| On
the road, north of Peshawar, 1988- Lifting a camera to your
face and looking through the viewfinder was never a simple exercise
in calculating light, composition or color. Refugees wandered
all over the roadside with no apparent purpose, dazed, lost and
miserable. Children, oblivious, played among them, running by
the road, cooling off in canals that were often little more than
open sewers. How would this old fragile anarchic society of Afghanistan
survive mass displacement? Could the Qur'an really hold them together?
That's what I was thinking when I tripped the shutter for this
picture. What would happen to these children? In the fullness
of time, the Taliban provided an answer. Many of these boys were
to become its troops, fighting for one set of indistinct and
sketchy values and delivering a social order very different and
worse. |
