Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Ahmad, pay attention,’ Mour said.
‘Seat belt,’ a Turkish air stewardess said.
‘Sorry, miles away.’ Traumatic memories rippled through me and I hadn’t even set foot on its soil. I pulled out the strap from underneath Mour and pushed it into the buckle.
‘Don’t forget why we named you Ahmad,’ Mour said.
‘Stop worrying. It isn’t good for you.’
‘You’re a pure Pashtun.’
‘Mour, relax. Breathe in.’ Mour’s anxiety had forced her to step up her lessons in who my ancestors were and what values they held dear in case I said or did things in my khastegari that would contradict ‘Pashtunwali’.
I pulled Mour’s hijab shawl over her white, thinning scalp and wiped with it the beads of sweat from her pale face.
‘Call Shujah akaand don’t forget to kiss his hand,’ Mour said, tightening her seat belt over her white, calf-length dress with navy dots like the seats of the airplane we were on.
‘It shows you’ve been brought up well.’
‘Mour, respectfully, I grew up in Afghanistan.’
‘And you’ve been away for 21 years.’
‘So?’
Kate Winslet, rushing up the stairs, froze on the seat-back screen in the front when the pilot announced something in Turkish.
‘Akanai Nazigul is like a mother to you. She deserves a lot of respect.’ Mour raised her voice to compensate for the announcement and crying babies. ‘Call her akanai.’
‘I already call her Nazigul on Skype.’
‘I thought you grew up in Afghanistan?’
‘Mour, hila kawom,’ I said, ‘please.’
Kate Winslet came back into motion.
‘You disrespect your elders if you refer to them by their first names.’
‘But Nazigul is the nickname the in-laws have given her.’
‘An ill-mannered son wouldn’t count for proper Pashtun.’
‘Proper Afghan,’ I said and pressed my thumb against the front seat’s torn leather. It unfolded once I released the pressure.
‘Akanai has taken all the trouble to dig you out the jelais. One of them will become your wife if you don’t spoil it,’ Mour went on, raising her henna-dyed palms in prayer and wiping her face with them.
‘Inshallah,’I said, my thoughts racing to the moment when Mour would place a gigantic lump of sugar surrounded by chocolates and sugar-coated almonds before me, breaking out the news that the jelai and her parents accepted me as ‘their servant’, and thus I got engaged. I wondered which jelai would turn out to be my future wife. Latifa, Nazia, Kubra or Humaira?
My ears got a feeling of fullness as though a roller coaster was going down a steep slope. I took a deep breath. Everyone else looked undisturbed. Two men in perahan tunban wore their turbans. A woman plodded up and down the aisle, soothing her crying baby. They were all meant to have been seated with their seat belts fastened. Same old Afghans: they cherished their customs but resisted foreign-imposed rules.
Mour’s eyes were closed, her lips moving and her body rocking from side to side. As she finished a Quranic verse, she prayed to Khudai to support my khastegari.
‘I’ve had two wishes – giving you a good education and finding you a decent wife. My first wish is fulfilled and may Khudai help me with the second,’ Mour said to me, looking skyward.
‘Ameen.’ I wiped my beard. ‘What about the other two?’ I referred to ‘seeing my children’ and ‘purchasing our own property’.
Mour went back into pleading with Khudai without acknowledging my tease.
Khudaimust’ve heard a thousand times Mour’s four wishes, and, inshallah, He’d grant us them all.
‘Your presence in the khastegari makes things complicated.’
‘With due respect, we’ve already discussed this,’ I said.
‘Spell it out: we don’t own the flat.’
‘It’s true. The housing association does.’
‘It’s permanent.’
‘“Permanent” is different from owning.’
‘Do as you wish; it’s your khastegari,’ Mour said with a resigned sigh. ‘Is this a plane or a nursery?’
Afghan families poured into Kabul during summer holidays, and it appeared that kids didn’t like flights.
‘What’s the smell?’
‘Pampers,’ I said.
‘You never stank. Someone needs to teach her the importance of changing nappies quickly. Her own nose will thank her.’
‘Mour, hila kawom.’ The woman with heavy make-up and a crying baby now sat on the aisle seat, a metre away from us.
‘I’ll say it to her face. You think I’m scared of her?’ Mour shook her head and glared at the woman. ‘All today’s mothers think about is make-up.’
