Chapter Thirty-Three
Mour planted a kiss on my head and thanked Khudai. I pulled my head away as she aimed to kiss me again. Hobbled to my place in the lounge, heavy with freshly sprayed vanilla, and sat on the mattress. Shujah and Mour took their places. The wrinkles on Shujah’s forehead had increased in number.
‘It’s all my doing, I’m sorry,’ Nazigul said. She didn’t sit by Mour. Perhaps she sensed I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, so kept a distance. Her eyes had turned red, and since I’d stepped into the apartment, she’d kept thanking Khudai.
I chose not to say anything, thinking whether she was also an accomplice to Mour’s lies.
One of the twins shrieked in the parallel room and Amina threw open the door, warning that she wouldn’t babysit her little siblings anymore if they interfered with her studies. Shujah raised his voice, telling the ‘fatherless’ children to behave or else he’d throw them off the balcony. Amina darted off.
‘Getting married into a Pashtun family involves going through pain,’ Shujah said to me.
I wondered if he might’ve given Mour the news on Frishta’s rebirth. Mour might’ve silenced them. Shujah and Nazigul abided because they didn’t want Mour to throw them out of the apartment, or, at the very least, impose a rent. They endured mother-and-son arguments, confined their children to one room, so their noises didn’t cause Mour a headache, and took time off work to do my khastegari to be able to live rent-free. Or perhaps, to please Mour further, they – more likely Shujah – might’ve given Mour the idea not to reveal to me Frishta’s revival. Mour normally wasn’t that imaginative.
‘What did you think of the jelai?’ Instead of thinking about Nazia and her obro and ezat and feeling guilty for having faked Frishta’s death, my selfish Mour sought to know my opinion on the jelai. I wanted to smash the window panes, punch the radiant crystal light dangling from the ceiling, and tear the kilims to pieces. But furiousness doesn’t justify a destructive response: things get worse when you react in the heat of the moment, my psychiatrist colleague used to say.
‘If you mean Nazia, she’s a child. I can’t marry a child.’
‘In this case, don’t ever get married. Age wifeless,’ Mour said, telling Nazigul to open the door to let the evening breeze in through the window.
I cursed Satan. I avoided people with emotions; today I struggled to control mine. The woman in the brown dress sitting at the top of the room by the open windows reminded me of the misery, pain and sleepless nights I’d gone through for Frishta’s death. All but for Mour’s lies.
Every time Mour talked of Nazo and Zarghuna, or Agha, or whenever someone mentioned war, Mujahideen, the Taliban, mina, or anything on Afghanistan, my thoughts raced to Frishta. What would Frishta have looked like if she was alive? What would’ve she done for work? How many children would we have? Some nights, Frishta came into my dreams, sometimes smiling, sometimes crying, and most of the time wandering around. I’d shout I was there for her, but she wouldn’t hear me, and vanish. I’d wake up, perform ablutions, pray nafl-prayers, read the Quran, and pray for her. Mour said the dead needed prayers when they came into your dreams. I spent most of the nights praying for Frishta in Ramadans. I didn’t remember a day I missed a prayer in the past 21 years, or a prayer in which I didn’t pray for Frishta.
After Frishta, I looked up to Mour as my role model. She had taught me that Islam prohibited lies, but she hated Frishta to the extent she let herself be guided by lies. Like Afghanistan, Mour gave me everything with one hand and took it away with another.
‘Did you ask for Frishta’s help?’
‘Amina phoned her,’ Shujah said.
‘Did you speak to her, Mour?’
‘Actually–’
‘Aka Shujah, I’m asking Mour.’
‘Yes, I did. What do you want to prove?’
‘When did you find out Frishta was alive?’
Silence, save the rustling of leaves outside the windows.
‘I asked you a question.’
Silence. Amina’s muffled voice pleading with the siblings not to touch her books.
‘Why have you been feeding me lies all these years, Mour?’
‘Mour thinks about your well-being,’ Shujah said.
‘I almost lost my health because of her lies. Was that for my fucking well-being?’
‘Mour protected your family name. Frishta wasn’t the sort of jelai one could recommend as a wife.’
‘What was wrong with her?’
