with as much hash as he could carry. He jumped off the moving caboose into the boarder area no-mans land and walked the herb dangerous into a small village where it was transferred to his European employers. Iranian law meted out a sentence of death by torture for Afghans caught smuggling anything. To Ghiaz, by comparison, the opposite direction through the Khyber Pass was a “walk in the park.”
Sakhi grew up in Balkh. For centuries Balkh was home to the world’s best hashpollen farmers and hand pressers. Sakhi took Mark and me north to show us what he had access to. He carried an old flintlock rifle for protection everywhere we went.
Afghanistan’s national game of buzkashi is well-known around the world and is played with the carcass of a headless, hoofless calf or goat. It is a rough and violent version of polo that tests the skills of man and horse. I set out to find a buzkashi horse to ride. I found a beautiful white stallion and, against the Afghani tradition of naming a horse after its color, I named this one “Sazz” – or music – for his tremendous, strong yet smooth gait. He was perfectly trained. Sazz, only recently retired from the game, became a beloved member of our family. I sometimes thought he missed the games. Sazz certainly loved to run.
The gardener also served as the resident caretaker of the estate and he was happy to continue his role when we rented the house. He lived on the estate and maintained it for the Deputy Prime Minister, who used it primarily for his daughters to romp and play behind the walls in the children’s playground. In an Afghan tradition, I also hired Rustan, a eunuch, to perform the role of a traditional housekeeper and cleaner.
I was able to find a small well-trained, Bamiyan breed of horse we named Red Flame for Rebecca to ride. This led to our first big cultural problem. Women were strictly forbidden from riding horses. On our first horseback ride, we were greeted by a hail of rocks at Karta-i-sah, the first village beyond our home.
After directing Rebecca to head for home and fueled by righteous indignation, as I’d never felt before, I stormed through the village market, kicking over fruit and vegetable stands, pulling down tent awnings and slashing at any and all with my buzkashi whip before galloping towards home after her.
Our next ride through Karta-i-sah village was without incident. However, at Kartasang, the last village before the Kabul River dropped from the mountains, we had another screaming, pelting attack. This frenzied mob even included some women. Rebecca raced off and my response was careful and quick … a surprise taste of village square destruction for Kartasang.
This couldn’t go on, of course, without escalating so I implored my landlord, the Deputy Prime Minister, to hold a jirga, or council, with the headman of each village and explain that my wife was a Western girl and we would be riding through their villages. We would not tolerate being stoned. Both headmen eventually agreed to the Deputy Prime Minister’s superior political pressure; however, we all had to go to each village and conduct a charade where the headmen fervently waved their arms and shouted it was forbidden. The Deputy Prime Minister explained to me, on the way home, that without this theatrical show each man would have signed his own trip to a beheading or the stoning stake.
Chapter Nine
“No great genius was ever without some tincture of madness.”
ARISTOTLE
Rebecca and I were invited to visit Lahore by a freaky group of actors who came through Kabul and charmed their way into staying a few days in Jangalak. They had talent, wit and wild looks. The theatrical troupe was a counter-culture sensation in Italy and had just appeared in the Fellini film “Roma.” Their fame stemmed from a brilliant scene in a previous Felleni blockbuster cinema hit. These “artistes” ended up in Lahore by signing a three-movie deal portraying drug-dealing hippies in Pakistani films.
Lahore was actually quite cosmopolitan. There was a thriving gay scene that was totally open and tolerated. We spent about five days there at a wonderful house with beautiful hanging gardens. Hashish was openly smoked in a few places where modern rhythm-oriented Pakistani music was played. Though rare, there were two or three very privileged women in attendance. This was the perk of being a female star in Pakistani films – you could go out in public in the company of foreigners and listen to music. After a while, I left Rebecca in the safety of the film colony and went up to meet Montreal Michael in Islamabad.
Pakistan is an artificially created country where five distinctly different tribes were cobbled together under one flag. Islamabad was the artificially created capitol. The only unifier was the Muslim religion. A difficult political situation was created because the tribes spoke five different languages.
The Grand Peace Mosque dominated the city that was created in the fifties and modeled after Western communities. All the houses had a driveway to the garage, a big front yard, and rambling, ranch-style homes with eight-foot high picture windows in front. Carefree, American TV sit-com families lived in neighborhoods and houses not unlike these built in the new Pakistani capital city. What made it so surreal was that instead of enclosing that big front yard with a picket fence or shrub border, the California-ranch-style homes were surrounded by high razor-wire fences. All the big picture windows were covered with massive anti-theft grills and the garages were boarded over and permanently closed.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the very progressive Prime Minister who was running things in Pakistan. Bhutto had graduated with honors from the University of California in 1950 and was admitted to Oxford. He embraced the American Federalist system and professed a dream of melding the five distinct tribal areas into one modern state. Many first-generation Pakistani leaders were heavily inluenced by having been educated in the U.S. of the 1950s. California ranch-style homes in safe neighborhoods were their vision. The razor-wire fences were the reality.
Prime Minister Bhutto made a fatal flaw in his political maneuvering. There was a great jockeying for what the official language of the new Pakistan would be. All these years after the creation of the country, the actual lingua franca of Pakistan was Urdu. Urdu was a coarse and profane multi-ethnic language that had developed out of the military in the nineteenth century. Bhutto preferred Sind. Sind was a beautiful old language that was still spoken in only one part of Pakistan by the intelligensia and wealthiest class. Choosing Sind to be the national language was a grave political miscalculation on Bhutto’s part. Bhutto went from being the darling of a military establishment that had fought India to a stalemate in the 1971 war, to facing trumped-up charges that sent him to the gallows.
The poetic Sind language brought to mind Pakistani art and culture and was spoken by the cinema community in Lahore. Urdu symbolized Islamabad’s garage doors nailed shut and dry swimming pools and was the metaphor for a backwards march toward religious fundamentalism.
Montreal Michael had been in Islamabad for six months and was slowly but surely assembling the components from the city’s scientific supply outlets necessary to distill pollen and create hash oil. It was a tedious and unpleasant task but he was undaunted and determined to see his hash oil dream factory built.
Michael met two other Canadians in Islamabad buying laboratory equipment at a scientific supply outlet for the same purpose. Cadillac and the Mad Professor were from British Columbia and, sharing the same nationality and the same purpose, they all became associates. We all went out for kabobs and info exchange.
We talked it through, always admiring the great, though somewhat bizarre, entrepreneurial skills of anyone who could come up with an idea like this. The Mad Professor, in a kindly manner, explained that Montreal Michael, while a genius, would never
