Chapter Eleven
The following day, to many students’ horror, the buffalo-headed Mullah Rahmat showed up at the assembly. He’d dismissed Raziq Khan for failing to follow his ‘clear instructions’ and reiterated his ‘feet-and-the-halek’s-stomach’ threat.
We marched into separate year nine classes: one all jelais; the other all haleks. We were in the nine alef, and Frishta and Roya in the nine jeem, the room opposite us. The segregation applied to lower classes, too, as appeared later. The partitioning turned out to be chaotic because the school lacked enough ustads for the newly formed classes. For the first subject of the day, history, Mahbuba jan had to join Frishta and our classes – an occurrence we soon got used to. The feminine Shafih and the new classmate, Jawad, clapped as jelais entered the classroom.
Mahbuba jan dropped the third bombshell of the day: the new mudir banned female students and ustads from wearing short skirts and leggings; they must dress in a long headscarf to cover all their hair. Although the school policy required the jelais – even female ustads – to wear a headscarf, many ignored it. Instead, the jelais wore a short headscarf or no headscarf, and female ustads put on short skirts and leggings. Raziq Khan turned a blind eye to both.
Students bombarded Mahbuba jan with questions. One didn’t have a headscarf, another didn’t like it, and yet another pleaded with the ustad not to impose it on them.
‘This is an order from mudir saheb,’ Mahbuba jan raised her voice, quietening everyone else. The new dress code also applied to the ustads, she reminded her angry students as she stood by the ustad desk in front of the blackboard.
‘He’s taking us back to the Middle Ages, ustad.’ Frishta’s voice came from the back of the jelai row.
We hadn’t spoken a word since last night – Frishta had been avoiding me.
‘Mudir sahebfollows Islam.’
‘He’s using Islam. Islam is about respecting women, not oppressing them. Today he imposes hijab; tomorrow he’ll order us to sit at home.’
‘Frishta, stop crying. It’s good for us all to dress by the Islamic rules.’ Mahbuba jan walked through the aisle with a high-heeled click-clack sound and stroked her ‘favourite’ student’s head. Frishta wouldn’t be comforted – she still sobbed. Mahbuba jan buried her face in Frishta’s bosom as though the ustad herself cried out for comfort. Jelais, one by one, joined them at the back of the class and put their arms around one another, weeping and sobbing as if the monster div had demanded a jelai each day for dinner.
I didn’t understand why Frishta cried because Mullah Rahmat’s new dress code didn’t affect her. She dressed like her heroine Malalai Anna; her headscarf alone was long enough to make headscarves for all the jelais of the class.
***
AFTER THE break, the nine jeem joined us again for algebra. We stood up in respect once the ustad, Baz Muhammad, nicknamed Mr Stalin, knocked on the door panel with his famous wooden stick. His presence in the class ensured students sat with one hundred per cent discipline. Although he became our ustad only this year, he’d filled in several classes last year for his best friend, the geometry ustad. After Rashid, he and his stick constituted another reason we viewed year nine with trepidation. Countless students had gone to the edara to seek medical help for their tender hands, sometimes for their bleeding noses, all because of his stick. We cut our break short in the sunny schoolyard earlier when we heard he was back from an absence following his wife’s ‘serious accident’.
On the positive side, he loved his students like ‘his own’ children. ‘That’s probably why Khudai has failed to allow me to reproduce; the only purpose we human beings are put on earth to serve,’ he often said. Passionate about mathematics, ustads classed him as one of the best in Kabul. Like any other member of the Hezb-e-Democratic, he touched no bribe despite living in poverty with his invalid wife, whom he took care of: perhaps this was the reason he always came across as sleepy. When you asked him a question, he stayed behind to ensure you learned, even if it required hours outside school time. And he never failed students.
We began to prepare an answer for the algebra formulaBaz Muhammad puton the blackboard. I finished in a couple of minutes and glanced up. Mr Stalin’s gaze fixed on Wazir, who was drawing Diego Maradona. I pushed my bottom forward on the hard, wooden chair and stamped on Wazir’s right foot; too late – he asked Wazir to come to the board.
