Cameras and watermelons

When things fall apart – as they currently seem to be doing – we humans need to hunker down. Our ancestors first took refuge in trees, then inside caves, then behind rude village palisades, which became huge city walls and led to the Department of Homeland Security. All of these have offered a semblance of physical protection.

Psychological refuge is something else. We have, if we’re lucky, each other. Some of us have religion. Others resort to sports or sitcoms, meditation or medication. Persian speakers have their poetry, one corpus of which I’ve been translating for the past six weeks. All of these, off and on, have worked for me.

Additionally, I seem to fixate on narratives, old stories that I’ve told myself for years. I’m telling them now, mostly in silence but some to friends here in Delhi. Here’s one from three decades ago, when I was a young diplomat working for the United States Information Service in Afghanistan. Telling it makes me feel good, gives me hope.

Most lunchtimes were slow at the American Cultural Center in Kabul during the pre-conflict 1970s. Some days there were “important” outside appointments: the monthly meeting, for instance, of Kabul’s new Rotary Club, or tennis at the Residence where my then-limber body was in demand for doubles.

This day, however, was one of the slow ones – so much so that I played hooky: Shed coat and tie, snuck out the back door, and ambled happily across the puddle-dry Kabul River, past a phallic independence monument, into the mud-walled warrens of the city’s oldest bazaar. I’d done it before, first out of touristic curiosity but increasingly – perhaps without realizing it – on account of an odd effect. Once there, something would give way between my ears. Something would stop: Call it “critical thinking” or “categorical thinking” or maybe even “thinking” itself. My mind would slide and dissolve. I’d feel blunt, unconcerned with direction, and full of unfocused wonder. Here was Kabul at its most picturesque, but on these strolls my camera ordinarily stayed in its case.

One corner stall still offered shoes with upcurled, pointed toes. Water carriers still lumbered under their dark, damp goatskins and sold drinks by the cup. Alleys were full of medieval smells and sounds. My mind absorbed all these by way of embrace more than notation. Rather than stride purposefully, my consciousness moved like a stumble-bum: half glide, half stagger.

This day, however, presented a new tableau. Twenty or 30 people were gathered by a kebab shop, next to a pile of green watermelons trucked from the North. In their midst was an old malang, the sort of mystic and mendicant for whom God is said to provide. I stopped short. Suddenly, in the space of a nanosecond, my mind went from gauzy blur to cocked shutter.

Distant from other sufi mystics, malangs live outside mundane society. They own nothing and are always on the move. They belong to no order. They wear Arab headdresses and tattered clothes festooned with amulets. They carry begging bowls and ritual staffs. I’d glimpsed them before but always at a distance. Now here was one close up, and I was unaccountably galvanized.

He spoke in quick, erratic snatches: plainly one moment, then in the ellipses of classical Persian poetry, then in what I gathered to be a Central Asian version of “tongues.” His core audience was spellbound and sat, disciple-like, on their folded cloaks. Others paused, shuffled nervously, tried not to look at each other, and walked away without comment in different directions.

Meanwhile, my camera was out, and the zoom lens was on. I hovered and darted and shot a whole roll. I crouched by the watermelons to insert another. It took me a moment to hear the silence. The malang had stopped speaking. I looked up. He and all the rest were looking at me.

“Can we see your photographs?” he said. “Is your film the kind that develops itself so we can see it at once?”

“No,” I said. “It’s special film. It has to be sent to a special place. Its development takes time. Give me your address. When it’s developed, I’ll send you a copy. I’m sorry, but the development of this film needs a special process.”

He giggled. “I have no address. I’m fine without one. And as for you, you too were fine until a moment ago. Until, in fact, you first saw me. Then you lost it. We all noticed.”

“Lost what?’ I said. “What do you mean?”

Another giggle. “You lost the way and found, instead, your camera and your special film.”

“What way? And what’s the matter with my film?” My Persian was getting shaky and so, with each new observation, was my ego.

“Your film is fine,” he said, “except that, as you say, it’s special and needs special development. Generally you imagine the same to be true of yourself. You worry about your specialness and your special development. But – thanks to God – not always. For a moment there, before you saw me, you forgot about being special. That’s the way. Take heart.” He paused and then said it again, “Take heart.”

Consider the situation and its sheer, absurd implausibility. I had never seen this man before. Yet now, with his talk of how I generally imagine myself, it was as if he claimed to see deep into me – and not only at that moment but before we h ad even met. How on earth could he pretend to know what I was like then and there, less still what I had been like five minutes earlier, and least of all what I was “generally” like? Outrageous … and yet no part of me felt outraged or even complaisantly indulgent.

Instead I felt reduced to simple phrases and generic questions. “So how,” I asked lamely, “should a man like me live?”

“Easy,” he said. “First, forget the phrase like me. Forget words like I and me altogether. Then simply live like any one of those watermelons in that pile. Note how they sit there, balanced and calm. Watermelons don’t need special development.”

Still baffled and increasingly embarrassed, I got up to go. He grasped my wrist. “Don’t worry,” he said with a big grin. “You had it for a moment. Take heart.”

Why do certain encounters stick, transform themselves into stories, recur in the mind three decades later while the world – driven by ego and perceptions of specialness – lurches to war? As we man the battlements, I’m thinking of watermelons.

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.