By Steven Roecker
April-June 1998
Lemar-Aftaab
"Are you sick?"
I remember the surprise I felt on hearing these
words spoken to me in English. It was a
late afternoon in mid July, 1977. I was lying with
my eyes closed on a rope bed in the
middle of the main street of a small village in a
remote area of the Hindu Kush, writhing in
pain from a stomach disorder and wondering if
this would be my last day on Earth. The
improbability of hearing anyone speak English
suggested to me that I had indeed passed on
to another world.
How did I get here? As a graduate student
in Geophysics at MIT I studied the
earthquakes, or Zelzelah, of the Hindu
Kush as part of my PhD dissertation. I was a
member of a team of French and American
seismologists who worked in Afghanistan in the
summers of 1976, 1977 and 1978, recording the
ground motions caused by the abundant
and unusual seismic activity of the region.
For a young man as myself who had rarely
traveled outside the confines of the eastern US,
Afghanistan was like another planet.
Everything was different, everything was strange,
everything was an adventure. I loved it.
Even my more worldly colleagues were entranced
by the people and culture of the country,
and the stories of what each of us encountered on
any given day would keep us entertained
well into the night.
It seems to me there are few better ways of
exposing oneself to the culture of another
country than operating a network of seismic
stations within it. You find yourself
negotiating with government officials for
permission to work, bargaining
with merchants for supplies and provisions,
and spending afternoons drinking tea with
the farmers and villagers in the places where
the equipment is installed. Because the
seismic stations are spread out over a large
area, you drive around a lot, see a lot of
scenery, and drink enough tea to feel like
a walking samovar. In many parts of the world
such traveling might allow only a
superficial view of a culture, but in
Afghanistan, where a
brief stop to ask directions inevitably
leads to an invitation to tea, then dinner, and then
perhaps an overnight stay, this kind
of work provided plenty of opportunities for learning.
As a result of all this traveling around in
Afghanistan, I accumulated a sizable collection of
stories. The following tale is one of
my favorites, and I assure the reader that it is true.
In the summer of 1977 our French-American
team operated a network of seismic stations in
the Hindu Kush. One of these stations was
located in the hills outside of Farkhar, a small
village south of Taliquan in the province of
Badakhshan. Every two days some members
of our crew would drive to Farkhar from their base in
Kunduz to maintain the equipment
and archive the data recorded. One day, a
heavy rain washed out a bridge on the main road
between Taliquan and Kunduz, making
frequent travel to Farkhar impossible. We were
keen to keep this station operating and I
volunteered to live in Farkhar and take care of it on
my own until the bridge was repaired. So
armed with supplies for the equipment and a
few personal effects, we embarked on a
long alternate route, driving north to the Soviet
border and then overland southeast to
Taliquan, and finally south to Farkhar. The Afghan
members of my group explained to the
locals that I would be living in the village and
described what I would be doing, and
then left me with my few belongings and even fewer
phrases of Dari to fend for myself.
I took up residence in a small room
that occasionally
served as the post office - with the
bridge down no one was expecting any mail anyway.
One of the shopkeepers loaned me a
rope bed which was too big to fit into the post office,
so I left it outside and slept in the
street (there was very little non pedestrian traffic in the
village). As it happened the street
turned out to be a nice place to spend the night as there
were few lights in Farkhar and the
sky was brilliant with stars.
I took most of my meals at the local Chi Khana (tea house).
Usually I enjoyed eating in
Chi Khanas, but this one was abysmal.
Not only was the menu unimaginative - the only
offering was a bowl of rice topped by
a microscopic piece of mutton - but it was
unbelievably unsanitary. At dinner
I would request two bowls of rice and place one at the
other end of the table to give the
armies of flies something else to occupy themselves with.
Inevitably, after a few days of living like this
I awoke one morning with my stomach in a
horrendous knot, the victim of some bug I had consumed.
The pain was nearly unbearable.
I lay in my rope bed in the street trying to stifle the moans
and groans that the eruptions of
my intestines were urging upon me. Some of the villagers
came by and looked at me
sympathetically, but while their voices were comforting I had no
idea what they were saying.
Early in the afternoon the contortions
went from bad to worse;
I started to think that perhaps an early
death would not be such a bad thing. I was about to
pass out when I heard someone speaking English.
"Are you sick?"
I presumed I was hallucinating, but the voice came again.
"Can you hear me? Are you sick?"
