He enjoyed bringing to town things that might otherwise not get here.
Across town, things did not look so bright at the Kandahar Medical College.
But on Main Street, in the center of town, things are still bleak.
"I haven't yet, since the problems started, gone out on my own and gotten a taxi from our place up to town, things like that," he said.
"But the opposites had somehow got together, got inside each other; country people wanting town things; town people yearning for a piece of the countryside.
"But if there were an emergency and people needed to get out of town, things could get violent".
I was going home through town from my mum's [in inner-city Birmingham] and when I'm walking through town things are happening, obviously.
But when they visit the nearest town, things seem off, as ringing bells turn the population oddly docile and the siblings' father seems to forget who they are.
There were other Bengalis nearby and an Indian grocery in the town, things that were more important to Chitra than the proximity of the ocean and modernist architecture had been for my mother.
But on the outskirts of town things are less green and pleasant: Feral children romped, and, fuelled on brought-out Cokes and glowing orangeades, ran up and over the pedestrian bridge across the A-road.
