The Bamiyan Valley from one of the monastic cells carved into the cliff next to the Buddhas

Developing a tourist industry probably isn’t a high priority in the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan at the moment. IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) would probably put off even the most daring of GAP year students. But the idea might not be quite as daft as it sounds.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times reported on fighting in the Nuristan region of Afghanistan where soldiers were struck by its extraordinary beauty. The country also has a fascinating history and tradition of warm hospitality. In 1970 Peter Levi, an English Jesuit priest, classical archaeologist, and poet set off to uncover some of these riches with his friends, Bruce Chatwin, the travel writer and his wife Elizabeth.

Levi wrote his journey up in The Light Garden of the Angel King, a book which demonstrates both his archaeological training and poet’s eye for the landscape. The title of the book is taken from the inscription on the tomb of the Emperor Babur. The Emperor began the mogul invasions of India, but despite the attractions of the Subcontinent, nonetheless demanded to be buried in the place closest to his heart: Kabul. The overblown poetry of the full inscription gives a flavour of Levi’s sympathies:

Only this Mosque of Beauty, this Temple of Nobility, constructed for the Prayer of Saints and the Epiphany of Cherubs, was fit to stand in so Venerable a Sanctuary as this Highway of Archangels, this Theatre of Heaven, the Light Garden of the Godforgiven Angel King whose Rest is in the Garden of Heaven, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, the Conqueror.

Next, Levi and Chatwin head off to Afghanistan’s other well-known tourist attraction, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. He mentions that Victorian explorer Sir Henry Yule described the arid landscape as having a ‘horrid aspect’, but irrigation seems to have improved the valley since and Levi writes of it as ‘dusky and peaceful’. They spend time around the Buddhas and in the shrines that honeycomb the cliffs and then explore more of the valley.

It turns out that there is more than just the standing Buddhas to explore, especially for an archaeologist like Levi. The Shah-i-Golgola, or city of the screams, was a thriving city until it was razed by Genghiz Khan (hence the screams). The great Khan reached the city after overrunning the Shahr-i-Zohak, a fortress at the other end of the valley, that, incredibly, is said to also be the site of a Greek acropolis (according to Nancy Hatch Dupree, the legendary specialist in Afghan archaeology and author of numerous guidebooks to the country).

Levi hunts down and even stumbles upon archaeological tit-bits throughout his trip. He’s forever remarking on the various ‘wares‘, ‘layers‘ and ‘mounds’ (common archaeological terms) of each site. Although I don’t know much about archeology, and haven’t even watched Time Team very often, I was fascinated by what he finds out. It is common knowledge that Alexander the Great passed through Afghanistan on his way to India, but his empire is only one of those that left their mark (and shards).

Alexander may not have been in the country for very long, but the Greek influence was felt for centuries afterwards. The Mauryan Empire of the Indian Buddhist Emperor Ashoka replaced the Greeks and together with the indigenous Gandhara kingdom produced the Indo-Greeks and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Then there were the Kushans, an empire that started in Central Asia, which somehow got in there too. Of course we shouldn’t forget the Persians, wandering Chinese monks and that’s even before the Islamic Invasion of the country and the numerous empires that have ruled it under that religion. Of course, in the nineteenth century the Sikhs and British had a go too.

The ‘tall, elegant, shadow-cut, biscuit-coloured pencil’ that is the Minaret of Jam is their next stop, which they somehow reach on horse with Levi himself suffering from appalling dysentery. From there they fly to Herat, which in the far west of the country, is the most Persian city. Blue minarets still tower over the city, like ‘big brick cigarettes stormed by swarms of cobalt and turquoise butterflies’, despite the British demolishing many masterpieces of Islamic art in the nineteenth century to improve the line of fire against a potential Russian invasion.

After a few stops in southern Afghanistan – Kandahar is so ferociously hot that it’s impossible to think – Levi and Chatwin head off to the North East, where the ‘greatest archaeological wealth’ of the country lies. They take in Surkh-Kotal, a Kushan city and Balkh, a site of early Islamic treasures. While staying in Kunduz, Levi meets some fellow poets and becomes involved with the local amateur dramatics society. At their Nashir Theatre, most performances are farces, and Levi be-friends Wazir Mohammed who holds Charlie Chaplin in the highest regard.

Levi and the Chatwins however don’t rest in one place for very long, they soon shoot off into the north east of the country. The speed at which they travel, alongside Levi’s keen interest in archaeology and problems with Farsi contribute to one of the shortcomings of the book – the lack of depth in the portrayal of any of the characters he meets. There are many short sketches, but no rounded portraits. Some of these brief encounters, however, can be utterly charming:

‘I offered one of the old men a pinch of English snuff; he took a huge pinch like a charge of gunpowder and sneezed and wept and beamed with happiness and came later to ask for more, because he said his eyes were bad and the doctors despaired of them, and none of the medicines had such an excellent effect on them as this powerful snuff. We became fast friends and he introduced me to his friend who asked me with a speculative eye where I came from. A country called England, I said. Oh yes, he said, England; would that country not be near Kabul?’

