The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (27 page)

I had not seen the deadly blow, and I missed the significance of much else that day. The birds’ spurs were bewilderingly quick. The betting, with men leaping into the pit and shouting odds, and others signaling their acceptance, was chaotic. Later on, having grown accustomed to the speed of the action, I was able to follow the feints and maneuvers more easily. I was not revolted, as I had expected to be. There were several small boys among the spectators, looking on with frank enjoyment, and they may have had a disarming effect. I thought of my own seven-year-old and how he would have reacted.

Westerners have felt drawn to write about conflicts in Afghanistan ever since the British and Pashtun first crossed swords back in the 19th century. Journalists maintained the tradition in the 1980s, in many cases romanticizing the mujahideen who fought to expel the Soviets, and they carry on today, embedding with American military units that are in conflict with the Taliban. Watching events in the ruined tile factory, it crossed my mind that I, too, was embedded—in a parallel war, a simulacrum of human combat, animated by the same honor and fear, the same selfishness and pride.

The atmosphere of the pit, the racking coughs and curses and the gamblers slipping out to squat and piss over the rubble outside, did not correspond to any idea I had of wealth. Then, after one fight, Karim told me that the equivalent of $22,000 had been riding on the result, including a $2,000 wager between the owners. These are huge sums in a country where per capita income is less than $500. Karim gave me whispered biographies of the better-known personalities sitting around the pit, telling me of their past service to the jihad and of their current elevated positions in President Hamid Karzai’s bureaucracy, army, and police. I would not, I realized, find a version of the poor Kabuli who had featured in Hossein Fakhri’s story. That character had bought his pedigree cockerel for less than $700; nowadays he would need to pay four or five times that much. Kabul is an artificial boomtown, powered by war, crime, and foreign aid, and the price of virtually everything, including gamecocks, has soared.

Later, at the end of fights that proceeded in increments and often lasted several rounds, I saw magnificent creatures die, trembling and alone, reviled by the very men who had cheered them, and I regretted my earlier insouciance. Surely the bouts could be stopped before it came to this, and points awarded? That way, the birds would live to fight another day and perhaps enjoy a warrior’s retirement. I looked around—at the flushed faces, the looks of triumph and vindication. No, death was the whole point.

As we were leaving the building, Karim and I found ourselves in step with the man with the
dastmal
over his head. We learned that he was called Hafiz and that he owned several fighting cocks. He agreed to meet with us the following day to talk about cockfighting. “The one true love of my life!” he cackled and went to fetch his bicycle. We heard someone greet him, “Hafiz! How are you, caliph of the tricksters?”

Early the next morning, Karim and I went for a walk in the center of Kabul. He told me that our route, toward Straw Sellers’ Alley, would take us past Zilgai, one of the brothers whose bird had caused such a sensation at the tile factory. Zilgai’s day job, as it happened, was selling fighting cocks.

Along the way I had a grand experience: my pocket was picked and then exquisitely unpicked. I was squeezing between two hawkers’ carts when I felt my progress impeded by a dark, bedraggled figure at my side, also trying to get through the narrow gap. “After you,” I said, and the man walked on. There had been a slight pressure on my waist, so I put my hand into my jacket pocket. My mobile phone was gone.

So was the man, who was now running through the crowds. I made mad chase, shoving people out of the way and eventually grabbing his collar and stopping him dead. “Give me back my mobile!” I shouted, guessing that a Persian-speaking Westerner upbraiding a thief would draw sympathetic interest; he stared with addled eyes while I raved and a small crowd gathered. The thief pointed at my pocket and said, “Have a look.” Again I put my hand in my pocket, this time drawing out my mobile phone. It took me a few moments to realize what had happened, but by that time the dark magician was gone and the crowd had turned away in disinterest.

As we walked on, I saw Zilgai from a distance, crouching in his black leather jacket while two cocks sparred furiously, their lethal spurs clad in leather muffs, for the benefit of a dozen observers. Both combatants were red
aseels
, the celebrated Indian breed known for its small wattles and indomitable courage that is prevalent in Afghanistan, but one of the two rose higher and struck with greater accuracy at his adversary’s head and neck, and it was clear that Zilgai had deliberately mismatched them in the hope of attracting buyers.

