by Anna Badkhen
My companion, a young Mazari man who had come on the trip with me to translate, saw something else entirely.
“I want to go across,” he whispered, in English.
“What would you do there?”
“Nightclubs. I miss nightclubs.”
“Have you even been to a nightclub?”
“No.” There were no nightclubs in Mazar-e-Sharif.
“Then how can you miss them?”
“I saw it in film.”
At two in the morning the women of my house in Mazar-e-Sharif rose without a sound from tick mattresses sweet with sleep and lovemaking and children’s breath and inexpressible loneliness. Quietly they stepped out of their bedrooms, pulled shut their doors, pulled tight their scarves over their bare shoulders, filed through the hallways hushed with cheap carpets woven by machines in some nameless Chinese factory, and entered the large second-floor kitchen. The city had power that night. The single fluorescent ceiling light went on.
Eight brothers lived in the house with their widowed mother—a kind and vulgar matriarch who had given birth nineteen times and had lost seven children in infancy, and who commanded the house with unflinching and unquestioned authority despite debilitating joint pain, high blood pressure, and silent and devastating lovesickness for her dead husband—and their hardworking youngest sister, who was said to have a temper and therefore, already in her early twenties, remained single. Four of the brothers were married and their wives lived with them; three had children of their own. Most of the year, the two-story poured-concrete house reverberated with a near-constant ruckus of screaming infants, quarreling toddlers, singing teenagers, jokes, chaffs, marital arguments, orders bellowed from one end of the compound to another, counterorders shrilled back, dishes clanging, doors slamming, the slapping of wet laundry against an aluminum basin, the whacking of a butcher knife against a wooden chopping board, the bounce-bounce-bouncing of a soccer ball on the cement floor of the yard, on the carpeting of the hallways, the cymballic syncopations of Bollywood tunes on the radio—often different tunes in several rooms at once.
Outside, a film of violence and death swirled and pooled over the province of Balkh like the rainbow plumes of an oil slick. During the ten weeks that had passed since Ozyr Khul and Naim had taken each other’s sisters as wives, farmers had clustered into armed gangs and clashed with Taliban fighters. The Taliban had shot dead a teacher from Siogert who had urged fellow villagers to resist the militia’s demand for tithes. Someone had fired rocket-propelled grenades into the compound of an elder in Shahrak, twice; both grenades had missed the house and bit into the cracked clay ground and exploded in black balloons of burnt dust. Four people died during a cholera outbreak in Dawlatabad. Six blocks south of my noisy house in Mazar, a bicyclist had detonated a bomb and killed three children and the grocer my hosts had known as the Old Man on the Corner. Men who said they were Taliban had telephoned one of the brothers in my house several times. They said they would kill him because he had helped the police identify and arrest one of the men who had led the attack that spring on the United Nations office in Mazar-e-Sharif, where my host worked as a driver. They said they would gouge out his eyes. They said they would track down his children and kidnap them. Night watchmen’s whistles in the city sounded more urgent, more dire.
Yet somehow the bloodshed and fear of that summer seemed only lightly traced upon the fixed topography of the land, the scarring of these latest war crimes and threats impermanent like drifting sand upon the immutable canvas of the plains and mountains, ready to be erased and rewritten anew the next summer, and the next, and the next. For the most part, life went on as it had forever. My Mazari hosts still smoked their mint-flavored waterpipe on starry Friday evenings. Village kids still played in irrigation ditches that sometimes oozed with warm mud. In Khairabad, men still sat on their haunches by wells and stared darkly down the road. In Karaghuzhlah, women still dried the bitter harvest of almonds on the clay stoops of their compounds. In Oqa, Thawra still wove her carpet, now almost two meters long.
And then, on the first night of August, a thread-thin new moon stitched through the sky and instantly sealed off all the pandemonium behind its arced parenthesis. Overnight the very internal landscape of the Khorasan became rearranged, adjusted to accommodate a rigid set of distinct and ancient rituals. The ninth lunar month of the Muslim calendar, the holy month of Ramadan, had begun.
