Kabul-Delhi-Kabul

A quick family visit took me back to Delhi last fortnight. Every trip home drives home the fact that the grass is literally greener on the other side. Though many parts of Afghanistan are very green, what you see around you in Kabul is brown all over; treeless hills, dusty roads and mud houses. Though Delhi may not be as green as we would like it to be, it is enough to soothe parched eyes. Surpisingly though, as we move along some of the roads leading away from the Kabul city towards to Paghman mountainside there is lot of green, with beautiful chinar and pine trees lining the entire route.

Though the journey to Delhi was only one hour and forty minutes in the air, over land I had spent another 4 hours just getting into the flight. A bottle of olive oil seen in the x-ray machine was mistaken to be liquor and the bag was asked to be opened up. The combination lock wouldnt open at the opportune moment and a struggle ensued. In the resulting melee or elsewhere in the numerous searches, I lost my pair of glasses. The rest of the journey was uneventful. Compared to what a trip out or into Kabul involved earlier, this was a cakewalk. At Delhi, I sit in the pre-paid taxi and say "salaam aleikum" to the hindu taxi driver and he looks at me as if i've landed from space. I grin and make up for the faux pas by saying - "kya karen bhaiya aadat ho gayi hai". The 'aadat' doesn't end there. On numerous occassions much to the embarrassment of onlooking family members i've stood with right hand on chest and bowed head while greeting people or thanked somebody saying "ta-shakur". Thankfully I wasn't back from a trip among the Maasai tribe or I would be spitting on people in greeting or farewell.

The other thing that I thanked God for was for the freedom that we had in India. There is a kind of relaxed feel which failed to come to me in Afghanistan. Small things which went unnoticed before made you feel good - the shopping complexes, the bright colors, the neon lights, the bustling restaurants, boys and girls sitting around laughing and chatting, the noisy parks. Every now and then I would turn to my wife and say, "I wish we had our Afghan friends over to see this". When I see a bollywood movie now I can see it with the eyes of an Afghan and understand completely, why he would love it.

All good things seem to end quickly and so did the Delhi trip. A week went by in a matter of hours. So I said "Khudafiz" to everybody and headed back to duty-station.