Bashir’s Car Is Not Shiny
Driving in the Taimani neighborhood of Kabul
Part I
Soon after I arrived back in Kabul this January (2018), our office driver, Bashir, picked me up in a car I’d never seen before. He had to tap the horn a few times and wave in my general direction before I realized it was him sitting tall in the driver’s seat, beaming. I congratulated him on his new purchase, which I knew he had put much thought into, and reiterated in detail what I believe to be the benefits of an SUV in a war zone. He nodded, pleased, elaborating on my points by offering situation and street-specific hypotheticals. When we had exhausted all the ways in which I could be more effectively saved from injury, kidnapping, and death, he looked at me very seriously and said, “Miss Jessica, you have to convince Mr. Tom that this car is not shiny. It is like a kind of assignment.”
I glanced down at the plush leather seats and out the sparkling windows, fully aware of how elevated I felt in comparison to the smaller, dingier cars around me. I tried to imagine a conversation with my Birkenstock-wearing boss who walked into Afghanistan over the Friendship Bridge with a single backpack and founded a law firm on a rented computer. No matter how many Fortune 500 companies he signs as clients, how many international organizations rank his firm the best in the country, nor how many accolades he receives, deservedly, for helping to build the rule of law in Afghanistan, he is adamant about not being driven around in an upmarket vehicle, or to use Bashir’s terminology, a “shiny car.”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I told Bashir. “But no promises.”
Part II
The very first time I landed in Kabul in 2015, Bashir picked me up in a silver Toyota Corolla, license plate KBL-1223. I noticed how spotlessly clean it was even through my arrival anxiety and the din of Airport Parking Lot C with its hawkers and cabbies, the fluster of money changing hands, the loading and unloading of suitcases, and the shouted conversations punctuated with the few Dari words I could recognize – bale, bakshish, bacha, tashakor, burra, khalas.
The seats were light grey cloth, the kind that would have reminded me of my sister’s minivan had they not been covered entirely in a coarse, black mesh pulled so taut you could almost bounce a coin off the surface. There was a Little Tree air freshener labeled “Bayside Breeze” hanging from the rearview mirror, but the acrid fumes from the yellow and white city taxis – seemingly animate with wildly gesturing arms and discordant staccato horns – masked any would-be coastal breezes. The windows were rolled down halfway, and the radio was emitting static-interrupted music that was unfamiliar but not entirely unpleasant. It wasn’t your grandmother’s sedan, or even what you’d expect of the company car, but it felt alright.
As we drove out of the airport I realized I was holding my breath, and I might have even registered fear – of the unknown, of the city, of the new life that awaited – if not for the incessant beeping coming from somewhere in the front seat. Was it a special alarm or security system that activated where danger lurked, or simply a paternalistic sensor that meant the driver should fasten his seatbelt? Perhaps it was my overweight suitcase propped awkwardly in the passenger seat. Should we belt it in? I almost chuckled thinking of my large, sky blue Delsey as a decoy passenger used to outwit the HOV lane patrol.
But we were not in New York and there were no lanes at all. The beeping continued, and I glanced at my colleague for any sign of panic, but her pleasant countenance seemed clear evidence that I had lapsed into some kind of situational psychosis. The way forward was to mimic her serenity, I decided – no need to act mental on my first day. And even if it did turn out to be just a seatbelt alarm, a nudge toward driver’s safety seemed misplaced as we accelerated into oncoming traffic past an Afghan army vehicle with manned machine guns.
Part III
Limitations on freedom of movement are extreme in a conflict zone. There is no such thing as a leisurely stroll in Kabul, and even quick jaunts to the supermarket or corner store are discouraged. If a walk is a necessity or a sanity-mandated eventuality, then one should always be covered, nondescript, and with a man, preferably an Afghan who carries a handgun and knows how to use it. As our office manager likes to remind us every so often, “Please don’t forget there’s a war.”
And so, Bashir’s Corolla became more than a subway car or a city bus or a taxi. It was also a classroom, a safe space, and a conduit to the city. As we drove the familiar routes I learned the neighborhoods and the landmarks, the shops and the street vendors. Sometimes we’d turn down a backstreet or tuck into an alleyway and find ourselves at a warlord’s doorstep. The first time we drove past Dostum’s candy-striped blast walls I recalled, with frustrating clarity, the torture scenes from Ahmed Rashid’s book: “He wielded power ruthlessly. The first time I arrived at the fort to meet Dostum there were bloodstains and pieces of flesh in the muddy courtyard. I innocently asked the guards if a goat had been slaughtered. They told me that an hour earlier Dostum had punished a soldier for stealing. The man had been tied to the tracks of a Russian-made tank, which then drove around the courtyard crushing his body into mincemeat, as the garrison and Dostum watched.” Bashir drove on.
