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 Qargha Lake every Friday. Our wives chat and the kids play ball. Wazir, Afghanistan’s national football hero, teaches them football tricks. He sees potential in Baktash’s son. Baktash, the next Salam Sangi, the superstar of Afghan cinema, works on a monologue with Wazir’s son.
The seasons take us to different provinces for fruit-picking: melons in Kunduz; berries in Panjshir; pomegranates in Kandahar; grapes in the Shomali Valley; apples in Logar.
My best friends and their parents lunch at Agha’s flat, and have dinner at Brigadier’s place on the first day of Eid. Baktash’s parents cook dinner on the second day, and Wazir and his mother’s turn comes on the third day. Every Eid evening after dinner, the families drive to Shahr-e Naw for shiryakh ice cream.
Wazir holds the spool and Baktash flies a kite in the Makroryan Festival. Wazir has torn up the books; we’re all Afghan, not Moguls or Panjabis. The father of the nation and the symbol of unity, our King, loves all Afghans like his own children, and has ensured that bullets and guns are alien to us.
A Duvvv sound… The ground shook. Screams of kids and women. Agha and Brigadier’s assurance that the explosion ‘went off far away’. My father and Brigadier couldn’t mute, though, the sound of the flying shrapnel striking against the block.
Fantasies were as sweet as Helmand’s watermelons, but facing reality afterwards was as suffocating as the hopeless basement. Frishta abhorred me. She sat next to her father or mother, writing or reading, and, without fail, facing away. Wazir had disappeared, and there was no news of Baktash since our stroll to the Market a week ago, even though he lived a few corridors down. The dark basement pressed a heavy stone against my chest every time I took a breath.
The vicious war had worsened by the day. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s fighters fired at random hundreds – or in a sour mood, thousands – of rockets daily to Kabul, and Massoud’s forces retaliated by dispatching an equal number of weapons to the outskirts of my city. Aerial bombardment added to the constant sound of heavy artillery. Kabul had turned into Mour’s heating clay oven, in which she used to bake us fresh naans. Families took a 50-50 chance and abandoned us one by one for Pakistan, Iran, safer provinces, or even for Kabul’s relatively peaceful districts in the north. Their mattresses, pillows, blankets, cutlery, crockery and oil lamps lay untouched in the cellar. Five families stayed put from our corridor; those who either weren’t fit to face the journey’s challenges, or had no relatives elsewhere to support them.
We fed on naans, which Mour baked on a petrol lamp, or sometimes on fires, provided she found fuel materials. Mothers no longer could afford to fry chips or place dough in boiling oil to make parathas; Zarghuna and Safi’s crying for chips no longer succeeded. Nazo had forgotten ‘the smell’ of chips. One oil lamp lit the basement, burning at a low level, which prevented us from walking over each other at night. Families were running out of wheat and petrol, however. The fighting died down every day at 4am, which gave us a time window to bring water from a well located behind the block and visit the toilets in our flats. Buckets and jugs replaced the push-button toilet flush. Everyone had turned into a smelly beast; water barely sufficed to drink and cook with.
Adults ate only to survive and left more naans for the children. Families had money to buy basic needs, but you risked a bullet or shrapnel if you ventured out; even a visit to the toilet during the day involved a discussion over the timing and often subjected you to the parents’ beratement for missing the right time or urinating too many times.
No shops were open, anyway. According to Agha’s multiple news stations, the gunmen owned Kabul. They robbed its treasure. Killed its sons and daughters. Allowed its zoo animals to die of hunger. Looted its Exchange Market. Plundered its National Gallery of Art, National Archives and the Kabul Museum, all of which I’d visited on school trips. I remembered our history teacher pointing at ‘Remnants of the British Army’, a painting by Lady Elizabeth Butler, showing the last survivor of the British retreat and the document of the British granting Afghanistan sovereignty at those places.
Shukria, the National Gallery of Art’s deputy head who lived on the second floor, feared that these historical items had found themselves at auctions in Peshawar. ‘The war has stolen our identity,’ she repeatedly said.
Everyone fought for their life more than for their identity, nevertheless. Dead bodies lay all over Kabul like berries lying on the ground at the Shewaki farm during the berry seasons. No one dared to take them. Barmak’s wife didn’t even get the chance to see his body, dead or alive. Four bearded men beat him up and threw him in a pick-up truck two days ago when he put a barrier around his shattered windows. Nobody knew his whereabouts. The wife sat mute: days of sobbing and screaming must have damaged her vocal cords. Barmak wasn’t the first and certainly not the last.
***
THE RAIN HIT against the plastic paper which covered the tiny basement window, whose glass a rocket had shattered two days back. I, like most others in the depressing place, buried myself under the blanket. Agha and Brigadier searched for any afternoon news on the hissing and crackling portable radio as we overheard a female’s screech. Agha switched off the radio.
