Kumar Living on the Mean Streets of Kabul

More about Kumar Living on the Mean Streets of Kabul

They call me a saint, though God knows better. I am only a broom in His doorway, sweeping the dust of my foolishness, and sometimes the dust of others. This is how Kumar came to me: not as a disciple, but as a gust of Kabul wind, carrying hunger, anger, and the fierce smell of survival.

In those days the streets were sharp. Children learned numbers by counting scars on their fathers’ hands. Men prayed with cracked lips and women stitched hope into bread. Kumar walked those streets like a stray star that refused to die out, even while sinking.

He was not born cruel, only cornered. He sold cheap cell-phone repairs and dreams of leaving. He smoked prayers he didn’t believe in and laughed so loudly at night that the darkness looked embarrassed. When people spoke of God, he shrugged.

“What use is a God who does not fix potholes?” he asked me once, when the city was coughing dust.

“What use is a man,” I replied, “who does not know he is already held by God?”

He didn’t like that answer. Anger is easier than humility. So he left.

For a while, I heard of him only through rumors: Kumar fought, Kumar loved badly, Kumar borrowed and vanished, Kumar shouted at the sky. Then one winter afternoon, I found him sitting outside my door, thin as a question mark.

“Everything I trusted betrayed me,” he said.

“No,” I told him gently. “Everything you trusted revealed its limits.”

He looked at my worn sandals, at the cracked tea glass, at the quiet room.

“And God?” he whispered, almost embarrassed. “Does He have limits?”

I poured tea but served him a cup of dust. He spat and cursed.

“This is not tea!”

“Yet you drank your whole life like this,” I said. “Dust of pride, dust of anger, dust of despair—and you called it survival. Let your tongue finally complain. That means it has remembered sweetness.”

He wept without sound. Kabul traffic roared outside; the world continued to be cruel, indifferent, uncertain. I did not promise him miracles. Sufis are not magicians; we are gardeners of the unseen.

“Go,” I told him. “Fix phones, patch potholes when you can, feed dogs, laugh less loudly and more honestly. When life gives you dust, do not swallow it—turn it into bricks to build shelter for someone shaking.”

He asked, “And God?”

“Walk,” I said. “If you walk toward Him one step, He runs toward you a thousand. Sometimes He looks like a prayer. Sometimes He looks like work. Often He looks like the next person who needs you.”

Years later, I still see Kumar in the streets—still poor, sometimes sad, sometimes stubbornly joyful—but with a light in his chest like a candle that refuses to be bullied by the wind. Kabul remains mean at times, but Kumar does not.

And that is the only miracle I ever trust: not that the world becomes gentle, but that the heart does.