Shujah wanted to say something but hesitated.
‘I’ll tell you, brother,’ Mour said to Shujah. ‘She spent a year in Moscow alone, and Khudai knows how many Russians she slept with, yet he quite happily saw her as my daughter-in-law.’
‘Did you see her sleeping with Russians? Baseless defamation is a sin.’
‘An actor’s daughter only becomes a whore. A harami–’
‘Bas,’ I said as the slanderous word ‘harami’ hit me like a bullet. ‘Fuck family name. Fuck obro and ezat. Fuck parents’ respect.’ I hated the serial swearers and the bad-tempered, but today I had turned into one.
Shujah scowled. Mour glanced at me, then averted her gaze to the kilim. Nazigul flinched and rushed out of the room.
‘I won’t tolerate anything bad being said about Frishta.’ Mour should’ve known her place. So did Shujah. ‘If I find out you’ve helped Mour to hide Frishta from me, aka Shujah, I’d ask you to fuck off from my flat.’ I could no longer try to sound reasonable on the outside.
Mour had the right to advise me on Frishta’s suitability as a wife; she had no right to steal her from me. I didn’t know what to do with Mour, or what to think of her anymore. I tried to shut out what was on my mind, but it burst through. ‘Until this morning I thought of you as a caring mother. You turned out to be a poisonous snake. You’ve been biting me all these years and I didn’t even know it.’
Her eyes didn’t move; they sat on the kilim.
‘I feel like a child whose mother purposely turned him into a drug addict so that she had control over his life,’ I said as if to myself, and my voice broke.
I’d hardly seen Mour shed tears since Agha and my sisters’ deaths. She was a worrying type except with no tears. Perhaps her limitless sorrow had drained her fluid. Not today – tears seeped down her cheeks. Her son’s shocking behaviour compelled her eyes to dig in and produce the last reserved fluid. A son who used a crane to demolish a castle he’d spent every hour of every day of the past 36 years building.
‘As good as a diamond?’ Shujah muttered and shook his head.
His mocking stung. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘If you swear one more time in my house, I’ll break your mouth. Had enough of you, piss pants.’
Shujah’s outburst increased my heartbeat. The words ‘piss pants’ felt like a mujahideen rocket, but Frishta’s voice whispered, Fuck what people think about Ahmad. Live for others.
‘Brother, he’s my son.’
‘And you failed to teach the coward manners. The result of a fatherless upbringing.’
‘Leave my husband out of this, please.’
Nazigul burst in and rushed to Shujah, ‘Please, don’t make a scene. They’re all I’ve got.’
Shujah’s hand travelled backwards and forward and banged against Nazigul’s face, forcing her head to bump into the wall.
‘Whore, chup.’
‘Are you not ashamed of raising your hand to a woman?’ I said.
Kids’ cries filled the hallway.
‘You’re supposed to be a man, piss pants. Come on,’ Shujah said and jumped on me like a venomous spider. My body unashamedly froze. He put his hands around my neck and squeezed me against the wall. His palms compressed my throat; I could feel my oesophagus closing. Mour and Nazigul pulled his hands, begging him to let go.
He released his grip, uttering coward.
I gasped for breath.
‘I don’t want to see your face again in this house,’ he said and made for the door.
‘This is our flat,’ I said breathlessly, my voice faltering to my disgust.
‘It’s mine now. I spent money refurbishing it.’ He stood by the door.
Nazigul burst into tears.
‘We sent you the money. How is it yours?’ I said.
‘This’s my husband’s,’ Mour said, her muscles tensing.
‘Your alcoholic husband should’ve come out of the fish stomach and saved it from the Mujahid commander.’ He slammed the door and dashed off.
‘The proverb is right: don’t stretch a helping hand and you won’t meet problems,’ Mour said.
