The earth here is untouched, the circle twenty paces wide. I catch my breath, wondering where I should begin. I walk to the center and take a moment to absorb the tranquility. It is possible, from here, to ignore the prison beyond the berm. It is possible, in this remote copse, to feel a few beats of peace or hope. I fall to my knees, close my eyes, and wait for a sign, some spectral nod, that I am right.
“Doctor-sahib!” a voice calls out. I open my eyes and spot two men coming toward me.
“We must dig here,” I command. I run my hands across the ground like a diving rod.
The two men stand over me.
“Why did you not bring shovels?”
They do not budge. Though they’re not inclined to take orders from me, they leave me where I am.
Everyone arrives then. The officer we met last time. Rostam, Clay, and Mom. Two more guards, one looking more bewildered than the other.
“What are you doing out here?” the supervising officer asks me. “What’s this information you claim to have?”
I take a deep breath and stand to face him.
“We must dig here,” I command. “I was told this is where they were buried. Let’s not waste time.”
“You speak as if you have stars and stripes on your jacket,” he mutters. “Who gave you this idea?”
“Please,” I say. “The man who told me was a soldier at Arg that night. He knew. This must be the place.”
I am leaning into what I believe in my heart. Shair may not have known the exact coordinates, but he brought me here.
“This is a small ask,” Rostam adds. “Given the number of bodies found over the years, she’s more likely to be right than wrong.”
The officer huffs.
“There is a process to these matters,” he says. “We don’t just pick up shovels.”
He turns his back on us and puts his hands on his hips.
“I’ll have to answer for this,” he mutters, then looks at two men waiting on his command. He shakes his head in the direction of the building.
Mom breathes an audible sigh of relief.
Heavy shovels and rusted picks are brought out in a wheelbarrow. The officer spreads the guards out within the circle. The earth in this patch is dry, every drop of moisture soaked up by thirsty roots. The surface does not want to be breached.
The officer walks to where Mom and I are standing.
“We shall see,” he tells me. “But I suggest you take this time to ask yourself what you’re hoping to find under this dirt.”
I pick up an idle shovel and choose an area away from others. The guards look from me to their supervisor, wondering if he’ll stop me from digging. He only shrugs and steps away to answer a call from the prison.
Rostam and Clay take turns too, giving the guards a break. Soon we are all sweating. My palms ache, but I do not pause. I toss small heaps of earth behind me, just past the trees.
The sun starts to set. I hear Rostam urge the guards to continue digging. One sets his shovel down and states that it’s time for him to go home. The others, despite having unearthed nothing but stones, pick up where he left off. Mom sits with her back to a tree, watching the trench widen. A new guard appears with oil lamps and a thermos heavy with tea. They take turns drinking from a single cup. The sky darkens, steeped in night.
“Thank you,” I tell the people around me. “Thank you for doing this. No matter what happens, I’ll always remember I wasn’t alone here.”
I want to say so much more but choke up trying to find the words.
“Sister, we’ve all spent more energy on lesser tasks. No need to thank us,” one says. I cannot make out his face in the dark. I turn and look at Rostam, whose eyes glisten in the lamplight. He turns his back and plunges a shovel into the ground.
Two hours after we should have given up, a shout cuts through the rhythmic toiling. The shovel falls from my hand and lands on the rutted earth with a clunk. Mom is at my side, and I lean my head on her shoulder as a circle of people gather around. Despite how I’ve longed for this moment, I am suddenly petrified to face it.
“My God,” I hear Clay exclaim. He is at my side in a flash. Rostam follows, his face rough with sorrow. I look at him.
“Give them some time,” Rostam advises. He leads me to a nearby tree, where I sit with my head resting on Mom’s shoulder. The work resumes, shovels exchanged for brushes and hands. An unfurled sheet prepares to receive the unburied bones. Under a night sky twinkling with mythical creatures and parables, I do the same.
