First Exposure
He implored me to take his picture, even though he knew he couldn't get a copy. A post-9/11 story of Afghanistan.
KABUL, Afghanistan, 2002
HE APPEARED, carrying our dinner. As he approached, he smiled gently.
In his hands he held a metal platter. It contained an enormous steaming mound of Kabuli palaw, an aromatic mixture of chicken, rice, saffron and tiny slivers of carrot. Around us, the Shahr-e Naw Restaurant bustled with the sounds of Dari, a language my father spoke but that I did not understand.
It was January 2002, four months after 9/11 changed all of our lives and three months after the U.S.-led coalition’s air war, backed up by the Northern Alliance on the ground, had ousted the Taliban regime. As we awaited our meal, my colleague Haroon, our “fixer” and translator, had been telling me a story about how his life — and his wardrobe — changed depending on who was running the country.
"When the Taliban came, I had only Western pants, no shalwar kameez. So I had to buy them,” Haroon was saying. “And when the Taliban left, I had only shalwar kameez, no Western pants. So I had to buy them again."
It was then that waiter and platter arrived. He spoke no English, and I spoke no Dari. As he put down our food, he started talking to Haroon and pointing at me. It was a gentle pointing — curious, friendly. Familiar, almost.
“Why is he pointing?” I asked Haroon.
“He likes your camera,” Haroon replied, tapping the strap of the early Fuji digital camera slung across my shoulder, the device I carried everywhere on this pre-smartphone-era reporting trip. “He says no one has ever taken a picture of him. He asks if you would mind taking one.”
I looked at the waiter. He smiled tentatively. I smiled back and nodded.
I lifted the camera to my face (we still did that then), caught him in the viewfinder, and pressed the shutter button.
KABUL, THE CAPITAL of Afghanistan, overwhelms the senses. All the senses. Sight. Hearing. Smell. Touch. I have been to many, many places, and it is a place like no other. The uneasy relationship between Kipling and colonized lands left us this quote from him, which captures only part of the matter: “Kabul town is sun and dust.”
I had spent my childhood hearing tales of Afghanistan from my father, who spent three months teaching there in 1951 after crossing from Pakistan on the Khyber Pass in a rickety bus. Behind it ran a boy carrying a wedge attached to a stick, used to shove under a tire in case the bus started drifting backward while going uphill.
My childhood home was dotted with Afghan artifacts. A wooden tobacco jar, with a huge cork and the word TOBAK burned onto the side, was one of my favorite things to explore in his study. It smelled of adventures and distant lands. A woven rattan fan he kept by the fireplace was, to my delight, exactly the kind of fan that Kabul’s street vendors deploy to blow away the smoke from the meat they were grilling.
By the time I was about 10, I began listening to Radio Kabul on my shortwave radio. When I got a world clock one Christmas, I set one of the time zones to Afghanistan. I had been looking forward mightily to visiting this place.
I did not envision it under these post-9/11 circumstances, though. I arrived to a city ruined by a generation of war.
Rubble was everywhere. The Defense Ministry was a burned-out hulk set against the mountains. The grass along the runways of the once-cosmopolitan international airport was studded with land mines and (quite understandably) overgrown. Burned-out cars sat in many intersections. In one section of town, people were making homes and keeping store in shipping containers. In another, they were making satellite TV dishes from sheets that would have been cans of Reddi-Wip.
In the months after the attacks and the air war that displaced the Taliban from their headquarters in Kabul, I:
gave the Afghan consular officer at Bagram Air Base my passport to stamp, and watched him dutifully record my name in his official ledger — a “101 Dalmatians” spiral notebook.
had Russian- and American-made automatic weapons pointed at me by screaming men, each of whom fortunately turned out to be on my side.
asked questions of the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, and been surprised when he told a joke.
traveled rutted highways with hand-painted signs that warned, "Beware of mines at the side of the road."
watched women entirely covered in powder-blue burqas — with only netting to let them see the world — move like ghosts through Kabul's streets. And then, months later, watched some of them emerge.
