Read An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World for Free Online

deep, sad crease on either side of his mouth.
    The Brigadier put his hand to his forehead that afternoon, waited, and finally got to his feet, crossing his arms behind his back. He walked away around the corner of the hedge. The Young Man lay watching through the window. A little later, when it had become horribly hot, the Brigadier came back to take his siesta. He slept with the same benign expression as he sat all day, the expression of someone whom months of unproductive waiting are slowly bringing to seed. Finally the Young Man’s own eyes closed.
FRIENDS
     
    General N.’s guest room had only one large bed, in which the Young Man and the Brigadier both slept. At first the Young Man felt uncomfortable with this arrangement. Like most males from his country, he believed that close and prolonged proximity to an older man might well presage homosexuality. He did not like it when old men held his hand to guide him through the bazaars. He felt as a Pakistani woman might have felt if her husband had taken her hand in public. None of this was right or wrong. He who adapts insufficiently to an alien society is a sort of evolutionary failure, condemned to isolation, sterility and extinction; he who adapts too much defaces the self he was born with. The Young Man, being young, should have adapted substantially; he had less previous self to deny. He did his best. In Karachi he’d met two men who befriended him. They paid for his lunch (
nan
, oil and curried egg), bought him a leaf-wrapped packet of betel nut to chew, showed him the tomb of Mr. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and took him on a bus ride to Clifton Beach, where in September the giant sea tortoises came to lay their eggs. “It’s a fascinating spectacle on a moonlit night,” the guidebook said. Unfortunately, this was the middle of a 125-degree afternoon (so it seemed) in the middle of June.
    The buses were painted in a hundred gorgeous ways: blue and silver, like the turquoise jewelry of the American Southwest, red diamonds with yellow centers (buttercups in poppy fields, the Young Man thought), emerald-glazed ivy patterns … They never stopped. You ran behind one for a block or so, dodging the cars and motor-rickshaws and the carts of the spitting camel-drivers, until there was a wagon blocking the intersection ahead, or the conductor felt sorry for you, and then the bus slowed. The conductor held out his hand. You grabbed it as the bus picked up speed, got a foot in and jumped. Inside it was dark. The floor was wet with spittle. His two new friends, Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim, stood protectively on either side. Muhammed Ibrahim insisted on carrying his pack for him. The Young Man, who’d spent hours in the heat trying to get his railway ticket to Peshawar,being bullied by people who wanted to do him expensive services, terrified by wailing beggar-women who pantomimed that they were dying of hunger (were they? how could he tell? why was it his fault?), cheek-stroked by smiling prostitutes, reviled by the men in official red uniforms (COOLIE NO. 17302) because he would not let his pack be carried by them; baffled by everything, thirsty, but afraid to drink for fear of disease (by the end of that first day in the country he was drinking a Sprite every hour and a half, plus water when he had to; he usually had to), sweating in crowded lines, always in the wrong line, until finally a man in the line got his ticket for him, saying, “You are a guest of our country; I
must
help you!”—all this with a gentle smile that confounded the Young Man with gratitude and guilt, for then his benefactor must go once again to the end of the line to get his own ticket; as for the Young Man, his train didn’t leave until ten that night and somehow he had to last till then, so he moved through the long confusion of that afternoon like a restless fly afraid of being swatted, knowing that whenever he stopped, the beggars, prostitutes, arrangers and desperate children would