The Hindu Business Line : A rare tête-À-tête

It wasn’t quite the roof of the world, but it was the Arctic Circle. We were in Kiruna, in northern Sweden, a mix-and-match group of women from Asia, Africa and South America, unfamiliar with snow, ice and all that sort of thing that Scandinavians consider nice. The year was 2002.

It had been a hectic day, but sunny with a visit to the original Ice Hotel, lunch in a Sami tent followed by a walk through a Sami museum, attempts at getting friendly with grouchy reindeer and walking on dangerously slippery roads. We were tired now and ready to go back to our temporary home in Lulea, southward.

We piled into a crowded waiting room in this mining town station reminiscent of Dr Zhivago with its long flat platform surrounded by flatlands and mountains of snow. Our train was due from Oslo and it was nearly an hour late, “but naturally, it is from Norway!”

“Are you from Afghanistan?” a voice broke through the restless muttering. Shereen, my gynaecologist friend, turned to the man who had spoken. He was sitting beside her on the edge of the bench.

“No, Pakistan,” she replied, smiling. Beside the young man stood three other young men, all smiling uncertainly.

“You look like an Afghanistani, that’s why I asked,” the young man said. “My name is Wajid. I’m from Afghanistan. My friends too,” he added, waving a hand at them. “What are you all,” his eyes swept over the rest of our group, “doing here?”

Shereen explained, in Pushtu, the language that Wajid spoke, about the conference that had brought the women to Sweden. Then she turned to me and said, “She is from India, and she too,” pointing to Sunita. “That’s Nabeela, she’s from Pakistan.”

“India!” exclaimed Wajid. “I’ve seen lots of Hindi movies! I love them!” His friends perked up and nodded their heads eagerly. And from then on he began to speak to us in Hindi, haltingly but enthusiastically…

“Did you have a good time here in Kiruna?” he asked. “Had we known you were here, we would have taken care of you, shown you around, given you a good meal. We feel so bad.” The others nodded and murmured in agreement.

“But what are you boys doing here?” Shereen asked.

“We’ve been here a month,” he replied.

“Doing what?”

It just didn’t strike us until he told us. “We’re at a refugee camp here. My friend and I are leaving for Stockholm on this train. The others have to wait here a little longer. We’re going to another camp. To wait for our papers to be finalised and we can become Swedish citizens.” He told us, in Hindi, how he and his friends had first moved from Afghanistan when trouble had started in his country. Wajid’s old parents were still in a camp in Pakistan, but Hamid didn’t know where his wife and two small children were. All they knew was if they wanted to make a life for themselves, they had to get away.

And now they carried identical blue kitbags given by the camp authorities in Kiruna. “They take care of us,” said Wajid with a smile.

“But why did you choose this place, of all places. It’s so cold, snow everywhere… you could have gone anywhere else,” said Sunita who had had a bad fall on the unforgiving ice a little while earlier.

Wajid smiled. “When you have lived in the storm of bullets and bombs as long as we have,” he said, “any other place on earth is better,” he said. “Anywhere else is heaven.”

The train from Oslo arrived and we made a rush to our coach. As we boarded, we stopped a moment and looked down the platform. There were Wajid and his friend, blue kit bags in their hands.

They looked at us, and with a smile and a wave they were gone.