Journey to Freedom

Mir Mahboob Ali

We have never seen anything even remotely similar to this magnificent snowstorm. Snow, snow everywhere …. Visibility was near zero. In places, the highway and the surrounding submerged into each other making it almost impossible to distinguish between them. It was to us navigating blindly in the dark. Surprisingly, the driver slowly but surely was inching through the storm unflinchingly as if the way was engraved in his mind. Deftly he was advancing towards Kabul we supposed. Since our vehicle was a bus, it drove comparatively faster than the Lorries, which travel mostly in convoys. Only when we passed one of such convoys we were assured that we were on the highway. The driver seemed to know every bend and turn, hillocks and trees on the way. If the driver were not a master driver we would have been freezing in the wilderness by now. In the blistering storm, we had not been able to witness the immensely incredible beauty of the earth covered with immaculate pure white snow. Our view was not extended more than a few feet as the snow was falling incessantly. Years later while I was travelling through snow covered fields of a valley just after a snowstorm moved by the indescribably pristine, majestic whiteness shutting my eyes I remembered the Afghan snowstorm. I tried to visualize the scene after the blizzard in the countryside. The grassland, the barren field, the hillocks, trees, bushes, huts everything, everything under the white, white unending blanket of snow glistening in pure sunshine that seem to have been cleansed of all impurities whatsoever. Oh the beauty, the superbly majestic beauty of pure white snow is simply mesmerizing! Oh, only if I had the power to describe it or a brush to paint it, I would have been able to share the sheer joy of witnessing it with others a bit, only a bit! O, how I long to, how I fail to…! Never, never a human would be able to capture the completely breathtaking beauty of Almighty’s creation. It is to behold, to admire, to be awe stricken and then to feel indebted.

We reached Kandahar in Afghanistan in January 1973. Zahir Shah was still the king of Afghanistan. We felt relieved and liberated. “O dear freedom,” our hearts felt like bursting out with joy unlimited. No earthly language can capture the feeling of such heavenly joy. It is winter. Days in winter are so short-lived that it flees like the glow of fireflies. So it did. The night engulfed everything in its embrace before we knew it. After a journey of two nights and one full day crammed into the belly of a truck like cattle we were damned exhausted. Reaching Kandahar at around ten in the morning before we could hardly breathe off our fatigue the winter night rushed on to us. Eating whatever rubbish we were given to eat, we went to bed early. At noon, we thought they might not have been prepared for our arrival and in the night, we did not care. In we found six of us squeezed into a two-bedded room. Again, in the morning, foods served were uneatable but the price was exorbitant. Our fellow Muslim brothers were profiting from our pathetic plight.

We are refugees fleeing from Pakistan after the dismemberment of the country after a civil war lasting nine months with active help from India. We belong to the part that emerged as Bangladesh from the ruins of the liberation war. Naturally, we are unwilling to stay in Kandahar even for an hour. Frantically, we begin to look for the Indian diplomatic mission in this case the consulate in Kandahar. We knew, on reaching Afghanistan, India would look after us. That was a great relief. In Kandahar, the consulate is responsible for arranging our transportation to Kabul, the capital. Today is Eidul Azha, a major Muslim festival and so everything is closed, Afghanistan being a Muslim majority country. On top of that, it is reported that it is snowing heavily and the highway to Kabul is not safe to drive. No drivers are ready for such a risky drive of about four hundred miles to the northeast. The consul advises us to stay until the snowing stops. We are unaware of the risk for we have no experience of snowfall and it is not snowing in Kandahar, neither have we seen any snow on the way to Kandahar. Our journey from Karachi was put off twice because of heavy snowfall in Quetta and adjacent areas. In Karachi, we only experienced a very cold winter. On the way, we were allowed to climb down from our trucks to relieve ourselves in a deserted segment of the highway. Relieving ourselves, we have only seen traces of snow at the foot of hills through which the road passes, without any idea of our whereabouts and that is not enough to get an idea of a heavy snowfall, a blizzard.