‘She may be passionate about make-up. Why should we judge if it makes her happy?’ I said.
With a sudden bump the plane touched down. Mour put her hands to her ears, swaying from side to side, her lips moving.
***
AN ANCIENT blue and white bus ferried us to the only building in Kabul International Airport, as large as a medium-size train station, and dropped us beneath the smiling photo of the beleaguered Afghan President with his traditional Afghan qaraqul hat and tribal chapan.
***
A MAN IN A BLUE uniform tapped on my back and gestured to follow him as I waited for the luggage. He led me into a windowless room with one desk and three chairs. The man left.
My heart beat faster. Why was I in this tiny room? Would they bring Mour, too, from the Prayer Room? Khudai, I take refuge in You. When You protect, no one will overcome me, Iprayed in my heart.
A man in a faded suit and thin tie entered. ‘What’re you doing in Kabul?’ He sat at the edge of the metal desk with a wooden top, his broad shoulders covering Hamid Karzai’s photo on the grey wall.
‘This’s my watan.’
‘Was.’ He stood straight. ‘Hold up your arms.’
‘Who are you?’
‘The NDS.’
‘Can I see a proof?’
He looked me in the eye: his bushy brows covered the corners of his scleras. Withdrew a card from the breast pocket. I read ‘The National Directory of Security’ in bold above his frowning photo. He reinserted the card and gestured at my arms.
His touch pushed the notebook against my chest. ‘What’s this?’
‘My diary.’
He removed it from my suit jacket. He raised his bushy eyebrows, revealing the blue pupils behind them. ‘A red colour diary for a man?’ He shook his head.
‘And this?’
‘My money.’
‘Take it out.’
My heartbeat increased. According to Shujah, mafia gangs killed you for £100 in Kabul, and the security forces turned a blind eye. Like a drug dealer caught by the police, I brought out the three envelopes.
He tore them open under the overhead fluorescent light the size of a car bumper, whose brightness filtered through his full hair, giving it a blue-grey colour.
‘How much?’ He felt the Queen’s head with his thumb.
‘£6,000.’
‘For your bearded brothers?’
‘It’s for my wedding.’ My legs trembled, realising why I was being interrogated.
‘Enjoy the honeymoon and then tell the poor jelai you’ve already got a wife in the fucking West?’
‘I’ve got obro and ezat.’
‘And yet you ran away from your watan?’
‘People like you forced me to.’
‘Beghairat.’
‘At least I don’t spy for the infidel occupiers.’ Did my forehead have ‘coward’ written on it in Pashto, which everyone read in Afghanistan but no one could in England? With time, I loathed the word even more, the worst kind in Pashto, someone who lacked ‘self-honour’. Proved an Afghan a coward, you left him stripped of character.
‘Does your mother know his son’s planning to be a jihadist doctor?’
‘I’m not–’ Hold on… ‘How do you know I’ll be a doctor?’
‘I know plenty. Just finished university. Live in Durham. A member of Hezb-e-Tahrir. We work closely with our colleagues from MI5.’ His blue eyes beneath bushy eyebrows were fixed on me.
‘I’m a member of no Hezb.’ What the hell? Did MI5 spy on me?
The door clicked open. The man in the blue uniform dashed in. ‘Downstairs at once. Ten KG.’ His eyes travelled to the notes in his colleague’s hand.
‘As though the world didn’t suffice, they now fucking want to supply Mars?’ the man with the bushy brows said to his colleague. His face turned to me. ‘Listen, son of a whore. I don’t want any trouble in my city. Understood?’
‘Don’t dishonour me.’
A bang against my right ear, causing a ‘binging’ sound. Calling Mour a whore hurt more than the slap.
‘So what?’ He pointed to the desk. ‘Want me to shove its leg up your backside?’
‘You’re abusing your power.’
‘Another word and I’ll hang you by the beard.’
‘And violating my civil liberties.’
‘Chup.’
‘I want to speak to your superiors.’
‘I said fucking chup.’ His eyes popped out like a mad dog.
He took half a step closer, his shoulders level against my head, reminding me of the evil Mullah Rahmat. No, it won’t happen again. My legs trembled, and my heart beat fast. In the Name of Khudai, with His name nothing can cause harm in the earth nor in the heavens, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing, I recited a dua in my heart. The cigarette smell entered my nostrils as he put the money in its rightful place and pushed me towards the door. ‘The sooner you leave my city, the better.’
