A short man in a washed-out suit was gesturing. He leaned against a Russian jeep parked on the pedestrian way in front of the Russian-subsidised cooperative. My heart fell as the short man showed his red-coloured card: a KHAD agent.
‘Asnad?’ The KHAD agent checked our ‘documents’, tazkiras or birth certificates, and handed them back to Baktash and me. ‘This is fraudulent,’ he said to Wazir, holding his birth certificate. ‘You’re not 15.’ He pointed to Baktash and me. ‘15-year-olds look like them.’
I pleaded with Wazir last winter to shave his uneven beard with bald patches in between and his thin moustache, but he said the beard was part of the natural order, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, cursed those men who assumed the manners of women, and those women who assumed the manners of men. I warned him one day that his six-foot height, large muscles, and, above all, his facial hair would come to bring him harm.
If the security forces found you hadn’t done the two compulsory periods of military service and were between 18 and 40, they conscripted you. We still had four more years to finish school before they lawfully enlisted us. But if you looked bigger and stronger for your age, they picked you up from the street regardless of your student status or age, and soon you found yourself in the first line of the battlefield, fighting the mujahideen – an almost guaranteed death. Every day we saw or heard of Afghan security forces’ coffins getting transported to Kabul.
In 1933, a student shot dead King Nadir Shah, who’d gone to a school to award medals to students. His tomb sat atop the Teppe Maranjan, which became home to hundreds of kite flyers during kite festivals. However, its outskirts served another purpose: a graveyard to which the security forces’ coffins made their final journey. The Kabul government called it the Teppe-e-Martyrs, and it almost ran out of space. To compensate for the loss, the KHAD, the Ministry of Defence and the Interior Ministry scattered their people in the streets of Kabul to check documents. Haleks acted blind or mute, and even wore women’s clothes to save themselves from askari, conscription.
‘How come you’re 15 when you’re taller than Amitabh Bachchan and more muscular than Rambo?’
‘None of your business,’ Wazir said.
‘Don’t give me that look.’
‘I swear on Khudai he is. We were born in the same year and grew up in the same block,’ I said, praying Wazir didn’t do something stupid, like punching the agent and running away. The two men in khaki military uniforms sitting in the jeep and holding their Kalashnikovs would shoot him dead.
Like any other morning, business as usual pushed on for everyone else around. Drivers from white and yellow taxis shouted, ‘To town, to town,’ while loud Indian and Afghan music played on their cassette players. Civil servants – in suits and ties, skirts and leggings, jackets and coats – waited for their work transport on both sides of the road, with a handful of men puffing on cigarettes. Overhead on the balconies, above the acacias and willows, Makroryanis, mostly women, in warm pyjamas and jackets, carried on with their daily routines of hanging their washing, talking to neighbours, or observing the hectic road with steaming cups of tea in their hands. No one cared why the KHAD agent conscripted a 15-year-old student – not even the students and ustads walking to school.
‘We’ve been in school since year one. You’re mistaken,’ Baktash said.
‘Hazara and you, handsome, you’re getting late – go to your class,’ the agent said, pointing with his head to the school walls located two hundred metres away.
‘I’m Uzbek, not Hazara.’
‘Is there a difference? They all have a flat nose.’ His eyes travelled to the sudden movement of people towards the opposite side, the Makroryan Market. A white and blue Tata pulled over at the stop, and scores of men and women pushed and squeezed past with yelping and swearing to get into the already filled bus.
‘He’s big because he goes to the gym,’ I said.
‘Good, we need people like him in the frontline,’ he said, still gaping at the bus pulling out with passengers hanging out from its doors. His moustache covered his upper lip; his lower lip and face had turned purple.
‘But he’s not 18 yet. You can’t take him away,’ I said.
‘We’ll let him go if his tazkira wasn’t fraudulent.’
‘Will you?’ Baktash said. The chilly weather had caused a fluttering of redness across his nose and chubby cheeks.
‘No, he won’t. He’ll do what they did to Mustapha from Block 15. We won’t go without Wazir,’ I said.
Last autumn, security forces picked up the 17-year-old Mustapha from outside his school. A month later the family had lamentation over his coffin. Mustapha entered in the flesh. The mother fainted; the sisters and other female relatives rushed out of the room, shrieking. Men in the adjacent room abandoned reading the Quran and dashed in, wrestling Mustapha down. Mustapha cried out that he wasn’t a ghost and that the Ministry of Defence had got it wrong, as, unlike his colleague in the coffin, he made it out alive. The family broke the wooden coffin in disobedience of the military, only to discover stones with pieces of human flesh drenched in rose water perfume. But three months later the family wasn’t lucky: this time, Mustapha’s corpse lay in the coffin sprayed with rose water fragrance.
To my horror, he placed Wazir’s birth certificate in his jacket’s side pocket and made Wazir sit between the two military men in the jeep. The rear left side door remained open, perhaps for more conscripts.
