Ch 7. Spring, chess, cricket and going with the flow
photo: Dragan Lekic.
Before I met my Afghan friends I really didn’t know much about Afghanistan, probably as much as the average news reader. So I began reading books and articles on the internet, spoke to journalist friends who’d been there and spent hours sitting in the park speaking with the guys. We queued for donated meals, I pored over collected statistics and facts on refugees and the EU, peeked into their tents (the winter months spent outdoors with the refugees were grim) and met transient Afghans who passed like shadows through Paris and, albeit briefly, our lives.
I attended a night-time rally for protest and action spearheaded by Prix Goncourt winner Atiq Rahimi, a handsome Afghan and writer who spoke with passion into a megaphone, his black beret tipped to one side. Around a bonfire stood perhaps a hundred homeless Afghan youths and amongst them the actress, musician and activist Jane Birkin (her British bulldog by her side) with the fashion designer Agnés B. The good people of Emmaus and Les Enfants De Don Quichotte were also present and together all fought (at the rally, on the television and in newspapers) and then won somewhere for the Afghan’s to shelter as temperatures dropped below zero. I spoke to countless guys, heard their stories as they picked through donated sleeping bags and listened to my particular small group of friends politics on whether to sleep or not to sleep in the shelter provided. I was asked so many times, “why are Afghan’s homeless in France?” I didn’t have the social, economic or perhaps just practical explanation for that yet. To answer that I’d need to get an understanding of the French system and practises of society versus state. Gulp.
Conversely, with each international newspaper article written about Afghan refugees, readers left the same questions again and again in comments boxes. Angry, fed-up and frightened British, Swedish or Norwegian readers wanting to know if these people were arriving to take advantage of their generous social systems. “If it costs 15,000 to be smuggled into Europe then they’re richer than me, I certainly don’t have that kind of cash lying around yet it’s people like me who’re paying for their benefits.” “We’re fighting for their country, why don’t they be men, join the army and do the same?” “Why are they sending unaccompanied minors and if we take them in isn’t it encouraging families to send these poor children?” All valid questions, immigration is a touch stone issue in the UK but it’s not imagined. When living in London I was taken aback many times by the dense population of some council estates that were pan Asian concrete ghetto’s whose scant shops were protected by metal grids. Bangladeshi kids holding the heroin monopoly in their post-code. White-trash wide-boys staging dog fights on the only piece of grass around. Many colours, largely unemployed and living, frankly, in an over-stretched shit-hole. Where was the balance in all of this?
Through the Afghan’s I’ve seen a side to France that perhaps many don’t. Around this story is another of citizens coming together to support and understand strangers who’ve arrived to their doorsteps from a far away land. Actors who have begun charities and charity workers who’ve begun free Saturday morning cinema clubs for the poor, the down and out. I’ve seen people of all nationalities and colour queuing at the offices of France Terre Asile and watched the media mobilise, reacting to cause and having effect. I’ve talked to rich house-wive who volunteer for Medecins Sans Frontiers and Afghan refugees who volunteer as chef’s at local cook-outs; Parisians who’ve hand delivered hot dishes and clothing to the winter shelter as well as men who’re clearly cruising homeless Afghan hang-out in the hopes of catching the eye of a handsome young thing. I’ve explained court hearings to deaf pensioners who question the morality of locking humans into detention centres when they’re escaping a war that links us all. Before this I’d never seen people in a bustling city show benevolence and simply neighbourly concern to tribes of people with different coloured skin that come from a land they know barely anything about. That sounds shocking to me but it’s true. But let’s get this into context, I’d never taken care to look before.