Though, we survived an accident, we lost our luggage on the way. Smugglers that smuggled us out of Pakistan promise to bring our luggage by the next truck available. They repeatedly tell us that they have no use for our goods and they do not want those even if those are priceless. They only want the money that we agreed to pay for our transportation. To prove their point they show us rooms filled with unclaimed goods. “If you waited till your luggage arrived you could get those back,” they tell us. They assure us that they would not touch anything kept in makeshift warehouse, in this case a few rooms of the hotels, if they may be called hotels. “We are forced to keep these warehouses under lock and key and only let people in under our strict supervision for your brothers have no inhibition in picking up valuable even if those do not belong to them,” Pathans tell us. In other words, given the opportunity, they steal! Smugglers are preaching virtue because our brothers succumb so easily to their greed. Unfortunately, we are witness to such plunder by our own brothers. In any case, we are not prepared to stay in Kandahar, not even the recovery of our lost valuables is enough incentive for that. We are glad we are alive and safe. It is a delightful experience that we could dodge the Pakistani police. Like many, many others who were caught being smuggled out, we were not incarcerated. They were all jailed under false and fictitious charges. Imagine, people, sent to indefinite confinement without the faintest hope of being extricated from the dark, desolate, despairing condition. No legal advice or protection is provided to them in an eerily hostile situation. It is as if being condemned to death but denied the luxury of the phenomenon called death. It is all so bloody uncertain. Uncertainty, a nagging uncertainty, a cancerous uncertainty, an indefinite uncertainty, is a slow poison that does not kill instantly but slowly leads to death. The mere thought of it is enough to drive one crazy slowly but certainly.

Anyway, at our insistence the consul arranges two buses that are not enough to accommodate all of us housed in different hotels and motels over a few days. Our group is the most recently arrived. We had no idea that there were others waiting for Kabul. To avoid trouble it is decided that bachelors and singles would not be allowed on these buses. Few who are travelling with families of relatives are allowed. Threatening cancellation the consul avoided an unpleasant situation. Yet, a few forcefully get into the buses and lodge themselves on the floor since there are no seats available. Unable to persuade them to move saying that it is already a dangerous journey in heavy snowfall and in an over crowed bus it is doubly so. To all our pleas, they turn a deaf ear. We are compelled to hide them from the consul’s man to be able to move on. Truthfully, we ourselves did not believe that it was snowing and we had no idea of how dangerous a journey could be in a blizzard. Therefore, our argument did not have the force of conviction and thus was ineffective.

In adversity, people have a surprising tendency to turn pious. So, most of us irrespective of our religious allegiance began our journey in the name of God. There is the man who is a subagent of the Pathan smugglers. This fellow boasted of medicines that he took before the journey, which would keep him free from the need of defecation. That was a time we had no idea about the magical tablets he was talking of. We felt jealous of him. On reaching Kandahar, he takes the antidote to his constipated condition and so opens the door to his misery. Hardly, thirty minutes into our journey we begin to see traces of snow on the foothills. We laugh within thinking the consul was bluffing us. This he calls ‘heavily snowing’! We barely have been over with our cynicism a few minutes later we begin to see flakes of snow falling. Suddenly, the subagent, Ruknuddin, runs to the door of the bus and start shouting ‘stop’, stop …, his face twisted and darkened. We are trying hard to understand what has gone wrong. Failing to understand we are puzzled. The Afghan driver unable to understand drives on merrily amused at Ruknuddin’s perceived antics. Ruknuddin in desperation shouts and unintelligibly gestures, his whole body is trembling from the effort to hold on from relieving himself in the bus. Others who are enjoying the comic scene, now realizing the graveness of the situation try their knowledge of languages but Persian, the only tongue the driver understands it transpires. The driver bemused by the ensuing hullabaloo drives on singing a Persian song though intelligible to us the tune seems perfect. Some among us involuntarily join in with him at which he burst into laughter and laughing uncontrollably, he drives on unmindful of Ruknuddin. Poor Ruknuddin now seems to bleed from his effort to control purgation.

Meanwhile, passengers exhaust their Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and Pashtu and almost surrender to the inevitable that Ruknuddin is going to spoil his pantaloon. Suddenly, the driver stops the bus on the roadside near a thatched hut in the otherwise deserted field covered with snow, as if a divine message has descended on him. The automatic door of the vehicle opens. As soon as the door opens Ruknuddin jumps from the bus and runs behind the hut with all the might he is left with, we all are relieved. All of us including the driver share a hearty laughter for a minute or two and all barriers of language dissolve into expression of joy. Suddenly we all begin to speak the same language. The Afghan driver who resemble a dervish with his dark black beard is driving the bus vary cautiously and slowly. As we advance towards Kabul, the blizzard intensifies gradually. There are no cars moving on the road, only big Lorries and trucks moving slowly towards their unending destination. Small cars and sometimes trucks lying at the roadside, some half buried under the heavy snow. Some are even dented and broken clearly skidded off along the highway. In an hour or so, we see a lot of them and thus come to realize the truthfulness of the consul’s considered advice.

