Cauliflower Season

Mud.

Mud is that which draws things together in Kabul. A harbinger of warmer days, but nevertheless the snows that came two weeks ago have retreated and left their tracery. The few times I have been out in the city, in these sunnier than usual days, my shoes and the lower quarter of my trousers immediately show the effects of the streets. This bodily grafitti sticks to you and you do not worry about it because anyone with clean shoes either makes it a point to clean them everyday or does not mind wearing a bit of Kabul around with them.

It has been difficult to get a handle on the expanse of the city save for the moments when the sun appears over the mountains and clears away the dust and frosted pollution, albeit temporarily. Low lying mud and timber-frame houses and buildings are littered across the hills and valley, up to the steepest portions of the rocky terrain where building (and walking) gets difficult. At night, lights from these districts shine like earthbound constellations. The typical panorama of Kabul is interspersed with green and blue-glass highrises--wedding halls with names like "Paris" further emphasized by the heavy silk puffy curtains you can see lining the upper storeys. Given that a typical bride price is in the region of $10,000, you might as well head for the Paris or the Zindagi (love/heart) and re-emerge the next morning after an evening elsewhere.

Major streets are thick at the edges. Not only with mud but with the five-person cushion of sellers of cauliflower and oranges, sheet metal stoves and stacks of tools. Chickens and beans. Their carts line the byways forming an impenetrable line between the cars and the shops and open shipping containers that stand behind selling crystal chandeliers and carpets. In fact, the number of cars and buses (from Milano, from Japan) makes one's movement across the urban expanse an exercise in bravery, if not patience. Traffic, apparently, is one sign of progress.

I would like to walk in-between them, these purveyors of color and sweetness in the midst of a seeming grayness and black. Their eyes bespeak a certainty, a calm. Knowledge that spring is near.