The Taliban Cricket Club

by Timeri N. Murari

  Qubad’s father had owned the only Ford dealership in the city, and business began to evaporate in the late ’90s until it finally collapsed. No one could afford cars anymore—the only wealth coming into the country was invisible in the national ledgers: profits from enormous poppy crops cultivated at the command of the warlords.

  As children, we had led nervous, claustrophobic lives, playing in our gardens first amid the Russian occupation and then the civil war. I had grown up with these boys and we were still alive, but not without great loss. Qubad’s father had been killed in cross fire in 1996 and so had many other relatives—fathers, mothers, and children. Our sleepless nights were punctuated by gunfire and the whine of rockets.

  And with the onset of the civil war with the Taliban, Parwaaze’s and Qubad’s studies at Kabul University came to a halt. Young men like them who had known only war now filled the cities and the countryside, idling away their lives. The unemployment rate was above 60 percent, thus replacing their ambition with bitterness and frustration. At times, I feared they had lost the will to live. It made them all the more vulnerable to the Taliban’s recruiters—I shuddered to think of my other male cousins joining their ranks.

  “Where are you all g-going?” Qubad asked us.

  “To be shot,” Parwaaze said dourly. “Rukhsana is in trouble. The minister for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice has summoned her but she doesn’t know why.”

  “I’m g-going home,” said Qubad, turning on his heel.

  But Parwaaze grabbed him by the tail of his stained and rumpled shalwar, the long shirt that reached his knees. “No, no, you’re coming too.”

  “What for? I d-don’t want to be sh-shot.”

  “Her maadar said we both have to accompany her,” Parwaaze lied.

  WE WALKED CAUTIOUSLY TO the Karte Seh circle with its four wide roads leading to the compass points, pockmarked and scarred by rockets fired by both the Talibs and the Northern Alliance. The Russians entered Afghanistan in 1979 to support President Najibullah’s Communist government. In the war between the Russians and the mujahedeen, our freedom fighters, we were armed by the United States. In 1987, the Russians retreated, and when General Dostum, President Najibullah’s main ally, defected to form a Northern Alliance based in Mazar-e-Sharif, Najibullah resigned. Then war broke out between the Northern Alliance and various warlords, all looking to fill the power vacuum. The Taliban, an Islamist army of religious warriors recruited by Mullah Omar from the disaffected students in the madrassas, became a third player in the war in 1994. From their base in Kandahar, backed by the Pakistan army, they gradually moved north to fight the Northern Alliance. In 1996, the Talib conquered Kabul, and the Northern Alliance retreated to Mazar-e-Sharif.

  Now the only color left in the city was that of the blooming roses growing wild in the gardens we passed. Afghan roses are the plumpest, sweetest-smelling roses in the world, and I breathed in their fragrance to calm my nerves. At the circle, there was a wide expanse of park to the south, along with a line of shops: bakeries, vegetable carts, fruit shops, a restaurant (The Paradise), a car repair shop, and a pharmacy.

  “It’s a long walk,” I said to the others. The ministry was in the city center, just north of the river and opposite the Afghan Central Bank. “We’ll take a taxi.”

  Qubad took the entire front seat, so the three of us squeezed into the back of the ancient Toyota. We slowly bounced along the broken Asamayi Road, twisting and turning to avoid the biggest craters and chunks of fallen masonry. The road threaded the pass between the Asamayi and Sher Darwaza hills, washed green and pale purple, that divided the city in two. I sweated in my burka—from the heat and from anxiety. Would I return home or be arrested? I prayed silently that my cousins and Jahan would be safe, whatever Wahidi wanted with me. I stared out the window—not even the stumps of the great trees that once lined Asamayi Road as far as the eye could see remained. I avoided looking at the Kabul Zoo as we passed it; its grounds were neglected and overgrown, and many of the large animals were dead, sport for the brave Talib fighters.

  There was little traffic, with very few cars and mostly bicycles, buses, handcarts and donkey carts, and camel trains carrying bales of cotton and sacks of grain and, probably, opium. A long line of goats obediently followed their herdsman to their eventual slaughter. Dust blew into the car, smothering us. Qubad tried to roll up the window but it wouldn’t budge.

  “You should r-repair your w-windows,” he complained to the driver.

  “What are you,” the driver said, laughing, “an emir? This is good Kabuli dust. Gives us our special color and smell.”

  I laughed with the others, enjoying this glimpse of our lost humor. He heard me and turned just as he avoided a deep hole. “Sister, as much as I love the sound of your laugh, you must be silent. I must not hear your voice. If you were alone I wouldn’t even have taken you. Three days ago, I picked up a lady to take her to the old city and some religious police stopped me. They pulled her out and beat her legs with their cables and then pulled me out and beat me for traveling with a single woman who was not my wife or a relation.”

  We stayed silent after that.

  “Where do you want me to drop you?” the driver asked.

  “Just here at Pastunistan Square,” Parwaaze said, not wanting to frighten the man by telling him we had been summoned to the very heart of the religious police headquarters.

  Here the city was still a wasteland. In its four-year rule the Talib had done nothing to rebuild or replace what they helped destroy. The city, as fragile as any human, was gaunt with sickness; its blackened ribs jutted out at odd angles, craters of sores pitted its skin, and girders lay twisted like broken bones in the streets. Its gangrenous breath smelled of explosives, smoke, and despair. Even mosques were not spared the savagery, their skulls explosively opened to the sky. The Kabul River was a trickle of water pulsing through a muddy artery clogged with garbage. Across the river, the pale blue dome of the Timur Shah tomb was, somehow, unscathed. The tomb seemed obscene in its beauty, rising above the broken mud-brick homes and shops that had once crowded around it for protection. Rising out of those humble ruins were lines of carts selling vegetables, fruits, meat, and clothes. People clotted around them, as emaciated as the city, emerging out of the rubble to purchase a potato, a peach, a chicken leg, a sliver of meat, a bowl of rice, some dry naan.