The voice shrieked again. ‘No, for… sake… four little kids,’ the half-audible voice said. AK-47 shotguns shut it out.
Agha’s mouth opened and his eyes widened. Nazo held Agha’s arm. They’ll now come after my father: the horrible thought crossed my mind. My heartbeat increased. Frishta pressed her head against her father’s upper arm.
The half-broken basement door slammed open and a soaking wet woman like a shishak, a witch, rushed in. Children and mothers shrieked. She tripped over the stairs and rolled over. Slapped her invisible cheeks with bloodstained hands as she knelt. Pulled her hair violently, which covered her face, and yelled something I couldn’t register. She stormed in my direction to eat me up. I yelled as she grabbed my right hand. Mour hugged me. The shishak pulled me to her blood-smeared hair. I screamed; the vampire was about to tear out my heart with her canine teeth. Mour pushed her. She fell back on Shukria, whose cutlery caused a clattering sound. Cries and shrieks filled the cellar as the screaming Shukria struggled to disentangle herself. The shishak’s wet hair drew back and the blood-covered face revealed itself.
‘Khala Lailuma,’ I cried out. Something horrible must’ve happened to Baktash’s father, I thought, my heart panting against my chest. She sprinted for the basement door, crawling up the stairs like a toddler. I released myself from Mour’s hands and accompanied Baktash’s mother. Agha and Brigadier followed us.
The machine gunshots and rocket sounds competed against the sound of a heavy shower outside. You spotted no living species as if the Little Moscow of Kabul was located on the moon. Branches of trees and bushes, green leaves and clay like sugar-coated almonds and chocolates at a wedding covered the ground thanks to the rocket impact in the garden. Khala Lailuma slipped on the concrete floor and fell over. Sprang up and rushed towards the lawn.
I counted two bodies lying on top of each other on the grass under the acacia tree. My stomach turned over and I fell. Khala Lailuma shouted to hurry up because Baktash ‘won’t go to Moscow without me’. The next few steps to the tree proved the hardest. Baktash, in a baggy perahan tunban, placed his cheek on his father’s chest and grabbed his father’s jacket with his right hand. The gun smoke and powder had burned the father’s face unrecognisably. The bullets had created holes in the cheeks, forehead and neck. Agha covered his comrade’s face and the blood pool mixed with grey and black materials like walnuts’ nutmeat around the head with his jacket.
My stomach turned over again, and I threw up
‘Wake your best friend up,’ khala Lailuma said to me. ‘He’s getting dirty.’ She grabbed my jacket and shook me. ‘My Shahzada hates dirt. Wake him up.’
Baktash’s nickname at home was Shahzada: Prince.
I knelt on the muddy grass and took a deep breath. Moved the fringe soaked with a mixture of mud and blood to the side. Fresh blood flowed from the eye-like hole in the forehead, joining the puddle of blood on the father’s chest and under Baktash’s neck.
‘Oh, Khuda jan, he’s bleeding. Stop the blood.’ Khala Lailuma threw herself on them, removed dirt from Baktash’s face and pressed her hand against the hole. Nutmeat patties-like things flowed from the bushy hair at the back and joined more of the same material and blood on the father’s chest and the grass.
‘It’s OK. Martyrs never stop bleeding,’ Brigadier said.
She smiled, let the hand go and planted a kiss on her son’s cheek. ‘Congratulations on your martyrdom, my Shahzada.’
Agha told Brigadier to take the bodies back to the basement and bury them in the early morning; no one would venture out when the fighting continued. She screamed, saying to dig graves for her and the three daughters, too, because they had no men left to provide bread and butter for them. Agha and Brigadier pleaded with khala Lailuma to calm down. Agha reasoned that once Khudai closed one door, He’d open many others. Like brothers, Agha and Brigadier would support her and the kids. Dow, dow, dow cannons fired from Bimaro Hill towards eastern Kabul, forcing us to duck.
Apparently, once the heart stopped, bodyparts wouldn’t straighten when they cooled. Baktash wouldn’t let go of his grasp, even though Agha and Brigadier asked him to.
Agha told ‘the mother’ to speak to Baktash and ask him to loosen his fist. She wanted his ‘best friend’ to do it.
‘Baktash,’ I heard myself say, part of me confused as to why they wanted me to speak to the dead.
‘You’re again late for school.’
No movement. Karss, karss, karss of Gulbuddin’s rockets blasting somewhere in Bimaro.
‘Remember, we’re going to the same college in Moscow.’ The other part of me disbelieved that a few bullets would take Baktash forever from me.
‘I heard Moscow has the best acting school in the world.’
Quietness, apart from raindrops hitting against his left cheek and the incessant firings of Kalashnikovs.
