Open Skies

by Niloofar Rahmani

  My parents, with two children in tow, walked until they reached a decrepit one-room shack with no doors or windowpanes that was overrun by stray dogs and cats. They cleaned the place as best they could and found some sheets of plastic to cover the open windows and doors. They fed the kids the few scraps of food they had left and then got them ready for bed.

  My mother remembers wrapping their dirty shoes in the extra clothes they’d brought and putting these “pillows” under my siblings’ heads. She couldn’t believe this was happening and what had become of their life. They’d been part of the middle class in Kabul. They hadn’t had much, but they’d had shelter, clothes, food, and a few basic comforts. They’d had a garden with beautiful flowers, red poppies and yellow tulips, and sometimes birds would land in their courtyard and sing. That was all gone.

  My mother and father stayed awake all night, watching over my brother and sister, praying they wouldn’t remember any of this.

  * * *

  My family stayed in Pol-e-Khomri for two months. Each day my father would work at the truck stop unloading cargo, and by late afternoon he’d usually have earned enough money to buy a few scraps of bread and some milk to bring home.

  They were squatting in a shack without windows or doors, and it was getting cold. There was no electricity and no wood to burn, just a small gas capsule they used to cook with and briefly warm themselves. Each night the wind howled through the breaks in the plastic, and the next morning they would all wake up with a film of sandy dust on their faces and clothes.

  The lack of food and the filthy living conditions caused both my sister and brother to get sick with heavy chest colds and fevers. My mother, who was now eight months pregnant with me, fell ill as well. My father knew they couldn’t stay here through the winter—they would never survive. They had to go back to Kabul and hope that the worst of the fighting was over.

  * * *

  My parents left Pol-e-Khomri with the same small bag they’d brought with them. They reached Kabul the next day and went back to my father’s parents’ home. The small room that my father and mother had built had been damaged by gunfire, but they had nowhere else to go. They collected the broken bricks and patched the walls with the few construction materials they had left.

  A few days later, while my mother, brother, and sister were in the cellar, a rocket struck what remained of the main house, completely destroying it. The roof crumbled, as did most of the walls. They were lucky they survived, but now the place was uninhabitable.

  My father moved my siblings and my very pregnant mother to my aunt’s house across the city. Aunt Mari lived in a Soviet-style apartment building, a big, monolithic, barren concrete structure. When they arrived, they found the door locked and no one home. With my brother and sister crying from hunger, my father was so distressed that he broke the lock to get them inside and something to eat.

  Aunt Mari came home later and found my family. After getting over the initial fear of finding her home broken into, she was glad to see them. Times were desperate, and she said they could stay for a little while until they figured out what to do next, but they couldn’t stay forever. She had her own husband and children to care for.

  A month later, bombs destroyed the adjacent apartment building. Things like this were becoming commonplace. Rockets and artillery would shower down on an area, sometimes because there were known fighters positioned nearby, and sometimes for no reason at all. Buildings would collapse and civilians would die, be maimed, or become homeless. No one bothered to rebuild, because it was quite possible that another attack would happen and cause a similar amount of damage. For the survivors, it was better to find somewhere else to go.

  * * *

  On December 4, 1991, my mother went into labor with me. It should have been routine. My mother was healthy, and the pregnancy had gone relatively smoothly, all things considered. This was also my mother’s third child, and her body knew what was coming. She expected to labor for a few hours as she had with Afsoon and Omar, and that would be the end of it.

  But as the contractions started, rockets hit a nearby building. The explosions shook my aunt’s building, and dust and smoke filled the air. Toxic fumes seeped in through the window and caused both my mother and aunt to choke and cough. They quickly ushered my sister and brother into the back room to shelter them if another barrage struck.

  Then came the screams from outside. Families had been in the building that got hit, and scores of women and children had been killed or severely injured. The ones who could walk came stumbling out of the rubble, while others sat stranded on the upper floors, staring blankly at where the walls and floors had been just moments before. Boys and girls were crying, and mothers were hysterical with fear.

  My father wasn’t home, and my mother and aunt decided it was too dangerous to go to the hospital. There were no cars or taxis around, and my mother would need help walking. A doctor wouldn’t come to the house, either. More rockets might hit the area, and no doctor was going to risk his life for some nameless woman giving birth. The few doctors who still remained in the city had enough to do with all the sick and dying in the hospitals.

  The contractions were getting closer together, and my mother realized she would deliver any minute. It was going to happen right here, in a dilapidated apartment building, with a war raging on the doorstep.

  My mother later told me that she was terrified, crying and screaming, and afraid she might die. Her two children were in the back, both in shock from the rocket attack, and she was in immense pain. She felt she had no control over anything, which was compounded by the chaos outside. She didn’t know what to do or what to tell my aunt. She’d never had to manage her own childbirth; there’d always been a midwife present and a doctor nearby.

  My aunt didn’t know what to do either, so she ran outside and found an old woman who was from a village up north. My aunt assumed this woman might possess the traditional skills of a midwife, and the old woman said she did.