One day we drove to Bibi Mahru Hill in the “posh” neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, and as we made our way up and around the winding gravel road, Bashir told me the story of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president who was killed by a bomb secreted inside a turban. When we reached the top, Rabbani’s grainy, weather-worn face stared down at us from a prominent billboard. Later on, we passed the spot where the Swedish journalist Nils Horner was shot, execution style, and then continued on past a series of bullet-ridden blast walls, each concrete slab a monument to civil war, foreign intervention, terrorism.
Most recently, we drove through Zanbaq Square, slowing as we approached the heavily-guarded Green Zone entrance near what remained of the German Embassy. The buildings unlucky to have been in proximity of the truck bomb blast in May were blackened and windowless, and some were merely twisted shells, a form of postmodern art in the darkest sense. As we passed the massive crater caused by the blast, I recalled my very first impression of Kabul as we made our descent into the dusty basin: “This city might as well be outer space.” It was the physical isolation that I was alluding to then – my new home was a country embroiled in war, its closest neighbors hostile, cunning, and opportunistic to varying degrees, its capital city sunken within majestic but seemingly inescapable mountains. Within the city I came to know, I contemplated a different kind of alienation and foreignness; Kabul was a place where everyday violence rendered the physical characteristics of the city synonymous with the topography of another world.
This was war tourism from the windows of a Corolla, exposure to disaster without drama or flourish. Bashir’s unaffected fact telling was part of the ritual, the incessant honking and shouting as we slowed to gaze at the wreckage or memorial, sacral horns. And though it’s almost impossible to drive anywhere in Kabul without a reminder of the savagery of conflict, it often occurred to me that there was a deliberateness to the stories and sights; they were warnings disguised as everyday colloquy, a nod to the dangers inherent to life in Kabul.
Part IV
And then there were the conversations in the Corolla, many of which started with a simple question and evolved into peculiar life lessons that I found myself trying to remember or surreptitiously write down. As we were driving over the Kabul hills for my first day of teaching at the American University, we were slowed by rain, traffic, and meandering livestock. I could sense Bashir’s frustration and decided to talk about the weather, an innocuous topic. Or so I thought. “This is the first rain in quite a while isn’t it? Good for the dust.” I snapped a photo of the rain drops on the windshield and the pastel pink houses in the background. “Yes, Miss Jessica.” He cracked the window to smoke a cigarette. “Do you like the rain, Bashir?” Heavy drag, big exhale, ash out the window. “This is the romantic weather. It makes people fall in love.” Pause, drag, exhale. Sigh. “You should be careful of love, Miss Jessica. It makes life so complicated. It makes people crazy.” He looked at me with a faint smirk, “And it is the sum of the sum of boring.”
Bashir’s understanding of superlatives involves a special kind of hyperbole. Just add the phrase “the sum of the sum” to the description and you’ll be speaking Bashir-ese. From our conversations, I know that the Turkish restaurant in Macroyan is “the sum of the sum of the best Turkish food in Kabul,” that Ariana is “the sum of the sum of bad airlines,” and that a woman he once knew abroad is “the sum of the sum of beautiful.” I looked at him quizzically. This wasn’t the first conversation we’d had about love, remarkably, so I pressed him a bit. “But Bashir, love can be wonderful. It can make you very happy.” He slammed on the breaks suddenly, then started yelling incoherently at the stalled car ahead, at the man with the vegetable cart, at the goat. There was subsequent honking, dramatic throwing of a cigarette, rolling up of the window. “Maybe Miss Jessica. I’m too old. But you should be careful.”
Bashir is a good driver – he can read any traffic situation and navigate through it effectively and efficiently. As he says frequently while maneuvering through traffic jams or driving against the flow of cars at a roundabout, “This is Afghanistan, Miss Jessica. Anything is possible.” But more than that, Bashir has been part of my Kabul family and his car is a home of sorts. There is nothing he wouldn’t do to protect me or any of his people, be it from complacency, gunfire, rockets, kidnappers, bomb blasts, the Haqqanis, the Islamic State, the ANP, the AFP, and even the might of the US military. This is also why Bashir’s new car is not shiny.
