Chapter Twenty-One Baktash and his father’s killings shocked everyone. Shukria, who worried more about Afghanistan losing its identity than her losing her life, supposed ‘high-profile Communists’ who stayed put at their addresses, or rather in the basements of their flat, would meet the same fates as Baktash’s father and Mr Barmak, because the mujahideen…

Chapter Twenty I throw a surprise party for my wife’s promotion as King Zahir Shah’s Advisor for Women’s Affairs. Frishta thanks her ‘supportive husband’, me, in her speech, and everyone claps, including Wazir and Baktash, alongside their wives. Our two sons and a daughter play with Wazir and Baktash’s kids. We picnic in the…

Chapter Nineteen Everyone in the dimly lit basement shushed as the extended BBC Pashto Service broadcast the night news: This is London. This is the Pashto programme. Agha told mothers to keep their children’s noise down, asking my sisters, and even some adults, to stop flying paper airplanes. I knew the introductory words for…

Chapter Eighteen I excitedly told Agha and Mour how the pakoled mujahideen came across as friendly, and how the worries about the mujahideen were unfounded. Agha, with a smouldering cigarette in his hand, hung on my words but made no comment. Mour passed me a plate of scalding ashak, pasta dumplings filled with leeks…

Chapter Seventeen Agha reassured Mour not to worry because the mujahideen had promised not to harm the pro-Communists, as he took off his right sock in the hallway. It was midday and Agha had just returned home; he’d been away overnight to officially hand over power to Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the head of the mujahideen…

Chapter Sixteen The wooden door, crumbling with age, had no chink to peek inside.Should I knock, or jump over the wall into the house? If I knocked and someone answered, what was I supposed to say? If that person was Shafih, I’d thrust Mour’s kitchen knife into his stomach. But then I wouldn’t catch…