I remembered Shujah imploring Agha, his ‘elder brother’, on the phone more than two decades ago to let him move into our apartment in Makroryan. Shujah, Nazigul and her mother, Agha’s aunt, had just returned from Pakistan after ten years and had no place to live. Mour told Agha to help them. Neither of my parents had any siblings, so Shujah and Nazigul were the only close relatives as such. I heard Mour many times refer to him as the brother she never had. Every time I transferred money to Baktash and Mr Barmak’s families from Moscow, I also sent some to him. Mour and I carried on helping him out from England. One clarification, though: you’d hardly find an Afghan with no relatives. We used to visit many trors and akas on Eids and Nowruzes back in Kabul, but we’d lost touch, partly because Mour as ‘a Pashtun widow’ kept herself to herself, and partly, I realised now, because Shujah kept them from us.
Nazigul wept.
Amina entered and sat by her mother. ‘Didn’t take even three days before he showed his true colours,’ Amina said.
‘I wish I died the day I got engaged to him,’ Nazigul said.
‘He’s gone gambling,’ Amina said.
‘What? We’ve given him £6,000 and our passports,’ Mour said. Like me, she sounded stunned.
‘The minute you gave him the pounds, he’s itching to gamble them,’ Amina said.
‘Na?’ Mour slapped her face in shock.
‘He’ll probably sell the passports to human traffickers,’ continued Amina.
‘You should’ve told me,’ Mour said to Nazigul.
‘He would’ve killed Mum,’ Amina said.
‘Oh, my Khudai. How do we get back to England?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Nazigul burst into tears. A neighbour played Indian music as loud as my heart’s palpitations.
‘He doesn’t give us a penny you send,’ Amina said.
‘Tawba-tawba,’ Mour said, repenting to Khudai for Shujah’s sins.
‘He wanted to wed me with an old man for a fatty walwar, but Mum warned she’d throw herself from the balcony if he went ahead.’
Mour slapped her face, this time with both hands, and uttered another tawba-tawba. The last revelation shocked me even more. Amina was just a kid.
‘Has he transferred the ownership of the flat?’ I asked Nazigul.
‘He’s been visiting the court in Surobi; he might have. He won’t tell me,’ Nazigul said, asking for forgiveness.
I remembered Mour and me travelling to the Afghan Embassy in London to give him a power of attorney so that he fought the Mujahid commander, who later defected to the Taliban. He must have used the document to transfer ownership.
‘Ahmad brother. Please don’t fight with him. He’s so bad he can hurt you,’ Amina said.
‘Over my dead body,’ Mour said. My mother had more courage than me.
‘Don’t worry for tonight. He won’t come back. He’ll be in the orchard in Bagrami, drinking, womanising and gambling until morning,’ Amina said, disclosing other shocking revelations about Shujah.
Mour slapped her face, again with two hands; Nazigul broke into fresh tears. Amina put her head on her mother’s lap, her eyes welling up. The Indian song played at high volume.
I slipped out.
***
BOTH PHYSICAL AND MENTAL pain had overwhelmed – actually concussed – me, but the mental one was more excruciating. I didn’t know why I had the urge to scream and swear. Was it for the rebirth of Frishta? The humiliation of Nazia? Discovering a new side of Shujah? My cowardice? Or for Mour’s betrayal?
How wrong I’d been all these years about Mour. I still couldn’t believe Mour was capable of such deception. Shujah likewise. Given his consistent advice on Skype about the importance of Pashtunwali, his lectures on Afghan history and his good-natured jokes, I’d have never suspected Shujah of committing such grave sins. Every time we spoke on Skype, when he sat on the Afghan rug behind the iPad camera in this very room I was now in, he’d temporarily excuse himself for a few minutes to pray. We thought we’d been supporting the family all these years, but Shujah gambled our money and starved his children. And had Frishta helped only to insult me? She knew too well I hated womanising, so why did she sting me with the word ‘pervert’? Given Frishta’s unpredictable nature, our unsettled account, and the police chief’s fierce eyes, I lost heart when he pointed his gun at me. Mind you, powerful people in Afghanistan did have the licence to kill.
And, importantly, what of my cowardice? Shujah had taken my property, my naamus, by force. I decided to pluck up my courage and stand up to Shujah earlier on, but my body trembled, heart pounding as loud as the dhol, and I froze like a coward. I knew why? After two decades of trying repeatedly to stand up for myself, it still happened to my body when it discerned violence. Damn it. Millions of Afghans sacrificed their lives to claim back their national honour from invaders, but I chickened out to defend mine. If there was no fear, there’d be no need for courage, Frishta’s voice whispered. I took a deep breath and swore that,like my ancestors, I’d give up my head but wouldn’t allow Shujah to grab my property.