Part V
My mother used to say, “We don’t grandstand,” a baseball idiom she liked that means “Don’t show off or be ostentatious.” If you got an A+ on a paper you shouldn’t stick the gold star to your forehead, for example. And in Kabul, in Afghanistan, that directive is even more salient, as grandstanding could get you targeted, kidnapped, or killed. This is the alleged problem with shiny cars. Where a Toyota Corolla, no matter how clean and well maintained, is still the Afghan equivalent of a Volkswagen, Forerunners or Land Cruisers, for example, are cars of the elite. They are the cars that warlords, businessmen, politicians, and expats drive. “Do we want to give the enemy more information about us?” Tom would say. Here, as everywhere, shiny new things signal importance; they are beacons of prosperity and magnets for envy.
Bashir’s new car is a 2009 Forerunner. Does the glossy, waxed exterior glisten in the sunlight? It does. Does its deep black color lend it an air of authority? Perhaps. Do its leather seats and sunroof and dropdown television set betray its luxuriousness? Indeed. Does it stand a head above the weary Corolla parade on any given weekday? Yes, it does. In those respects, the new Forerunner is not a car of the people. And yet there are number of ways it can be differentiated from those of the elite.
Considering its physical characteristics first, the Forerunner does not boast tinted windows of any strength or make. It is not armored, which is evident at checkpoints where, instead of cracking the door open to exchange greetings and pass along official documents, Bashir handily presses a button to retract the window. Additionally, it does not come equipped with uniformed and heavily armed guards as so many shiny cars do. You may see me through the front window, or one or all of Bashir’s three children. “They like to ride around with me and it’s good. We make the company car a family car,” he says. It’s a clever tactic, because from what I’ve seen, there are very few big shots riding around with their kids in tow. He has also reminded me that the Forerunner is not actually new. “It is not so old to be expensive with the repairs, but it is the age where I can do maintenance and it lasts for 10 more years. It is like 50.”
The vehicle itself aside, the concept of shininess should be interrogated. How brilliant must the thing shine? What threshold must it exceed to garner the attention of those who would do its passengers harm? Is it a monetary threshold? Criteria based on make and model and year? Or perhaps there is a softer calculus.
If cost is a determining factor, a 2009 Toyota Corolla can be bought for $15,000, while a 2009 Forerunner can be bought for $20,000. Are the enemies of the state and the people fussed – or duped – over so little? Where a Rolls Royce would beguile many a Kabuli felon, it stretches the limits of reason to classify a larger Toyota in the same category.
Say there’s a list of the makes and models of all qualifying shiny cars, and by default, anyone riding in a Forerunner has a higher risk of being targeted than those riding in a Corolla. The argument might be that the odds are in favor of targeting more expensive, flashier vehicles, especially in a place like Afghanistan where nouveau affluence is often flaunted. Wise, perhaps, if you’re an ordinary criminal seeking the highest monetary return, but absent other criteria, such as visibly armed guards, predictable schedule, high profile employment, or recognizable surname, this theory has not been borne out. And if terrorists rather than criminals are the concern, no car, large or small, shiny or dull, will be able to mask one’s foreignness.
But the real reason Bashir’s new car isn’t shiny has nothing to do with its physical characteristics or the tenuous correlation between safety and ostentation. The focus should rather be on seeing from Bashir’s perspective, and in his eyes, the Forerunner is powerful not extravagant, reliable not conspicuous, and a means of protection rather than a symbol of lucre. Bashir would never say his vehicle choice is the sum of the sum of f*ck you, but it is the anti-norm in a place that very nearly demands conformity for the sake of security. Perhaps for a number of foolhardy and ill-considered reasons – some of which I have mentioned above – kidnappers and criminals will target the Forerunner because they consider it to be shiny. The crucial question, then, is: Since when have we agreed to stake our lives on weak arguments and fear-based derivations? Penumbral reasoning doesn’t work well in a war zone.
And for me, it is also about feeling. All of the experiences I’ve had in Kabul, from the moment I left the airport, and likely up to the moment I’m dropped off there for the last time, I will have felt safe in the midst of war in large part because of Bashir’s diligence, skill, and heart. There is no car in the world that could change that for me. I’d ride in a Humvee painted red, white, and blue with Bashir, or in a bicycle tuk-tuk sans roof. Certainly, there is comfort in seeming anonymity, moral rectitude in humility and conservative spending, and good sense in not changing the things that work. But weigh that against years of hard work, loyalty, and love and you’ll most certainly agree that Bashir’s new car is not shiny.