‘My diary?’
‘It stays here.’
I took a deep breath. ‘I won’t go without it.’ It belonged to Frishta’s grave.
He slapped it into my hand and told the other man to throw me out.
As I stepped outside, he made a cheesht sound. ‘I’m watching you.’
***
AFTER COLLECTING OUR luggage, consisting of bargain clothes from Primark as gifts for Shujah’s family, and taking Mour from the Prayer Room, an old-aged porter dawdled with us amidst a strong wind to Section C of the airport; Sections A and B served the elite.
The fenced-in section in the open air felt like a half-empty car park surrounded by billboards: Afghan cricketers in blue and red uniforms advertising 4G Internet; a young woman in an Afghani dress with gold threading detail and gold beads held a metal can, saying, My energy source to rap; and three young men and a woman in suits and ties inviting Afghans to their concert for the coming Eid. I’d been away from Afghanistan for more than two decades and recognised none of these faces. All my knowledge about post-invasion Afghanistan came from Nadir, a former lecturer at Kabul University and now a PhD student at Durham University, and Shujah. According to them, new Afghan singers, predominantly female, had blossomed since the American intervention in Afghanistan. Afghan TV channels invited indigenous and foreign singers from abroad to give concerts in the hundreds of newly built wedding halls in Kabul during Afghan festivals. Warlords owned many of those channels and halls. They’d once fought for Islam and now entertained Afghans, Nadir would say.
Beneath the fresh-faced celebrities on the billboards, however, in the blowing wind of a sunny mid-morning, waited men, women and children with weather-stricken faces. To the right, outside Section C, some dozen concrete barriers stood on either side of the road, leaving a narrow entrance for vehicles. Blue-uniformed policemen with Kalashnikovs manned it, one holding a German Shepherd searching a Toyota boot. A fine layer of dust covered their faces.
Deth-deth-deth-deth-deth shots of an AK-47 grabbed my attention. A jeep with tinted windows braked, making a screeching noise. A 16- or 17-year-old halek in a pakol hat jumped out of the vehicle, slapped, kicked and punched a policeman.
‘Please forgive him,’ a colleague of the policeman said.
‘He won’t stop your vehicle again,’ another said.
‘He didn’t recognise that you’re the Minister’s son,’ another colleague said, holding the dog leash.
‘He’ll fucking recognise me once he’s transferred to the frontline,’ the halek said and jumped into his jeep, revved the engine and drove off.
The victim policeman stood numb. A colleague picked up a hat from the ground and placed it over the beaten man’s dishevelled hair.
‘Salaam alaikum,’ a voice said. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll see plenty of such cinemas here.’ A man bowed and pecked Mour’s right hand. ‘Salaam alaikum, zoya.’ He embraced me, his pot belly getting in the way.
We greeted, and I planted a kiss on his hand with a strong, alcohol-smelling aftershave.
The clean-shaven, thick-haired Shujah of no more than 5 foot 3, who looked shorter in real life than on Skype, took the luggage from the porter and handed him a banknote; the man showed no gratitude. Instead, he looked at me, pointing to his white beard.
‘Fuck off,’ Shujah snapped, his small eyes disappearing into his wrinkled face.
Cursing Shujah under his breath, the porter walked off. I paced up, and placed a £5 note in his hand.
‘Leave me to deal with them; I know their language better,’ Shujah said once I caught up with him and Mour heading out.
‘They’ve swallowed billions of US dollars, yet they complain America has done nothing.’
‘America has stolen our mineral riches a hundred times more,’ Mour said.
‘Invaders rob; they don’t give,’ I said. A strong gust of wind lifted some dust, and particles of sand entered my mouth. ‘Why is it so dusty?’
‘Combination of the dry weather over the last few years and an influx in population,’ Shujah said, pulling the luggage.
I shielded my mouth and nose with my hand. His eyes narrowed.
‘What’re you grinning at?’
‘You so-called foreign Afghans have become a little delicate abroad. You all moan too much whenever you come back to Kabul.’
‘I didn’t mean to sound snobbish. Kabul was nowhere near as grey as when I was growing up.’ I recalled summers being hot and often windless. Even autumns brought both wind and rain, but hardly pollution.
