Realities of a Boy in Bamiyan

So now I know.

Something is wrong with my spine. It is not going to get better and the only thing I can do is to manage the situation, not cure it.

When you are younger, you never think of how your body can fail you. Maybe that is why kids think they are invincible and dare to take risks.

These days, I am mindful of my actions. And my actions remind me of what I have. So if I sit too long, my body tells me so. If I stand too long, my body tells me so. It is easy to feel pity for yourself because you can tell yourself you are not whole, or that the one thing you know for certain is that pain is inevitable. When the very foundation of your anatomy gives way slowly, you wonder when the time will come before you really end up being confined to the bed.

Having recently been confined, I only had the television for company. And I slowly became a fan of the National Geographic channel.

They had a spectacular documentary on the Gospel of Judas. And just days after, they had a whole expose on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. I loved they way both programs questioned the status quo.

Tonight, I stumbled upon a documentary about the lives of people in Afghanistan.

To call it a documentary is a little strange though. There was no voice over. No immediate sense of what the picture narrative was leading the viewer towards. It was like reality tv, voyeuristic in appeal.

Eye opening nonetheless.

In the eyes of the media, Afghanistan is just a festering hole of terrorists. Certainly the occasional international news reports peppered throughout the show reinforced this impression.

The people, many of whom were displaced over years of fighting, would tell a different story.

How once they were rich. How the Russians came in with planes and bombs. How the people rushed to take cover, to survive. How the Mujahideen fought back and won. How four different foreign powers tried to gain political control over the people for their own purposes. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, The US, and Russia. How each power offered 'assistance', not in terms of aid, but weapons. Until what finally was born out of the struggle was the Taliban.

Interspersed with this commentary was life seen through the family of one boy named Mir. How in the midst of this political turmoil, there was everyday life. The boy looked like a cross between a Russian, a Chinese and a Middle Eastern. Attractive, cute but truly weathered. For an eight year old boy. Weathered.

Still he seemed happy, unaware of the world outside his environment. In fact, the only thing they heard of 9/11 was how the Taliban had an American ally called Osama Bin Laden who flew a plane into a 5 storey building and caused a lot of destruction. To this the family condemned. Especially since the Taliban was seen as oppressors.

Mir's family seemed like any others. They shared happy moments, they shared bad ones too. But everything is relative isn't it? Their issues surrounded things like getting firewood and water. Boiling water and finding food. Being able to afford money for bread to fill the stomach. Fighting to get the international aid away from gypsies.

These people were not political. They had no agendas. They were not Taliban.

They witnessed the Taliban destroy the wheat fields, the pharmacies, their lives. They saw the Taliban destroy the Buddhistic monuments that once stood around the caves they lived in. Worse, they saw the Talibans kill women and children. The same Talibs that the Afghans supported because they were Muslims too and shared the same interests. But this was not so. The Talibs' justification for cutting ears off, blinding people, bayoneting kids was: "You are not Sunnis, you deserve to die."

I tried to imagine being in their shoes. I know from the pain of my degenerating back that the future is uncertain. The question of whether I can maintain my health and my lifestyle. The costs involved.

But then they showed Mir's father, whose spine was broken by a fallen tree. He lifted his shirt up and showed how his back was disfigured, and talked about how he could not work. He could not support the family, and was labeled useless. There are worse fates. Especially if the fates lie in a hostile desert environment.

I have always been thankful for everything I have been allowed to have. I use the word 'allowed' carefully as I believe nothing is a right in this life. Yet as I tried to imagine what it was like to live in caves where dust floated in the air as if time had stopped, where the main concern really is whether you have enough to eat, I couldn't. But just the effort made me feel trapped. If I had to live under those circumstances, knowing what I know now of the world around us, I would feel cheated of a life bigger than the immediate environment would allow. I could not imagine living thinking that 5 storey buildings were truly tall. But that is just it, these people knew little of what is really happening around the world.

I realized how little it really takes to live. Do we need our designer lamps or dresses? Some of us we cannot live without our morning coffee. I am all too aware that everything is relative and we all aspire within our circle to be better, get more, to live the best life possible. But what is the best life? A year ago, I would have never imagined that one could live in a penthouse in a big city or even have yet another home in the country. It was a luxury I could not fathom. But I met someone who had that. I knew for myself that having Hansgrohe bathroom fittings and WMF cutlery was an achievement, of being able to get something that could be the best in their class. But to have two homes, to have two cars etc was beyond my dreams. I started to question if I could really live out my plan to move to New York. If that was the standard I should live by, how could I possibly get that?

But then I discovered that the person with the two homes was in the danger of losing his country home because of some potential financial difficulty. This made me quizzical. Because it seemed to him like a disaster if the country home had to go. So I asked him, do you have money to eat? Yes. Do you have a roof over your head? Yes. But I don't want to lose my country home.

I suppose he worked for that home, and for that he deserved it. But when I thought about that family in Afghanistan, it truly does not take a lot to live. That family was concerned with basics. Mir's parents kept reiterating how they wanted him to have an education, so that he can support them and help the family. But like any parents, they had dreams for him, bigger than those they had for themselves. That he would be a teacher, who would be able to eat good food (better than the cow stomach the father begged the butcher to give to him for free), and good clothes (better than the single pair of shoes they could afford to give their son). And maybe, just maybe, he would be able to give them the same privilege of good food and good clothes.

Just good food and clothes. That's all they dreamed of. That and a home. But in spite of the fact they have gone for days without food, they were denied a home by UNESCO because they were deemed not needy enough.

I looked around my home, with my Yothaka sofa, and my trinkets from around the world. And realized how lucky I was. And how I really did not need yet another designer lamp to make my home complete.

And for the self pity I could have felt about my back, I can tell myself that unlike Mir's father, I am still able to work. Like him, I just have to adjust my realities.

We all live in our own realities. But the basic concepts of pain, happiness, dreams, etc hold the same for everyone. Looking at Mir's family, we all want the same thing. Comfort, security and a full stomach. Maybe knowing this would hush any complaints one may have about how their lives could and should be better. Because at least its not worse.