in memory

My father attended high school in the mountains of northern India. I grew up on the stories of this time: chasing soccer balls down the mountainside, feeding monkeys, holiday hikes, contracting dengue fever (this recounted by my grandmother), meeting the Dalai Lama—and trying to shake his hand. Tantamount to all this was his departure: After he graduated in 1965, my father, five of his classmates, and one set of their parents drove across Asia, the Middle East, and into Europe to meet a ship bound for New York. My father helped build a rooftop carrier for the station wagon so that they could fit all eight passengers in the station wagon. The carrier was held down by metal clamps and body weight—somewhere among his Indian bangles, carved ivory lamps, and jade cuff links, my father has saved the one C-clamp that made it all the way to Amsterdam.

By the time I was old enough to understand the magnitude of such a journey, and to wish I could repeat the trip with my father, I was old enough to realize the near impossibility of doing so. Indeed, the route became impassable not long after the Volkswagen drove it, when the Cold War seeped into the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and American foreign policies tested sovereign hospitality throughout Asia and the Middle East.

It’s this road trip I’ve kept in mind while working on a book review of Ethan Casey’s Overtaken By Events. Casey, a freelance journalist, spent six weeks traveling around Pakistan in the early spring of 2009, arriving shortly before the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team. He’d come to follow up on a book he’d written in 2004 about a semester he spent teaching journalism in Lahore. Both books lack a certain sophistication of style, but certainly not of effort or intent, and in that sense they are the type of reporting I would wish to gather on a Eurasian road trip with my father. Overtaken By Events, writes Casey, is an on-the-ground narrative, the “kind of book that rarely gets written about Pakistan, and one I felt the country needed and deserved.” While he realizes that it is impossible to not write about politics when writing about Pakistan, he doesn’t think it necessary to always address them directly. Instead, he “made the contrarian decision to write about everything else and to let the politics seep in.”

Tragically, the politics have seeped into my father’s own stories, as we learned that his good friend, Dan Terry, was one of the ten aid workers shot and killed in Badakhshan Province last week. Terry and his parents were three of the passengers in that overstuffed station wagon over 40 years ago; it was on that trip, my father recounts, that Dan Terry fell in love with Afghanistan. He lived and worked in the country for over four decades, supporting aid groups and community development projects. He spoke Dari and Pashto, and was deeply knowledgeable about the country and its people. I can imagine the joy with which he summitted the 16,000-foot pass the medical team traversed while on their way through the Hindu Kush.

Growing up, his name—always the first and last together—carried the lush air of adventure and far off places. We saw him rarely, but his name lived large in my father’s, and many others’, esteem. Earlier this week, a writer for the Afghanistan Analysts Network recounted that in 2000, Dan Terry was jailed for overstaying his visa (he was working in one of the rural areas, and paid scant attention to the calendar):

He went off good-naturedly, seeing it as a rare chance to have the time to learn Pashto. He was released from prison after a couple of weeks and then re-arrested after the authorities decided he had not served enough days. He arrived back to the prison to cheers from his fellow inmates who were now newly-found friends. He finally emerged with tales of beatings and the hardness of the lives of those he had come into contact with.

While it remains unclear who killed Dan Terry and the other aid workers—be it Taliban, loosely-linked insurgents, or bandits—to read the Taliban’s declaration of responsibility is to peer into the scaffolding of their propaganda: Their false claims that the group was proselytizing and distributing Bibles demonstrate their willingness to torque a massacre into political gain. Terry was a man of faith and peace; both of which led him to a life in service of the poor—a life of respect for a people and country he deeply loved. Whoever the killers may be, it is proof that they value power and violence over the lives not only of Dan Terry and his fellow aid workers, but of the very people they chose to serve.

Both Dan Terry and Dr. Tom Little had requested to be buried in Afghanistan; alumni from my father’s high school hope to raise enough money for Terry’s wife and three daughters, who were raised in Afghanistan, to attend the burial.