A thud sound, followed by Nazigul’s scream. Mour has had a stroke, I thought, and rushed out of my room to witness a moment I’d never forget. Nazigul in the hallway with a Nokia handset in her right hand, her face as ashen as the Salang Mountains’ snow.
‘Khudajan, forgive me. Tawba-tawba, forgive me,’ Nazigul said, tears coming down her cheeks. She tilted backwards. Amina and Mour held Nazigul against the concrete wall, but her legs were bent forward, her back pushing down against the wall heater. Her brown headscarf collapsed onto her shoulders. I, a non-mahram, couldn’t touch her.
‘What’s happened?’ Mour asked, pulling the headscarf over her hair.
‘She’s dead.’
‘Who?’ Mour said, her face as pale as Nazigul.
‘Nazia’s just hanged herself. Her mother cried her heart out. Khudai–’ Nazigul’s eyes closed.
‘Mum’s dead,’ one of the twins said.
Mour told them off, ordering them to go back into their room. Nazigul breathed. I told Amina to position her on her back and loosen her dress around the neck. Rushed to the kitchen, filled a cup with water and offered it to Nazigul. She opened her eyes. Took a few sips.
‘She wanted to prove… she was as chaste as the daughter of the Prophet, peace be upon him,’ Nazigul said, and a tear made its way from the corner of her left eye. She looked as if she’d cried and screamed all day.
Mour wiped Nazigul’s tears, telling her it was Nazia’s fate.
‘And she was as virtuous. I’m a witness to this. Khudai, please forgive me. I’m the engineer of all this.’ Nazigul went on begging for Khudai’s forgiveness.
I, more than Nazigul, felt responsible for Nazia’s death but shed no tears. The immensity of the painful events in the past days had baffled me. Frishta failed. I did destroy Nazia’s life, but Nazia didn’t allow me to stain her honour. Khushal Baba once said:
Let the head be gone, wealth be gone, but the honour must not go because the whole of the dignity of a man is due to this honour.
Nazia was courageous enough to prove her dignity. But I… A hand held my throat and pressed against it. Shujah’s apartment felt as small as District Nine’s cells.
***
I TOOK A DEEP breath and hobbled, letting the warm breeze touch my cheeks. Like the lit Makroryan flats, bright stars and a half-moon shone out of the sky. A star twinkled and dropped. Maybe Nazia’s star said its goodbyes from this world of lies and betrayals. I took a stroll the same way I’d taken one 21 years ago with Baktash. Our last stroll. What an innocent time it was. I’d urged no one to commit suicide.
Men played cards on the grass in front of their block. Young haleks sat cross-legged in a circle, and two wrestled each other in a brightly lit lawn before the next block. Senior men with white hats, pakols and turbans perambulated, perhaps waiting for the Isha Prayer. Teenaged haleks and some jelais wandered in twos and threes, licking ice creams, sipping juice or carrying shopping bags. Muffled beats of Afghan, Indian and even English music thumped through flats and passing vehicles. Makroryanis lived their everyday lives without Nazia. She’d lived last night this time; maybe she prepared her homework for school, working hard for a future she’d never have. My khastegari played the leading part in stopping her from seeing that future.
The Makroryan Market arrived. Even the fluorescent lights in its shops, which made the place as bright as a summer morning, and the smell of the freshly made mango and banana juice couldn’t brighten up one of my darkest days. My feet took me to the mini-restaurant where my childhood friends and I used to eat burgers and ice creams. It had turned into an estate agent’s, and a man with a large moustache sat behind a desk. Like the ice cream shop, my best friends had vanished. They weren’t around to help their friend. The hand tightened against my throat. I wandered back down.
