Jamshed's silence was adominant one, if one distinguishes between dominant and recessive in adopted quiets. As a driver he still checked angrily form time to time his rear mirror—gauging the impact of his bark on me when I related that joke—and hardly betrayed any sign of being disturbed by having insulted me. Assad's quiet by comparison was dominant recessive. After Jamshed's unchallenged bark he pretended to look at the horizon line's sublime beauty and be totally lost in it, having thus forgotten his immediate surround. And for me the option of asking Jamshed to stop and getting out of the car before reaching Hanau was anything but viable. I had burnt my ships before I had set foot in Europe and certainly long before I embarked on this journey to Hanau. I simply hid inside my doubly recessive silence.
Jamshed was one of my many maternal cousins, of whom two were living in Austria and the rest scattered across Europe, Asia and America. He was living with his wife and kids in the vicinity of Frankfurt; had been living there for more than fourteen years. They had been living there ever since his departure from India where he had stayed with us, then refugees within the mandate of UNHCR. We had not met for more than fourteen years, did not know what the other had done, which ways he had gone and now something which is probably called fate had brought us face to face again, much to the disappointment of the person that I was.
* * *
In the wake of April coup of 1978 and the ensuing chaos which forced Afghans to leave Afghanistan on mass, our family i.e. my parents, my sister and I had managed to reach India over our misadventures in Pakistan and Iran and had found something of a safe heaven in New Delhi, exactly at a time when our modest financial means had all but run out. I was then seventeen.
Like many a teenager of my generation which was born to participate in dialogues and intellectual wrestlings shaped and conducted by our immediate forerunners, mine was the task of comprehending a conceptual chaos which in hindsight would appear to have defeated not only our generation but the very generation of our forerunners. A conceptual chaos unlike any other known to Afghans or perhaps any other group of people. And a defeat as unprecedented. Yet despite that defeat of sorts, I believe I had the distinct privilege of acquiring the tools of the trade for those wrestlings from a forerunner who in many ways was a unique blend of eccentricity and social engagement. Lucky I believe now I was in many ways in having him and unlucky in others. But for a boy of seventeen of my character, given to idealizing things and in search of meanings not immediately available in the life of destitute refugees that we were, it was perhaps the lucky ways that counted the most. Or were they?
My father was a religious man, a pious man, courageous, straightforward and honest, but perhaps like most men with those qualities despotic and single minded. It was not only I—who had been shaped by him and literally for too long a time did not have the luxury of a meta level of judgment to evaluate him for myself—that admired him. He was the favorite of his friends and colleagues all alike, all drawn to him by those admittedly admirable qualities. What made him exceptional, I think now, was the fact that he was a very able mathematician and physicist, known for his competence and expertise in those fields in addition to being firmly and openly religious. It was that queer blend of religiosity and modern science—for some the produce of a-religious or at least secular Europe—which made my father so engaging, especially as it combined with a very vivid interest in European literature and literature in general. No doubt he was the top of his class throughout the school and university as his friends and former classmates would always point out. And it was also in his small personal library of books—which he had bought either in Kabul or brought from his study periods in Europe—that I came to see the names of those European giants whose ideas or ideas attributed to them were the primary elements of the conceptual chaos drowning my father's generation. From Rousseau and Montesquieu to Hegel and Marx, from Stendhal and Balzac to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky....
I still remember how I would spend hours looking at books I could not read, admiring the likenesses of men like Rousseau and Marx on the covers of books which bore their names. After all they were important because my father had them. It did not matter, I was incapable of opening their books. If not German or French, at least I could read my own mother tongue Persian: the language of Saadi and Firdausi and the language of Hafiz and Mawlana. As if goaded by my inability to read those alien languages and certainly in more than just an inversely proportional relation to the time I spent looking at those foreign hieroglyphics, I would consume the Persian stock of my father's collection of books. From Professor Khanleri's collection of classic fairy tales written for kids through the non ending exercises of Iranian story tellers in writing short stories to translations of Chateaubriand and Hugo and Balzac. From Golestan and Bostan through Khayyam's poetry to the pinnacle of Persian poetry Hafiz and Mawlana. Whilst the origin of one's capacity to appreciate art is a decidedly interesting topic to explore and perhaps ultimately unfathomable, I believe in my case it was Hafiz and Mawlana, whose poetry taught me my first lessons of emotional delicacy and linguistic brilliance, philosophical insight and intellectual rectitude. It was their poetry which opened the first vistas of my appreciation of sublime beauty. They took me out of the confines of my material existence into worlds which by their very indeterminate and ethereal nature were to influence my life in so many profound ways later on....