One Taliban practice is particularly relevant here. Taking photographs had been, for some years, anathema in many contexts. The Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam barred images of living humans — except, later on, for passport pictures. The notion of photography became fraught.
So three months after the old rulers had been chased from the city, old endeavors were re-emerging. Photography in public places was one of them. No one cared any longer if you took a photo of someone else. Street stalls taking box-camera photographs were popping up everywhere.
That was the sitrep, as they say, on the night I snapped the photo of the waiter at the Shahr-e Naw Restaurant.
He heard my electronic shutter click. He gazed at the tiny screen on the back of my camera. He grinned. But in the pause that came afterward, I realized: There was nothing I could leave with him. I couldn’t give him a copy.
“I make you a promise,” I said to him as Haroon translated. “If I come back, I will bring you a print on paper so you can have it for yourself.”
The waiter nodded enthusiastically, put his hand over his heart and left us to our dinner.
I felt badly that I couldn’t come through for him. Worse, I didn’t really know if I’d ever be back.
IMAGINE HAVING NOT A SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH of yourself. In our age of selfies and phone photos by the billions, imagine not having any frozen moment anywhere that can say to you, “This is who I was when that shutter snapped.”
In our world — not just since the dawn of the smartphone but for generations now — taking photos has been an act of making moments, and people, more real. My father even took a photograph of our TV during a moon landing to say to himself, and to posterity, “I was there” — even if “there” meant nothing more than his own living room.
Today, so much is coming at us that grabbing moments seems almost an act of defiance against time and encroaching chaos. I have a camera, ergo I can, in a manner, stop the clock.
Many Afghans then had no such power; many lack it today. I had one friend in Kabul whose father had died when he was a young boy, and the family was too poor for photographs. He could not remember what his father looked like. “I wonder if somewhere, out there, a photograph of him exists,” he once said to me. “That way, even if no one knows who’s in the photo, it would mean that he is not completely gone.”
After that meal of Kabuli palaw at the Shahr-e Naw Restaurant in January, I went back to my apartment in Beijing, not sure if I’d ever return to Kabul. But four months later, in May 2002, I was dispatched there to spend six weeks covering the loya jirga — the nationwide tribal meeting at the heart of Afghan politics.
A few days before I was to leave for Kabul, I remembered my promise. I found the SmartMedia card (#techflashback) with the waiter’s photo. I made my way to a photo-printing shop in my Beijing neighborhood and I got an 8x10 made. Carefully, I tucked it in my carry-on between two of my files (#anothertechflashback) so it wouldn’t get bent.
When I arrived in Kabul, I asked Haroon if we could go back to the restaurant. He warned me not to expect much. “Jobs here now, sometimes they last a month, or a week, or a day. Who knows where he is?” But he took me back.
After we were seated, I looked around. I didn’t see the gentleman immediately. There were three other waiters hustling around. Then he emerged from the kitchen, a towel over his shoulder. Haroon called him over.
They exchanged words in Dari, and the waiter grinned — an even bigger smile than the moment after I took his photo all those months ago. I reached into my shoulder bag, pulled out the print and handed it to him.
He went quiet, a bubble of contemplation in a raucous restaurant. He looked at the picture of himself for a good 10 seconds. He closed his eyes for another two or three. When he opened them again, I saw they were wet.
He stepped forward and grabbed my arm. “Tash-a-cour, sir!” he said, using the Dari word for thank you. Then he put his hand flat on his heart, looked up and — ever so slightly — bowed.
Then he walked off, photograph in hand, back to his job. I was so glad that I could gift him a moment of himself, a moment that said to him: “This is who you were when my shutter snapped.”
I never saw him again. I never got his name. And I’ll never forget his face.
©2025, Ted Anthony
BONUS PHOTO:
Thank you for this article . It’s humanity and warm
I read this not expecting the ending–nice job! It reminded me of a funny moment last week as I was being fitted for hearing aids. I was nervous and clumsy as I was shown the devices, then given a mirror to hold as they were placed on my ears. The tech guy continued to talk and work on the computer synchronizations at another desk, while I continued to hold the mirror, transfixed by my own image. Whole minutes went by before I realized I was just sitting there, looking at myself! Imagine!