The fall of Kabul reminded me of strange, long forgotten things.
When I was a child in Calcutta, going to school in a school bus and noticing everything around me. I remember huge men in pastel colored salwar kameezes, bearded and so much taller than local folks in West Bengal. They were known as Kabuliwallahs who brought dried fruits from Afghanistan and someone told me that they would usually be waiting near the factory gates to collect debts from the workers. There were at least three huge factories that I crossed on my way to school-- a cotton mill, a jute mill and a ship yard. Only the shipyard survives.
I used to accompany my grandmother to radiotherapy for her breast cancer to a radiation unit in Calcutta. I must have been eleven years old and I remember an Afghan man who may have had oral cancer and whom no one understood as he seemed to only spoke Pashto. It was heartbreaking then and even now, it strikes me as sad not to be understood. I still think about him sometimes.
One of my colleagues in residency for whom Medicine was a second career, told me that he had backpacked in Afghanistan, so very long ago. I was jealous of him as I imagine it is a beautiful country. In the few hours of history I learned in school, it was said Babar missed the gardens of Kabul, where he is now buried. The inscription on his tomb in a garden in Kabul, is said to reads "If there is paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this!" For us in this millennium, we can only think of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha.
More recently, I was waiting for my takeout at an Indian place, another patron shared that she was stationed in Afghanistan and loved the unleavened bread from a tandoor, one of the foods she got used to during her deployment there.
For all of us, faraway places feel closer when we understand the people who live there. I saw a movie called The Breadwinner on Netflix a few years ago which told of the struggles of people living under the Taliban. It touched me deeply then and as I think about the people in Afghanistan today, I hope better days are ahead though I worry that life under the Taliban will be much, much worse.
