Even so, I always rushed home from trips to post-9/11 Afghanistan to keep Uxval happy. I shuttled from a Kabul mental hospital, where I saw naked women wandering through the garden and other women chained to the walls, to twenty-mile mountain-biking trips in Mexico, where we cooled ourselves in glittering streams. I tried to keep up, to love what he loved, to be the complete woman.
One night there was to be a meteor shower, and Uxval suggested we climb Iztaccíhuatl, a mountain outside Mexico City, to watch the stars fall out of the sky. The last thing on earth I wanted to do when I wasn’t in Afghanistan, where I was climbing mountains for professional reasons, was to climb a mountain for fun, but of course I agreed. He excitedly packed the tent, our gear, and a stove and was ready in an hour. We set out around noon and climbed twelve thousand feet. I could barely lift my legs. My temples ached. I had altitude sickness.
We stopped and set up our tent. Images from Peshawar, Quetta, and Kandahar flashed through my mind. All I wanted was to go back to South Asia on assignment for the Times. Around 1 a.m., Uxval roused me from a deep sleep and pulled me out of the tent into a bitter cold night. He held me in his arms, as the stars poured out of the weeping sky. I lived in that beautiful moment, not wanting to be anywhere else. But a few minutes later I was cold. My mind slipped back to the mountains of Afghanistan as we fell asleep.
? ? ?
IN THE FALL OF 2002, two months before my twenty-ninth birthday, on a Saturday morning in Mexico City, I sat down at my laptop. Yahoo! Mail was on the screen. There were dozens of messages from a woman named Cecilia with a similar subject line from the top to the bottom of the page: te quiero, te quiero, te quiero, the occasional te extra?o (I miss you). I stared at the screen in disbelief. These proclamations of love were not for me. Uxval had inadvertently left his e-mail open on my laptop. The e-mails were to him from another woman. He was cheating on me.
My shock turned into sadness and then anger within an hour. I threw everything Uxval owned in garbage bags and put his belongings by the door with a note: “I know about Cecilia. You left your e-mail open on my laptop. Get all your stuff out of this apartment by the time I come home on Monday. Do not call me.”
I couldn’t eat for weeks. I forced myself to drink water and juice. My days ebbed into wide-awake nights. Depression was not something anyone in my family ever talked about, unless we were referring to friends or distant relatives. Now I couldn’t get out of bed.
One sleepless night I remembered how wonderful the last year had been for my career: traveling back and forth to South Asia for the Times, once my biggest dream, and working consistently with the paper’s Mexico bureau chief; shooting stories for the Boston Globe and the Houston Chronicle with Marion. I had been so happy.
“You have your work,” I told myself. I even said the words out loud to give me strength.
The next morning I called the foreign picture editor of the New York Times and asked if there was a region where she needed more freelance photographers. I explained that I had to leave Mexico City.
“OK, let me think about it,” she said. “Give me a few days.”
In the meantime I had dinner with Uxval’s best friend. He told me Uxval had been cheating on me for months with this Cecilia of Yahoo.
“Who is she?” I asked him.
“She is a secretary for Telmex, the government telephone company.”
I looked up. “Does she match her handbag to her shoes?”
She was predictable and present. I could never compete with a secretary who clocked in nine to five Monday through Friday, who had all her weekends free.
A few days later my Times editor called. “I have an idea,” she said. “The paper is moving Dexter Filkins to Istanbul to be close to Iraq, so he’s positioned nearby when the war begins. He is one of the paper’s top correspondents, and I bet we will need a photographer there.”
“You mean you need someone in Istanbul?”
“Yes, Istanbul.”
I knew nothing about Turkey. But Dexter and I had been friends in India, and within months I had packed up my life in Mexico and moved to this country to which I had no ties and whose language I did not speak. It didn’t matter. I would be there for the next war.
Fall of the Taliban in Kandahar, December 2001.
CHAPTER 5
I Am Not as Worried About Bullets
I moved to Istanbul the first week of January 2003 with two bags of clothes, my cameras, and my laptop, and was lonely from the moment I arrived. Istanbul was cold in January; there was a constant gray drizzle outside. I had pictured a biblical Middle Eastern city, more exotic than Western, with narrow alleys and mazelike stone walls. Istanbul’s architecture was modern and industrial, almost cold.