  When they returned and the old woman started working on my mother, however, it became apparent she had no idea what she was doing. The woman was probably a bit crazy, and she was determined to push on my mother’s stomach and in other places, which caused my mother immense pain. The old woman muttered unintelligibly and kept poking and prodding. If she had continued, she likely would have killed my mother and me.

  My aunt realized what was happening and yanked the old woman off my mother. She screamed at her and pushed her out of the house, slamming the door. My aunt then rushed back to my mother’s side, held her hand, and assured her everything would be all right.

  My aunt told my mother to breathe and to push. She kept her eyes locked on my mother’s and spoke to her gently, encouraging her to keep breathing and pushing. At this point that’s all she could do. The baby was coming and they just needed to let it happen.

  This went on for a time, my mother breathing and pushing, mothers wailing and children crying outside, and the toxic stench of explosives lingering in the air, until eventually my aunt helped deliver me.

  Miraculously, my mother and I were healthy. We survived when dozens outside had just perished. It was all unbelievable.

  Despite the relief that came after the ordeal was over, my mother was devastated and so was my aunt, because I was a girl. My mother had one son already, but it didn’t matter. Giving birth to a girl was shameful. Even amid all this madness, the cultural stigma of having a baby girl plagued my mother.

  My mother knew my father was different and not like other Afghan men, but she was still afraid to look him in the eye when he got home. It took her a while to shake this feeling, because it was something that had been etched into her, but she eventually did. She told herself that Nooragha would be grateful and happy to have another baby girl.

  My father arrived home later that night, and my two-and-a-half-year-old sister met him at the door, bursting with excitement. My father rushed into the bedroom, overcome with joy, and lifted his second daughter
into his arms to welcome her into the world.

  They named me Niloofar, which is a Persian name that means “water lily.” It also signifies peace, purity, and spiritual enlightenment. I couldn’t have asked for a better name.

  5

  Escape

  I was seven the first time I heard the story about how we got to Pakistan. We were living in Karachi, and it was 1998. My sister Afsoon was about to turn nine, and we’d never celebrated her birthday before. None of us had celebrated a birthday before.

  That night after work, my father came home to surprise Afsoon with a cake, a beautiful dress, and a set of hairclips. Both my mother and father tried to make every moment of that evening special. They wanted her to experience what most children did on their birthday—to be doted on and made to feel loved and celebrated.

  My sister was of course overwhelmed, never having been the sole focus of attention for an entire evening of celebration, but it was more than that. We were all emotional, thankful, and happy to be a family and to have finally found a degree of safety and stability. Our life in Karachi was better than it had ever been since the wars started.

  I already knew our home was Afghanistan, having learned that on the playground three years earlier, but I didn’t know how we’d come to Pakistan. I asked, and in the midst of the celebration, my parents told the three of us what had happened.

  * * *

  I was six months old in May 1992, and the violence in Afghanistan was spiraling out of control. President Mohammad Najibullah and the remnants of his Communist government had been holding on by a thread since the Soviet Union’s collapse in December 1991, but without that support he had nothing left. He resigned from the presidency in March 1992. The United Nations tried to broker a peace plan between the warring mujahideen parties, but five armies sat perched outside Kabul with tens of thousands of troops. Major fighting erupted in and around the city and lasted into the summer, forcing half a million civilians to flee Kabul, while thousands of others died in the fighting.

  My father saw his country falling apart, and he knew it wouldn’t end soon. If we stayed in Kabul, the chances were very high that we would be killed, starve, or die of some disease. He had to make one of the hardest decisions of his life: we would leave Afghanistan, perhaps never to return.

  At midnight on May 24, 1992, we were ready to go. My parents and siblings each had a small bag. My father wore traditional Afghan attire, and my mother donned her burka. We weren’t able to say goodbye to anyone, including our family; it was too dangerous to venture across the city, and the phone lines had been cut long ago.

  My father said he saw my mother crying, but there was no time to ask her what she was upset about. He suspected he knew, and years later my mother admitted she feared she’d never see her family again. She wanted to stay in Kabul. It was her home, and she wished there was some way she could protect her family and remain, but it was too dangerous. The civil war had brought Afghanistan to its knees, and death and violent oppression were the norm. They had no choice but to leave.

  My father, my siblings, and my mother, with me in her arms, walked ten miles through Kabul’s darkened streets to the bus station on the east side of the city. Tired and hungry, with blistered feet and aching legs, we arrived just before dawn. My father found a taxi driver willing to drive us to Khost Province, which was the best place to cross into Pakistan.

  Khost Province is located on the eastern edge of Afghanistan and shares a border with Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Pakistani government exercised limited control over this region. It’s where the Americans trained and supplied their mujahideen allies in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s and where, fifteen years later, after 9/11, numerous insurgent networks would find a safe haven in their fight against NATO and the newly installed Afghan government.