Around this and in my old life I was accused by a drunken friend at a party that I was turning into a muslim (eye-roll) and attended the fashion shows that I’d begun reporting on for various magazines. One hour I was seated opposite Anna Wintour, my eyes blinded by paparazzi bulbs as the lead actress of Avatar swept into her seat at a Givenchy haute couture show. The next I was huddled in the cold listening to descriptions of Bagram and extremist grooming techniques, trying to decode fact from opinion or understanding how a person could come to solidly believe that Osama Bin Laden is a an Arab CIA agent sent by the Americans. My mind spun on the question of verifying anything that anyone was telling me, from their names to even writing about a country that I had never been to. Back in England I had essentially lived the life a good-time journalist whose dusk-til-dawn party antics and bar bills matched her word counts. For nine years I had interviewed only musicians, actresses, designers and DJs; put simply white, middle-class and hip. My life had definitely changed. To what and to where?
I’ll freely admit, the whole experience became too intense. An emotional and intellectual fog set in and I stopped writing this blog. I also realised that the Afghans about whom I’d proposed to write an article had life situations and points of view that I had only truly begun to scratch the surface. A time out was in order and instead of continually grasping for my own annoyingly elusive point of view for my article on the Afghan migrants (I’ve swayed from centre left to centre right and back on this subject countless times never mind choking for air under the weight of countless, confusing statistics) I decided just to simply hang out. “What,” I said to my friend Bashir from Logar province, “around all of this, do you like to do?” His answer was to play chess. “What,” I asked my teenage friend from Bajaur, “do you like to do?” His answer was three things: cricket, watching Bollywood and WWE wrestling superstars. Well ok, I said to them, let’s do that.
Bashir and I found a speed chess club in Paris. We went and met a whole host of quirky, interesting characters, each there to play ten rounds of chess at fifteen minutes a game. Chess masters, newbie’s, spectacled students from Germany and Lithuania, banlieu boys, retired gentlemen and an elegant Indian banker who spoke Urdu to Bashir at a million miles per hour. Bashir won his first game in fourteen seconds and progressed to his second game while I worked my way through my first pint of beer. Between games he talked chess strategies, how he’d fared against each opponent, his happiness at the opportunity to speak French, how a strict uncle had taught him the rules and how his cousins used to tease him by stealing pieces from his set. “Imagine that this is Karzai,” said Bashir pointing to a piece when I told him that chess had never lit my imagination. “These are his governors, these his chiefs of police, the press and his soldiers. They move across the chess board which we can say is Afghanistan….” I looked at the chess board and this dusty old board game turned into a vibrant tussle of strategy and chase.
Onto Bollywood. Actors Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan (anyone named Khan infact) are huge and very real heroes to my friends. “Khan means Pushtun,” said my Bajaur friends proudly and they talked about the fight for a land for Pushtun’s. I came to know better my friend Imran’s sense of humour, poetic view of life and that he, more than any of the Afghan’s I had met had not just made the journey from Bajaur to Europe as much as jumped into a time machine – more on this another time. I found out that he walked thirty minutes every other day to use free internet facilities in a library that he had found. He said that besides Afghan’s who had arrived from or near his home province on the Af-Pak border, his primary news source was BBC Urdu. I learned that sometimes he had news from home of the war in FATA that either hit international news sources three weeks afterwards or sometimes didn’t hit the news at all. “I saw one western journalist in our area,” he told me, “and he was killed so after that nobody dared come.”
Mostly, as much as he could, he would spend his time watching Bollywood clips. When times got hard he escaped with Bollywood. This nineteen year old is a dreamer who otherwise admires the passionate poetry and romantic passages of the Koran. Bollywood was, still is, his ticket out of daily life: the reminders of death and fighting brought by the news, his daily Catch 22 predicament and the grinding boredom that refugee life brings. Salman Khan’s characters were tough so he could be tough. Aamir Khan was upright and thoughtful, he was too. Shahrukh Khan was a proud, romantic hero and so too he became airbourne, up and out of the cold, forgetting the “problems, many problems” and that Pushtun’s were “living like dogs” in their own land and here in Europe.
So before meeting these lads I didn’t know much about Afghanistan, I had never really paid attention to Bollywood, I had never thought to talk with my old school friends about the lands and traditions of their parents (I barely knew those of my own parents) and I had certainly never played speed chess. That’s all changed forever. And cricket? What does that mean to my friends? Ha, that deserves a juicy blog post all of it’s own.
