I pulled in, switched off the engine, and stared. The stalls stretched far back into impenetrable darkness beneath a low concrete roof, the shoppers mostly chattering in Urdu as they hurried to and fro with bags of groceries. The stall-keepers were hawking the same exotic fruits, the same halal meat, the same plastic tat and £2 watches and bolts of primary-coloured cloth that are the stock-in-trade of the Saddar Market in Peshawar, treats for magpies. The place even smelled the same, a spicy-sweet mustiness that was two parts curry house and one part poverty.
Mir was waiting, but a closer look at this market was irresistible. I strolled with my helmet through the stalls, inhaling Central Asia again, feeling like an alien in the city of my birth.* Women in saris swarmed around the vegetable stands, bargaining with the stall-keepers, sifting through the foodstuffs with practised brown fingers. Among the recognisable goods were species of vegetation that were new to me – mooli and tindora, papadi and cho-cho, patra and parval, long dhudi, posso, china karella. There were over a dozen types of flour with names like dhokra and dhosa mix, mathia and oudhwa, mogo, raja-gro, singoda. There were packets of moth beans and gunga peas, sliced betelnut and sago seeds. There was a mouth freshener called mukhwas manpasand, and something called red chowrie, that was not to be confused with brown chorie, which according to the label was also known as pink cow peas.
There were implications to all this variety. It spoke of hours and hours spent in kitchens, of women’s lives (because the food shoppers were almost entirely women) in which the preparation of meals loomed far larger than it ordinarily did in the West. I was conscious of how little I knew about food, how little I cooked. The last time I used any kind of flour was in a domestic science class at boarding school when I was ten. I thought of the cling-film-wrapped vegetables I occasionally cooked for myself, steamed broccoli or little packets of pre-washed green beans, always identical green beans that were imported and sorted and chopped to the regulation length: junk veg. They went all right with a pre-cooked chicken kiev or a frozen lasagne, but I really bought them because, like a fast-food burger, their consumption required no thought.
Back outside, I noticed for the first time that it was a match day. Fans wearing the claret and blue of West Ham Football Club were making their way south towards the end of the street, where the floodlights and the tops of the stands of Upton Park stadium were visible. They were mostly working-class white, some of them looking like National Front archetypes with their earrings and shaven heads. According to the tabloid version of modern England this was a classic recipe for a bloodbath, yet there was no sense of racial tension here. I had been to football matches and witnessed at first hand the thuggery that English supporters are sometimes capable of, but these West Ham fans were turning that preconception on its head. They did not look angry or furtive or alienated. There was no nervous cordon of fluorescent-jacketed police. They just shambled along the pavement without a second glance, ordinary people on an ordinary Saturday going to an ordinary late-season football match.
I suddenly saw how easy it was to sit in the white-majority fastness of west London and pontificate about multiculturalism, while it was quite another thing to live as a minority in one’s homeland. It was astounding to find that multiculturalism actually seemed to work. Did the West Ham fans feel their national identity was under threat? Did they sit around in shabby pubs plotting to petrol bomb the modest homes of immigrants, the modern European equivalent of a Deep South lynching? They gave no sign of it. Further along the street was a stall selling paraphernalia in claret and blue, scarves and flags and football shirts with the names and numbers of the team’s heroes on them. The names of the players were not Asian, but some of them were unmistakably foreign – Miklosko, Berkovic, Lazaridis. It was hard to see how a fan could be a xenophobe when he supported a team like that.
The house was in the middle of Mafeking Avenue, an unexceptional double row of Victorian terraces typical of the late-nineteenth-century London housing boom during which they had been built. Avenues named after Ladysmith and Kimberley ran parallel, forming a mini-memorial to a corner of a vanished empire. These street names must have meant little to the neighbourhood’s modern inhabitants. The Boer War was just another imperial milestone, a bitter battle between Afrikaners and the British for control over turf that arguably belonged to neither, a hundred years ago and a distant continent away. And yet London’s success and status in the world owed everything to Britain’s imperial past. The Boer War was about control of South African diamonds and gold, riches that thousands of British soldiers had fought and died for at places like Mafeking. The relief of this obscure outpost in 1900 after a 217-day siege inspired such public jubilation in London that a new verb, ‘to maffick’, was added to the English language.
It was the stuff of history, and it was also the source of the prosperity that had attracted the immigrant scions of the colonised to come here in the first place. Kimberley was one of the greatest diamond mines the world has ever seen, and London is still littered with memorials to the battles by which the Empire was accrued. In the index of my street directory I counted six streets named Mafeking, nine Ladysmiths and twenty-two Kimberleys. The town planners of the early twentieth century were unimaginative: what would they have made of their streets’ present-day occupants? Did they perhaps imagine that they were building houses for returning troops, homes fit for heroes? Were they now turning in their graves?
I wondered if Mir had ever heard of Mafeking. He had been a diligent student, but the late-Victorian scramble for Africa seemed unlikely to have featured very high on the Mazari school curriculum. It was a pity that he had not ended up in that concentration of streets in SW11 that commemorate Britain’s Afghan Wars: Afghan Road, Khyber Road, Cabul and Candahar Road spelled the old-fashioned way. That would have grabbed his attention, for there are few Afghans who do not know the stories from the time of the British.
Nor are stories the only things that are passed from generation to generation. I once visited the Panjshir Valley in a bid to interview the late Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. On an exploratory walk along the valley road I came across a twelve-year-old boy shooting ducks on the river. The antique gun over his shoulder was almost as tall as him, and I asked with the help of sign language if I could examine it. The boy seemed pleased by my interest and I handled the gun admiringly, feeling the balance and heft of it. The cellophaned stock was decorated in the Afghan taste, with a gruesome colour photograph of someone undergoing open heart surgery taken from the brochure of some Western aid organisation. The metalwork was worn but had been carefully oiled and polished. Decorative tassels and a small felt pouch of gunpowder dangled from the trigger guard. It was obviously old, a heavy matchlock muzzle-loader from the era that preceded cartridges and bolt-action loading, more musket than modern rifle. Turning it over, I found an inscription on the sideplate that read VR 1840: Victoria Regina. I was holding a relic of the First Afghan War.
The weapon had in all probability been taken from one of the unfortunates who died on the legendary 1842 retreat. A general of quite breathtaking incompetence called William Elphinstone (Elphinstone Court SW16; Elphinstone Road E17; Elphinstone Street N5) tried to lead his force ninety miles back to Jalalabad in the middle of winter. Some twenty thousand people set out from Kabul, including barefoot Indian sepoys and several thousand women and children camp followers. Their tents were lost in the confusion of departure. Snow lay a foot deep on the ground, and at night the temperature dropped to -24°C. According to legend only one European survived the retreat, a surgeon named Brydon who straggled into Jalalabad on a donkey. Those who did not freeze to death were picked off without mercy by tribesmen armed with long-barrelled jezails who ambushed them in the high passes. Hordes of ululating women descended on the dead and dying and emasculated them with knives. There is an account of a redcoat who rounded a corner of the mountain path to find an Afghan boy of six attempting to hack off the head of a dead comrade. Without hesitating he hoisted the child on his bayonet and pitched him out into the abyss. The retreat was the worst military disaster the British Empire had ever known.
The gun’s new owner let me fire it. He tipped in powder