As they leave the archaeological heartland of the Uzbek north of the country, the landscape and Levi’s focus starts to change. The book starts to reveal what ideal hiking territory Afghanistan had in 1970. They take a short walk in Badakhshan Province, in the Pamirs, where the hills appear in the morning like ‘piles of fine dust’. This walk is really a preparation for a longer walk in Nuristan. Meaning ‘Land of the Enlightened’, the province was previously known as Kafiristan, or the land of the unbelievers, until 1895 when King Abdur Rahman invaded the region and converted the local people. The paganism of the region got the Victorians dreaming, and the idea grew up that the inhabitants were descended from the remnants of Alexander’s army. (Rudyard Kipling later sculpted this idea into The Man Who Would Be King.)

Levi, and his party walk up the Kamdeh and Kamdesh Valleys where the US Army are now involved in heavy fighting. The valley is beautiful, but wild. The Kamdesh houses are balanced on precarious precipices and the men walk around barefoot, carrying long handled axes. They do, however, encounter a shepherd with his head wrapped in a wreath of flowers who proceeds to sings them songs.

Finally, Bruce and Elizabeth Chatwin fly off to Pakistan, and Levi at last gets a permit to visit the site of the most important Hellenistic city in Afghanistan – Ay Khanoum. The site is in the north of the country near Kunduz, and he bumps into his old Thespian friend, Wazir Mohammed. The man has grown sad as his theatre company had become riven by internal divisions and broken up.

Levi and the Chatwins stayed in a hotel at the foot of the Kamdesh valley after their wlk in Nuristan. The place is run down, but Levi still manages to ’sincerely recommend this hotel to anyone intrepid enough to reach it.’ It is a sentiment that I’m sure he would apply to Afghanistan itself. The Afghanistan, that is, before the advent of IEDs.

(Image courtesy of MastaBaba on Flickr)

Two Buddhist monks, Marine Drive, Mumbai

Coming home from your holidays can make you feel blue. Out of the deckchair and into the office is a dismal contrast. It’s helpful to have a treat waiting for you a few days after you get back. A little something to look forward to.

The week before last Autumn and I did the first week of the Coast to Coast walk (no deckchairs in sight, actually). It was a great ’summer’ holiday, but made even better by fact that smack bang in the middle of the week after our jaunt, we were off to a smashing lecture. Nothing beats a good disquisition. We were scheduled to see William Dalrymple give a talk at the RGS. That’s the Royal Geographical Society to the uninitiated. This institution is where some of Britain’s greatest explorers and travellers have set out from on their way into the wilder parts of the world. And if they didn’t leave from the RGS, they probably ended up telling their tale there when they got back.

William Dalyrymple however is not an explorer or geographer, but a historian, journalist and travel writer. I haven’t read any of his eight books, but I am a fan of his journalism. He draws vivid pictures of the places he visits,and fills them with stories using his finely tuned ear for dialogue and sympathy for the characters he meets. He’s also interested in India and the subcontinent.

His latest book is called Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India which tells the tale of nine people whose lives have been profoundly influenced by the religious traditions of that region. The talk was organised by Stanfords, the map shop. Robust, he strode onto the stage wearing a yellow, quilted Nehru jacket, with a coral red cotton scarf draped around his neck. In one hand he carried his canvas holdall and in the other, an almost empty glass of whisky. He looked like a travel writer.

The talk covered three of the chapters in his book. The first story told of a couple of cheerful Bauls, or wandering monks, from Bengal, the second the melancholy story of the sacred prostitutes or devadasi of Karnataka, and the low caste labourer and prison warder who becomes host to the god Vishnu for three months of the year finishes the book. All the stories were fascinating and affecting. His softly plummy, slightly whiskied tones eloquently conjured up these distant personalities.

The two Bauls (pronounced ‘bowels’) are friends, one is blind and the other is his eyes. Dalrymple explained that he met them in rural Bengal and assumed they were unspoilt by the modern world, but it turned out they’d been to London in the Sixties for a massive psychedelic knees-up with the Stones for the launch of their Beggars Banquet album. Prior to Mick ‘n’ Keef, they’d come from opposite ends of the social spectrum in rural Bengal. Kanai was from a poor family of labourers and lost his sight at six months old. When his parents died and his sister committed suicide, the Bauls provided refuge. Debdas was the son of a wealthy landowner, but he was a rebel and ran away from home and also eventually joined the Bauls. Now they are friends and mutual protectors.

