This election was, perhaps, the most confusing ever held anywhere. Somehow, a voter in Kabul was supposed to pick one candidate out of 390. The ballot folded out into seven large pages, and each candidate had a photograph and a symbol, because many Afghans were illiterate. But creativity ran out, and symbols had to be reused. Candidates were identified as different objects, including a pair of scissors, one camel, two camels, three camels, two sets of barbells, mushrooms, two ice-cream cones, three corncobs, two tomatoes, stairs, a turkey, two turkeys, one eye, a pair of eyes, a tire, two tires, three tires—to name a few. The symbols were randomly drawn out of a box.
The journalists struggled to make sense of the election, of the candidates, of the lack of interest back home. For me, the election was complicated by my inability to sleep. The Gandamack had welcomed me back and all was forgiven, especially after I repeatedly apologized for the Laundry Incident. I had loaned one of the Afghan women who ran the place a Pilates exercise DVD; the Afghan front-door guard, who lost one leg when he stepped on a land mine during the civil war, pumped my arm like it would deliver oil when I first returned. The Washington Post was there; the Guardian was there; the award-winning British TV journalist doing a documentary on female drivers was there; a photographer friend was there; a group of genial security contractors was there. But my personal life intruded. I had not yet ended my relationship with Chris—I wasn’t sure why, maybe because I was never home, maybe because I felt guilty, and maybe because, ultimately, I just didn’t want to be alone. Yet my boyfriend started sending me paranoid e-mails, or more paranoid than usual. I called him. He sounded paranoid.
“There are men outside, watching me,” Chris told me.
“It’s India. There are always men outside watching you.”
“Yeah, but they also know what I’ve done. And they’re watching your computer.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you drunk?”
“No. I was. Now I’m fine. I erased all the incriminating files on your computer.”
“What files? What are you talking about? You did what?”
“The proof,” he said. “They were watching me. They were scanning your computer.”
“You erased my computer?”
I was confused. Chris had never displayed any sign of mental illness before. He told me he had put up notes saying “Think of Kim” and “Remember Kim,” and that they were the only thing keeping him together. In other words, yellow Post-its were holding him in place. I told him to go to sleep, to get some rest. I called my office manager and asked her to check on him. This was getting messy. Then Chris called the U.S. embassy help line, asking for help. Someone called back and heard my work answering machine; someone else figured out my e-mail address and wrote me, asking what was going on.
“He’s a friend,” I wrote back, embarrassed to have my personal life enter my professional one. “He’s off his medication.”
I worried. For months, I had vacillated on whether to break up with Chris, but if anything happened to him, I would never forgive myself. He had never behaved like this before, but he had never spent this much time in India before, never been alone like this. India was a series of challenges wrapped in a mystical blanket covered in an existential quandary. I often thought that all the gods—maybe three, maybe three thousand in Hinduism—made it easier in India for there to be three thousand answers to a question that should have had only one. India was colorful, fabulous, energizing. India was a Chinese finger puzzle. India made you scream at people like a Hollywood diva for the smallest of reasons. India was a crazy football coach. It could break you if it didn’t make you stronger.
Chris was broken. He wouldn’t leave India without seeing me. I couldn’t leave Afghanistan in the middle of an election. I tried to throw myself into work and to avoid thinking or talking about my boyfriend. The guilt I felt had actual weight—I felt the responsibility of him moving halfway around the world for me, of me failing him, of fears about what was happening to him. I cried in front of Farouq and Nasir on a road trip. Farouq worried.
“I just want you to be happy,” he told me.
“Too bad I don’t have an eligible cousin,” I said.
Maybe the fortune-teller was right. An old friend, a photographer I hadn’t seen in more than a year, told me that I seemed angry and bitter. Overseas for longer than me and world-weary, she warned me that maybe it was time to move back to the States, that many things were more important than the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. Night after night, I lay in the Gandamack room that smelled like my childhood because of the wild marijuana plants outside my window. Night after night, I couldn’t sleep.
The construction next door didn’t help. Work started at 6 AM and often stopped at 1 AM. As with everything else in Afghanistan, no laws regulated noise or construction. Every night the pounding would be our dinner music. Every night the tenants of the Gandamack would try to make it stop.
Sean, the British journalist who was working on a documentary about female Afghan drivers, was particularly annoyed. I had met Sean with Farouq months earlier, in the garden of the Gandamack. It was a sunny day, and we were sitting outside in the garden beneath a large umbrella. A man approached us, said hello to Farouq, and thanked him for his advice. He was expansive and obnoxious, attractive and repellant, all in one package. He sat down at another table. I introduced myself, slightly defensive, worried about the man’s familiarity with Farouq.
“Call me sometime,” he said, handing me his phone number. I soon learned that Sean gave everyone his phone number.
I didn’t call at first, but I couldn’t help running into him everywhere. Sean was a few years older than me, his hair was prematurely gray, his chin was slightly receding, and his nose balanced out his chin. Yet there was something about him. Sean was so funny, he was always the center of attention, the ironic self-deprecating smart aleck with glasses who sat in the corner surrounded by smart attractive women. Sean was Kabul’s version of a B-movie star. He was also a war junkie, having done time in Iraq, and that addiction went a long way toward explaining why he was separated from his wife. Sean and I became quick friends. He had taken me on my first social outing to a brothel in Kabul, and he had told me when his friends had decided to drop me off early because I was cramping their style. He told me when he wanted to copy my story about the first traffic light in Kabul, as part of his documentary. In fact, Sean told me pretty much everything, as he told everyone pretty much everything, even when he told something that was supposed to be secret. Everyone knew that Sean was going through a divorce. Everyone knew that Sean really wanted to stay with his wife. And everyone knew that the divorce was pretty much Sean’s fault—he was always on the road, bouncing between war zones, an ageless man-child. But of all the people I had met in Kabul so far, few were as good company as Sean.
Now the construction next door stalked our days and nights. The Gandamack was a two-story guesthouse. The new project, allegedly another guesthouse, soon grew taller than the Gandamack, and the construction workers only seemed to stop working to leer at the female guests in the garden. Any silence was a kind of torture, filled with waiting for the pounding to start again. The hallways echoed with combinations of four-letter words I had never before heard. We tried various tactics to stop the banging at a reasonable hour. Someone found out who owned the land—a respected spiritual leader, a man I had interviewed. I called him one night in a panic.