Duvvv… The ground shook as if a colossal hand had shoved it. Everyone dropped face-down like trained soldiers, objects raining down on us. Mour and I ducked behind our suitcase above which a blood-flowing arm in blue uniform holding a silver dog chain landed. Bodyparts and debris had filled the ground. A thick, black pillar of smoke filled the air. My ears felt like someone had rung them with a sledgehammer. The smoke-like burning rubber tightened the muscles around my nose and throat, and compelled me to cough black mucus. Muffled cries, wails, screams of pain and coughs. A male scream topped everyone else’s: ‘My whole body’s burning, Khudai. My whole body’s burning.’
Mour and I dropped face-down following Shujah’s shouts to lie flat and not to move as there was often a further bomb. I checked on my hands and legs – thanks, Khudai, they weren’t missing; Mour and Shujah seemed OK. ‘Thanks, Khudai. Thanks, Khudai,’ I kept saying. I could’ve just died if I was a little closer to the blast. Writhing and yelping, all in either Pashto or Dari, continued on the other side. Blood kept gushing from the chopped arm onto the ground. Goose bumps pricked my skin, and I looked away. My heart pounded and my body shivered: the two physical sensations that’d become alien to me in England. The enormity of my decision sank in. I was in Kabul, even though I’d decided never to step back on its soil.
Earlier on, I spared Mour the unnecessary worries and myself timeless interrogations and hushed up everything about the windowless room. I knew what to do with MI5 or 6 – I couldn’t distinguish between the two once I returned to England. But what about Afghanistan, the ocean of troubles? What if the next blast wiped me out, or the NDS arrested me? If you got blown away by chance to an Afghan prison, Shujah often said, it’d take six months before they gave you a pen and paper to jot down your details. Worse, what if kidnappers…?
Shouts of blue-uniformed men and women like ants scattering from pick-ups and ordering us, the uninjured, to shift to the far corner until further notice, adding to keep a vigilant eye open for signs of a second attack.
I leaned against a concrete wall as events in the aftermath of the bomb attack unfolded. Men in white overalls picked up the dead bodies and the injured, removed the bodyparts and placed them in ambulances. Men in orange overalls swept together the shards of the broken windows and car parts and washed the streets, including our bloodstained, eight-wheel spinner suitcase.
Voices of the police shouted, ‘All’s normal’. Indeed, normal life continued after a 70-minute wait, as though nothing had just happened, when we drove through the blast-site where a fedayi, a suicide bomber, had slammed his vehicle into the entrance. New faces in blue uniforms searched the incoming vehicles; without the German Shepherd, though – unlike indigenous lives, foreign lives, human or otherwise, had real blood flowing in them, and the loss was investigated before a replacement was provided. But life would never be normal for those families who just lost their loved ones. My heart ached for them. We continued to die in wars that were never ours. I didn’t know when Khudai would have mercy on this land.
Mour thanked Khudai for having saved us all once Shujah drove his 1980s Russian Volga out of the airport, drifting amidst the strong wind blowing against us, at times making the air so thick with dust that we almost lost sight of the slow-moving vehicle in front.
‘Imagine it never happened: don’t think or talk about it. Otherwise, it’ll drive you crazy,’ Shujah said to Mour.
‘Best approach. Life must carry on,’ I said, finding myself sighing.
‘And don’t use up all of your prayers. You’ll need them,’ Shujah went on, looking at Mour in the rear-view mirror.
‘I told Ahmad we’ll find a suitable wife in England. But he won’t listen,’ Mour said.
‘Now you’re here, I’ve got to tell you the truth. I didn’t want you to come either,’ Shujah said.
Mour reiterated that she knew and told me so. ‘“Don’t let fear define you”, he’d say,’ Mour added in a deep voice, pointing at me.
Shujah sighed. ‘Kabul’s turned into a valley of the wolves.’
‘What Khudai wills happen, Inshallah, he’ll keep us safe,’ I said. My heart had dropped to my stomach, and my legs trembled. I’d experienced these symptoms at the start of year nine in school, and in Moscow, days before we set out for England. Would something horrible strike again? Mour wouldn’t be able to take it this time… Damn Satan. Khudai, I put my trust in You; may You look after us and take us in one piece back to England. Save us from all the evil of fedayi bombings, windowless rooms and kidnappings; please accept our prayers and help us find an honourable bride from a decent family.