Intertexts

Intcrtcxts, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003 Something There: Love, War, Basketball, and Afghanistan: An Antidotal Memoir 1 Naeem Inayatullah I T H A C A C O L L E G E The goal of encouraging ...historical sympathy is achieved not by telling people what has been lost but by getting people to see what is there. (Chernoff 11) If we can find something in “nothing” then we can find something even in those that seek to destroy all “nothings.” In November 2001, the town of Ithaca premiered Jun£ (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin, afilm that documents how Italian doctors created a humanitarian hospital in war-torn Afghanistan. Afterwards, in the conversa¬ tion that Ihad agreed to facilitate, Iwas unable to evoke much beyond the usual sense of helpless guilt and hollow moral stridency that comes from see¬ ing others suffer. Suspecting that just below their easy sympathy lay hidden assimilationist presumptions, Ipressed the audience with these questions: Is there anything we need fromAfghans,Afghan cultures,Afghanistan? Can we find some lack only they can fill? If not, what impulse stops us from sim¬ ply accepting the loss of this culture? Even those few who had passed through Afghanistan seemed baffled by this line of thinking. Finding no tak¬ ers, it occurred to me then that Icould pose these questions to myself. Gordon College provided little competition on our home court. In the winter of 1972, it would have been ashort drive from their campus in Rawalpindi to ours in Islamabad. Crossing into the compound of the Inter¬ national School of Islamabad (ISI), they entered arecognizable yet unfamil¬ iar and oddly heterogeneous space—something not-America and not-Pakistan . Their bodies must have sensed and absorbed the gravity of the uneven, overlying, and jagged cultural force fields flowing, protruding, infringing, and breaking all around. On the one hand, there were the smooth soft pol¬ ished brick red octagonal campus walls, with inner courtyards centered by star-shaped fountain, beds and waterless wading pools; windows from floor to ceiling, carpeted classrooms, sports fields expanding into the distance, and the large yellow, not blue, school buses waiting in the too-large parking lot. Not to mention the not-yet-men boys, with hair long and so wellgroomed that the desire to touch it was tethered only by the all-powerful straps of decorum. And Iimagine that after viewing the miniskirt-clad teenage girls, the unbearable displays of sexual affection, hyper-groomed boys, and the bouncing, shouting, infinitely beaming cheerleaders, they put away these snapshots and probed them only once they were out of the com- I N T E R T E X T S 1 4 4 pound inside their blue bus. ^Without the topographic charts and compass needed to navigate the plate tectonics of ISI, their psychic vigor must have been sapped before tip-up. But there was more; the basketball court itself was surrounded by those high on the bleachers and others sitting on the ground. What, Iwonder, did the Gordon College players make of the fact that more than afew times the bleacher crowd students, teachers, and parents burst into amedley of abadly copied but emphatic Urdu cheer: Leader: Aag-thay, Bagh-thay, ChuchuupChapackthay Crowd: T A H ! Leader: Chapackthay C r o w d : T A H ! Leader: Chapackthay Crowd: TA H ! OurfanshadlearneditonaroadtripfromthefansofLahoreAmerican School, an institution that had no choice but to be embedded in acity meas¬ uring its age in millennia. For those in our bleachers, this cheer was nothing similar to say, “Craig, Craig, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, Chris ca More so, like much of the Urdu learned by my teammates and classmates, it part of atainted language TheGordonCollegeplayers wondered if this double “call and pidgin” absorbed in athin contact zone, to have known the cheer and to have was imitative flattery or if it was w a s o r a w e r e s u r e response" one more spin spun for their disorientation. On the other hand, while waiting for the ball to go up, if they turned theireyestotheWesttheysawMargallaHills—gatewaytoPeshawar,the Khyber Pass, and Kabul. Or if they followed...