Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Heart: My Afghan years
(London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002), pp. 338. Price. Rs. 995 (in
Pakistan).
This is an odd title for a book which deals with war,
cruelty, adventure and contemporary history. But you get the hint what it may
be about when you read the subtitle: ‘My Afghan Years’. And if you know the
legend Christina Lamb of the Waiting for
Allah fame, you will start reading it. If you do that you will be
hooked---at least I could hardly put the book aside; it reads so much like
fiction. But it is not fiction; it is grim, cold, cruel reality---so cruel that
you sometimes wish you had better not known it.
Christina Lamb takes you backwards and forwards in time,
beginning with the winter of 2001 when the Taliban were on the run to the year
1988 when she, a young girl keen on being a war correspondent, went across the
Pakistani border to Kandahar---the spiritual capital of the Taliban movement.
She had met Hamid Karzai, now the president of Afghanistan, earlier and wanted
to see this Pashtun heartland. The story of how she was carried there by
‘giggling mullahs’ on motorcycles is almost incredible. This is an area where
even men, let alone young girls, do not dare venture and it was a time when a
war was going on. Christina Lamb’s courage and physical stamina must have been
absolutely extraordinary for her to have undertaken an adventure before which
Kipling’s adventurers pale in the comparison.
Ironically enough there was much laughter and a sense of
mission even in the midst of this war against the Soviets. The Afghan tragedy
turned really sombre when the warring warlords turned the country into a
lawless land where girls as well as boys could be abducted and raped. She
herself did not witness these years coming back only after Nine Eleven when the
United State had forced the Taliban out of power. This time her journey begins
on a grisly note---she meets a Talitab torturer in Quetta. This man, a graduate
in business studies, joined the Taliban for money. He says what is confirmed by
countless reports on those mirthless years: women being barred form schools and
public life; games, videos, films, hobbies, kite-flying etc banned; public
executions; beating people for not saying their prayers or trimming their
beards and so on. The list goes on and on and as the author goes deep into
Afghanistan meeting people it ceases being a mere list. It becomes a profoundly
disturbing catalogue of the abnormal. The Taliban who ordered all these tortures
under the impression that they were promoting virtue were probably the products
of abnormal times. They were brought up away from women, away from their
families and in a country which had seen death and destruction for more than a
decade. Thus the strictness of their interpretation of Islam and the ferocity
with which they implemented it is really unprecedented even in this part of the
world.
In Herat, which was hated by the Taliban because the
people were Persian-speaking and of the Shia Sect, libraries had been
destroyed. The literary circles took the name of ‘Sewing Circles’---the title
of the book---to survive. The women would be discussing literature till the
Taliban arrived when they would suddenly start sewing. With such stratagems
some art and literature survived the Taliban.
In the end Hamid Karzai takes over and Christina Lamb
finds the girl who used to write her moving letters of how she lived under the
Taliban. These letters, interspersed between the narrative, provided a powerful
commentary on the social and psychological devastation of Afghaistan under the
Taliban. The young women who wrote them finds it incredible to begin life again
after she had lost hope. The author uses
this Afghan girl’s point of view with such powerful effect that her work
takes on the quality of the fiction of a master of narrative.
Christina Lamb’s remarks against the Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI) and Pakistan will probably earn her a bad press in Pakistan
as some remarks in Waiting for Allah did.
She quotes Afghans who blame Pakistan, and its ISI, for their troubles. She
says she herself was at the battle of Jalalabad which was an utter failure.
However sharply people may react to such strictures coming from a foreigner,
the fact is that many Pakistanis of eminence have said exactly the some things
about Pakistan’s Afghan policy. This policy was reserved at the behest of the
U.S.A, of course, but there were many people. They wanted it reversed both for
humanitarian reasons and because it was too costly for Pakistan. Also, it was
giving a bad image to Pakistan in the eyes of the world. Anyway, coming as they
do from Lamb, people will be upset.
Personally I find one major omission in the book it does not
touch upon the misery the ordinary Afghans suffered because of the American
invasion of the country. She need not have taken a political stand on the issue
but her job as a reporter of the human condition made it incumbent upon her to
record the sufferings of the people under this attack. This Christina Lamb
refused to do in an otherwise movingly powerful indictment of those who cause
suffering of any kind.
However, even if all Lamb’s views or attitudes may not be
approved by all readers, it will be conceded that she has written an extremely
readable, informative and interesting book. This is one travelogue---or book on
contemporary history if you will---which no interested reader should miss.
Dr TARIQ RAHMAN