Khader’s mujaheddin unit photograph

Khader’s mujaheddin unit photograph is both a formal group portrait and a record of men whose lives and deaths the narrator recalls by name. Its fixed image cannot convey their warmth or their stories, but the act of looking at it brings those stories into view. The photograph also preserves the narrator’s position within the group: behind and slightly to the left of Abdel Khader Khan, with a composed expression that sits uneasily beside the losses he remembers.

The portrait and its limits

The black-and-white photograph shows almost all the men of Abdel Khader Khan’s unit assembled in the stiff arrangement of a formal portrait. The narrator reflects that such photographs can make people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India appear more rigid and glowering than they were. Nothing in the image conveys how much these men had loved to laugh or how readily they had smiled. As a record of appearance, it is accurate; as a record of their lives together, it is necessarily incomplete.

The direction of their eyes makes that incompleteness visible. Almost none of the men look directly into the camera: their gazes fall a little above or below it, or to one side. The narrator alone meets the lens. Holding the picture in bandaged hands, he recognizes the names of the men leaning together in its ragged lines. The contrast between his direct gaze and theirs makes the photograph seem to return his attention, while the remembered names supply what the formal image leaves out.

How the photograph was made and returned

Kishmishi took the picture. Shy about posing with the others, he volunteered to operate the camera instead. The older fighters affectionately called him Kishmishi, meaning Raisins; as a young Pashtun fighter, he had survived smallpox, which left his face marked. He revered Abdel Khader Khan as the embodiment of his warrior heroes and followed him closely, quickly lowering his eyes when the Khan looked his way. His absence from the portrait is therefore not an absence from the unit’s memory: it is the consequence of the choice that put him behind the camera.

The camera had been the only one Abdel Khader Khan had permitted in the unit. Khaled Ansari had kept its roll of film. When he left the group, the film was among the belongings that fell from his pockets, and Nazeer took it with him. Nazeer later explained that he had left it at a photo studio the previous week. The prints were returned that morning, before the group was due to leave, and he thought the narrator would want to see them. Thus the photograph’s arrival depends on a chain of permission, possession, departure, and care: it survives not by remaining with its photographer or its original custodian, but because Nazeer carried the film onward and had it developed.

The names held in the image

The narrator’s recollection turns the rows of the portrait into individual lives. Mazdur Gul, whose name means labourer, was a stonemason whose hands had been made permanently grey-white by decades of granite work. Daoud preferred the English form David and dreamed of visiting New York and eating in a fine restaurant. Zamaanat, whose name means trust, bore the shame of his family’s hungry poverty at Jalozai, the large refugee camp near Peshawar; his brave smile concealed that sorrow.

Hajji Akbar became the unit’s doctor for an unusual reason: he had once spent two months as a patient in a Kabul hospital. When the narrator arrived at the mountain camp and accepted the doctor’s job, Hajji Akbar greeted the decision with prayers and a small Dervish dance of joy. Alef, a mischievously satirical Pashtun trader, died during the fighting. Juma and Hanif, remembered as wild boys, were killed by Habib. Jalalaad, their fearless young friend, died in the last charge, while Ala-ud-Din escaped unharmed. Suleiman Shahbadi, recognizable in memory by his furrowed brow and sorrowful eyes, died leading the others into the guns. These recollections do not make the formal portrait a complete account; they give its faces names, circumstances, and distinct fates.

The central group and the narrator’s place

At the center of the assembly, a smaller and tighter group gathers around Abdel Khader Khan. Ahmed Zadeh, an Algerian, died with one hand clenched in the frozen earth and the other clasped in the narrator’s. Khaled Ansari killed Habib and then walked alone into the snow. Mahmoud Melbaaf, like Ala-ud-Din, survived the last charge without injury. Nazeer, despite his own wounds, dragged the narrator’s unconscious body to safety. Their different outcomes—death, survival, and rescue—are held together in the same compact arrangement around the Khan.

The narrator stands behind and slightly to the left of Abdel Khader Khan. In the image his expression appears confident, resolute, and self-possessed, even as the recollection surrounding the portrait names comrades who died and one who brought him to safety. The closing insistence that the camera does not lie is complicated by everything the image cannot show: laughter, fear, private shame, loyalty, and the later consequences of the fighting. The photograph’s significance lies in that tension. It fixes the group in one moment, while the narrator’s act of remembering restores movement, distinction, and loss to the faces that the camera preserved.