Ezra Azra--If The Commies Had Crossed The Khyber

It was the year 1979. The mighty world super power, the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), ruled by their last President, Mikhail Gorbachev, encouraged the rest of the nations of the world to believe the Soviet Communists were about to invade the Khyber Pass road.

The Khyber Pass road is an ancient mountain road in the north of the country of Pakistan. The road winds its way in a general northwest-southeast direction through mountainous terrain that frequently suffers mild seismic upheaval and disruption.

To the Pakistani nation the Soviet threat had little fear, if any at all, because every political Empire that had violated the independent sovereignty of the Khyber Pass had gone on to be a failure. The latest victim of the Khyber curse being the former British Empire, the only Empire in world history ‘upon which the sun never set.’

The older generations in Pakistan had every confidence that the Ancient Khyber curse of extinction that had befallen all others so far, would fall on the USSR, if it was blasphemous-minded enough to violate the hoary sanctity of the Khyber.

In the histories of some nations of the world mountain roads have allowed invading conquering nations to enter. Of these few roads, the Khyber Pass road holds the record. In the 2,495 years up to 1979, eight Empire-building tyrant armies had marched through the Khyber.

The first was led by Darius, King of Persia, approximately 516 years before Jesus Christ walked this Earth. That Empire ended when Darius was assassinated in his own country thirty years later. Approximately twenty-two centuries later another Emperor of Persia crossed the Khyber. His Empire, too, came to an end when he was assassinated in his own country.

The fact that all those Empires eventually crashed into failures, was seeming to not deter that over-ambitious USSR in 1979.

The fearlessness in Pakistan of an impending Soviet invasion arose from the curious fact that Pakistan itself had never been one of the intended primary destinations of any of those eight illegal historic military crossings of the Khyber.

Indeed, a fact of the matter was that for the duration of each illegal military crossing the national economy of Pakistan benefited significantly.

The Khyber Pass road is approximately thirty-three miles long as it weaves through the Spin Ghar mountains and hills, known also as the Safed Koh mountains. Both names translate to “White” in the local Pashto language. The Pass road itself takes its name from Pakistan’s political Province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In its narrowest stretches the Pass is a few hundred feet wide. Its widest stretches are up to two miles wide. Nowadays, as in 1979, the Khyber is a modern maintained road, as much as the mountains and the surface seismic disturbances allow. At its northwest end in Pakistan at the Afghanistan border, is the town of Torkham; at its southeast end near the border with India, is the town of Jamrud.

Fortunately and curiously although the mountains through which the Pass runs extend into neighboring contiguous countries, while in some of those countries those mountains have suffered violently destructive earthquakes, the Pass itself has never suffered a significantly disruptive seismic event; so far. Hence, since the 1920s, the successful construction of a system of railway transportation tunnels and bridges!

Considering the phenomenal history and reputation of the Khyber Pass, it is puzzling why it seems nobody knows when or why the Pass acquired its name.

The nation-wide excitement in 1979 in Pakistan of the probability of an imminent invasion by the unscrupulously “evil empire” Communist USSR, had a particular significance for Ms Nuurr Nadhirr.

Ms Nuurr Nadhirr was a School teacher in one of the local all-girls Secondary Schools in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. She taught all the branches of Mathematics.

Despite her exceptional genius in Mathematics, Ms Nadhirr, because she had been born an autistic Down’s Syndrome albino, was seriously disadvantaged by some of the petty prejudices of the Society into which she had been born in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

She was a firstborn. Her parents chose to not have other children. Her parents were thankful that their Nuurr showed exceptional intellectual capacities and abilities from the earliest age. This meant that they somewhat healthily survived their parental disappointment, shame, and guilt until their Nuurr became an adult and left home.

In her teaching of Mathematics, Nuurr naturally sooner or later encountered the 1935 “Albert Einstein-Nathan Rosen bridge,” hypothesis, which, in colloquially non-science jargon, is known as the first “Wormhole” hypothesis. The hypothesis was proposed by the two scientists in 1935, published in the international scientific journal in New York City, “The Physical Activity Review.”

Ms Nadhirr’s encounter with that 1935 “bridge” theory would have been without particular significance had it not struck a sympathetic relationship with her Khyber road obsession.

The Pakistan authorities in the Province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, encouraged Schools to organize “adopt-a-road” visits to sections of the Khyber Pass by schoolchildren. The children had fun sweeping-up litter on the Khyber surfaces, and in being on-the-spot where important history had occurred. The children were especially intrigued by graffiti in unknown languages scratched on rock surfaces in some cases centuries ago, along stretches of the Khyber.

Approximately thirty years beyond 1979, Nuurr Nadhirr would have the distinction of interpreting into Pashto some of the words of one such stone-scratched graffiti: “Almighty immortal good health.” The words were at least a thousand years old. The name of the original language remained unknown. Ms Nadhirr would dedicate her life to interpreting the remaining words.

In Nuurr, as a school child on many Khyber “adopt-a-road” sweep-ups and sweep-alongs, there developed a pastime of fantasizing sections of the Khyber road as Lego pieces to be continually re-arranged into different configurations, each configuration assigned to one of the past historic invaders of the road.

In one of her obligatory intently rational classroom exercises involving the entirely hypothetical Einstein-Rosen bridge, Nuurr’s Khyber Lego fantasy made a quantum jump onto the bridge, transforming it into an imminent any-minute realty, in Nuurr’s thinking!

In Nuurr Nadhirr’s thinking, the Einstein-Rosen bridge is hard timeless mathematics. Does such indestructibleness not equate with the longevity of the Khyber road despite the seismic destruction all around it; and, too, despite the wholesale abuse it has suffered from unscrupulously invading foreigners for 2,495 years? She regarded her spontaneous instinctive quantum jump as confirmation that inveterate scientists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen had made a carefully considered choice in terming their hypothesis, “bridge”; and never endorsing the inaccurate non-scientific criminally careless “wormhole” substitution. After all, does not a bridge connect distant destinations more sensibly and obviously than a hole?

In other words, in Nuurr Nadhirr’s thinking, the Khyber road was, most probably, a dormant Einstein-Rosen bridge!

In Nuurr Nadhirr’s thinking, the Einstein-Rosen bridge remained a mere hypothesis because its mathematics does not provide for auto-combustion of auto-generated energy.

Were the Khyber road, already by its continually seismic-prone natural environmental evolution, an Einstein-Rosen bridge ‘in effigy’, so to speak, about to be infused with the energy of dozens of mighty Soviet internal-combustion engines roaring along in concert, that energy might very well catalyze-cause the Khyber to transmute into an Einstein-Rosen bridge physical realty!

The first one ever in our Milky Way galaxy!