Agha had already left for work; so had Baktash’s father. Clueless about a solution but desperate to do something, I looked around in despair, supplicating to Khudai to help me spot a neighbour or one of Agha’s friends, or even a male ustad to help release Wazir from the death penalty, when my eyes caught the crazy jelai in the school outfit across the road. Not at this time, I thought, and turned around, my heart beating faster. Because of her, Mour hit Nazo’s palms with a stick this morning, warning my sister to stay away from the crazy jelai and telling me to be vigilant.
A taxi on the road put on Naghma and Mangal’s attan song and drove off, its passengers grumbling about the ‘incompetent government’.
‘Why’s Wazir in the jeep?’
I took a deep breath of fresh air and read Ice Cream and Burgers for Sale on the window of our favourite shop.
The agent signalled to a tall student. Changed his mind as the student got closer. You couldn’t miss the relief on the student’s face.
‘I’ve asked you a question, mister,’ the crazy jelai said.
Dark clouds rolled in the sky above the trees and the blocks of flats behind them.
‘He doesn’t believe Wazir is 15,’ Baktash said, blowing on his hands.
‘I confirm he is,’ the crazy jelai said.
‘How?’ the agent asked.
‘He’s in my class.’
‘Hold up your jeans.’
Wazir glared.
The agent told one of his men in the military uniform to execute the order.
Please don’t do something stupid, Wazir, I said in my heart.
The man pulled up Wazir’s black jeans and revealed his lower hairy legs.
‘Look, he’s got more hair on his legs than I do. Twice as tall as I am, yet you confirmhe’s 15.’
‘That’s how Khuda jan has created him,’ the crazy jelai said.
‘Because he eats too much.’
‘Shut up, Baktash,’ I said.
‘It’s true,’ Baktash mumbled.
A coach bus pulled over. Its doors opened with a hissing sound before a queue of civil servants emerged.
I swore again that Wazir was what his birth certificate showed, my hands and feet becoming numb with the cold. He pushed me and asked one of his men to switch on the engine. The military man stepped to the front, behind the steering wheel.
‘You will not move the jeep,’ the crazy jelai said and waved away the black exhaust from the coach.
The agent snickered. ‘What can you do?’
‘You’ll see.’ Her eyes moved to a Makarov on the agent’s right hip.
‘Is he a classmate or lunda?’
The military man behind the steering wheel sniggered at the word ‘boyfriend’. The sky roared.
‘My brother.’ The crazy jelai stepped before the jeep, dropped her schoolbag and stretched herself out on the concrete.
The coach bus doors closed with a hissing sound and pulled out, its passengers’ eyes fixated on the crazy jelai.
Could she have not stood before the vehicle? It’d still prevent the jeep from moving. The shameful jelai treasured drama.
Now onlookers gathered around to watch a jelai in a black outfit and white headscarf, having lain down on the wet ground, passionately arguing with the most feared people in Kabul, warning them over her dead body they’d take Wazir for askari.
The crazy jelai lifted her head from the schoolbag, and her headscarf fell. ‘Ahmad, go and get padar jan.’ She sounded like she’d given birth to me. ‘For your information,’ she flicked her eyes to the agent, ‘my father is a deputy in the KHAD, and my aka jan, Ahmad’s father, is Azizullah Azizi.’
The agent eyed me up and down.
‘That’s right. It’s him, Senior Political and Foreign Policy Advisor to the President,’ the crazy jelai continued. She pulled her headscarf up and tightened it against the chin.
‘The law applies equally to all.’ You couldn’t miss the sudden softness in his otherwise harsh tone.
She told Baktash to go to school and let the mudir know. Asking me by name and ordering me what to do embarrassed – even angered – me, but I had no chance except to obey the crazy jelai. Her father was the only remaining hope to save my best friend. I sprinted in between the blocks of flats and the dark green Russian Volgas and jeeps parked before them, breathing in and out the fresh air coupled with the scent of trees about to wake up for the spring. My heart sank when Mahjan said Brigadier had already left. I hurried back to Wazir, panting and gasping. They weren’t there. Had the agent taken them? I felt lost. Besides, I dreaded Mour’s reaction to me running late for school. I didn’t remember a day entering the class after the ustad. Learning was built on previous learning; you could never make up for an absence, Mour believed.
I raced back to Mahjan’s to see if she could inform Brigadier of her daughter and my best friends’ disappearance. The day brightened as my eyes caught Wazir, his mother, Aday, the crazy jelai, and Brigadier by the garden of Wazir’s corridor. Brigadier’s two bodyguards in military uniforms stood by the dark green Russian Volga a few metres away near the lawn where the gardener trimmed the bushes. I uttered a salaam, suppressing my breathlessness and the pain from my arm, which I must’ve scratched on a thorny bush.
Brigadier discussed the government’s desperate need for more security forces and how we had to take caution. Luckily, earlier Brigadier spotted Wazir and the daughter driving past the road; otherwise Wazir would’ve had his head shaved and on his way to the frontline.
