Afternoon in the Babur Gardens
(Note: This post is from August 10th.)
After wasting 45 minutes driving around trying to find the (fabled?)
OMAR landmine museum, I ended up going to Babur's Gardens instead. The
gardens were almost completely destroyed by the mujaheddin, with a
local pointing out one of the hilltops where one mujaheddin camp was,
and another hilltop, on the other side of the garden, where another
had taken up a position. That whole section of Kabul was deserted at
that time, reduced to rubble by heavy shelling and rocket attacks. All
that was left of the once-spectacular gardens, by the mid-90s, was a
single dead tree, which still stands as a reminder, and some remnants
of the walls.
In the post-Taliban era, the Aga Khan Foundation has been working to
reconstruct the gardens and I must say, it's going splendidly. Thanks
for the Aga Khan funding and a work team of 150 men, there're now
hundreds of trees planted, rows of flowers, the pathways are being
laid with new stone, the buildings are being slowly rebuilt. In a few
years, once the work on the walls, paths, and buildings is finished,
and once the trees have had a chance to grow in, it will likely be the
most beautiful place in Kabul. A large, lush garden, terraced up the
hill to the top where the tomb and buildings are.
After a walk through the garden, I began talking Umar Wardak, the
project overseer for the reconstruction who doubles as the keeper of
the guest book. I signed the book and we chatted for twenty minutes
before he invited me back for tea. He showed me the original pieces of
the buildings that they've been able to salvage and the work being
done to faithfully recreate the garden buildings based on what they
used to look like.
We sat down for tea and slowly other people trickled in to sit and
talk with us. An ex-mujaheddin, now the night guard for the gardens,
two foremen who manage the masons working on the project, a former
military officer of the Najibullah government who fled to Pakistan and
then Iran when the Taliban came to power, and who is now a tree
sprayer, and Rahullah, a very tall, strong man who, it turns out, is
the number one boxer in Afghanistan and has won many tournaments in
Pakistan and Iran as well.
We talked for a few hours with the former military officer acting as
translator. Again I'd told them I was Australian, initially, and then
felt bad that I hadn't been honest when the subsequent discussion went
so well. We talked about marriage, which, with all the gold jewelry
you have to buy and the feast for everyone you know, etc, costs
approximately 300,000 Afghanis. That's approximately US$6,000 and thus
it's no surprise that many of them said they had to go to Iran for
many years and work, saving up money, just so they could come back and
get married. They asked if I was married and then if I lived with my
family or if I lived alone. When I said I lived alone, one exclaimed,
"Yes, that is the good way to live!" but the others were shocked by
the further revelation that I cook for myself. Their expectation, I
think, was that I would live with my mom, with her cooking for me,
until I married and lived with my wife who would by my new cook. The
idea that I took care of my own food, and my own laundry, was very
foreign to them. In the course of this discussion, I was able to
dispel some rumors for them, such as the idea that Westerners don't do
laundry at all because they buy clothes, wear them once, and then
throw them in the trash and buy more new clothes.
Afterward, I watched the sunset from the garden terrace and then
caught a taxi back across town to the Mustafa.
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