Passengers are sitting in a ghostly silence, as if a big Anaconda has engulfed them. Lifeless, listless passengers seem to be barely breathing. The driver is as strong and as energetic as he began. He is driving focussed on the road which is sometimes visible and sometimes not, lest the bus veers off the road. Passengers are rattled into consciousness when occasionally the driver blows the horn to ask for passage to overtake a convoy of slow moving Lorries. In the blizzard, horns are not heard if the window pan is not moved. Drivers, therefore, watching their rear-view mirrors slide open side windowpanes to ascertain if the vehicle behind is blowing its horn, wishing to overtake. And only when the windowpanes are slid open the incredibly loud hissing sound of the storm is audible inside, otherwise almost soundless the snow is falling incessantly.

Fear of incidentally veering off the highway slowly and silently creeps into the hearts of the passengers. Cheerful countenances beaming with joy at the sight of falling snow gradually turn into melancholic indifference. Everybody is itching now to reach the destination, Kabul. Incredulous travellers now are remembering the consul. Faced with uncertainty, and fearing an accident at any moment watching car after car, truck after truck lying on the roadside as the journey progresses everybody look tense. Everybody must be thinking now, “Was not it better to listen to the consul?”

The never-ending road, meandering through the hills and fields covered with snow, as if a big python under snow is untiringly passing behind us sometimes visible sometimes unseen. Everybody is praying that we reach Kabul before nightfall. We are in fact afraid that we may be stuck on the road once night embraces everything into its darkness. We are wrong the driver is an expert pilot who seems to be able to find his way even his eyes closed. We are fortunate to have the Persian-speaking dervish as our drive and guide. The other bus is merely following us. Confidence in the driver keeps us hopeful. Hope is power, we all realize.

At long, long last, we have arrived in Kabul at around eleven in the night. It is a very unusual time for arrival of expatriates in Kabul. Since the weather is miserably bad, it is not surprising that nobody is expecting us. We absolutely have no way to ascertain if there was any communication between Kandahar and Kabul regarding our journey. Drivers motion us to get down. Two or three of us reluctantly descend on the snow-covered pavement the rest remain inside despite the drivers’ gestures otherwise. We begin to bang on the closed main gate of the house buses brought us to. Supposedly, this is the Indian Embassy. We have no idea. It is a very funny situation. We are communicating in sign language with the drivers. After alternately banging and shouting for about twenty or so minutes, a man peeps through the peeping hole. He is a night guard. He takes a bit of time to realize that we are expatriates destined for Bangladesh. We breathe a sigh of relief since at least he confirms that it is the Indian Embassy, indeed. He is trying to reach the deputy who is in charge of the embassy in the absence of the ambassador. Fortunately, the deputy is a Bengali. We are not willing to talk to him and ask the night guard to do whatever needs be done. The night guard gives us the phone asking us to talk to the deputy. At about midnight definitely forcing him out of his cosy bed we talk to him. “We are sorry to disturb you at this hour of the night,” we say. “Never mind, the pleasure is mine to be of any help to you,” he replies. He does not show a bit of irritation and is very attentive to us. “I am sending my men to arrange for your accommodation, you don’t worry, you are all my responsibility now, I am happy that you could arrive in Kabul safely”, says the Deputy to the Ambassador. His politeness touches our hearts and all fatigue of the tiring dangerous journey is forgotten immediately, such is the power of even bits of kindness. Within an hour, two men arrive at the site. By now, the ever-smiling drivers begin to show their displeasure for they are supposed to deliver us at the Embassy and no more. In the absence of any other transport, the embassy staffs somehow mange the drivers to transport us up to the hotel they arrange for us. We can finally put our bodies to rest that have forgotten the soft touch of a bed for we have not been able to sleep properly for quite a while. Meanwhile, there has been a little respite in snowing as if to give us time to find a resting place for the night.