The worst bus in the world

“Oh. My. God.”

came along and extracted it with a knife.

 

The bus is the last in its row, each more battered and less brightly

painted than the one before, its roof more heavily crushed by boxes

and buckets strapped on with string, and a larger pool of water rising

around the wheels to trap them in a glue of mud. All the buses

in the station look decrepit, but this one is a parody of the rest. It

looks like the worst bus in the world.

 

A man is standing over me, wrinkling his nose at my ticket. It

turns out he’s the driver.

 

“Why do you go to Afghanistan?” he exclaims. “You think this is

a country for tourists?”

 

His laugh is throaty and thoroughly disconcerting. Had the old

man behind me not set his arm on my shoulder, I might be making

a dash for the bus back to Tehran.

 

“I am a traveller like you,” he whispers.

 

This man has skin like walnut bark and wears a gray waistcoat

over his knee-length shirt, under a brimless woollen cap that looks

like it’s been woven from his beard.

 

“You are a Hajji?* You’ve just come back?”

 

“No, no, no!” His teeth gleam gold between his parched lips.

“I went thirty years ago. I couldn’t afford to go now!”

 

His small grey eyes shine through the creases of his skin. He

seems to be kind, so I decide to stick with him.

 

“Afghanistan is a good country,” he says, poking his nose between

the headrests in front of me—we have settled inside the bus now. He

squinnies his brow for a moment, before adding, “It was a good country.”

 

“When?” says a man in an ocean-colored polo shirt who’s taken

the seat across the aisle from mine.

 

He looks like he should be on vacation

in Hawaii.

 

The Hajji looks up, frowning, then in a burst of inspiration he declares,

“There was a train.”

 

We wait an hour for movement. When it finally comes, there is a

terrible groan underneath us, as if some wild beast has been stretched

out under the chassis, then a  tick-tick as the engine rattles to a stop.

Is this bus not even capable of forward propulsion? But I can hear a

noise swelling around us, suggesting another cause for our pause.

Gingerly, the Hajji lifts a pleated nylon curtain to peer through the

window. I notice an anxious expression creeping across his face.

 

“Mujahideen,” he whispers.

 

A wave of sunlight washes through the door: a swamp of flailing

limbs, enormous beards, long torn gowns. Boxes fly down the aisle;

burlap sacks pile on the seats and around the steps in the middle.

Buckets clatter on top of them, all the way up to the Formica ceiling,

as do more sacks, plastic bags, and finally—shunted through the

door, defying the tiny space that’s left—a Honda motorcycle.

 

“They are fighting men,” whispers the Hajji. “Do not say you are

a foreigner.”

 

All of them are dressed in baggy trousers and knee-length shirts—

the traditional Afghan costume known as shalwar qameez. I bought a

troubled south, but I haven’t put it on yet, so it will be easy to identify

me as an outsider. Hiding my tell-tale Roman-scripted notebook in

the overhead rack, I excavate an enormous green-jacketed hardback

out of my pack. It’s the only Persian book in my possession—the language

not only of the Iranians whom I’m leaving, but also of a large

number of the Afghans among whom I’ll be traveling. Tooled across

its spine—a gorgeous cluster of golden dots, elaborate curls, and long

barbed stalks—is the word Shahnameh—“Book of Kings.”

 

“You are reading that?” asks the Hajji, his gold teeth flashing in

 

The man in the ocean-colored polo shirt, whose name is Wahid,

is more proactive.

 

“Here,” he says, leaning across the aisle and reaching for the book,

“give it here.”

 

He turns its pages delicately, and familiarly—as if he’s caressed

these very pages in the past—and when he comes across a verse he

likes, his mouth expands to the size of a tea saucer:

 

The Hajji smiles, his eyes as bright as his gold teeth, repeating the

across plenty of poetry aficionados in Iran—on a few occasions I’ve

even attended poetry circles where traditional instruments were

played as people recited from their favorite authors. But I was advised

not to expect this sort of thing in Afghanistan. “They are murdering

brutes” was one of the less cryptic descriptions I heard. So to

watch polo-shirt-wearing Wahid, his eyes glued to the pages and his

lips quivering to the rhythm of the thousand-year-old words, is

hugely reassuring. Maybe the Afghans won’t be as formidable as I’ve

been warned.

 

We are near the border. You can tell because the landscape is growing less and less friendly. A medieval traveler would have known the “abundant fruit-trees, streams and mills” spotted here by the great Muslim globe-trotter Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century. But now the fertility has dried up. Low-slung mud-brick farmsteads slumber behind bald fields and mountain scarps

scissor the sky like dragon scales. As the Afghan border draws

ever closer, even these features grow scarce. It’s as if the land is

stripping itself of possessions in preparation for bandit country...

 

 

If you'd like to read another extract from Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah's Beard, click here.

Or, to read an extract from The Prester Quest, click here.