I could read. I could read with avarice! Or was it vengeance? I could read like someone who had to read; had to read to survive. Pretty early I must have started reading, because before I knew it—and certainly way ahead of its proper time—I was going with my mother to attend—thanks to that precocious zeal of reading—year one of an all female combined High school—where my mother taught—as its most junior male pupil. If I have thanked my father in my hearth of hearths, time and again for his introduction of mine to intellectual masters of European descent, I have cursed my mother many a time for her decision to force me so early into competing with those, who were on average three years older than I was—just to be able to brag in her circle of fiends that her son was an exceptional kid if not indeed a complete genius. It was also to her utmost dismay that I turned into a bookworm, devouring books of fiction primarily but performing less than satisfactory in all other subjects till quite late in my school years.
When we left Afghanistan I had managed to finish the German Oberrealschule in Kabul with an Abitur and knew about life as much as a youngster of sixteen knows who has been brought up with books on bookish ideas; someone who has not been allowed to mingle with street kids. Someone who has not been permitted to go through the schools of violence so to speak. I was somebody who for the most part had yet to experience life first hand, see it, taste it and form his own conclusions; somebody as lonely as anyone is who is yet to discover that one may not need friends in the long ordeal one calls life, ordinarily.
Hence in a weird way, despite our roots in Kabul, the Indian capital of New Delhi—where our nomadic way of life once again had found something of an urban permanence—was the environment where I had to taste the world first hand, learn to swim intellectually, see things for myself, experience them on my terms. New Delhi was the place where I was supposed to find substitutes for the friends I did not have and for the social courage I lacked. And despite our dependence on the pittance we received from UNHCR for survival, life in New Delhi at the time was indeed full of promises and decidedly a privilege to live in, for us and for Afghans in general whose influx in large numbers in Pakistan and Iran had led to xenophobic mass hysterias there. There, in New Delhi away from home and what it meant, it was once again possible to breathe, to breathe outside the prison cell into which the agents of progress and democracy had turned Afghanistan. It was again possible to see new horizons and be hopeful, invest youthful, boundless energy and have reason to be happy. In New Delhi it was once again possible to read what one wanted without the fear of secret service reporting one for subversion. It was again possible to study without having to first survive the compulsory conscription. Despite the actualities sky seemed the limit.
To get started and because we did not have the money required to do anything else I joined an advanced German language course offered by Goethe Institute which kindly accepted former students of the German schools in Kabul without any fees. "Odd" was the adjective which a fellow Afghan had used to describe my decision. "Why not English here in India? Even if you had wanted to join a university you need English to start with." he had added. And odd it must have been, given the circumstances. Why German indeed where English was the order of the day everywhere? Why did I really choose to continue learning German? Was it that little something which makes you stand out in the crowd, which drove my decision? Or was it an obvious case of successful branding by German culture thanks to the German schooling which I had received back in Kabul? Maybe a bit of both, I guess. I believe more than anything else it was my way of catching up with the flow of times in the face of our destitute refugee status. It did not matter my family was unable to send me to Germany to study as the families of better off youngsters did there in New Delhi. I could brazenly outdo them in their own game by studying German language and literature in India. How else could I put to use my natural talents in a hopelessly unfair game of survival? After all even Indian education enjoyed a status of sorts in the neck of woods where we used to live. And the son of an academic I was without any doubt. Not entirely in vein had I inhaled the air of my father's library in Kabul, consciously and unconsciously mimicking with every drop of blood the father that I was not.