Prostitute, Rani Bhai is a devadasi, part of a tradition of whores who used to be attached to temples. Although the Indian government has broken the official links between prostitution and temples, these women are still seen as having a special connection to the goddess Yellamma. To make it through her grim life, Rani Bhai consoles herself with dreams of retiring to a small farm and occasionally being venerated as a representative of the Goddess. Eventually, Dalrymple learns that this dream is only that: she has HIV and is unlikely to live long enough to tend to her chickens, cattle and buffaloes.

Finally, Hari Das, a stoical chap works as a labourer during the week and supplements his meagre income as a warder in a prison that makes the Turkish prison in Midnight Express sound like the Sandals Caribbean holiday resort. Not only is Hari Das desperately poor, but he’s also a ‘dalit’ – of one of the lowest castes in Indian society. However, for three months of each year he packs in the drudgery and becomes a dancer. Not just an ordinary dancer, but a cosmic dancer. In a jungle clearing, after several hours of getting dressed up and made up, he looks in a small mirror and *boom* his personality is replaced by Vishnu. Then he dances for the assembled masses and the local big wigs and Brahmins queue to touch his feet. Despite their unusual lives, Dalrymple makes the humanity of his ‘lives’ clear.

It’s probably fair to say that most books that address religion, at least in the UK, will have to contend with the ideas of Richard Dawkins. He stands like a bull-necked bouncer at the door of religious debate in the UK. For Dawkins, it’s not enough to say that God does not exist, he goes as far as saying ‘faith is an evil’, because ‘it requires no justification and brooks no argument’; in short, faith ignores scientific method. Dawkins the Bouncer isn’t bothered about scruffy trainers, but if a belief system hasn’t been subject to hypothesis, experiment and peer review, then it isn’t getting in.

It doesn’t appear that Dalrymple’s subjects have been reading The God Delusion. Neither however have they been using religion to justify hatred. It is a part of their lives that provides solace amidst hardship and offers possibilities where options are constrained. Above all, whatever these belief systems might represent, it is difficult to see them as the deluded fancies of dupes.

After we had been introduced to these spirited and curious characters, during the question and answer session an Indian man in audience asked Dalrymple, whether he was not seeking out exceptional personalities and then exoticising them. Taking his second glass of whisky, he replied that although it might be true to an extent, these wandering minstrels and ecstatic dancers do still exist in India and so surely it is worth reporting on them. Perhaps things will change when the Indian economy rivals that of the USA in 40 years time, but for now, these nine lives don’t seem that strange.

Toys - Indian style

If you buy a copy of Geoff Dyer’s new book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi you get a free copy of a second book. It’s not unusual to get good deals on books in the Amazon era, but it’s still welcome. In this case, the additional volume is not physical, but comes with reading Jeff in Venice for a second time in an entirely different light.

The novel is divided into two distinct sections, almost two separate novellas, both written by Geoff whose central protagonist is a character called Jeff. As Jeff’s name is not mentioned in the second book we have to assume it is the same person. The first half is set in Venice and told in the third person, and the Varanasi-set second half is told in the first person, but from a more impersonal perspective. His earlier book Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It skirted around the spiritual, this book steers around similar skirts.

Anyone who’s read a book by the author might know what to expect. Geoff’s personality is a powerful presence in his non-fiction books; you might say that his books aren’t ‘by Geoff Dyer’, but are ‘Geoff Dyer books’. They have an amusing, cerebral and stoned style, the persona they construct is of a tall, thin and well-read, but lazy man who lives a peripatetic, slightly druggy life. A similar style, idiosyncratically Dyer-esque is used here. I’ve read a few of his books and enjoy this voice, but the lovely Autumn, for whom this was her first Dyer book, thought his persona in the first half was annoying and creepily lascivious. Her attitude softened a little after seeing the author’s handsome face on the sleeve.

I thought Dyer was a bit of a cult author (although I’m sure he’d had the title), in that very few of my friends or acquaintances seem to have heard of him. Jeff in Venice… on the other hand gets some impressive reviews on the dust jacket from the great and the good, including Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Edmund White.

The first section tells the story of an arts journalist called Jeff Atman who gets sent to cover the Biennale di Venezia – the art extravaganza held every two years in Venice. The exhibition of contemporary art is an excellent opportunity for some first-class ligging. Jeff and a vast gang of other art-involved pissheads down countless bellinis in the middle of a giddying heat wave. He meets a beautiful American and the party gets even better – sex, drugs and longing ensue.

