I
remember the first time I saw him. It was early in the morning, and I was wondering why Dad had woken me up and prodded me into the
kitchen. The first thing my bleary eyes settled on was a thin man with a
dark curly beard.
“This is
Alam Sher”, Dad was saying, “and he’s going to be our helper.. But we’re not
going to treat him like some slave.”
Alam smiled at me, bashfully. He seemed more shy
of me than I of him. “OK”, I said. I shook his hand, andsat down at the table
while he prepared the first of thousands of breakfasts for us.
Alam was
an Afghan Pushtun from the Mohmand tribe. He left his village of Hazarnow near
the city of Jalalabad and moved to Kacha Garhi refugee camp outside of
Peshawar, Pakistan, where he was recommended to my parents, who were looking
for a helper. He seemed to be in his early forties when he first started
working for us - like many Afghans, he was himself unsure of his exact age. He
was, as I’ve said, a thin, almost puny man. He wore, like a lot of Afghan men,
a black herbal concoction on his eyes like eyeliner. This was supposed to ward
off the evil eye, but to look at his bony frame you knew he needed more help
than that. His beard was kept neatly trimmed and combed, and he kept a
well-chewed stick to clean his teeth with. He was fastidious about his
appearance, almost to the point of fussiness.
Maybe
this fact, coupled with the fact that, unlike most chowkidars, or doormen, around
Peshawar, Alam’s job entailed, in addition to answering the gate, bicycling
around town doing various errands for my mother, cooking, and cleaning, gave an
answer as to why Alam was treated the way he was by the other men around town.
They didn’t despise him, by any means, but they looked at him as they would an
old grandma. I always wondered, in this male-dominated society, if he wasn’t
ashamed of his job. He made it very clear he wasn’t. Alam never lost a chance
to show how proud he was of his job, and how much he respected my parents, his
employers.
And this pride powered his work ethic, which was
amazing. He came at 6 o’clock in the morning and began getting breakfast ready.
After breakfast, he washed the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and then, one by
one, every room in the house. He also did a little mali (gardener) work, as well as fed
our dogs, washed our clothes, fed us lunch and dinner and of course, answer the
gate. He did all this with an almost careless efficiency. These jobs, like
every job, entailed a thousand little details: Uncle Alam, as we came to call
him, quickly learned which clothes Mom wanted washed separately from the
others, where she wanted certain things kept, how to feed the dogs at the same
time so as to keep them from fighting over the food, whom to let in at the
gate, when NOT to answer the gate, even how each of us kids liked our eggs
done.
And through it all, he found the time to be a dear
friend. “Uncle” was to us more than a term of polite respect - it spoke of the
gentle familiarity we had with Alam. I remember well the impish long face he
wore when he’d tell one of his terrible, fabricated tragedies- one of our dogs
had been run over, or my mom’s favorite cactus was dying. Then he would break
into a toothy grin and give his characteristic “huh-huh-huh”, a hoarse throaty
chuckle that brought an affectionate but exasperated grin to my mother’s face.
Alam was literally like a member of the family.
My parents felt comfortable leaving us children alone with him, sometimes overnight,
trusting him even with disciplining us and refereeing our petty squabbles. We
in turn, loved him as if he were a combination of uncle, mother, and big
brother. He was so close to us that I often forgot he had a family of his own.
But he
did, and his gentle nature extended to them. In contrast to the much
stereotyped, but all too often accurate image of the chauvinistic, overbearing
Muslim husband, Alam loved his wife and children. Where in most Muslim
families, the birth of a daughter is an occasion of sorrow, I clearly remember
his joy at the birth of his own daughter, and his profound grief when she died
soon after. Often, it was easy to overlook the fact that Alam had a life
outside of his job, simply because he was so completely devoted to our family
and his work.
But I did
come to know Alam as a friend, not just a “helper”. It became something of a
ritual, that in the morning, I would greet him with the traditional series of
questions and answers that made up the typical Afghan greeting: asking
rapid-fire about his health, his family’s health, his mood, and invoking
blessings upon his household and all that he owned. Then, in an exchange no
less formulaic, he would ask me what I wanted for breakfast, even though he
knew full well what I’d ask for.
“Yaw agui gwardum, kha? Sukht wala, teek dey?” I’d say, and I could always
be sure that I’d get a fried egg, cooked on both sides so that the yolk wasn’t
runny. The process never varied, until, of course, I left for the States.
I think the main thing I learned from Uncle Alam
was to take pride in work, even never-ending and difficult work. Alam always
did everything with an “elbow-grease” work ethic, and everything he did, he
took a lot of pride in. Everything he did, he did well.
There were some times
when Alam would have had a good reason to lose his temper, but he never once
did. He was always patient and gentle, replying to my and my siblings'
brattiest scuffles with only a soft “khaternak, khaternak” (“dangerous, dangerous”).
He showed by example a strong maturity and grounding in common sense.
The last time I saw Alam was at a small, dirty airport
in Peshawar, Pakistan. I hugged him one last time and bid him goodbye with the
traditional Afghan wishes for peace and prosperity, like I’d done for every
morning I can remember.
