“Why do you care for me? Do you know me?” she asked me. Her voice shook. Her beautiful eyes were full of tears waiting to come out.
“No, I don’t know you, but I’m a human like you, and we should share the sorrows and the joys together,” I said.
“And how will you share my sorrows with me? It is not just me who needs someone to share her pain with. There are thousands of people like me who are even more desperate.”
I did not know what to say. She grabbed the money from me, pulled her veil down, and walked away without looking back, the dust blowing after her and settling on her blue burqa.
20
The Length of a Hair
My mother gave me some money and a list of what she and my sisters needed: trousers, skirts, shawls, scarves, and other small things.
After the arrival of the Taliban, they hardly went out. They did not like wearing the burqa. They could not see through those little holes. In fact, if they left the house, it was only to go to the wedding parties or funerals of close relatives. For those occasions, I hailed them a taxi, or I called a relative with a car who collected them from our gate and dropped them at another gate. While they were in the car, their heads were completely covered with shawls, even their faces, and they could not see which road they were on.
I hated shopping for them, but what could I do? I was the only one available; with my father always working, they had no one else. We left the crying machine with a neighbor. My little brother had, in fact, become a joking machine. Everything he said was funny, and he made everyone laugh. He was the sweetest kid and knew how to keep us entertained.
I took my shopping bag and headed to the main bazaar in midafternoon. On my way there, I was stopped by a Talib in front of the high-rising Ministry of Communication. He wore the usual long, white turban and long, black shalwar kamiz. But he had a pair of scissors in his hand instead of a gun or a whip.
He asked me to take off my shirt. I thought he was joking. Nobody in my life had ever asked me to take off my shirt in the middle of the road.
“What do you want to do with my shirt?” I asked him in Pashto.
“I have nothing to do with your shirt. I want to see your armpits,” he said.
“Why?! Look, look, there is nothing in my armpits. No hashish, no opium. I’m an athlete. I don’t use drugs. You see I have muscles,” I said as I raised my arms and flexed them.
“I need to see how long the hairs of your armpits are. They shouldn’t be longer than one inch,” he said insistently, and commanded me to take off my shirt.
“What does the hair of my armpits have to do with you?” I wanted to ask. But I had been to the Taliban prison once and did not want to go back again. I pulled off my kamiz in the middle of the road. The passersby on either side of the road watched me from the corners of their eyes, but they kept moving and kept their silence.
The Talib pulled out a hair from my left armpit and measured it. It was a tiny bit longer than one inch. He frowned and told me that I was in big trouble. I pleaded with him to measure a different one. He pulled out another hair from my right armpit and measured it. That one was just less than one inch.
“Some of the hairs are long, and some of them are short. When was the last time you shaved under your arms?” he asked.
“Two, three weeks ago,” I answered as I was putting my shirt back on.
“Give me an exact date,” he shouted, frowning.
“I don’t remember,” I said. In fact, I had never shaved my armpits at all.
“I want to see your penis and testicles,” he said matter-of-factly as he stared between my legs.
“What? Why?” I asked. Panic was replacing my anger.
“Because I said so,” he calmly replied.
“You know they look the same as yours,” I said very seriously to mask my fear. I did not want to take off my trousers in the middle of the road for a stupid and illiterate villager who called himself a Talib.
“This is your last chance. If you don’t show me your penis and testicles, you’ll be in prison in ten minutes, and I’ll see them there,” he warned.
“Oh God! What the hell is wrong with this man? Please God, help me!” I screamed inside myself.
“Why don’t you show me yours first,” I challenged, playing for time until I could think more calmly what to do.
“Do you have an interest in my penis? It is quite big, and there is a lot of semen in my testicles,” he said with a totally different tone. “My boy loves it, but he is not as white as you.” He suddenly smiled a warmly engaging smile, even though he was a Taliban, and they hated any sign of happiness.
Now I understood why he had stopped me. We had heard rumors that the Taliban who had been fighting on the front lines against the Mujahedin would go to the prison during the night so they could relax by raping young boys who had been imprisoned for no crime.
This man wanted to use me every night with his frontline friends until they got bored with me and found someone new, or younger, or with whiter skin. I had seen some of those frontline Taliban, as we called them, a few days before in the park near the Qala-e-Noborja. They had long, dirty hair and untrimmed beards. They were full of lice since they did not wash for months, despite what the Holy Koran told them about cleanliness. The worst ones were from the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, or from Chechnya or some of the Arabic countries such as Yemen and Syria. They had no interest in Afghanistan. They just wanted to kill people.
I could not let such a thing happen to me, to my life. I would bring shame to myself and to my family, even if it was done by force.
I did not know what to say, but I knew that I had to get away from this man any way I could. I opened my trousers and, very self-consciously, lowered them to my knees. Passersby stared at me. I glared back at them.
