A Burqa and a Hard Place by Sally Cooper

Author:Sally Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2009-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Two weeks later, the three had still not been freed. The wait went on. The Ghan’s mobile phone services flooded subscribers with a series of text messages asking anyone with information about the whereabouts of the hostages to call a hotline. The messages were in English and anglicised Dari. Dari is written in Arabic script but the Ghan’s growing army of texters was adapting it to the Romanised form of the standard Nokia. The kidnapping was being viewed as a national outrage. ‘This is not what we do.’ Afghans everywhere repeated Ismail’s sentiment. For them, this evil has once again come from ‘outside’.

Yet despite the text messages and the occasional story on the BBC, the hostages slowly receded from people’s conversations. The unthinkable had become the ordinary. Life went on and, although everyone was still mindful of the situation, there was work to be done. Over the last three weeks there had not been one reported incident of violence or even threats of violence towards the international community, while the kidnappers’ deadlines were constantly revised.

The UN kept a tight grip on its staff and I was prohibited from going out at night. I was beginning to go stir crazy.

‘Peter and I are going out for dinner, do you want to come?’ asked Cole one evening.

‘Mmmm … what if I get seen?’

I wasn’t worried about being kidnapped. My fear was that one of my eager UN colleagues would see me driving by and feel the urge to tell Bing.

‘We won’t tell,’ grinned Peter and Cole. ‘Come on.’

Later that evening, under the cover of darkness and the hood of my winter coat, Peter, Cole and I slipped quietly into a waiting taxi. Our destination was an obscure Chinese restaurant, one of the few in Kabul whose sole mission was actually to serve food. Like many other countries, China had a proprietary stake in the new Afghanistan. Beijing was funding a number of large-scale infrastructure projects but perhaps the country’s most notorious (and, it must be said, unofficial) contribution to the reconstruction effort was the number of ‘Chinese restaurants’ that had begun to spring up throughout the city. With Chinese waitresses in high heels and miniskirts and a menu devoted almost entirely to Jack Daniel’s, their clientele was limited to Kabul’s ever-expanding legion of goatees and ‘geographic bachelors’.

Peter had discovered our nameless Chinese restaurant on one of his sorties. It was behind an obscure dark blue door on a busy street a few blocks from the Karwan Sara. He rang the bell and, moments later, a middle-aged Chinese woman opened the door with a smile. A pale pink apron covered her brown woollen trousers and floral blue shirt. There wasn’t a miniskirt in sight as she shepherded us indoors with maternal urging and a string of Mandarin. Inside was the standard replica of Chinese restaurants from Guangzhou to Gundagai: round tables, pink plastic tablecloths, soy sauce bottles and, best of all, Chinese customers slurping and chewing their way through chicken with black bean sauce and Szechuan beef.

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