So Similar, So Different...

Call it a risk! Call it war, opium, little boys with dry cheeks and chapped lips at the border offering to carry your luggage for only one dollar. Call the girls limited under the blue burqas. Call it dirt roads, humidity, dust, body odor and flies everywhere. Call them beggars, sitting on the hot pavement, barefoot, sunburnt, their brown eyes following you. Call me stupid. Be my mom, call me on the phone. Say you will disown me. Say I’m only eighteen. Fucking eighteen. Say there was a bombing three days ago on the same road I’m going to travel through. Be scared. Call it a long, lost empire. Say it’s all gone; no shit worth a picture.

I call it Afghanistan. I call them children whose lives depend on those corroded wheelbarrows. They run after me. I call them to carry my luggage. They jostle each other, fighting to win my over-packed black suitcase.
“From where, madam?” they ask. I laugh and pay them fifteen thousand Iranian tomans. I call them funny when they kiss my hand to show their gratitude. I take their picture. “Iranian,” I answer, and I listen to their Dari accent; this thick, raw Persian dialect:
“Oh, Iranian sister!” Now we’re closer. We’re siblings by spirit, by earth, by history. “By the way, my uncle lives in Tehran.” The boy with the frayed brown Pirahen Tunban says. This other one with the white stitches in his bushy eyebrows has lived in Shiraz for three years. I tell them I’m from Shiraz too.
“Shiraz was the capital of the Persian Empire,” another one says.
The drivers honk their horns, peeking from behind the cracked windshields of their yellow cars.
I take a taxi to Herat. I call it videogame driving. I remember there was a bombing three days ago on this desolate road.
“Herat, one of the greatest cities in Persian history,” the driver says. We arrive. I call it busy streets full of red carts and motorcycles. I call them girls with sensuous, almond-shaped eyes who sneakingly open their aquamarine burqas and smile at me. I call it the smell of the Afghan kebabs everywhere; the scent of caraway and fresh, succulent homemade bread. I call the driver with the walrus mustache “my brother.” I thank him. I ask for a picture.
He calls it diminishing. “Don’t take my picture!” He calls Karim Bakery in front of my hotel and the mirrorworks in Jami Mosque worth a picture. He doesn’t stop frowning. “Afghanistan used to be a part of Iran,” he says. I put my camera back and won’t bring it out for the rest of my trip. Instead, I write for mom.