Wazir was terrible at algebra. He’d end up with red tenderness in thehands, so I dared to volunteer.
‘I want him, not you,’ Mr Stalin roared.
A hesitant Wazir stepped to the blackboard, picked a piece of chalk from its recess and stood with a blank expression.
Mr Stalin stared at my best friend with a face conveying that he expected zero knowledge from his student. Mr Stalin, whose dark brown suit had turned into a mixture of grey and white owing to several years of wear and tear, glanced at students and shook his head.
Everyone laughed. Wazir’s face darkened. Wazir could have been intelligent if he made an effort. His heart wasn’t in school studies; at times, I did his homework. His aka’s extreme books had conquered his brain and drove his life.
‘I know what you’ll make. A donkeyman,’ Mr Stalin said, provoking titters among students.
Everyone feared the same fate, I bet, but they sniggered because Mr Stalin was in a good mood and because some, like Shafih, loathed Wazir.
Wazir gazed at his worn-out shoes. My best friend wanted you to respect him, make him feel important. Mr Stalin was doing the opposite.
‘Get your father to buy you a donkey. Sell tomatoes.’ Mr Stalin cupped his mouth and raised his voice: ‘Tomatoes bakharin.’
Bursts of laughter.
Men – what Mour called ‘illiterate donkey riders’ and she seldom warned me to excel in my studies, or I’d end up like them – rode donkeys that carried tomatoes and shouted out loud, ‘Buy tomatoes.’
‘He may already be a donkeyman.’
Mr Stalin had just crossed the red line. You stabbed Wazir in the heart if you disrespected his father.
The gentle aka Iqbal used to take us to Chaman-e-Hozori, where we played football with haleks from the other districts. He often talked about how in the 40s Afghanistan played in the Olympics, and beat Iran in 1941. Aka Iqbal wanted Wazir to become not a donkeyman, but a professional footballer like aka Iqbal had once been and play for his watan. Thanks, Khudai, he wasn’t alive to witness what was about to befall his son.
‘Look down.’ Mr Stalin said to Wazir. He clenched his teeth – a sign he was turning into Mr Crazy Stalin, no longer a laughable matter.
Wazir continued his gaze.
‘Look down, I said.’ He raised the stick but froze…
‘This’s wrong,’ a female voice cried out.
A few faces turned to Frishta; most, however, were cast down.
‘Everyone’s born differently, ustad. Some have a talent for solving equations. Others are skilful with their hands. Maybe Wazir isn’t a natural mathematician.’ Tears rolled down Frishta’s cheeks, her left shoulder, visible from behind the jelais, trembling. She’d been in a foul mood since our last meeting. The new dress code and Mr Stalin’s treatment of Wazir appeared to have upset her even further.
‘It doesn’t help to humiliate him publicly, and I don’t know why some find the humiliation of a fellow student funny,’ Frishta said, casting her eyes over some students, Shafih and Jawad in particular. She stomped out.
Mr Crazy Stalin’s body trembled – another dangerous sign. I didn’t remember anyone confronting him. He’d take the shit out of us.
‘Is an ustad not allowed to discipline his students?’ he asked, as if to himself.
His eyes travelled from the left row to the middle, and then to the right. Students cast their eyes down.
‘Ustad, he’ll learn it for next week,’ I dared to say.
‘Chup.’ He ‘shushed’ me.
‘You, chup. A Communist kafir,’ Wazir said.
Unbelievable. Why did Wazir not shut up? Did he want his bones to be broken?
Mr Crazy Stalin pushed Wazir. Next, Wazir lay down on the concrete floor. The stick whacked Wazir’s shoulder. Another the head. Wazir crossed his hands around his head, and the stick struck against his arm. Mr Crazy Stalin’s right hand went up and down with the stick.
What followed next was too quick. Wazir’s right hand flew to his shoe and flew back with a force of President Najibullah’s Luna rockets and bashed against Mr Crazy Stalin’s chest. The ustad screamed, ‘Ahhkh…’ His body folded, the stick dropped with a taqq sound, and his hands pressed against his chest. Wazir sprang up on his feet with a knife covered in blood in his right hand and hurried out, leaving the slain body of Baz Muhammad on the concrete floor.