‘You’ll be the next Bruce Lee, inshallah. I should get your autograph now, man.’
May Khudai strike me blind should I tell lies. As the last sentence finished in my mouth, his face turned to me, his lips stretched and fist loosened. I took his hand and put it against his side. My fingers entered a hole twice bigger than the one in his forehead as I held his head with Agha and Brigadier’s assistance to turn him over. Blood and the nutmeat bits stained my left hand.
My body began to shiver as if someone threw ice cubes in my stomach. ‘He’s left me. My best friend’s gone forever.’
Brigadier tapped on my shoulder.
‘He planned to study in Moscow, not to enter a grave behind the block.’
‘Ahmad?’ Agha said, pointing to the dazed khala Lailuma.
‘Agha, Baktash has gone. All my friends have left me.’
Agha told me to have patience; his pale blue perahan tunban was drenched.
‘Why did they martyr him? He’d harmed no one.’
‘Patience, zoya.’
‘Under this very acacia tree, he pleaded with me not to disown him.’
‘Ahmad?’ Agha said.
‘I’m sinful, Agha.’
‘Zoya, you didn’t mean it.’
‘Baktash, I’m sorry. I’m deeply sorry.’
‘Ahmad.’
‘Actually, you’ve always been a hero, Baktash. I sided with the villain. I’m not a good halek, Agha. I betrayed my friends.’
‘You didn’t mean to.’
‘Yes, I did. Frishta is right, I don’t have an Afghan heart.’
‘You’ve earned her respect,’ Brigadier said.
‘Khudai’s created me Afghan but has denied me the heart. Why am I a coward?’
‘You’re not a bad person, nephew,’ Brigadier said.
‘I let Frishta down, too, aka Brigadier.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘Accused her of bad things. Stole her diary. I’m a thief.’
‘We all make mistakes. Learn from them,’ Brigadier said. Pointing to the bodies in the heavy rain, he whispered, ‘Time to make it up to friends.’
‘My best friend did live like a shahzada, a happy one.’
‘Pray for him. Let’s help the rest of the family,’ Agha said.
‘I didn’t stay longer in the Market last week when he wanted me to.’
‘You didn’t know,’ Agha said.
‘I would have if–’
‘Ahmad, he needs your help now.’
‘I miss my friends. My school. My old life.’
Brigadier planted a kiss on my head and echoed Agha’s words about patience, his grey hair and baggy pyjamas soaked in the rain. He reiterated that it was time I made it up for Baktash, adding to stop crying, or I’d make it worse for khala Lailuma.
Agha hugged me and told me it was time to help the family.
‘What if they hurt you, Agha?’
‘They won’t.’
‘Who would I say farewell to in the morning and greet in the evening?’
‘I’ll always be around, zoya.’
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
Agha said something three times today that he hadn’t said a single time in the whole of 15 years: he called me zoya. I hugged him, as tight as Baktash’s grabbing of his father’s jacket. ‘I love you, Agha.’
He kissed my head – several times – and told me to let go, but I wouldn’t. His hug, the sweaty, fatherly scent, was what I’d been craving all my life. He said again to let go as we heard sounds of ‘papa’ from behind.
Baktash’s sisters in pink nightwear stood next to each other, rain and tears coming down their faces. The two youngest wanted to know why Papa and Shahzada stayed out in the rain: why didn’t they come home?
Brigadier stroked their hair and told them that Papa and Shahzada were preparing for their ‘real home’ journey. ‘Khudai has invited them.’
‘Where’s Khudai’s home?’ the youngest said.
‘I’m also coming,’ the one in the middle said.
‘Only I get to sit on Papa’s lap,’ the youngest said.
‘Khudai only invited Papa and Shahzada,’ Agha said.
‘He won’t go without his princess,’ the youngest said, pointing to herself.
‘I am his princess,’ the one in the middle said.
‘Stop it,’ the eldest said to the siblings.
Brigadier’s eyes welled up and looked skyward. ‘Oh, Khudai.’
Agha told him to collect himself.
‘Are Papa and Shahzada dead, Mama?’ the eldest sister said.
Khala Lailuma slapped her face and pulled her hair. She hugged her daughters. All four wept, as loud as the weeping sky of Makroryan.
We carried the bodies into Baktash’s apartment and laid them next to each other after Agha and Brigadier managed to persuade khala Lailuma to move inside. Khala Lailuma screamed and slapped herself. I prayed to Khudai to look after the family and keep the mother sane for her children.
All the families from their corridor had vanished as I peeped into the basement, leaving their belongings in the living quarters untouched. She and the daughters refused to come to our cellar. They stayed in, wanting to have one more night together with their loved ones before sending them on a lone journey forever in the early morning.