Another watery city, Varanasi, is the setting for the second section. If decadent, art-filled Venice is an empire of the senses, Varanasi is equally vivid, but as one of the holiest cities in India, concerns itself with a different realm. The narrator, Jeff we assume, is sent on another journalistic jaunt. He likes the place and decides to stay. Moving to a less luxurious hotel, he makes friends, hangs around and starts to feel at home.

The whole book is filled with some very funny writing and peppered with amusing observations: Jeff’s trip to a swanky Marylebone hair salon where he ends up getting his hair dyed; a rickshaw journey through the lunatic chaos of Varanasi’s streets which inspires a fantasy computer game called ‘Varanasi Death Trip’, and a forensically accurate description of the frustrations of queuing on the sub-continent.

Although Jeff seems more intent having fun at the Biennale than appreciating the art, he still can’t help but catch some.  Geoff writes very well about the installations that Jeff sees, but I still got a bit lost on the art. I was pleased to discover the New Yorker had chosen Jeff... as it’s book of the week. They helpfully showed some of the work that gets mentioned in the book.

Jeff encounters some indifferent work at the Biennale, but there is also some which is genuine. Sitting inside James Turrell’s Red Shift ‘time melted away…there was no distance…’. No space or time? Hmmm, that sounds like a metaphysical or spiritual theme… sorry, that should be ’spiritual’ theme. In India, Jeff adds his own metaphorical inverted commas:  ‘the reason it [renunciation] doesn’t feel like renunciation is because it’s not,’ he says.

Although it’s never entirely clear whether the Jeff in Venice is the narrator in Varanasi, there are themes which appear in both – art, sex, music, etc. As you read the second half of the book you might spot even more connections between the two sections.  Specific motifs pop up again too – a bloody bogey, dolphins, and a painting of a storm reappear in India. Somehow I didn’t spot them until I read a review in the San Francisco Gate. Then, in an interview in the New Yorker, I discovered that Geoff mentions that there’s loads of obvious mirroring between the stories. Now I had a free book: I would have to go through Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi again to root out ‘these little echoes, chimes and rhymes.’

Since then, programmes like 6 Feet Under, The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire have made songs that whine about bad telly slightly redundant. And you can’t really rock out about ’staying in to catch a really good drama show’.

Of these decent programmes, The Wire is often reckoned to the most brilliant. I’ve only managed to see the first series so far, but it does seem to be a beacon of carefully sculpted characters, microscopically-detailed research and plotting of Byzantine complexity. The writing team of the fifth and final series included the author of gritty urban crime novels and screenplays, Richard Price.

Lush Life, Price’s eighth novel is set in the Lower East Side of New York. It’s not the harsh drug-scarred landscape of the Baltimore projects, but life for characters that inhabit this novel is also no walk in (Central) Park. The neighborhood has long been the first port of call for poor immigrants into America, but now there is a new kind of influx: arty, middle-class youngsters.

Gentrification can create resentments in the original population, but for Price, the various ethnicities and classes who live in the area rarely seem to make contact. Until, that is, events seek to puncture the membrane that separates them.

Like in The Wire, Lush Life uses some of the stock characters of the detective genre – there’s even a hard-bitten, Irish-American cop with family problems as a central protagonist – but Price avoids creating cardboard cut outs. The novel zooms in to show us the perspective of each of these central characters, who are never less than believable and sympathetic. His myriad voices are alive with the roar of the city.

One of the most intriguing characters is Eric Cash, a 35 year old bar/restaurant manager who first came to the city in his early twenties hoping to become a writer. After initially working in catering to support his writing, Eric’s dreams are disappointments and his job a dead end. He’s now adrift – bitter and frustrated.

Early one morning Eric and two new acquaintances get mugged as they walk home from a night on the lash. Eric, knowing the procedure, looks down and hands over his wallet. One of the others, Ike, still green (young, dumb and full of ambitions for artistic success), plays it cool with a “Not tonight, my man”, which gets him shot.

Solving the crime doesn’t reveal conspiratorial links to organized crime, big business and bent politicians. Instead the murder is absurd. As one character puts it, “It was like nothing. It was like God snapped his fingers.” It’s also a wonder that anyone gets caught. The investigation gives us a glimpse into a society composed of East Asian men who hire a shelf to sleep on by the hour, teenagers orphaned by drugs living with distant relatives and upstate cops driving round town while stoned out of their brains.

If the characters in Lush Life who currently inhabit the Lower East Side are vivid, their predecessors are never far behind. The synagogue roof may have collapsed, but the pages of a battered scripture littering the building’s shell are still valued by a passing rabbi.

Eric Cash, Price’s doppelganger, takes to sheltering in his restaurant basement. Eric’s ancestors had also lived in the area. Underground, with the weight of the Victorian tenement above him, a piece of Yiddish graffiti proclaims ‘Gedenken mir’ – remember me.