I opened my eyes and saw a young Afghan fellow
standing over me. He explained that he
was a student at the university in Kabul and
was visiting his father on break. I managed a
small amount of conversation and he invited
me to join him at his father's house for dinner
-apparently it was his father's birthday and
there was a big celebration planned. I thanked
him but explained that I was in no shape to eat,
much less attend a social event. The young
man urged me to come, saying there would be
some medicine for me at the house. I
protested that I could not get up but he
would not accept no as an answer. After a bit more
cajoling, he threw my left arm over his
neck for support and guided me down the road to
his father's house, about a kilometer
south of the village.
The house was a handsome one story adobe-type
construction common in that part of the
country. It was well kept and had a beautiful lush
garden in the back. When we arrived
the party was in full swing; a band was
playing and there were perhaps twenty men and
boys eating and talking to one another. I made my
way to some inviting looking pillows
on a Bukharah style rug and reclined,
my intestines feeling no better for the exercise just
endured. My new friend went to collect
some food and drink for us both, but I declined
his generous offer and asked him
about the medicine he had mentioned earlier.
"I've discussed it with my father.
He is making it for you now."
Making it? I had expected that this
medicine would be something that someone had
brought up from Kabul or imported from
a pharmacy somewhere, perhaps even a bottle of
Pepto-Bismal.
After about half an hour my friend left
and then reappeared with a cloth, inside of which
was something that resembled a large
oatmeal cookie with bits like odd shaped M&Ms in it.
He offered it to me but I said again that
I wasn't hungry.
"This is the medicine I told you about",
he explained.
I looked at the large round pill doubtfully,
debating the consequences of ingesting this
unknown quantity versus enduring the
ever growing agony in my abdomen. Pain won the
day; I took the pill from my friend and ate it.
At first nothing happened but after a few minutes
I could feel the pain starting to subside.
After about half an hour I not only felt fine but
started to regain my appetite. I joined my
friend over at one of the tables for a kabob.
"That medicine you gave me is fantastic",
I said to him. "What was it?"
"My father makes medicine from plants that
he gathers in the mountains. In his youth he
lead a caravan between India and Turkey, and
traded for a book of natural medicine in Iran.
When he started his farm here he used to make
a number of different medicines, but now
that he is older he regularly makes only two."
We were interrupted by the entrance of my friend's
father, a handsome, powerful looking
man of, I guessed, 50 years of age. He exchanged
greetings with several persons at the
party and took a seat at one of the piles of pillows
obviously arranged as a place of honor.
After he sat, one of the guests, a
man who looked to be of similar age, placed a small
child, barely more than an infant, in his
lap. The father was obviously delighted to have
the child sitting with him and began
playing with him. Grandchild, I guessed, or perhaps
even a great-grandchild, as there
appeared to be several generations
of men and boys at the
party (the women were all sequestered
somewhere out of sight, as custom dictated).
My friend went to pay his respects to
his father and after some time returned to speak with
me.
"My father is 80 years old today", he
told me. I couldn't believe this, and asked him to
repeat it to make sure I heard correctly.
"I've never seen anyone that age in
such good condition", I said.
"Yes, he takes good care of himself", said my friend.
"By the way, you mentioned that
your father makes two kinds of medicine. What are
they?"
"Well, one is the stomach medicine I
gave you earlier. As you know, stomach illness is
common here, so my father makes it rather often."
"And the other?"
My friend smiled. "It's an aphrodisiac.
But he makes it only for himself and he won't tell
anyone the ingredients".
I laughed. "Oh well", I thought, "
at least one of these medicines is for real".
Our attention turned back to the
party, and as I was feeling much better my friend took me
into the crowd and introduced me to
some of the men. After talking with five or six
of them, I detected something rather curious.
"Are all these men and boys related to your father?",
I asked my friend.
"Yes, in fact we are all his children", he said.
"We are all brothers, or at least half-
brothers. My father has five wives, ranging in
age from 78 to 23. That man" he said,
pointing to the fellow who had handed
his father the infant, "is his oldest son; he is 60
years old. The baby in his lap is his youngest".
That night as I lay on my rope bed I
thought about what had transpired
, and resolved to try
to convince my friend's father to share
the secrets of his book with the rest of the world.
But the bridge to Kunduz was fixed
, and I left Farkhar the next day. I spent the rest of my
tour of duty minding stations east of
Kabul, and so did not return to Farkhar that year. I
planned to return to Farkhar in 1978,
but the coup d'etat in April of that year made it very
difficult for foreigners to work outside of Kabul.
I never made it back to Farkhar and never
saw my friend or his father again. Indeed,
because of the nearly continuous fighting
since that time most of the people and places I
knew in Afghanistan exist now only in memory.
I still think about that book, however,
and wonder if any of the father's many
descendants managed to escape with it.
