Afghanistan…Jalalabad
From the novel, The Warlord’s Daughter
When they came to the first houses and shops on the outskirts of town, Josh thought of his first trip to J-Bad, and he smiled. At one time J-Bad, with its mild winter climate, had been the Royal Winter Capital, and before the wars that began in the 1970s, it had been a winter resort town. The city, located at the junction of the Kabul and Konar rivers, sits in an oasis ringed by mountains. It looked exactly the same as that first time Josh had driven into town. He weaved the Land Rover through pedestrian traffic along the road, where almost everyone was dressed as they had been for centuries. The men were mostly in white pants—shalwar kameez, baggy pants with a drawstring waist—and long, loose white shirts that came close to their knees, almost always with a dark brown or black vest on top. They wore either a brown Pakol hat, or a traditional white cap, and almost without exception, the men sported full beards and moustaches. Some of the younger men had trimmed their beards, but for the most part the men were uniformly fully-bearded, and many of them still had the full Taliban mandated beard, which is a beard that will extend from the base of the hand when grasped.
The majority of the women wore burqas, and a good percentage combined the robe with a one-piece, veil-like head garment with mesh over the eyes called an Afghan burqa. When the Taliban were in power the Afghan burqa was mandatory, but now it was optional, and some women opted to wear head scarves. Many of the young girls, usually under the age of 13, wore bright dresses and rarely covered their heads.
Josh grimaced as he noted the numerous amputees, the blind, and the crippled men, women, and children who were making their way along the road. Of course, the causalities from wars that had ravaged the country were not just in J-Bad, but in almost every town in Afghanistan. The millions of mines left from these wars had made the countryside, and even certain areas in town, dangerous to both man and beast. Driving and walking in an area that had not been cleared of mines was risky, and daily casualties continued to pour into J-Bad as the mines did their deadly work. Everyone tried to stay away from the scarlet-painted rocks which signaled a minefield, but less than 20 percent of the minefields had been marked. Sometimes, just the absence of goat and sheep droppings was enough to for a savvy observer to identify a minefield.
The dust, flies, smoke, and heat created a hazy, gray blur, and the city seemed to be
simmering. J-Bad has a distinctive odor–and not a pleasant one. Garbage pits line the road, and the refuse is not confined to the pits. Nor is it all garbage. The dogs that nose through the rotting piles of rubbish feed on scraps of animal hides, human waste, and anything else that a starving animal might find edible. The stench is a combination of waste pits, open sewers, roadside garbage, and burning dung.
Before the wars ravaged the town, J-Bad, with its tree-lined streets and parks, had been known as “the city of gardens.” However, several decades of war and abject poverty had decimated many of the parks and trees, as the people, desperate for anything that they could use for fuel, cut and burned all the greenery. The street fighting turned the remaining ones into stark, leafless specters reminiscent of the horrors that had swept across the country.
The people on the street, walking beside the mostly flat-roofed, one-story, mud-brick and plaster buildings, all seem to blend in with their dreary surroundings. The plastered walls that covered the mud-brick buildings were never smooth and unbroken. Either age or bullets had knocked off much of the plaster, and the mud-bricks underneath were exposed. The dirty brown color of the average house was punctuated by an occasional whitewashed house, and sometimes a blue-painted one. Josh smiled as he thought of his first impression of J-Bad. God, I wonder if there’s a building in this city without bullet holes. The city’s population was estimated at around 96,000, but to Josh the town seemed much smaller.
