Back at it

Keeping in the spirit of my last post, I’ll be reviving some regularity to my blog.  I doubt I’ll get to the idealized vision I had when I first started back in…what was it now?...2004?...when I vowed to write here everyday, all the time, without fail.  That was stupid.  But I will make a bigger effort to keep things updated, partly as a promise made to a dear friend, and partly as a promise made to myself. 

Things have come full circle.  In April 2002, I started my career as a journalist covering the war on terror by plopping down unannounced in Peshawar, with no idea what I was going to do nor any idea for whom I was going to do it.  Things turned out alright, I think.  Nearly seven years later, I’ve done it again.  I’ve landed in Peshawar, unannounced, staring eagerly into the vast unknown of a new future.  Things are slightly different this time around – I do, for example, know what I want to do, and I do know, at least partly, for whom I’ll be doing it.  But there is an appreciable consistency in the overall picture, a thematic connection between 2002 and 2009 like the swirling brushstrokes in a van Gogh painting. 

Things are the same and yet they’re different.  I’m the same but altered in some ways.  Peshawar is the same but some elements stand out more while others have retreated into the background.  Histories have grown, expanded, renewed and eroded.  I see the world around me through altered vision and the world stares back with a new expression.  We recognize each other but in the way of old friends who meet after a long time apart.

I visited Shuba Bazaar yesterday and the child mechanics who work there.  The faces are different but the grime, the hopelessness and that unsettling look in their eyes is the same.  I walked the streets of the old city and the new city and on the surface, all is as it was, excepting for a few cosmetic additions and subtractions.  The organized chaos, the determined faces, the sounds of growling rickshaws and screaming car horns, the smells of karahi and roasting meats and curries and garbage and shit, yes, that all remains, defiantly.  But there is an underlying sense of urgency in the air, something akin to the night before an examination, something not unlike the apprehension one feels a day before the day of reckoning.  My old friend T. in Shuba Bazaar, who now owns his own shop but still smokes hashish as if it’s a life-saving medicine, told me that this city is surrounded by danger.  “You go six kilometers out and everything changes,” he said. 

Six kilometers.  Well, at least this time I won’t have to go far.