Wazir nodded. The Volga engine started.
Aday told Brigadier she had one child left, but the government wanted to have him dead, too.
The mujahideen killed Wazir’s elder brother, a second lieutenant in the Army, in the Jalalabad Battle following the departure of the Soviet troops. A year later, the Parchami President Najibullah bombed the Royal Palace of Darul Aman to defeat General Shahnawaz Tanai and his Khalqi followers’ coup. Aka Iqbal was ‘unrecognisable’ when they pulled his body out of the rubble, as were parts of the palace that European architects built in King Amanullah’s era.
Wazir and Aday lived on Wazir’s father and brother’s inadequate death gratitude payments. His clothes no longer originated from the posh Jamhuriat Market but from bazzar-e-lilami, second-hand markets in Foroshgah. He had worn the same pair of black jeans and shirts for a year now. Aday could afford to cook one type of food: piawa, onion, oil and boiled water. Mour and khala Lailuma, Baktash’s mother, often dispatched a plate of ‘tasty’ food to the family, especially Wazir’s favourite kichri quroot, short-grained rice, quroot made from dried yoghurt, and meatballs. A dish only tasted delicious when Wazir received a plate.
Wazir told me that Aday never stopped mourning the losses. Every night she spoke to aka Iqbal’s Army uniform with one star on the shoulders hung as he’d left it. Wazir hid emotions, but I discerned he was sad on the inside; he missed his father. Initially, he hated the Parchamis for political autocracy in the power-sharing government and, after the unsuccessful coup, for killing his father. Later, he despised both the Khalqis and the Parchamis. The poverty and Aday’s constant sorrows compelled Wazir to spend time away from home. Mour and khala Lailuma threatened us with a father’s punishment if we disobeyed our timetables. There was no father to discipline Wazir. No schedule to follow. No future career to aim at, apart from pumping up his body and dreaming of the jihad. He was a loose cannon.
Aday expressed her gratitude to Brigadier, who told the dark brown woman with a shoulder-length black headscarf that she really should thank us. He placed his cold hand on my hair and gently shook my head. If only Agha were such a cool father. We must leave now or Mour would notice, I thought. I peeped up and, to my relief, our balcony was closed. Two corridors down above the exhaust steam of the Volga, khala Lailuma hung clothes on the patio, but the trees comfortingly obscured her view.
Aday stroked the crazy jelai’s head and kissed her on the forehead, thanking her for giving another life to her son.
Wazir wasn’t only a son to Aday, but also a brother to the crazy jelai, replied the crazy jelai. Aday said that from that day on she was her ‘daughter’.
Brigadier planted a kiss on the daughter’s head and said how proud a father he was.
***
THE METAL GATE made a screeching sound as the school keeper opened it.
‘Frishta’s the type who’d sacrifice her life for you,’ Wazir said.
The sound of students reading the renowned Pashtun poet and philosopher Rahman Baba’s poem out loud echoed in the corridor.
‘You’re the smartest, Ahmad. Help her with the exams.’
I suggested we needed to be more careful where we went. We were to stop taking evening strolls to the Makroryan Market, where we ate burgers and ice creams in restaurants and listened to loud Indian songs, to save ourselves from not just the askari, but also the random rockets. Wazir and Baktash to give up their gyms. I sounded like Mour, but I didn’t want to lose my best friends. Wazir spent two to three hours daily in the body-lifting gym, where he worked on his own. Last year he persuaded me to join as he needed a training partner. Agha said to ask Mour, but Mour didn’t permit it in case I sustained a spinal injury. I must advance my education instead of strengthening my muscles, she advised: ‘A quality education lands you a good job like Agha has. Get bodyguards then.’
We asked for permission to enter the classroom; the Pashto ustad wrote on the blackboard with a scraping chalk sound: Your beatings were sweeter than the love of others, Your harsh words were better than the prayers of others. The ustad asked for the author’s name and who they wrote the poem for.
Blank expressions in the classroom.
‘Ghani Khan, son of Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The poem was for his mother, whom he adored,’ I said with hesitation.
‘Why? Not you, Ahmad.’
Jasmine aroma and panting came from behind.
‘Why did he adore his mother…? Come on.’
Blank faces.
‘Ahmad.’
‘He was seriously ill, dying. His mother prayed and supplicated to Khudai to take her away instead of her six-year-old son. She died; Ghani Baba lived.’
She uttered an afarin and gestured to come in, saying no word about our lateness. She carried on scraping the chalk against the blackboard, writing the remaining poem.
‘I’ve been so worried,’ Baktash whispered from behind.
‘You were meant to get the mudir?’ I murmured.
‘Baz Muhammad sat me in the class.’
‘Did you tell him about Wazir?’
‘He said, “The school will have one dumb student fewer”.’
‘He’ll burn in the Hell, the Communist,’ Wazir said.
‘Can I be your friend?’
I looked at Wazir and wanted him to say yes. Wazir was in a world of his own.
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