Such tenderness reigned in the kitchen. The women worked in silence. Only when they passed one another coursing around the floor did they touch hands lightly and say one another’s names and suffix them with an endearment. “Manija jan.” “Nilufar jan.” “Ruwaida jan.” On a two-burner gas stove they heated up leftover okra sauce and rice in a big cast-iron pot. The eldest of the wives, Nadia—“Nadia jan”—cooked a quick lobio of red beans. I chopped tomatoes and cucumbers and white onions into several small salad bowls and swept the floor with a balding broom. “Anna jan.” No other words were uttered. Kotzia jan, the unmarried sister, at quarter to three spread a maroon plastic dastarkhan in the hallway, and the rest of us brought out teacups and long glass platters of beans and rice and okra and yesterday’s nan stacked into a short pyramid and two thermoses of hot tea brewed the night before and a tray of sliced watermelon. We touched hands. We smiled. The matriarch made her way heavily upstairs and sat on the carpet and leaned against the wall and moaned quietly through her pain the name of God:
“Lordy, lordy.”
She looked up.
“Sit, Anna jan.” She patted the floor next to her. I hesitated. She grabbed my thigh and forced me down. “Sit, daughter. Sit here next to me.”
Her name was Qalam Nissa. No one called her that. She was Madar—Mother—or Madar jan—dear Mother. Dear Mother the sorceress, who would throw water from a red pitcher after me when I would leave the house, to protect me from the evil of the road. Dear Mother the bonesetter, who, after I had fallen off a horse, tried to fix my wrist and laughed when I screamed louder than I had thought possible. Who would come into my room to drink tea and mourn her husband’s death of blood cancer and check that I was warm enough, cool enough, fed enough, loved enough, and, one evening, to squeeze my breasts with both stubby hands and demand: “How come your tits are so small? Look at mine!”
Her chest was colossal, like her love.
Dear Mother the midwife, who had grown up illiterate in a mountain village in eastern Afghanistan and had delivered more babies than she could remember, including those of her two married daughters and of her sons’ wives, and thereby—in her mind at least—had earned the right to offer, in the kitchen while her daughters-in-law and I did the cooking, a comparative analysis of the women’s physiology.
“My cunt is like this,” she explained in Farsi, and drew her fingers into a tight fist. “Ruwaida’s cunt is like this,” and she loosened the fist and flapped her wrist up and down, like a dog’s tongue. “Nilufar’s is like this—waah, waah!” and her fingers became a hungry bird crying for food. She looked at me and grinned.
“And your cunt, Anna?”
“Enough already, Mother!” shouted one of the women. Everyone else was squealing with laughter.
“Shush, girl—and your cunt, Anna? What’s your cunt like? You have one, don’t you?”
And she reached out and pinched my crotch, and I blushed. I could never keep up, in any language.
Of course, in kitchens all over Afghanistan, women traded sex jokes, often in two-line verse.
I will gladly give you my mouth,
But why stir my pitcher? Here I am now, all wet—
went these landays, unrhymed and proverbial, bitter and teasing, composed in Pashto and repeated over decades, over centuries. They had no one author but belonged to everywoman, and so she threw them into vats of pilau along with pinches of cumin—
Is there not a single madman in this village?
My pants, the hu
e of fire, are burning on my thighs—
and kneaded them into the air bubbles that sneaked inside the ragged loaves of nan, and wove them into carpets—
My love, jump into bed with me and do not fear,
If it should break the “little horror” is there for the repair.
Landay, the Pashto word for a short snake full of venom. The “little horror,” explained the Afghan poet and landay collector Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, was the husband, the “companion . . . forced upon her”—often an old man, like Zarifshah Bibi’s husband, Mustafa, or a child, like Ozyr Khul.
But during the first Ramadan breakfast, Qalam Nissa was quiet, groggy with sleep, hushed by the solemnity of the occasion, awed by the twenty-nine impending days of thirst and hunger. All she said to me was, “Sit with me, daughter.”
And I sat.