He separated the birds before they exhausted themselves, the observers drifted away, and there was no sale. “I keep the best specimens at home,” Zilgai told us, grinning and cradling under his jacket one of the combatants, who clucked excitedly. “That’s where the serious buyers come.”

Karim and I moved on from Zilgai, passing hundreds of chickens and turkeys for sale at the side of the road, and entered Straw Sellers’ Alley. The name is a misnomer—straw hasn’t been traded here for years—and the first few storefronts, where knife sharpeners sit at their wheels and an old man promises a cure for rheumatism, offer no hint of what lies ahead. Then this corridor of a street narrows further, and the sounds of the city are drowned out by the warbling and chirruping of thousands of birds inside wooden cages that have been hung up in the storefronts or laid out on the ground. The bigger cages are spliced with twigs jammed between the bars—perches for quails, starlings, and mynahs. Pinstriped partridges sit with their mates, while barrel-chested homing pigeons, the color of café au lait, squabble and chafe.

Straw Sellers’ Alley doesn’t cater only to the refined senses— our enjoyment of the mynah’s mimicry, our poetic identification with a flock of pigeons performing above our heads. The shopkeepers here deal mostly in partridges and quails, and these are sold in order to fight. In front rooms and backyards the length and breadth of the city, combat is arranged, bets laid, and birds maimed and killed. So the economy of Straw Sellers’ Alley, too, is a war economy.

To the aficionado of the fighting cock, these others are inferior warriors. As Hafiz told me, “I don’t like quails or partridges. They fight for a few minutes and then one of them gives up. Even fighting dogs will fight for no more than five or ten minutes before one of them gives up. But a fighting cock, that’s a different matter! They fight over three days, four. They fight until they can no longer fight. God created these birds to fight.”

I spent more time with Hafiz than with any other cocker. I visited his home, accompanied him to a provincial fight, and partook of the cigarettes, laced with
charas
, a local form of hashish, that he smoked when he was not tending his birds. “I am addicted,” he declared without regret. He was referring to the cockfighting, not the hash. “Everything I earn, I lose!”

Hafiz stands about five feet seven and often smiles through his gray beard while his eyes twinkle roguishly. Apart from the
dastmal
, his main prop is a ring set with a milk-white agate, which he rubs against his eyes, and to whose mysterious properties he attributes his excellent eyesight. As a cocker and a
charsi
, Hafiz stands on the margin of respectable society, and this is how he likes it. He is a bucolic rejection of all the handwringing that abounds in Afghanistan—all those predictions of doom and gloom. I once asked him how he viewed the country’s future, and he gave a shout of laughter and replied, “I don’t think about my own future. Why should I think about the future of the country?”

Hafiz earns good money when he works as a construction foreman, but the building season in Afghanistan ends at the start of winter, when he becomes unemployed. This frees him to spend much of his earnings on cockfighting; he has lost a lot of money over the years and has had to sell family land in order to put his children through school. Hafiz is far from being one of the richest members of Kabul’s cockfighting fraternity. He is the only cocker I have seen who comes by bike to the old tile factory.

As a Shia Muslim and a member of the Hazara ethnic minority, Hafiz is distinguished twice over from the Sunni, mostly Tajik elite that dominates the new security forces. The sum of his military experience was a spell as a reluctant conscript in the Soviet-run army of the early 1980s. He described the civil war that followed, when the different mujahideen factions fought one another, as a “wretched” time. Hafiz spent the Taliban period in exile in Pakistan, weaving carpets in Peshawar, returning home only after Karzai came to power in 2002.

Sitting in the house he inherited from his father, in a modest but respectable Kabul neighborhood, he showed me the bird he intended to take to the tile factory that coming Friday. The cock was a lustrous red creature with a large comb and a white-tipped saddle, and Hafiz withdrew him from his cage in a corner of the warm sitting room so that I could admire his sheen and the tautness of his breast and thighs. Even when his cage was covered, Hafiz told me, this bird unfailingly emitted his first crow of the day a few moments before dawn; it’s not for nothing that the cock’s first crow is known as the call to prayer.