The Talib sat on his knees and pulled out two hairs, one which he called “the hair of your penis forehead” and another one from my testicles. Then he asked me to tie up my trousers. He measured them both with a ruler. I was looking closely at his hands, which were trembling. Both hairs were curly; I could not even guess how long they were. The one from “the forehead of my penis” was nearly two inches, and the one from my testicles was one and a half inches.
“Boy, you are in big trouble. I will have to sentence you to one month in prison,” he said, a devilish sneer growing as the corners of his eyes narrowed.
He gripped my right arm tightly and pulled me toward his car, which was parked at the roadside. Another Talib, who was lounging in the driver’s seat, stood up and opened the door. They pushed me into the back. Then my captor went off and stopped another young man who was hardly more than a boy.
As I sat in the backseat, the Talib in the driver’s seat was holding the steering wheel and listening to one of those Taliban songs without music. The singer was mixing verses of Persian love poems with some random Urdu words. Only the singer himself knew what he was singing about.
We both watched as the Talib examined the armpits of the boy he had stopped. The boy was younger than I, and paler, and very handsome. They loved white-skinned boys.
I was determined to escape.
* * *
Not far from me, in front of the Ministry of Communications, I saw a group of builders who had been working nearby, constructing the largest mosque in Kabul. They had finished their work for the day and were heading home. As they came alongside our car, I opened my door, jumped out and shouted very loudly, “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Bomb under the Taliban car!”
There were more than thirty builders. Instantly, they panicked and scattered like a flock of frightened pigeons. People on the sidewalks also started running to get away from that Taliban car. The Talib who had been in the driver’s seat was equally frightened. He raced toward the new mosque with some of the builders.
I ran in the opposite direction, toward a bakery. When I entered, the baker asked me what was happening outside. He could see the panicked people through his w
indow. It was real chaos. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. Everywhere, people were yelling “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!” They were all trying to hide. I saw a few middle-aged men who had stuck their heads under a pushcart with the rest of their bodies hanging out.
“They think there is a bomb,” I answered, breathing hard. “But there is no bomb. I shouted, ‘Bomb! Bomb!,’ so I could jump from that Talib’s car. They arrested me for nothing. So, they could use me in the prison,” I told him.
The baker looked at me in bewilderment, then terror.
“Get out of here! Get out of my shop!” he shouted at me.
“If I were your son, would you let them take me to prison and use me for days and nights? Are you a stonehearted man?”
“You can see I’m a Hazara. You know that they hate us. If they find you in my shop, they’ll kill me,” he said. I tried to stay where I was, standing inside the shop. But he was a strong man with big arms and broad shoulders and was a head taller than I, and he pushed me out the door.
Now I was outside on the street again. The people were still running up and down. I did not know where to go or where to run. I felt very desperate and lonely. Suddenly, I felt myself being pulled back inside the shop. It was the baker. He practically picked me up and carried me all the way to a room at the back of his shop. He was gripping my left arm very tightly. I tried to speak, but in my terror I could not think of anything to say.
The back room was huge, almost twice as big as his shop. It was full of very large sacks filled with wheat flour, corn flour, and sugar. The baker brought me to a corner where there was a mountain of flour sacks. They were put one on top of another, all the way to the ceiling. He told me to climb over those sacks and jump in behind them.
I did what I was told. There was hardly enough space between the sacks and the wall to squeeze myself in. My nose filled with flour. I sneezed several times, one after another. The baker shouted at me to shut up. I tried my best to hold my sneezes back, but it was very hard. My nostrils kept itching, and I had to sneeze. The man shouted again with his thick voice.
I stayed there for four hours until it was completely dark and there was no sign of any Taliban outside. By then, people were hurriedly walking toward their homes, as they always did. The pushcart men were pushing their carts slowly, as they always did.
The baker called for me to come out from my hiding place. A boy who was younger than I brought me a pot of water to wash my face. I was powdered white with flour.
Some moments later, I was standing near the window and peering outside, still afraid that if I stepped out, the Talib would grab my wrist.
“I’m not letting you go out by yourself. That is even more dangerous for me. I’ll take you to your house. I have a car. If someone asks you anything, tell them you’re my son,” the man said.
I looked at him, not knowing how to express how grateful I felt. All I could say in a shaking voice was, “You are a hero.”
Half an hour later, I was sitting in the backseat of the baker’s car along with his son as he drove toward my house. He dropped me in front of the main gate. I insisted they come inside and eat dinner with my family. He said that he had to go, otherwise his wife would get frightened if he came home late.
I watched as he drove down the dirt road away from Noborja, then stepped through the gate feeling a weakness that was now replacing my fear.
When I went into our house, everybody was angry at me for being so late. I told them what had happened. I do not know whether my father and mother believed me. But my sisters did not believe me, and they were unhappy that I had not brought them the clothes they had asked for. If what I said were true, they taunted, then I would have been imprisoned for a month at least. I was probably at a friend’s house, or playing volleyball in the park, or using the parallel bars, because I was addicted to parallel bars in those days, and won every bet I made when I swung on them.
