Fleeing from Tradition…
He leaves his village as a pilgrim, all those years of tradition behind him, where it should stay, for his chance to escape has never been so close to his fingertips.
The call to prayer echoes hauntingly in the dawn sky.
It reverberates across the hills, mountains, and rocky scenery. The villagers gather their domestic animals, shepherding them from knoll to pen. The people pray, like Ahmed, praying, yet he does not feel it at all. He never has felt it at all. He lifts his head from the floor, looking at the other men around him. Sixteen years of age, Ahmed has planned his flight from his village for years since he was ten. He knows of this vast country known as the USSR, further north, where the Russians rule over its sheer enormity. He doesn't know how to get there, how to escape his present, how all around him, tradition and age-old customs saddlebag young people like himself. He endures it because he must, waiting for the right moment to present itself. He senses that the older he grows, the more feasible and mature he becomes, except for the risk it will take, which shall change his life.
He has manufactured the escape well. He will ask his family for permission to embark on the Hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Mecca, where he will most likely depart from Kabul. Still, once there, he will find Soviet sympathizers, already visiting Kabul once, encountering vague Soviet propaganda. From there, they shall more or less smuggle him into the USSR as a factory worker. They will inflate his age to eighteen and manipulate his documents for the price of his secrecy. He must never tell a soul who helped him. He must remain quiet about it for the rest of his life. He goes to his parents and meets with their imam, who permits him to take the pilgrimage to Mecca alone through Kabul. To go alone shows bravery, courage, and maturity, even in adulthood.
He leaves his village as a pilgrim, all those years of tradition behind him, where it should stay, for his chance to escape has never been so close to his fingertips. Ahmed travels the Afghan countryside towards Kabul, rugged yet spilling out pretty fields occasionally. This journey, a precarious one, grows even more so with his ulterior motive. When he reaches Kabul, he searches for past clues, walking through dirty alleyways, blending in as any pilgrim or wanderer. He looks for signs, though none seem to reveal themselves for him, so he grows frustrated, frowning at the lack of clues. He then bumps into a bearded Afghan man, who glares at him, yet the man knocks on a flimsy, wooden door, speaking Russian. The clue! Ahmed knew.
That was twenty-five years ago. In 1979, the Soviet Union sought their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. Ahmed, a high-ranking official in the Soviet apparatus involved in maintaining unofficial atheism throughout the USSR, takes the news with confidence, with the distinct possibility that tradition, plaguing, not benefiting the Afghani people, could be dismantled and replaced with communism. He has studied Communism, Leninism, and Marxism religiously. He has visited East Berlin, East Germany, and Moscow, finding connections, making hypotheses, and surmising that this ideology can eradicate all that holds a nation back from its true potential. He believes this, just like his neighbors believe in Islam. He acknowledges this, just like his parents recognize their faith. He sees what comes between these places as a crusade, a chance to reshape everything.
It starts in Afghanistan; it spreads to Pakistan. It enters India, and place by place, tradition fades. Communism remains.
