The car slowed and his eyes met mine in the mirror. He wobbled his head and clicked his tongue to answer my question.
"Madam", he smiled, "now we Afghanistan, not Pakistan." He turned to the men in the field. "They no playing cricket, big meeting they having for making big trouble. Come I show you na?"
He began to turn the car around, but I wobbled my head and clicked my tongue back at him to continue onward.
I sat in the back seat of his battered taxi wearing the cloth pulled from his head. The dusty covering fell to my knees and I became the same colour as the thirsty landscape.
From the moment I met him, I liked him. He had a good face. Tanned lines surrounded by a clipped silver beard. He wore traditional baggy pants and lifted them up as if to curtsey, instead revealing guns strapped to his legs and shiny new Nikes.
We were not in Afghanistan, but on the road to where Pakistan meets it. On a river plain known as the Fruit Basket of Pakistan, we dodged NATO trucks and utes full of men in white cricket like clothes.
Our shared curiosity and caution of each other left as we spoke in broken languages and smoked. I smoked like him, constantly and with the cigarette between my middle and ring finger. He only stopped when the music did, taking the cassette and licking it to make it play smoothly again.
We stopped for gas and he returned to fill my hands with pink bubble-gum, the kind that comes wrapped in fake tattoos for kids.
Winding down the window, I let my hand be lifted up and down by the wind. I closed my eyes.
I thought of my home, the Fruit Bowl of New Zealand, fertile alluvial plains of orchards and farms. I saw my Dad, bearded and smoking in his ute, tapping the steering wheel to music. I remembered him getting petrol, always coming back with a treat for me.
He whacked the dashboard and rolled his eyes at the sight of my blonde hair blowing out the window. His arm gestured out at his country. "Why you like my Pakistan?"
I told him I felt at home.