I once asked Qalam Nissa what, as a little girl in a village of stone homes and emerald brooks, she had wanted to become when she grew up.
“A mother,” she said. “I wanted to become a mother. And here I am.”
• • •
We sat. Qalam Nissa’s sons came out of the bedrooms in their tank tops and wrinkled pantaloons, tiptoed to the dastarkhan, sat. Their wives sat. Their unmarried sister, Kotzia, sat. We ate little. We spoke in whispers. Only adults fasted for Ramadan, and the children were asleep. The house was never this quiet at mealtime. For the last forty minutes of this nocturnal breakfast, we drank and drank tea until “the white thread of dawn appear . . . distinct from its black thread,” as prescribed in The Heifer, the second sura of the Koran. And then, just after four o’clock, the call to prayer sounded, and the family wiped their lips for the day. The men put on their knee-length shirts and went to the mosque, and the women finished cleaning up and went back to sleep. The next time anyone would eat or drink would be after seven at night, after the sun had subdued and then flashed one last burst of violent crimson over the western desert, and the mare’s tails over the Hindu Kush to the south had lit up purple and burgundy and faded to inky black, and Venus had risen large as a ping-pong ball in the eastern sky, and the thirsty voices of the muezzins, amplified by a hundred crackly megaphones, had told the city that the first day of the fast was over.
That morning I walked out of the compound in Mazar-e-Sharif into a grid of blinding unpaved streets.
It was nine o’clock. At eight, four hours after the predawn meal and three hours later than usual in summer, the men of the house had gone to work in the city, and the women had stirred out of their rooms to feed the children, then retreated to their unmade beds. Qalam Nissa, in her nightclothes, peeked out of her bedroom to ask me where I was going—“Shahr,” I said, “downtown”—and she wished me to go with God and moved her hand as if to bless me but then, overcome by fatigue, shut her door and went back to sleep. All the curtains in the house were drawn and would remain so until the month was over.
The white sun of August had veiled the Hindu Kush with stagnant haze and flattened the Khorasan into a two-dimensional eggshell pancake. It had blanched thistle plants down to translucent rattling husks among which sheep and goats kept their heads tucked low into the stark blue pools of their own shadows. Humans squatted against clay walls that threw miserly slivers of shade. Excruciating days were spent waiting for the slightly cooler nights, when it was thinkable to unfold, to stretch, to stand tall again. When it was possible, at last, to drink.
I moved at a crawl. So did everything else. The few cars that were out. The occasional horse-drawn cart. The rare pedestrians—men in clean shalwar kameez, women in burqas or in the white Ramadan headscarves of chastity, of schoolgirls—crept down the streets, clinging to the rope-thin strips of shadow that hemmed bone-white walls. Even the sunlit dust that, stirred by passing trucks, rose from the potholes in a slow pink motion hesitated to billow and then hung above the road long after the trucks had gone. Ramadan decelerated all movement, congealed time, rang in the ears with the white noise of thirst, like the aura of an approaching migraine.
On Dasht-e-Shor Street, which bounced south from my neighborhood toward the Blue Mosque, most shops were shuttered. The shopkeepers in the stores that did stay open were lying on their backs on clammy carpets or charpoy rope beds in the thin light that seeped through half-open doors, trying to expend as little energy as possible and not to sweat the precious liquids. There were no customers. No one spoke except to wish one another a peaceful Ramadan: to open your lips was to dry out your tongue, and then how to survive the ten hours till iftar? An intolerable hush sifted through the city. Women who gathered to fast together stopped talking one by one after a few minutes of lament, pointing with their forefingers at their mouths, and then sat fanning themselves with the fringes of their scarves in dehydrated silence. The sorriest were the child vendors who stood under improbable awnings of ripped canvas beside large plastic coolers full of individual packets of pomegranate and cherry juice, the packets soggy from the melting ice and no longer very cold. Little old men with crow’s-feet of disillusionment and suspicion around their dull and exhausted eyes, underage breadwinners who worked in the stalls of their fathers, their uncles, their widowed mothers. Who would buy their juice at this hour? Even those who did not observe the fast—the travelers, the sick, the pregnant or menstruating women, the lackadaisical Muslims—would have been ashamed to drink in public.
