Timeline:   Graduated from UC Berkeley School of Business in late May 2003. 

Left for Delhi about 10 days later to do raw materials sourcing and patternmaking before arriving in Kabul.   Stayed in India for a little over 3 weeks and the excerpt below is part of an email sent to a friend from that time.   Aaah youth – I don’t write long descriptive emails like this one anymore…. 

Timeline: July 3rd, 2003 signified the first day of my official “move” to Afghanistan.   Had not been in Kabul since the prior summer.    Below is an email to a friend in the US who was interested in making a documentary about my trials and tribulations with the startup. 

The skies above Kabul had thundered so ferociously that they woke me up at 4 am on Saturday night, and kept me awake for 2 hours pondering the madness of my first 72 hours in Kabul.  Even though I was looking forward to a day of work (yes, they work Saturdays and Sundays here) with little sleep, it would be coated in a mojito-sugared bliss.  I have never been one to fuss over birthdays...

One has chosen a peculiar line of work when there are so many opportunities in the middle of the day to break down and start crying.  Not that there is anything so obvious to cry about.  The rains have made Kabul green.  I just keep seeing those magical conifer and cypress trees everywhere...

God bless satellite. I am listening to my favorite super wacky independent radio station in NYC -- wfmu.org, while typing this email.  But no kind words for the Kabul energy crisis -- I am also rewriting this email because it got wiped out from a power outage a few minutes ago...

Talk about being at the forefront of change.  I am riding a wave that is being created in real time.  Certainly nothing horrible has happened…yet.  It has just been rather stunning to experience the rawness of this place.  But then, what did I expect?    Last week’s fact finding odyssey for getting an export license left me dumbfounded.  It turns out that nobody has any idea what the country’s laws are….

I finally found some girl playmates, which was not an easy task considering that I worked in such a solo capacity and didn’t arrive at an office every day filled with peers. My office consisted of a conservative Pashtun Afghan male 15 years my senior, a bevy of young female subordinates, girls whose entire lives had consisted of shuttling between refugee camps in Pakistan and who barely spoke English, and dozens of virtually illiterate embroiderers...

D,

It takes such a huge amount of time to craft a non-cheesy, non-exploitative
sounding story...I just can't tell you.  At least for me.  Maybe you should try
writing the biography of Tarsian & Blinkley, though I doubt you have time at
this point :)...

So it’s been a while since the last data input.  Too much has happened, though fortunately most of it good.    The last time I was inspired to produce a diary was last Friday when I was at Pir Sab Gilani’s house for lunch, and since then, layers of new stuff has been piled on.  The Gilanis are a kind of Aga Khan-ish spiritual family with a sort of cult following but are also related to the former royal family.  I found the 40- something Pir Sab, probably no taller than 5’, to be absolutely charming, albeit way too much of a politician...

And another week has gone by with no sign of time or strength to write a diary. I guess the closing weeks of this epic voyage really had their demands. I have just shipped off my boxes with FedEx (cargo freight). I chose these guys, over dozens of possibilities because I had developed something of a relationship with them – starting with when they showed up at the workshop to sing happy birthday to me and deliver a cake...

I returned to the States in mid-August, and days later, so did the shipment from Kabul.   Good little things had happened to bolster confidence, such as having the customs duties turn out to be almost exactly what I estimated they would be.   Not an amazing feat if you’re importing from China, but believe me, when folks at the US ports are telling you that Afghanistan is...

Khokher's car was not stolen - it was just towed.  We managed to find it, but how I have no idea since the way India organizes itself perpetually confounds me.  I guess the diplomatic neighbhorhood in town is just ultra- paranoid and towed it even though it was in a seemingly legitimate spot.  I was much more distraught than Khokher about the whole thing because I felt very responsible -- I had kept us hanging around a lethargic and useless Afghan embassy for a full two hours this afternoon, about 90 minutes longer than he was originally bargaining for...

Week 1:

Charmed progress continues to keep me warm, even enough to feel optimistic about my first winter visit to Kabul, the high-altitude city of no central heating.  As my thoughts occasionally jerk to the unpleasant thought of being cold all the time, I am also delighted to discover that my shipment has arrived safely to Kabul from Delhi with minimal hassle.  Afghan customs had even tried to lab test the fabrics (and thread!) to determine customs duty, a legitimate, albeit slightly absurd, effort at professionalism...

I was clearly losing a grip on documenting all the stories worth telling.  The excerpt below is like a list of stories I had wished I had made time to write..

I was digging through old notes and found an excerpt from my July 2004 trip to Bamiyan, the valley that housed the famous giant carved Buddhas that the Taliban destroyed with rockets just a few months before 9/11.   At this point, I had been coming and going from Afghanistan for two years and had still not managed to see anything except the capital of Kabul.   Whereas all of my friends were being shuttled on official business to every obscure corner of the country, from Zabul to Badakhshan, I remained unhappily trapped in Kabul, still working intently on training the assistants, manning the shop, and overseeing the quality of the work done by the women embroiderers.   There was something actually quite UN-liberating about working for oneself – something that if not monitored carefully, could keep one in a state of total enslavement and self-limitation...

These days, there is so much stimuli piled brick upon brick, that a fortress wall can be constructed before my disoriented self gathers enough energy to write something down.  But after what I just went through, I think it’s high time I make a little attempt at documentation.  The great question here being, why do I remain to so blindly smitten with this mad life that I’ve created for myself?...

So if you recall from the last Diary, it was dumping snow in Kabul and the official conclusion of a seven year drought when my girlfriend Suphala, tabla player extraordinaire, and a few of her friends, decided to turn up in Afghanistan.   She was spending her usual winter in India, taking lessons from her guru, Ustad Zakir Hussein, and decided that is would be great fun to “check out” Afghanistan.  Visitors like her, coming for reasons of leisure and artistic exploration, don’t come around very often so it was really an occasion to celebrate...

Based on past diary entries, I really don’t mean to sound like a self-indulgent party girl because that is definitely not the way my life really is.  I just try to fill you in on the unexpected facets of life in Kabul, and much of it seems to revolve around intriguing people and events, not really the day to day grind of the workshop or the harsh realities that have almost, or I should say certainly, driven me to the brink of insanity.   But I promise I will give you a better window into that world, including a proper journal on the lives and personalities of my embroidering ladies...