Chapter Thirty
I put a mantu with a piece of naan in my mouth and chewed on them. Shujah praised me for following the habitual practiceof the Prophet, peace be upon him. I told him that I hadn’t abandoned my traditions, including using my hands to eat, thanking Frishta in my heart for her contribution to my life.
Mour and Nazigul entered the lounge.
‘Her round face was like a Persian queen’s. Her soft baby skin. Her huge, black eyes. Long eyelashes. Smile. Shyness. Cleverness. Housekeeping skills. Hygiene. Khudai must’ve had a whole day available to spend so much effort into making Nazia,’ Mour said, her face beaming with pleasure.
‘Mour loved the jelai,’ a smiley-faced Nazigul said to Shujah, taking her hijab off.
They forgot to say salaam. Mour sat in her usual place, leaning on a cushion against the wall at the top of the room. She didn’t join us when Shujah invited her to the tablecloth to eat mantu with lintel korma and fresh naan.
‘And what an honourable family,’ Mour said.
How could I see this perfect jelai?
Her friend, Najiba, would help, said Nazigul and sat cross-legged on the mattress by Mour.
‘Everyone’s happy with Nazia. We all wait for your consent,’ Mour said.
‘You’ll go crazy when you see her.’ Nazigul’s face beamed with excitement, delighted to have finally found me a wife.
‘Khudai’s blessings on you, Nazigul. I’ll never forget your and aka Shujah’s help and sacrifices,’ I said. Please, Khudai, make it easy for us if Nazia is the person we are looking for.
Nazigul was ‘happy’ to have assisted the son of his ‘late brother’. She pressed the button to turn the fan, but her face dropped. ‘One hour of electricity then no electricity the whole day. Do they call this electricity?’ She wiped sweat patches from her face with her headscarf. Pulled out the black container from her side pocket and sprayed the vanilla scent into the air. She preferred to keep the curtains and windows of the sunless lounge closed. Mour asked Shujah if I hadn’t ventured out again after finishing a lecture on what curtains Nazigul required to prevent extra warmth from getting into the heated lounge. Shujah said he’d kept an eye on me.
In the early morning I slipped out of the apartment and travelled to parts of Kabul I’d craved to visit as a young halek, without telling Mour and Shujah knowing they’d invoke the threats of fedayis, kidnappings and the NDS, and thus disagree. I left a letter in my room to reassure them I’d be back by the afternoon, well before the visit to Nazia. Mour and Shujah boiled with rage when I returned. Shujah suspected another motive behind my disappearance. He wasn’t wrong; the events of the past days had obliged me to take action.
‘Visit the Qargha Lake finally?’ Mour said.
I nodded and put a spoon of home-made yoghurt in my mouth.
‘Was the risk worth taking?’
‘Captivating.’ Hundreds of Kabuli families did what Agha had never given us the chance to do: sipped green tea in cafes with free Wi-Fi; munched on sikh and chapli kebabs in restaurants; smoked shisha; went boating; played golf; took rides; went horse riding; swam in the lake; and, like me and my elderly taxi driver, ambled along the road adjacent to the lake and enjoyed the scenery. Contrary to what Mour and I’d assumed, Kabulis lived, or pretended to live, a normal life.
I told the taxi driver to drive to two more places I longed to visit back in the days: the Paghman District and Shomali Valley, the latter famous for remaining green during Afghanistan’s long summers, where also hundreds of families on Fridays, a day off, went to munch fresh berries and drink doogh, and where you once found King Zahir Shah during holidays. But the taxi driver said we’d be unable to return by the afternoon for the khastegari, even if we visited just one of those holiday hot spots.
To compensate, however, we drove through Sarachowk, whose buildings had burned down to rubble. Trolleybuses and their overhead copper wires had vanished: looted and sold to the scrap dealers.
Chaman-e-Hozori’s green lawn, where back in the days we played football on Fridays, and where Afghan and Iranian singers gave concerts to tens of thousands of Kabulis during the King Zahir Shah era, had turned into dirt, full of tiny tents: drug addicts sat in groups with headscarves, perhaps to smoke in privacy or to escape the blazing sun. Next to it, the Kabul Nandari Theatre, Afghanistan’s only national theatre, had burned down.
I regretted telling the driver to journey to Chaman-e-Hozori – it now clicked why Agha used to say ignorance was bliss.
***
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, after Shujah and Mour had discussed politics, and after Shujah told us about Kabulis, their lives and the difficulties they went through, I inquired about my childhood friends – something I’d asked him about many times but never got a clear answer to. Sitting in the lounge and eating a Kunduzi watermelon while the sunshine came through the open windows and the birds sang, Shujah repeated that he hadn’t seen them and that most ‘Muscovites’ were either killed in the mujahideen civil war or the Taliban-American conflict, or emigrated abroad. Some sold their apartments to feed their children. Others lost them to the mujahideen, and later to the Taliban, because the Muscovites had committed a ‘crime’ of having worked for a pro-Communist government or ‘run away’ to the West.
‘I visited every government department and court to save this flat,’ Shujah said for the hundredth time, ordering Nazigul to put a cushion on the window recess to cover Mour from the sun’s rays.
Mour said Shujah’s bravery enabled us to afford the wedding, and skilfully broke the news we dreaded: the intention to sell the apartment. Shujah’s forehead wrinkled: he had ‘a feeling’ we’d sell the flat. Nazigul’s face darkened as she placed the cushion on the recess; she didn’t know how they’d be able to afford $300 per month in rent for the affluent Makroryan, and pleaded that we should find an alternative. It wasn’t easy for Mour and me to sell a flat with sentimental value and make kids homeless, Mour told them, but we saw no other option.
Our £6,000 would go nowhere to cover the costs of an Afghan wedding. In addition to the hundreds of relatives, family friends, neighbours and colleagues, you got a few hundred wedding-crushers whom you fed to stay committed to melmastia, or else you’d be dishonoured. Young haleks remained wifeless for years; the lucky ones sought work abroad days after their nuptials to pay off their debts, but many came back as drug addicts or didn’t return at all.
I’d spent no money on the wedding and instead gave out the expenses to the needy in Kabul, if it was down to me. But no jelai family would consider such an ‘insulting’ proposal.