hidden in the future, veiled from our conscious minds. Prophet Mohammed understood that such prior knowledge would be psychologically intolerable. Modern science deems it impossible. So, on a conscious level, Masood and Khalili couldn’t have known.

But what about moments of unconscious awareness, vague and disguised intimations of things to come? How to account for Masood’s seemingly whimsical summons to Khalili? And for Masood’s sudden flood of tears upon hearing about other faiths which, as a rigorous Muslim, he’d previously ignored?

Most remarkable of all – and still ahead – was one last poetry evening, shared by these two best friends and lasting into the early morning of Sept. 9. What to make of their invoking an ancient fortune telling practice? Of their opening a much-loved book at random in the wee hours? Of a fatal premonition before dawn?

We in the West turned our backs on such things centuries ago. Not the Afghans. Stay tuned for this story’s climax – horrific and heroic, mysterious and mystical – next week in the Bangor Daily News.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.