What will this change? I wonder. If I’m no less alone than I was yesterday, what is the difference? Will I feel released from this knotted grief? Will my dreams soften? Will I still be me?
I close my eyes and breathe in the scents of this night—mint on my mother’s hands, the spice of my father’s cologne, and Faheem’s milky breath. It does not stop there. I sense my mother’s spirit first, as if she’s floated over and taken a seat beside me. I can almost feel her caress my head. My father comes next, smiling as if he were expecting me. His steps are slower because he’s carrying my brother. Faheem’s small arms are wrapped around my father’s neck, his eyes bright with an eternal love.
I feel foolish then that I ever thought they might have resented me for surviving that night.
And so, when I’m summoned to see all that remains of my family, I walk steadily, I am ready, for I have already seen what I came to see.
Epilogue
There is a joke I read years ago in an online chat room for Afghans. King Zahir Shah, who was monarch before Daoud Khan overthrew him and declared himself president, settled into a new life in Italy. He had gone from a gilded palace to a small apartment, from an exalted life to one of exile. He was a nobody living in a foreign land. Dejected, he went to see a psychiatrist. In the waiting room, an Italian man peered over the top of a magazine, curious how his malady ranked against those of others in the room. He leaned over and asked King Zahir Shah what affliction of the mind had prompted him to seek help.
King Zahir Shah explained that he had been, until recently, king of a sovereign nation. The Italian man said nothing.
When the door opened and the doctor’s assistant asked who was next in line, the Italian man pointed to the bald man with a graying mustache seated beside him and said with great empathy: “Take him first.”
Clay laughs when I tell him this story, at how much like delusion the histories of dispersed Afghans must sound to new neighbors. We are sitting on Mom’s porch watching fireflies light up the nearby woods. Mom is inside, packing up the leftovers of tonight’s dinner. Clay had offered to wash the dishes, but she shooed him away.
You’re a guest in my home tonight, she’d said. And only tonight. Tomorrow I’ll expect all hands on deck for breakfast.
This is our first weekend away at Mom’s house. Clay spent our first hour here taking in all the pictures on the walls, the curio crowded with souvenirs from around the world, and the carefully arranged spines on the bookshelf. He looked hesitant about touching some pieces, leaning in with his hands behind his back.
My fingers float to my neck, a habit formed since I started wearing my mother’s necklace. Clay bought me a glass dome for my father’s pocket watch. It sits on my desk where I sometimes lose myself staring at it, watching time suspended. Dayo, my stoic friend, cried to see it. I showed her pictures of the three graves on a hilltop in Kabul. I told her about the burial I’d finally been able to arrange for my family. Though they hadn’t been sent off with a twenty-one-gun salute like Rostam’s grandfather, they had been laid to rest in dignity, with headstones to mark their existence.
“You’re thinking about them,” Clay observes.
I look down.
“Yeah, I am. It’s just . . . it’s just so different now. I used to only think of those last moments. It was so hard to think of anything else. But now I feel like I can have so much more back, and it’s nothing like having them again, but it’s something. It’s a lot.”
I t
hink of Dayo and what she said about lightning and thunder, the flash and the bang. I think of the patients I’ve returned to and the storms they are enduring. I was wrong to think I could move on quickly. I expected so much more of myself than I expected from people I care for.
“That’s a big step,” Clay says as he takes my hand in his. I smile and lean toward him so our shoulders touch.
“I wonder what the little girl in the cemetery is doing now,” I muse. On our way to the airport in Kabul, I’d asked for one last stop at the cemetery. I’d walked up a hill with haphazardly arranged graves, some in protective metal enclosures that looked too much like cages for my taste.
As I’d approached the graves, a little girl carrying a bucket of water had appeared. She must have spotted me from a distance and scared off her competition. The cemetery had become a land of opportunity for children looking to help feed their families. She offered to sprinkle water on the graves of my loved ones to wash away their sins and maybe even inspire a patch of green to grow.