And it was hot, hot, unforgivably hot. I lasted two hours on my walk. Then I went home and shut the door to my bedroom to read Rumi.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.
When you’re full of food and drink, an ugly metal
statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast,
good habits gather like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Solomon’s ring.
Perhaps so. I was very thirsty. I prayed a heathen’s prayer for the night to come.
• • •
At four in the afternoon the women of the house emerged from their rooms again to get going on the iftar dinner.
Iftar in Qalam Nissa’s house, invariably, was bolani, the savory, deep-fried stuffed pancakes made fresh each night. Sometimes the women would serve dogh, the salty drink of diluted yogurt and garlic; dates, which the Prophet Mohammed had eaten to break his own fast; and lemonade made with powder imported from Iran. Occasionally someone would prepare rice or veal pilau, and once I dared to cook a large vat of chicken curry, which the family said was good but a little too spicy.
(The grainy rice I had made to accompany the curry was rejected. It was not sticky, and difficult to eat by hand. My hosts unanimously agreed that it was undercooked. “Do you feed this to your children?” one of the brothers asked. “Is it even safe?” And, when I blushed in embarrassment, he offered this comfort: “You should watch our women sometimes. They will teach you to make rice properly.”)
But bolani were a Ramadan staple in Northern Afghanistan. In my house they were prepared collectively on a large tarp covered by a clean white bedsheet and spread on the hallway floor next to the kitchen. One of the women kneaded the dough and shaped it into balls the size of a fist; two rolled the balls into thin round crepes; the rest arranged the stuffing on them, folded them in half, pinched the sides together. The ritual was the same in every city household, though the number of cooks varied. Each afternoon thousands of thirsty and sweltering women knelt on the floors of their kitchens and hallways in an inadvertent unison, a city-scale ballet of flour puffs. The wife and teenage daughter of Satar Bigzada, sweating, smiling, joking in whispered Uzbek. The mother and sisters of the young Hazara woman who worked as my translator that month. Qalam Nissa’s two married daughters and their own teenage girls. The wife and daughters of her oldest son who lived separately, four blocks away. Qaqa Satar’s wife.
And then the families would sit together around the oily golden piles and fan themselves and
wait for that magical moment of gloaming when the city would hang suspended from a double layer of lace: of holiday prayer streaming horizontally from a hundred crepitating loudspeakers, and of old light streaming down from myriad stars.
• • •
“Bolani,” said Amanullah, and closed his eyes, and imagined the bubbling half-moons of deep-fried dough, the delicate, thinly layered stuffing of minced garlic greens, or of pureed potatoes, or of crushed pumpkin, or maybe even—delicious, unbelievable—of spiced sheep tripe. Imagined folding these pies in half with burning fingers and dipping them in cool fresh yogurt. Imagined the way they must crunch and melt in his perpetually hungry mouth.
He smiled, eyes still shut.
“Would be nice.”
Once upon a time the moon was white, and the sun and the moon had a fight over who was more beautiful. The sun said it was more beautiful because its beauty illuminated the entire world. The moon said it was more beautiful because its face was completely white. Then the sun got angry and collected desert sand, dust, and the ashes from its bukhari and threw them at the moon. The dirt soiled the moon’s face forever. The moon became embarrassed and stopped coming out during the day. That’s why the moon comes only at night and its face is blemished.”
Finished with the story, Amanullah wiped his forehead with the loose end of his turban, and in an instant his skin was beaded with sweat again. It was very hot in his cob house. Outside it was hotter still. Weather forecasts showed the mercury at one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, dipping to one hundred at night. The desert throbbed in the dry heat. Amanullah squinted at the cigarette he was holding between his thumb and forefinger to gauge whether there was any more tobacco left in it worth smoking and took one last drag and tossed the squashy butt in the direction of the door.