But that night, I shaved my armpits and also between my legs in case any more Taliban wanted to see them.
21
The Secret of the Pigeons
The next day, I never even left our rooms to go into the courtyard. I tried to sleep, but I could not sleep in daylight. I thought about the baker. I had never asked him his name.
I arranged some pillows in one corner near a window where I liked to read, and sat down with a copy of the Bible that had been translated into Dari. My mother’s brother had brought it to me from Pakistan, where he had to go sometimes. He had a job in the Ministry of Interior Affairs drafting official papers, because he had very clear handwriting. He had held a similar position under some previous governments, and had simply kept his old job. In the third year of the Taliban, he came to live with us at the Qala-e-Noborja. Though he worked for the Taliban, he was not one of them, and he hated their decrees. But he kept that to himself. He needed to use his skills to support his family, who was in Pakistan.
Every morning a car came to pick him up at the fort and dropped him off at the end of the day. That gave us some protection from the Taliban assigned to control our neighborhood.
He brought other books, too, by Maxim Gorky, Aristotle, and one called Plato Selections. It was his way of defying the regime. All such books had been banned by the Taliban. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were infidels as well as foreigners. So, their books should not be read in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Furthermore, since they were written before Islam, they were full of non-Islamic thoughts.
That, of course, made me more curious to read them.
At noon prayers on Fridays, the mullahs in the mosque would say that the Holy Koran was the only true book that was sent by God. But I wanted to read other books that other people believed were sent by God. I had heard that these books had helped solve the problems of millions of people for hundreds of generations before me.
I had already read this Dari translation of the Bible once when my uncle first brought it. I found that it was filled with poetic stories about the prophets who came before the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him.
Having recently read the Holy Koran in Dari in prison and now understanding it for the first time, I wanted to understand the Bible better, so I could compare it to the Holy Koran. The mullahs, however, said that the Bible had ceased to be the word of God a long time ago, because it had been rewritten and translated many times by different people. The Holy Koran, they said, has never been rewritten, nor will anybody ever rewrite it, nor can anyone rewrite it. Whoever rewrites the book of God is an infidel. He is in battle with God, like Shaitan.
* * *
Suddenly, I heard an unfamiliar voice calling my father’s name: “Basir, Basir, Basir…” I looked through the window to see who was out there. My father was taking a nap, as most of my family did after lunch in the July heat. There were more than twenty Taliban in the middle of the courtyard, looking all around. One of them was tall and thin, dirty as the others with a long beard and a big, black turban. He kept shouting, “Basir, Basir, Abdul Basir!”
I hurriedly woke my father.
“Who let them in?” my father asked as he was rubbing his eyes.
“I don’t know,” I replied. I heard anxiety in my voice.
“Did they knock on the door?” My father was rising from the toshak where he had been lying.
“I didn’t hear any knocking. I didn’t open the door for them,” I answered, my voice now shaking. “Are they looking for me? Did they come to arrest me?”
“I don’t know. Let me go and talk to them. You stay here, and don’t come out,” he replied.
I woke my mother, my sisters, and my mother’s brother. When my uncle heard the word “Taliban,” he hurriedly went out to talk with them.
We stood back from our windows and looked at the Taliban through the little holes in the curtains. My father was surrounded by them, just inside the passageway into the courtyard. He was talking with the tall, thin one. My uncle showed them his ID card from the Ministry of Interior Affairs. A fe
w of them kissed my uncle’s hand as a sign of respect and honor.
They moved toward our rooms at the other end of the courtyard, looking searchingly at the niches high in the wall where my pigeons nested and laid their eggs.
“They’re looking at your pigeons,” my mother said. “Didn’t I tell you a hundred times to take them to a shrine or a mosque somewhere? But you are so stubborn like your father, you never listen to me.”
The pigeons had been living in the Qala-e-Noborja long before we moved there, in holes made for them in the mud-brick walls above our rooms.
I had always wanted to keep pigeons, as many Afghans do, even when we were still living in Grandfather’s house. My father would not let me, though, saying, “You’ll waste all your time on pigeons and not spend it on your lessons. When you have finished nine grades, I’ll let you keep some.” But I did not have to wait that long.
When we were living in Grandfather’s house, one of our next-door neighbors had some pigeons. I used to go to his roof and watch him cutting the extra feathers from their wings and putting rings around their legs. They were of many breeds and colors, and each breed had its own name. I loved it when he held seeds in his hands and they came and sat on his hands, his arms, his shoulders, and his head.
I helped my neighbor keep two large pots filled with water for the pigeons to wash themselves, and two other large pots filled with sand for them to rub the insects out of their feathers.
When we moved to the Qala-e-Noborja, Haji Noor Sher already had many pigeons there. After a while, the pigeons knew me. As soon as I walked into the courtyard, many of them flew to me. Even when I just stood at our windows, they all came.
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 32