A city it is not — even though it is in name and is named after one. It can’t be one, no more than Kabul can be a bazaar, a city reduced to a carnival of noisy transactions. A ferment of buyers and sellers, rippling to the shrill soundtrack of caterwauling vendors drawing attention to their competitive prices: guavas for 80, bangles for 20 — rupees, that is.

Look for a resemblance and, among the unsightly buildings and streets, there is none. Nothing here evokes the elevated nest of the Afghan capital — rimmed by mountains, a river running through its heart — except for the unsettled dust that finds no home, scattered by heedless winds in all directions, like refugees, and the smoke from burning hay that lines the fruit crates.

This place, like Kabul itself, has been burnt and rebuilt ten times over. Its buildings and roads decrepit, its people insecure and harassed, it has long been in transition — 25 years now — as if in sympathy with the fate of that restive city whose name it has appropriated.

Chhota Kabul, or Board Bazaar, is a marketplace built around the business of unsettled lives; holding breath when the deadline for refugee repatriation is announced, exhaling when it is extended. Once you know their constant preoccupation with repatriation — voluntary only in name — and what it would do to their lives and livelihoods, all else — clothes, cutlery, fabric, footwear, bangles and burkas — become mere trappings to distract oneself with from a deadline that always looms.

Inadequate though its pretensions are, this could have been Kabul in miniature. Perhaps it once was, despite being a poor facsimile. For who knows what terrible homesickness an exiled heart endures. Only a refugee could look for aspects of home in an alien land and find it in an unlikely part of Peshawar.

But home it is not. Dress, eat and celebrate like Afghans. Be born, live and die here. But know the shelter is temporary and its price is high: settlement that comes at the cost of unsettlement.

“When I first came here, there was no Karkhano bazaar [the multi-block smugglers’ bazaar full of goods from the Afghan Transit Trade],” he says of a time long ago. He wants to remain anonymous, despite not mentioning authorities harassing him as so many others do. “From here, you could see all the way to Gora Qabristan because there were no buildings on the [Jamrud] road.”

He invites you into the gloom of his restaurant. Kabuli Pulao, mantu, ashak, chopan kabab, badenjan-burani…. Menu items spill out of his mouth, exotic in name and the lilt of the Dari accent, even though you have been to many similar establishments peppered throughout the city.

He is 40 years old, and came here when he was only five. He fills a glass with steaming qahwa for you and says, “Saloranay may hum chalo lay da.” Back then, even 25 paisas could get you something. It was that long ago.

He remembers Zia’s death, adding sahib to his name. “It was only 20 years ago that the board neighbourhood [named after the textbook board office based there] became what we see now. I was here before that. There was nothing here but a single narrow road to the border with vehicles careening off the road if they wanted to overtake others.”

Nothing here but dusty plains with no names. Those who couldn’t find refuge in the nearby crowded Kacha Garhi and Nasirbagh camps came here and made mud settlements. In time, the plains become Tajabad and Danish Abad — concrete settlements that the relatively well-off refugees and locals gravitated to. Since this area fell along the busy Jamrud Road, refugees from here and nearby started opening small fruit and vegetable stalls. “When we came here, we only had aid but we were enterprising and had labour skills,” says the restaurateur.

But beyond survival, engaging in labour and local businesses also made fiscal sense. In Pakistan, refugee labourers and traders got paid in kaldaray (the Pakistani rupee) — the reason behind Chhota Kabul’s emergence 25 years ago.

Its relatively stable value helped many a refugee life back when jihad and civil war had stripped the Afghani of its buying power.

In time, locals who owned the land built commercial buildings and leased them out to those refugees who could afford them. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the bazaar shifted, always spreading. The muddy canal that ran through it — the River Kabul it is not — had shops built over it, only to be bared again. Merchandise and money were lost to fires; the bazaar’s warrens, nonetheless, always rose like a phoenix from its ashes. Every conceivable commodity found demand and supply here — but mainly among Afghan clientele and served by Afghan proprietors.

“Of the nearly 5,000 shops, only about 50 belong to locals,” says Haji Asmat from Baghlan, Afghanistan, president of the traders’ union here. “The rest are all Afghan.”

The name Chhota Kabul was probably coined by locals, to whom every Afghan was a Kabuli. It never really stuck. For most, the place remains Board Bazaar.

And just as well, considering this tiny piece of Kabul was built on the shifting sands of refugee lives, forever in transition, even now as they look towards another deadline to leave Pakistan, as ties sour and attitudes harden on both sides of the border, as businesses close and traders leave. The bazaar that has witnessed many iterations of itself is all set for another transformation.

With the Afghans gone, who knows what shape it will take, or what name it will have.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2016