Highway butterflies
1322 Words
HIGHWAY BUTTERFLIES
As the bus rolled along the only paved road through the valley into the small town, a young man peeled away from the crowd of afternoon shoppers and shouted for Dan to stop. “Salaam aleikum. I am friend of Yusuf. He come and see me yesterday. You please stay at my house.”
Dan looked down at the young man, who stood in front of a butcher’s shop, his palms open, a friendly smile on a prematurely lined face.
“I am Harun Ali.”
The skin of whatever animal had been most recently slaughtered hung like a limp flag from a horizontal pole in front of the compact wooden shack, advertising its innards. A group of bearded men, wearing felt hats and shalwar kameez, the typical long shirt and baggy trousers worn by men and women all over Pakistan, were shouting at a young boy inside. Everyone seemed armed, antiquated double-barreled shotguns casually slung across broad shoulders. A boy sat stony faced, armed with a huge cleaver, over the remaining few pieces of meat and offal that hadn’t yet found a customer.
Dan, momentarily distracted, stared at the economic microcosm, returned the greetings and asked, ‘Where to park the bus? Actually, just get in, mate.”
Excited, Harun Ali slipped into the co-pilot’s seat.
“These are Kohistani people from Kalam. Very dangerous to go there. You no go there. Stay at my house, my wife is good cook. Many foreigners stay my house. And Yusuf is here in two days.”
Handshakes and Salaams, though Tim and Fred made a concerted effort to remain physically distant from their host. No need to infect the man they were to stay with.
“You like to smoke?” he smiled.
The bus still stank of the last piece they’d consumed. Life was a haze.
They drove the Bedford into the backyard of a bakery and climbed a steep hillside. The river, now mean and foaming, squeezed through a narrow bed a hundred meters below the main road, which they could follow meandering around several bends north.
The houses, first closely clustered together, but soon thinning out, were one-storey affairs with flat roofs. Everyone smiled and waved at the new arrivals. No doubt the unwashed foreigners would provide the week’s gossip in Madyan. Livestock and happy urchins moved between the buildings and the air was warm, golden and smelled of mountain and cow s**t. As they left most of the houses behind, Dan realised that the valley was still several kilometers wide. The hills had just gotten a lot higher. Green-gray ridges, shaped like dragons’ spines, towered above their heads.
“Hallo-o-o, hallo, we haven’t seen any new arrivals here for a while.”
On the wide veranda that extended past the four guestrooms facing the valley, two western girls in their twenties were lounging on deep pillows, a freshly split watermelon on a steel tray in front of them. The younger one rose. Dressed in tight orange pants, flared at the bottom, and an Indian-looking white pajama top, that seemed to have most of its buttons missing, she offered a glimpse of her tanned breasts to Dan, the first arrival to stumble through the door. Her shortly cropped hair showed off a long row of finely crafted Afghani silverware arranged along her right earlobe. The heavy jewelry emphasised her strong cheekbones and beautiful red lips.
He noticed all this in less than three seconds.
“Hey, native English speakers. I didn’t expect that in Madyan. I’m Dan.”
The girl approached him and stretched out a tantalisingly smooth hand.
“Ciao, Dan, I am Paola. Not quite native, actually. I come from Italy. How are you? This is my friend Susanne, from Germany.”
Her eyes lingered and for the first time in weeks Dan wondered what he really looked like, covered in dust, hands oil-encrusted, black stubble that had been spreading across his sunburned face for too many days.
“We are on the way to India, Dan,” Paola continued, leading him towards the other girl.
He liked the way she rolled her R’s. She spoke almost perfect English, in an entirely affected manner. And what an accent. Cool. Magic.
“But we kind of got stuck here. It is a nice place to hang out.”
Tim and Fred pushed past him to step onto the terrace.
“Hallo, girls. Guess what, we’re the bug men.”
Dan turned to his friends.
“That’s Fred and that’s Tim. We’re driving a bus to Kathmandu. They’re infested with bed bugs and need to be isolated. Too bad, guys.”
Susanne, almost as tall as Paola, but not nearly as skinny, dressed in an elegant red-as-sandstone hand-stitched shalwar kameez, giggled and rolled her eyes, “Eeh, bug men. Get them out of here.”
Harun Ali and Thierry were the last to arrive.
“Enchanté.”
The Frenchman removed his shoes as he stepped through the door, made a slight bow towards the girls and followed the Pathan to the last room.
In broken French, Dan called after his friend, “Je veux une chambre seule ce soir, pas avec toi.”
Thierry smiled back at Dan, cast a brief, detached look at the small crowd on the terrace and disappeared after Harun Ali.
“How many rooms you need?” Dan heard their host asking the Frenchman.
“We take three rooms, one for the bug men together, one for me, one for Dan. He drives all day; he has a great need to sleep.”
The two girls looked at Dan questioningly.
“And that’s Thierry, our smooth and mysterious co-pilot from Paris. Actually, we picked him up in a really fantastic club in Iran. You should have seen him there, the best dressed man in Isfahan.”
Dan sat with Thierry and the two girls on the guest house’s flat roof, drinking tea, exchanging scraps of gathered road lore, smoking and watching Fred and Tim, stark naked on the veranda below. Each armed with a bucket of hot water, their entire ragged wardrobe isolated in a corner, they were scrubbing themselves down with Dettol, and cursed at the stink in the fading light.
“I make sure my wife is inside the house.”
Harun Ali excused the departure of his charming wife and young daughter who’d been busy serving tea, staring with undisguised curiosity at the wild-looking foreigners. He put down a large clay bowl of red-hot charcoal and rolled a piece of paper into a long thin tube.
“You know Chita? Best way to smoke the hashish. You have hashish?”
Thierry passed him a couple of grams of the dark, oily hash they had scored for a few rupees in one of Peshawar countless bazaars.
The young man carefully tore off a few small pieces, lining them up on the warm rim of the clay bowl. He placed one piece, flattened like local bread, the size of a fingernail, onto a piece of coal. As the hashish began to emit a thin thread of grey, pungent smoke, Harun Ali tipped a glass of water into his mouth, and stuck the paper tube between his lips. Inhaling slowly, he caught the smoke with its tip. The piece quickly burnt out and he spat the water off the side of the roof.
“You can do?” he smiled at his guests.
Dan looked across at Paola who just stared back, her face imbued with golden contours by the last rays of sun that was quickly sinking behind the ridges on the opposite side of the valley. She looked altogether feline.
He shrugged coolly. She shrugged right back, pulling a face and burst out laughing.
“I only tried this one time. It’s not so easy. It requires soft touch, good breathing and the ability to control what is in your mouth.”
She pulled a face at him.
“But I’m sure you have got it, no?”
Dan liked her. A lot. Was this in the script?
He took the paper tube, filled his mouth with water and leant over the clay bowl. And choked on the smoke and water.
“You have to practice some more, before you can join the true oblivion seekers,” she commented.
The call to prayer rose from several mosques in town.
Harun Ali rose slowly against the fading sky and said, “I must go. Inshallah, we speak later.”
A quiet Salaam and he was gone.
- Writer
