(The Red Fort, New Delhi, India, 2002).
Given recent events, the Writer’s Section at Refuge Farm was chatting about Iran and their Bomb this morning. And Afghanistan and pieces of the rest of a long story. It accounts for some of the feelings down at the Fire Ring about events that have been dragging on most of our lives.
This morning it was about some familiar topics, including the Iranians and America and the end of our twenty year war in Afghanistan. It brought back memories from just after the turn of the current century. Back then, in 2002, it was the Taliban who was quitting the fight. But of course that wasn’t the start of it. We asked for a show of hands about the arrival of the Russians on that mountainous landscape. Splash lurched to his feet. “I was in New Delhi a few years ago, jetting halfway around the world to talk to some people. With a morning to kill, bleary, I found myself in Delhi, at the end of the Great Northern Trunk Road that leads from Pakistan to the town the British made capital of all India. It wasn’t a pleasure trip. I was holding the horse of a Congressman who had an issue to talk about, and I doubted I would ever see India on my own nickel, so I volunteered to use yours.”
He sat down on his Stone seat but continued to speak. “Many people have come down that road to that town, some angry, and a lot of them with the determination to leave their mark. The Mughals were the last to come from the Northwest. Kabul is only a couple hundred clicks upslope. The guidebook says there are seven cities of Delhi, eight, if you count the one we had come to do business with, left behind when the Colonials decamped.”
He then started a longer story about the Lahore Gate of the Lal Qila- the Delhi Red Fort- which is part of the seventh city of Delhi, where hi delegation was commencing a tour. “It is an imposing structure,” he said slowly, eyes looking pensive. “It rises out of red sandstone walls with turrets and flagpoles. The Mughuls designed it to impress, to intimidate. The Brits tinkered with it, but as with so many things here, they adopted the best and gilded the lily. The Indian Prime Minister addresses the nation from the gate each year. The gate issues out into the great teeming bazaar of Chandni Chowk. In Hindi the words mean “moonlit silvery square,” and it was, once. That day it was a mess, and we were headed into it on the back of bicycle rickshaws.”
This sunny morning in Virginia made it hard to imagine being in the Moonlight Square at the Red Fort. Splash recognized the cognitive problem and paused. “Let me fix you in time, here amidst the pleasant confusion of the Piedmont. I will try to stitch this together in a single paragraph.” He continued with determination.
“The tribes who lived by the river adopted Hinduism and ruled the original inhabitants who have lived here since at least 2500 BCE. They left us some of the great epics of Hindu literature, the gitas of Ramayama and the Mahahharata , forming the cultural bedrock of India. In the first and second centuries this was the center of a great Buddhist empire, ruled from what is now Pakistan. They also left behind the gigantic statues in Afghanistan that endured the centuries until the Taliban blew them up. In the 1500s the Mughals arrived, and three hundred years of Indo-Islamic fusion began. The Mughal Emperors brought spectacle and majesty and a sort of peace and a sort of tranquility to North India. There was a flowering of architecture and art and Hindu temples were ripped down to build the glittering mosques. The Peacock throne stood above the audience yard of the Red Fort and the Mughal Emperor was serene, ruler of all the world. Decorations on this ceiling came from Italy and supplicants on his audience floor came from all across the sub-continent.” He seemed a little breathless and took a sip of Chock Full O’ Nuts to refresh himself.
“There is more, of course, including the amazing fountain where the Brits executed the two heirs to the Mughal throne after the Great Mutiny. But that was part of why the Russians went in later when we were there trying to do something else.”
Rocket nodded. “We were on USS Midway (CV-41) out there in the Indian Ocean in 1979. We weren’t worried about Afghanistan. We were responding to the Iranians who occupied the American Embassy in Tehran. We steamed big circles on a patch of ocean we called “GONZO Station,” waiting for Washington to figure out what it was going to do and realized the Russians were going to do something. It was interesting, and their Afghan adventure went on for ten years until they gave up and pulled out.”
“That is why we felt uneasy when we sent the CIA paramilitary in after 9/11. Our run at the mountains lasted almost twenty years. The exit we did a year ago made us feel bad. But considering we had personally been watching the wars there for almost a half century, ours and theirs, we didn’t find anything unique about how it turned out.”
“Seems like something has been going on there since Alexander the Great. I prefer living in the Piedmont,” said Melissa. There was some generalized nodding around the Fire Ring, but no specific comment. It seemed like everyone knew that whatever was coming next would be generally similar to all the things that have come there before. Al Qaida and the Taliban are back now, and there was general agreement that there would probably be something unpleasant to follow. Then we tried to figure out who was going to do it this time. That might take a minute, so bear with us.
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