The kitemaker...

It's going to be a tough task to be not intellectualizing this blog about a Soviet fighter staying away from his homeland for more than 20 years and still managing to find inner peace and joy in the war ravaged country Afghanistan.

So why is this post named The kite-maker? Read on...

Afghanistan - I can trace a few genes in me back to both Iran (Paternal Grandfather) and Afghanistan(Great Grand Mother) with Bengali(Paternal Great Grandfather) and Marwari (Maternal Ancestry) thrown in. But the only connection I ever felt to the pashtun nation is that when I was in elementary school, our green eyed tonga wallah spoke Pashton. "Khoche - yeh godah bhot mazboot hai ". The pashton accent of urdu is as funny as the south Indian hindi. He used to call his horse (Ghoda - in proper hindi/urdu) as "godah" which sounded more like "godha" (gadha).
And then there was another "Khan Saab" in our neighbourhood who used to import Irani carpets via Kabul. Whenever he was back, he used to bring back the best almonds and akhrots (walnut). Every one used to call his wife as "Khan-ni" and she had the heaviest female voice which I remember from my childhood. Her sister was named "Shahpeeri" and she was another beautiful lady, who I think was married and went to Pakistan.
I have always thought of Afghanistan as a nation with no future. Even when it wasn't the proclaimed hideout of Bin Laden, it was still the country of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the IC-814s. So I never gave second thoughts about whatever bad news kept coming out of that part of the world.

Tonight, I watched this documentary on BBC world about a Soviet fighter who stayed back in Afghanistan after the Red Army left the country in 1989 in the hands of the Mujahideen. It was the kind of story that you'd find in hindi movies... a brother in search of his lost brother and finding him 20 years later... with all the melodrama thrown in... but the part that struck me the most was this one line in which the reporter asked this man, who now is a devout Muslim taxi driver in Kabul, about going back to the security of his homeland Ukraine.

To my amazement his answer was "I like it here. I have a wife, two kids...my house is here... I am happy."

To me a man away from his homeland that too in a country where you don't know where the next bullet is coming from can only think of getting out. He would barely be able to think straight let alone be happy. To a question about going back I would only expect him to answer yes. Yet he said he was happy, and I watched this when he said it. He said he with absolute peace of mind.

Looking at him I think, what does one need to be happy...? Money... security... success... He has nothing of that...even in the smallest sense of the words (no intellectualizing I said... didn't I?). So, it was even more confusing to me that he was letting go of the love of his home and yet proclaiming to be happy... And here I am worried about some mundane unfinished tasks about which only a few people care... I know I'd do them the day after if not tomorrow and they would be followed by more of such.

This brings me back to the final take away from this book - The only crime is Theft.