An unconventional heroic account; perhaps this is the expression that would define Anna Badkhen’s The World is a Carpet the best. One comes across many such courageous accounts in which some journalist or writer travels to a perilous war zone and survives to tell the tale. But that is one thing. It is, however, a completely different thing — and quite rare, to say the least — to experience and endure the hardships of war once, actually yearn for more and travel back to it — willingly. And then pen a tale not from behind some 40-feet-high security barricade, but while actually living and travelling across a war-torn country on foot. This is Badkhen, a Philadelphia-based American writer, musing about plot and narrative amidst absolute turmoil, factions battling for power in and out of the country, and the victims of crossfire in different cities of Afghanistan.

Needless to say, it is only natural that whenever someone endeavours to undertake such a daring quest risking life and limb — quite literally — the results are nothing short of extraordinary; and so is the case with The World is a Carpet, a first person narrative with the ability to keep readers glued to the pages.

The book begins at a relatively slow pace. There is not much plot or character development at the outset and Badkhen is merely content with rendering a few hints about the events that would unfold later when she goes on a journey with some Afghans companions across the prominent cities of the country. Instead, what we get to experience in the opening chapters is Badkhen’s command over the history of this part of the world when she discusses the past invaders of Afghanistan and how history played a pivotal role in shaping the present and the future of the country. This manner of narrating the story continues on other occasions as well. At times, Badkhen almost leaves the narrative at hand completely and pours out incidents she had undergone over the years:

“I was afflicted with ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,’ … I had spent my adult life in motion of one sort or another in the war-wrecked hinterlands of Central Asia, Arabia, Africa. That I had been coming to Afghanistan since before American warplanes dropped their first payload on Kabul in 2001.”

Badkhen sheds light upon how some American merchant might make thousands of dollars off a product — a standard-sized carpet, for example — which is weaved in extremely adverse conditions in Afghanistan. These carpets make their way to the highly lucrative markets of places like Islamabad, Istanbul, Dubai and the United States. Irrespective of their final destination and price, their weaver will have to settle for something as meager as less-than-a-dollar per day for all the hard work that went into the making.

It would be quite a feat to not get carried away and start fantasising while writing about a land that has such a storied past. In an attempt to portray the lighter side of things, a writer might paint a picture slightly coloured by romanticism. But Badkhen manages to portray reality quite gracefully and imaginatively:

“This temporal Grand Canyon where millennia condensed in valleys between the crescents of dunes and unfurled again out of carpet knots, this seemingly organic realm ... Then a newborn overdosed on opium. Women wailed over the slight body of a six-year-old boy mangled by a 30-year-old land mine.”

Tentatively, out of many commendable aspects of the narrative, if one were to highlight the single most important, it would perhaps be the way Badkhen captures the perpetual struggle that this nation is going through:

“A village unmapped, unremembered, unaccounted for. We could not see it from the ditch. But it was there, and Amanullah would never escape from it. In the spring, when winter wheat would rise above the knee in the rain-slaked fields of Balkh, Amanullah and Baba Nazar would ride to Dawlatabad and buy skeins of yarn that would smell like sweat and sheep dung and lamb fat and juniper smoke, and bring them to the village. Boston would roll the yarn into balls. Leila would fasten pale warps to the rusty beams and Thawra would hang Sarah Gul’s woven cradle over the loom and tie the first knot of her next carpet. In a year or two, two or three million knots later, Leila would join her, and then Sahra Gul. They would weave their foremother’s lotus blossoms and their kinsmen’s wars, the golden eagles of their desert, the music of their village and its silences, its weddings and funerals, their own joys and sorrows. They would sever the yarn with old sweat-stained sickles in time with the sacrosanct rhythm of their hearts. On the edge of a sand-dune sea, on the edge of a war zone, in their crepuscular loom room on the edge of the world, past and present would converge.”

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The World is a Carpet

(Memoirs)

By Anna Badkhen

Riverhead Books, US

ISBN 978-59448-832-0

271pp.