Hilarious it may very well appear the industriousness with which I set myself to work, to polish up my knowledge of German language. And hilarious it decidedly was. But I still recall how I would bring home Heinrich Böll's works and how I would start translating his seemingly simple German into Persian with the help of a dictionary I had bought at the institute. Unabashed by the bulk of what I had to go through, I would stay up till one or one thirty in the morning, for as long as those final three terms for the acquisition of the "Kleines Deutsches Sprachdiplom" lasted and would translate Böll for myself, laboriously but painstakingly and to the best of my abilities. The belief into which I poured my initial quantum of youthful soul was the paternal dictum that you do not learn a foreign language well unless you speak yours well and if you learn a foreign language, the target should be to speak it with the same ease as your own language. And I had intuitively found out that the best way to enrich your vocabulary naturally and authentically whilst at the same time relishing the spice of a powerful narrative was to translate a great story into your own language: my thirst for literary fiction had just blossomed.
I think it was a combination of good luck and immense desire to succeed which—after I obtained the "Kleines Deutsches Sprachdiplom"—hurled me into the Masters program at Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of the top universities Inida wide so far as the humanities were concerned. The fees required for the course were payable even by us and I could finally do in a foreign country what my own country, thanks to the communist conscription laws, had stopped me from doing: study at a university. At the time I was undoubtedly ecstatic. A year and a half of hard work had paved the way to what in the ferocious heat of that inhabitabed savanna called New Delhi was nothing short of a paradise: the rich German section which the library at JNU offered. Despite the now many intervening years I still remember vividly that four storey tall yellowish library building of the old campus which stood parallel to the administrative building housing the vice president and further south parallel to the road connecting Nehru Place to the New Delhi international airport. I still remember that oblong container of quiet wisdom.
It had its entrance off its southern face toward the vice presidential building and once you had entered the glazed entrance to hand in your bag for inspection, you had left behind the only fire escape route which cut at right angles the rectangular block. To your right—if you faced north—was the administrative section of the library and to your left the reference section on the ground floor. Lit from the north it was furnished on its level of immediate access for users to sit in and browse through the newspapers or the reference material if they so chose. One needed then to walk past the book shelves facing the glazed entrance to see the three by two meter opening in the wall to the left halfway across the floor. It was there where steps led to a split level which was roughly equal the furnished part in terms of area and housed the books of classic English literature. Receiving its light from all sides but the north it did not allow anyone to sit. And that split level arrangement was repeated for all the floors above. French and German had their quarters on the third floor and I had my favorite spot near the window to the north side, not very far from the steps to the books. Even if I did not want to, I would overlook the ever yellowish university lawns where sidewalks of concrete looked horribly unfriendly in the permanent heat of non-ending Indian summers and appreciate being inside.
What an exquisite Quiet there prevailed, almost sublime. Peace, albeit artificial and controlled was there, the ever escaping peace....
Was it wrong then that I had assumed the validity of universal principles underlying life then, I wonder now? Was is presumptuous that I had infused everything with the idea of myself and thus believed everybody, everything to be just another version of me: Human? But it was that effervescent crazed infinite something within me, keeping together that fragile shell of a shattered ego—which I was then and still am in many ways now—that drove that guy two decades ago to sit at a hard wooden desk on an uncomfortable wooden chair along the northern library wall of JNU and lose himself in the study of German literary works, imbuing everything with his sense of things, his infantile sincerity, his stupendous credulity, his incredible naïveté. Imbuing words, imbuing sentences, imbuing paragraphs, books, ideas: Universals.
Universals which "just happened" to have been written in a different language and "just happened" to have come out of a different corner of the world. Universals which theoretically could have been written there! So that the idea was to acquire that language to have access to those human ideas, human thoughts, human notions. Acquire a language and read! Read, read, read, read! Very simple! Simple indeed. It must have been then the kick I got out of the exquisite entertainment the works of German literature provided that nailed me there, transfixed me, mesmerized me, making me read, inhale, devour: literature as a tool to entertain third world strivers like I was one to get them to invest their lives in and for that entertainment....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ethnic city by Said Yama Ahmadi Copyright © 2012 by Said Yama Ahmadi. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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