My eyes drifted to the barefoot young haleks playing khusai on the dimly lit lawn before Shujah’s block. They held their right feet with their left hands at the back, hobbled with their left feet, and wrestled with their right hands, panting, puffing and yelling. It brought back memories from the old days. We’d divide into two teams of three or more, and push, pull and wrestle each other until one side let go of his holding leg or fell on the ground. Wazir alone wrestled three players. Whoever had Wazir on his team won the tournament. The very same play on the very same lawn, but different players, I thought. I was ready to pay half of what I possessed to relive those childhood moments; pay the other half to suspend them until death. At least Nazia’s life could’ve been spared. And I’d have not emigrated to England.
England felt like a golden cage. From the outside, life looked as if days were Eid and nights Barat; but, from the inside, it tasted like a cucumber: neither sweet nor bitter. The English had their weekends to go to nightclubs or pubs. They celebrated Christmas and Easter. Went on holiday and visited their relatives and friends. We neither had relatives, nor celebrated Christmas or Easter. It didn’t make sense to celebrate our festivals without families and friends. At times I didn’t even realise the arrival of Nowruz. During Eids, I offered the Eid Prayer in the mosque, and off I went to the workplace or university. During all those years I never heard the sound of azan from the mosque, but from my phone.
There was no Khana Takani, cleaning home. No queuing for hours in Mandawi to buy kulcha-e-Eid or kulcha-e-Nowruz. No new clothes to put on. No Agha to give me eidi money. No Wazir and Baktash to accompany me to neighbours to ‘Eid Mubarak’ them, Happy Eid, and ask for eidi. No Wazir’s mother to offer us home-made khajor. No Makroryan Market to spend all the eidi money on shornakhud, egg tapping and fanfares. No trors and akas to visit and hide-and-seek with their children over the rooftops. No fancy dinners in their houses. No lounges full of trays of baklava, cream rolls and half a dozen dried fruits. No sisters to fight with over trors and akas’ eidis. I envied my ancestors; they were the most fortunate people. They were born, grew up and died in the same country; never had to go through the humiliation of emigrating to another country where everything felt foreign and, importantly, never traded their identity for their security.
London had a sizable Afghan community, and during our special holidays it organised Afghan concerts with Afghan comedians from Europe and America. Mour and I neither approved of concerts nor could afford to buy train fares, let alone concert tickets. A few times we travelled to London for our passports and asylum applications or my khastegari during our 16 years in England; otherwise, we stayed put in Durham and, like a machine, worked, studied and slept.
England was the Amazon jungle where no species had any idea about me or my past, however. I didn’t know the next-door neighbours by their proper names, even though we’d lived next to one another for years. No one interfered in my business or told me how to live my life. No one taunted me with coward or, worse, piss pants. Conversely, they perceived me, to my pleasant shock, as ‘courageous’. They saw me as courageous, in large part, because of Frishta and perhaps, in small part, owing to the nature of the struggle to fight for racial equality in a non-violent way. There you didn’t have to physically fight your war to take revenge, anyway; everyone was allocated a powerful bodyguard: the rule of law. It always – well, almost always – stood by the victim. I lived a new life.
My eyes drifted to the half-open basement door of the block, the very door Frishta retreated to in my dreams. I’d taken the basement as a grave. But why would Frishta wander there if she was alive? I found myself passing through the metre-long door and stepping down a couple of stairs. No sign of Frishta, but the musty place had a calmness to it. The hand around my neck eased its grip. I leaned against the hard concrete, placed my hands on the warm floor and wept like a young halek, asking Khudai for forgiveness for Nazia’s death. The hand around my neck released its grip and my eyes closed.
***
I OPENED MY EYES and they were acquainted with the darkness. I saw the empty place in the middle where once the young Frishta sat, her head on her father’s arm, her brother and Zarghuna playingmarbles. Ironically, I sat in the exact place where young Ahmad used to sit, eating chips, while Mour talked to Frishta’s mother. Agha and Brigadier listened to the BBC News on the portable radio. 11 more families from our corridor squeezed themselves into that little section of the basement: the cries of children, the conversation of women, the smell of chips and the smoke of small fires. I saw my past, even though more than two decades had elapsed.
Faith, if you believed in it, united me again with my past. Khudai indeed had accepted my prayers for Frishta in the Makroryan Mosque. The time had come to disclose to each other what we hadn’t dared to do then.