Screams and cries filled the room. Sadaf and Laila, along with Shafih, shifted to the far corners; the jelais covered their eyes with their hands. It was a day of Qiyamat.
The deputy mudir, Amrudin Khan, together with Frishta, hurried in. Frishta was, alas, too late.
Amrudin Khan placed his hands on Baz Muhammad’s shoulders and turned him around, revealing his eyes, white like the ceiling. Jelais screamed. The ustad’s jacket was soaked with blood, giving it a reddish-grey colour.
‘He’s losing blood. Help me,’ Amrudin Khan said.
The ustad’s pupil-less eyes and the pool of blood on the floor convinced me he wouldn’t make it. The knife had penetrated his heart.
Amrudin Khan, Frishta, Shafih, Jawad, Baktash and I carried the ustad’s breathless body to the edara. Amrudin Khan, whose white shirt was stained with blood, allowed only Frishta to stay behind.
***
‘Get prepared for Pul-e-Charkhi,’ Shafih said to me as we marched back to the class. ‘Pul-e-Charkhi, empty a cell,’ he shouted, his voice echoing around the long corridor.
What’s just happened is real or a horrible dream?
‘I’ll tell the police you gave your boss the knife.’
What’s going to happen to Wazir?
‘I’ll be a witness,’ Jawad said.
‘Ahmad has got nothing to do with it,’ Baktash said.
Has someone physically shaken my brain?
‘Traitor,’ Shafih slapped Baktash. Kicked me in the buttock. Jawad pulled my T-shirt, and a fist landed on my nose. A pair of hands pushed against my chest and moved up and down. ‘More evidence,’ Shafih said. My chest felt moist.
‘Ustad,’ Baktash raised his voice.
Shafih and Jawad sprang into the class.
‘Your nose is bleeding,’ Baktash said and passed me a tissue. ‘The bastard smeared your shirt with blood,’ Baktash added over the ambulance siren. ‘They’ll turn the school into hell for us.’
My heart had fallen into my stomach.
***
AFTER RUKHSATI, Baktash and I knocked on Wazir’s apartment door; no one opened it. Aday had vanished together with Wazir. Baktash told me what he later said to the police when they questioned us about Wazir’s whereabouts, that ‘Wazir joined his Panjabis’. Baktash sounded relieved to see the back of him – he said no word about me siding with Wazir.
For the next few days, I knocked on Wazir’s white wooden door every morning and evening, but it stayed shut and without any sound. Never heard from either again. Agha assumed they’d gone to areas under the mujahideen’s control where the Kabul government had no jurisdiction.
I later thought Wazir was too popular for Baktash and me. His aims evolved around the gigantic idea of jihad. I sensed he felt stuck and would abandon us once he got the opportunity. Baz Muhammad gave him one.
Mour and Aday gave birth to us in the same hospital, Zayeshgah. We crawled on the floor of the same nursery. Rolled marbles in the same playground. In Barats and Ashuras, we distributed our mothers’ dishes of halwa, sweet rice and chilli rice among neighbours. In Eids, we dashed to the fair, rode on carousels, swings and Ferris wheels, joined the egg-fighting game, and shot balloons with guns. In the last days of Ramadan, after breaking the fast, we, along other haleks of the block, went from one house to another in the neighbourhood and sang ramazani songs in return for sweets, dried fruits and kulchas. And six days a week, from March to November, we walked to school together. School without Wazir turned into a painless source of torture. Life without Wazir became a prison. In fact, Kabul had turned into a prison. Families left for the West by the day. Agha confided that President Najibullah had also shifted his wife and daughters to India. Agha believed ‘something bad’ was about to happen to Kabul as the mujahideen closed in on the capital.
Things changed in school, too. Raziq Khan had vanished. His substitute ‘like the KHAD’ tortured anyone, ustads or students, who challenged his ‘instructions’. His bodyguards searched all haleks, and sometimes jelais, at the gate. In a way, you couldn’t blame the buffalo-headed mudir. Students previously threatened ustads – in some rare cases, mostly when Rashid was around, beat them up – but never murdered one.
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