Nasir Bagh refugee camp

Nasir Bagh refugee camp, situated near Peshawar, Pakistan, was a sprawling settlement of tents, dust, and open sewers where Tariq and his parents lived for a year after fleeing the Afghan civil war in 1992. It represents the harsh reality of displacement, poverty, and survival for millions of Afghan refugees, and it is the place where Tariq endured profound loss, moral compromise, and the beginning of his long journey toward a new life.

Conditions and Daily Life

When Tariq and his parents arrived at Nasir Bagh, they were handed a stick and a sheet of canvas and told to build their own tent. The camp was a landscape of brown tents, brown people, brown dogs, and brown porridge. Tariq remembered a leafless tree he climbed every day, where he straddled a branch and watched refugees lying about in the sun, their sores and stumps in plain view. He saw little emaciated boys carrying water in jerry cans, gathering dog droppings to make fire, carving toy AK-47s out of wood with dull knives, and lugging sacks of wheat flour that no one could make bread from that held together. All around the refugee town, the wind made the tents flap, hurling stubbles of weed everywhere and lifting kites flown from the roofs of mud hovels. Many children died from dysentery, tuberculosis, hunger, and other causes. Tariq said there was nothing worse a person could see than so many kids buried.

Loss and Survival

Tariq's father did not survive that first winter; he died in his sleep, apparently without pain. That same winter, Tariq's mother caught pneumonia and almost died. She would wake up all night long, feverish, coughing out thick, rust-colored phlegm. The queues were long to see the camp doctor, who worked out of a station wagon made into a mobile clinic. Everyone was shivering in line, moaning, coughing, some with shit running down their legs, others too tired or hungry or sick to make words. The doctor was a decent man who treated Tariq's mother, gave her some pills, and saved her life that winter. Desperate to keep his mother warm, Tariq cornered a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, held a shard of glass to his throat, and took his blanket. He gave it to his mother. After her illness, Tariq made a vow that they would not spend another winter in camp. He would work, save, and move them to an apartment in Peshawar with heating and clean water.

Struggle for Work and the Path to Crime

When spring came, Tariq looked for work. From time to time, a truck came to camp early in the morning and rounded up a couple of dozen boys, taking them to a field to move stones or an orchard to pick apples in exchange for a little money, sometimes a blanket, a pair of shoes. But they never wanted Tariq; one look at his leg and it was over. There were other jobs—ditches to dig, hovels to build, water to carry, feces to shovel from outhouses—but young men fought over these jobs, and Tariq never stood a chance. Then, in the fall of 1993, he met a shopkeeper who offered him money to take a leather coat to Lahore. The shopkeeper gave him a bus ticket and the address of a street corner near the Lahore Rail Station where he was to deliver the coat to a friend. Tariq knew already that the coat contained hashish in its seams. The shopkeeper said that if he got caught, he was on his own, and that he should remember that the shopkeeper knew where his mother lived. But the money was too good to pass up, and winter was coming again. Tariq never even got on the bus; the police took a knife to the coat, and the hashish spilled all over the street. He was arrested and spent seven years in a Pakistani prison.

Significance

Nasir Bagh refugee camp is a microcosm of the Afghan refugee crisis, a place where the international community's initial generosity during the Soviet war gave way to neglect after the Cold War ended. For Tariq, the camp was a crucible of loss, moral compromise, and the beginning of a long, painful journey that led to prison and, eventually, to a new life in Murree. The camp's conditions—the brown dust, the open sewers, the dying children, the desperate struggle for work—shaped Tariq's character and his determination to survive, but also left him with lasting trauma, including the headaches that would plague him for years.