She’d been generous with the water, wetting the dirt as I said my silent goodbyes. I’d given her a bill that made her eyes go wide and asked her to look after their graves a few more times for me.
“She’s probably wondering when you’ll be back,” Clay says.
I don’t know the answer to that question yet. A lifetime ago, Shair had told me that Kabul was no longer my home. He’d been right, but only in a literal way. The city would always be a part of me, and I would always be a part of her. Our stories are intertwined.
I think of Rostam, wandering Kabul looking like a ghost of himself. He video-called me from Germany a week ago and introduced me to his wife and children. Though they were polite and even cracked a few jokes, the conversation quickly petered out. We were strangers, after all. Even Rostam struggled to come up with things to say, and after a few moments we promised to talk again soon. I take comfort in knowing he is surrounded by love. That might be all I can salvage from what we once were.
“Who knows? Maybe you and I will end up going back together,” I say, thinking of Waleed’s sister and the churning hospital. I’m surprised at how easily I talk about a future with Clay. Maybe that comes from having talked about so much of the past with him.
“Maybe. I’ve still got those stories to finish,” Clay says. He managed to squeeze one article out of his trip to Kabul, but it was hardly the piece his chief had expected.
“Are you sure you don’t want to write about . . .”
Clay shakes his head.
“That story is yours to tell, Aryana,” he says. “I just hope I can be the first to read it.”
I fill my lungs with the cool night air, the scent of evergreens and a distant fire. I wrap my arm around Clay’s waist, and my head spins to think of how fast and far we’ve traveled together. There is so much more I want to learn about him. There is so much more of me I want to share with him.
And for the first time in my life, that thought does not daunt me.
Author’s Note
A few years back, I pinned a newspaper article by journalist Carlotta Gall to the corkboard above my desk. It was a short piece on the discovery of the remains of Afghanistan’s first president, forty years after he and eighteen members of his family had been killed in a swift coup that forever changed the country’s course. The youngest victim was only eighteen months old.
My parents were born and raised in a peaceful window of Afghan history that came just before that coup. When they speak of their childhoods, they speak of crisp melons, stern teachers, kites and bicycles, the indulgent hugs of a grandmother, and poetry-filled nights. The photographs they carried into their lives as refugees and immigrants, the pictures I’ve seen throughout my life, would surprise people who have only gotten to know Afghanistan in the past twenty years.
My previous novels about Afghanistan span the last century, from the time of kings and harems to the suffocating grip of the Taliban to a fledgling democracy. Sparks Like Stars is my exploration of how a country that inspired wanderlust could have tipped into decades of war and turmoil. I see Afghanistan as a survivor, victimized by colonialism, imperialism, the Cold War, and, at times, by her own people.
While Aryana, her family, Rostam, Neelab, Antonia, and Tilly are my own creation, many characters, details, and events in this story are factual. President Daoud Khan did drive around Kabul in a white Toyota Corolla. The Americans stationed in cosmopolitan Kabul did indeed put on a performance of the musical Oklahoma! around the time of the Saur Revolution. Before the coup, Afghanistan had been a desirable and exotic posting that promised good times for diplomats. I took liberties with the timing of the siege on the American embassy in Islamabad, shortening the time between the assassination of Afghanistan’s president and the bubbling of anti-American tensions in neighboring Pakistan.
Afghans in the countryside were hospitable toward and likely intrigued by overlanders as well as bright-eyed Peace Corps volunteers from the sixties and seventies who still consider themselves “Friends of Afghanistan.” They are some of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met and their Afghan students, people like my father, remember time spent with these Americans fondly.