  The actual border—the Durand Line—is just a scribble on a map rather than a physical marker on the ground, and my father knew we could cross over using the centuries-old smuggling routes.

  The 145-mile taxi ride from Kabul to Khost took six hours. There were no rest stops; it was too dangerous to stay in one place for too long, what with all the bandits and warring factions. My father told us he thought we might be ambushed or robbed at any point along the way. My mother said she felt like a prisoner under her burka, barely able to see out and crammed in the back of the car, breathing dusty air that reeked of diesel.

  We arrived in Khost in the afternoon on May 25, and the taxi driver dropped us on the edge of the city near a small mosque. At least ten other families were waiting there, over thirty people, and we were all in a similar situation. Everyone was trying to escape the war with hopes of making it across the border into neighboring Pakistan.

  There weren’t any inns for us to spend the night, and there wasn’t a camp with humanitarian services to help. No aid organizations could get into Afghanistan, and there weren’t any international peacekeeping forces present to establish safe zones. The situation was completely lawless.

  We were strangers here, with no relatives nearby, so our only option was to seek refuge in the mosque’s courtyard. At the very least we’d be safe there, because even the most ruthless of bandits wouldn’t dare rob and murder women and children hiding in a mosque.

  That night was cold, and all my parents could do was hold us tight to keep us from freezing. We were hungry too; food was scarce, and those who had some kept it for themselves.

  I don’t remember any of this, but my family does. They remember the tears and the fear, mostly. They can recall the fear they felt from having escaped the only place they’d ever called home, walking for hours at night in a bombed-out city, and convincing a stranger to drive them over a hundred miles away.

  And there was the fear from arriving in an unfamiliar place and finding clusters of other families and groups who were just as exhausted, desperate, and frightened. The cold, the hunger, the dusty wind coming out of the surrounding highlands—the emptiness they felt must have been staggering. Thinking about it saddens me to this day.

  The next morning, three smugglers approached what had become our larger group. These men wore long, black perahan tunbans with black-and-white scarves around their heads. They told us to wait until nightfall in a deserted area near the border that was far outside the city. With piercing eyes and long, scraggly beards, they barked out these instructions.

  We went into the desert to wait, as we’d been told to, but my father was suspicious of the smugglers. He’d heard rumors about other refugees who had tried to flee the country, and he feared the smugglers might rob and kill everyone. Such atrocities had occurred before in this now lawless frontier. Anything could happen, and no one could be trusted.

  My father knew we were helpless if the smugglers came back with guns to murder us. But if they only wanted to rob us, he had an idea. He carefully gathered all of our valuables—our money, my mother’s jewelry, his watch—taking care not to let anyone see what he was doing. I can picture my mother flicking her eyes this way and that, doing her best to keep calm while the terror roiled inside her.

  Once my father had collected everything, he looked at me, his baby girl. He then gazed at my sister and my brother, and then at his wife. He stared at their smudged faces and dirt-stained clothes and saw the exhausted vacantness in their eyes and felt the hunger in their bellies. He then looked back at me and told himself that he had to do this.

  He asked my mother to change my diaper. She gave him a confused look, but he insisted, and she began to change me. My father then wrapped our valuables inside the removed diaper. He walked away from the group as if to relieve himself and buried the package. When he returned, he secured a knife in his boot.

  This moment cemented the perilous destitution that had become our reality. My father armed himself with a knife in his boot and buried the only valuables we had in his daughter’s diaper. He sat and waited, keeping watch over his three children and wife, anxious for the return of the men
who would either murder us or smuggle us across the border.

  One of the smugglers appeared just before the sun went down. He had a long red beard and a booming voice. He ordered everyone to take out anything of value and then went from family to family, confiscating their possessions and yelling at them to hurry up and be quiet. He didn’t care what people had—he took everything.

  When he got to us, my father said we had nothing, that we were poor. The smuggler didn’t believe him and ordered all of us to stand up so he could search us. The man had fiery eyes and a mouth that curled, the face of a murderer, but no one said anything or resisted. We allowed him to rifle through what few possessions we had before he gave up and moved on to the next family.

  When the smuggler had finished with the last family, he told us no one could leave. They would come back to take us across the border at four the next morning. With the smuggler gone, the tension that had hung over our group seemed to relax, but it didn’t go away.

  My father chatted with the other fathers and husbands, and many of them worried that when the smugglers returned later that night they would kill everyone and that this was all just a ploy. My father agonized over this possibility, too, and contemplated whether we should leave and try to make the crossing on our own.

  He decided against this, not knowing where we could cross, and also because if something were to happen, there was safety in numbers. If it was just the five of us, bandits could easily slaughter our family and none of us would ever be seen or heard from again.

  * * *

  At four the next morning, the three smugglers returned and told everyone to get ready. It was pitch black, but they instructed us to start walking east toward the border. My parents had retrieved the diaper a few hours prior without the smugglers suspecting anything, but we were still hungry, cold, and whipped raw from the dusty wind. Still, my family stood up and walked.