Hafiz had exercised the bird that morning, driving him around the courtyard to build up his muscles and stamina. Now he placed him on the floor and snapped his fingers. The cock pirouetted aggressively, his dark eyes gleaming. In Afghanistan they call the onset of maturity, when a cockerel becomes an adult and will fight any adult male who comes near, his “drunkenness.” Hafiz’s eyes gleamed, too. “He’s ready to fight! He’ll cause a revolution in the pit—just see if he doesn’t!”

I asked Hafiz’s eldest son, Omid, a solemn 11-year-old, whether he would be coming on Friday. Omid shook his head, and Hafiz explained how, unlike many other owners, he has not encouraged his children to get involved in the sport. In this, and in his
charas
smoking, Hafiz’s approach to fatherhood is to point to himself as a negative example. “Who do you learn manners from?” he asked, then supplied the answer himself: “From the ill-mannered.”

Hafiz placed an iron tablet flat on the room’s wood-burning stove. When the tablet was hot, he laid some lengths of old cloth on it and unscrewed a container that was full of a dark, glutinous pomade. Several times in the days leading up to a fight, Hafiz coats the heated cloths with this pomade, which he has concocted from a dozen concentrates and infusions, and wraps them tightly around the bird’s head, breast, and thighs. This is intended to toughen the skin and make it harder for a spur to penetrate. Hafiz started telling me which ingredients go into the pomade: “alum, pomegranate skin, tamarisk blossom, walnut shell . . .” Then, wrapping a length of cloth around the bird’s neck, he interrupted himself: “Hold on! I’m not going to tell you the rest. They are a secret that only I know!”

The following day, Hafiz was due to attend a meet in the Shomali Plain, about two hours’ drive from Kabul, and he agreed that Karim and I could accompany him. Traveling is one of the aspects of cockfighting that Hafiz likes best, and the trips he has made around the country are his fondest memories of the sport. From Mazar-i-Sharif in the far north to Kandahar in the south, Hafiz has carried birds from one fight to the next, staying with fellow cockers, smoking his
charas
, and watching the young men whose dancing, in this sexually segregated society, constitutes an acceptable evening’s entertainment.

Karim and I picked Hafiz up at dawn and drove northward, out of the capital. He told us that the Taliban exerts growing control over the countryside, including many main roads, and that traveling is becoming less and less feasible. If members of a Taliban roadblock find a gamecock being transported, they will confiscate the bird and fine or whip the owner.

Shortly after the Taliban took Kabul, in 1996, Hafiz was caught attending an underground cockfight. “They hung me up from the ceiling by my right wrist and flogged me on the right side. Then they did the same to the left side of my body. I was covered in wounds.” But Hafiz was dedicated, and two days later he attended another meet. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “someone shouted that the Taliban were coming. I ran for home, a long way away, and by the time I got back my wounds had opened and I was covered in blood.” This experience convinced Hafiz that he should leave the country. A few days later he was in Pakistan.

Now we were beyond the mountains that encircle Kabul and so had escaped the city’s dust and smog. We entered a broad plain flanked by mountains and headed toward the Panjshir Valley and Mazar. We were traveling along one of the few safe routes out of the capital. The people here are Tajiks with a history of loyalty to the mujahideen, and they have provided thousands of recruits for Afghanistan’s new army and police. Taliban are thin on the ground.

I asked Hafiz to describe the most poignant cockfight he could remember, and he responded with a tale of humiliation. One of his birds had been losing badly, and Hafiz had wanted to concede defeat, which would have saved the bird. A fellow member of his syndicate had insisted on a different course of action. “I’ll take over your bet,” the man had said. “Your winnings or losses will be mine.”

After this, Hafiz recalled, “my bird suddenly got a second wind. He defeated his opponent, and my partner picked up my winnings. I put the bird under my coat and went home, but when I got home I saw he had died along the way.” He grinned ruefully.

The men who gamble large sums on cockfights do not regard themselves as having repudiated their religion. Hafiz’s description of his encounter with the Taliban reminded me of the words of another cocker I spoke to at the tile factory. He said, “Everything we do is sinful. You walk down the street and look at a woman—it’s a sin. Under Islam, traders are supposed to make no more than ten percent from their transactions, but here in Afghanistan there are people who make five-hundred-percent profits.” Then he quoted an Afghan saying: “Drinking wine is forbidden; tell me something that is permitted in this world!”