My portrayal of President Daoud Khan and the coup itself was informed by many sources—friends and family, books like Tamim Ansary’s Games Without Rules, Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan, and the oral history collection maintained by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST). I read the interviews given by Americans who served in Kabul during the time of the coup, including Ambassador Theodore Eliot, political counselors, and officers of various positions. I reached out to Louise Taylor, who served as Director of the American Cultural Center in Kabul at the time of the coup and she was most generous with her time and memories, indulging my questions and enriching my story. The CIA’s reading room also holds a trove of fascinating and carefully redacted documents and communications. Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars is a worthy read for those looking for an easier to follow record of the CIA’s contorted involvement in Afghanistan in the years prior to 9/11. President Daoud Khan’s grandson, a survivor of the coup, shared his firsthand account with the Dari-speaking world. Mujib Mashal, and many of his journalist colleagues, have gifted us with compelling glimpses of life in Afghanistan today.
The low ceiling for women in the American foreign service is well described by many women who served and available on the ADST website as well as in Alison Palmer’s memoir, Diplomat and Priest.
The Head East guidebook published in 1973 offered a wide range of travel tips to overlanders ranging from best post offices to cheap meals. My favorite section included a recommendation for travelers to wade through poppy fields dressed in a loin cloth to collect “pollen hash” that could then be pressed “against the warm sweating body of a fellow romantic field nymph or satyr.” It’s easy to lose an afternoon browsing posted photographs of hippies in eastern bazaars or picnicking with their packs to the Hindu Kush mountains.
Imperialism and colonialism are two-handed thieves, robbing nations of their destinies and their histories. The artifacts of Ai-Khanoum, like Afghans displaced by war, can be found around the world. The plunder of antiquities is receiving more thoughtful ink these days. I recommend Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, and Afghan Art and Architecture through the Ages by Hamid Naweed for those interested in the arts and civilizations unearthed by archaeologists.
Aryana’s story is not my story, though I leaned into my personal experiences more for her than perhaps any other character I’ve written. Like me, she was an Afghan American physician in training in New York City on 9/11, when America’s gaze swiveled back to Afghanistan and struggled to sort out friend from foe. And as physicians, both of us have had the privilege of sitting with families in their most vulnerable moments.
In the years since the coup, conflict in Afghanistan has claimed far too many lives. Those who survived plod forward bearing scars and trauma. Nadia Anjuman, a poet m
urdered by her husband, left behind verses that are fusions of hurt and hope. The title of this book comes from her stirring work, The Night’s Poetry.
I hope I’ve done this sliver of history justice.
Acknowledgments
My village came through for me again and I am more grateful than ever. To my husband, who wears a great many hats when it comes to my stories, your belief in me sustains me. Thank you to my beloved early readers and cheerleaders—Mom, Dad, and Uncle Isah. To my most precious book club—Zoran, Zayla, Kyrus, Cyra—may we always gather over stories. To my circles of friends and family, I can’t imagine this journey without you. You know who you are.
Thank you to Louise Taylor, a former Foreign Service officer stationed in Kabul during the Saur Revolution, who provided invaluable insights. To those who collected and curated the oral histories at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, I have spent hours delving into the past and enjoyed every bit of it. Thank you for making this available. A princess wave to Arzo Wardak, who helped nudge Anastasia into this story.
Helen Heller, you bring every manuscript I give you closer to its destined form. Your instincts are invaluable. Rachel Kahan, you are a true ally and make bookshelves adventurous, richer, and more honest reflections. Big hugs of gratitude to you both.
Many thanks to the team at William Morrow who have beautifully packaged this story and helped deliver it to readers—Mumtaz Mustafa, Cindy Buck, Jennifer Hart, Stephanie Vallejo, Allison Hargraves, Camille Collins, Kaitie Leary, and Liate Stehlik.
Dear readers, thank you for asking me when you can expect the next book, for inviting me into your living rooms, and for keeping me on my toes. Your personal notes give the work meaning. To organizers of book festivals, humanities organizations, librarians, teachers, bookshop champions, narrators, translators, journalists, and all who continue to uphold the importance of storytelling in its many forms, we are all forever in your debt.
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