  The taxi stopped on the curve of the road leading to Pastunistan Square and we hesitantly climbed out. The two-story Ministry to Propagate Virtue and Prevent Vice building stood behind crumbling walls scarred with bullet and shell holes, aloof, in an island of traffic, deceptively humble. The windows were shuttered. Farther down the road were the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance, and other government offices, their windows open for the light. We could see the walls of the president’s palace from the square. Pedestrians jostled us and we headed reluctantly toward the entrance. Many whom we passed were missing hands, missing legs, and had a wild look of disorder in their eyes. There were children on crutches, jerking around like puppets, all play drained from their faces, and holding out their skinny hands for alms.

  I walked a few steps behind my brother, who held our summons as protection against the whims of the police who padded along the streets like predators, armed with their canes and guns, watching us for the slightest infraction. They would strike out, as quick as snakes, to punish the transgressor of any one of their laws.

  But it was the quiet that I found most disturbing, and which filled me with unease. This was once a city of music; we hummed and sang Sufi, Farsi, ghazals, qawwali, and Bollywood songs. Melodies, seducing us to enter and listen, flowed out of every shop and followed us from street to street. Now the shiny intestines of cassettes fluttered in the breeze, knotted around posts and trailing along footpaths, ripped out to teach us how fragile music was. Guns were the only culture left in the country; they were the only music, the only poetry, the only writings, the only art that nourished the children. We
had been an exuberant people, loquacious, generous with our smiles and laughter, we had been gossipers and raconteurs, but now we spoke in whispers, afraid to be overheard. Suspicion soiled our daily lives. We had become a city of informers and spies. A soot of despair had settled on our souls and we could not scrub it off.

  We stopped outside the ministry. “All ready?” I said bravely, but I trembled as we entered the compound. I was grateful for my three escorts. Jahan held my elbow to steady my footsteps. I could not glance at him, my burka denying me even such a simple gesture. I turned my head to peer at him through my bars.

  “It’ll be all right,” he whispered. Two Talibs stepped in our way and quickly took the summons that Jahan held out. They were not Afghans but Arabs, either Saudis or Yemenis, surly men with dark, heavy beards. They had hooded eyes, like drowsy beasts, that awakened when they saw Jahan. I suddenly wished he had not accompanied me.

  The Announcement

  THEN THEIR EYES LINGERED OVER PARWAAZE AND Qubad. All three looked down. Finally, they examined me in my burka and, despite the masking mesh, I looked down too, as frightened as the boys. Satisfied that we were summoned by the minister himself, they escorted us through the building and into the rear courtyard.

  Taliban edicts, tattered and frayed but still menacing in their message, were reproduced in large notices pinned to the walls:

  WOMEN SHOULD ONLY BE SEEN IN THE HOME AND IN THE GRAVE

  We were only reproductive beasts to them, like goats, or chickens, or cows, fed and watered to await our slaughter should we break free. Our role was defined only by our womb and not by our thoughts and feelings. All in the name of God. How does a woman believe in God when the conduits of his messages are only men?

  I straightened my back in mute defiance. I was determined not to be afraid.

  In the courtyard, five men stood along the wall in the shade. I wasn’t the lone one summoned here and was momentarily relieved. I recognized Yasir, my old editor from the Kabul Daily, among them. He was a small, burly man, Napoleonic at times with his reporters. We had our differences, but he could be kind too. Now he wore the mandatory full beard. The others must have been reporters from the Dari and Pashtu newspapers. They looked like they wanted to be there as much as we did. A sense of panic broke over me afresh—why was I being rounded up with reporters? Yasir glanced in my direction—I was the only woman there—and I could tell he knew it was me under the burka. His presence made me feel slightly better. He lifted his small finger in cautious greeting. I would have liked to have talked to him—surely he knew more than I did. He could have told me stories about the regime that I could not hear under my burka. As if he read my mind, Yasir made his way to my side. “Salaam aleikum, aleikum salaam.” We quickly exchanged formal greetings, Jahan next to me.

  “Why are we here?” I whispered.

  “He’s going to make an announcement and no doubt threaten us.” He spoke quietly too, staring straight ahead like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “He’s called all the press on the government list, or what’s left of us, and that includes you.”

  “But I don’t work for the KD anymore.”

  “The list doesn’t know that. You still get government press releases at the office.”

  “My summons came to the house.”

  “Maybe one came to the office too. Have you been writing articles?”

  “No, I haven’t. How can I as a woman?”

  “Knowing you, a lot,” he said drily. “There have been stories in the foreign press on the bad treatment of women under this regime. There are very few women journalists in the country to report on that. In fact, I know of only . . .” He lifted his index finger, and then pointed it at me.

  “And they think it’s me?” I said indignantly, desperate to convince Yasir. “I swear I haven’t written a word since I was forced to resign.”

  Except that, of course, I had. With Jahan a reluctant mahram, I would—if not go where I wished and mingle in the bazaars to hear the gossip—follow up on the whispered stories that were passed from one to another. I could speak only to women and spoke to the men through my brother. It felt as if I was in a foreign land with a translator interpreting my questions and giving me the answers. Through these channels I interviewed Ayesha, a pretty woman a few years younger than me. She told me, “I had been walking on Chicken Street with my father when the religious police stopped me. At first, I didn’t know why. I didn’t know nail polish was banned; no one told me, it wasn’t written anywhere. They dragged me and my father to the police station, placed my hand on a table, and with a hatchet chopped off the tip of my little finger. I screamed with pain and shock. I didn’t know they would do that. And then they beat my father, as he is responsible for my behavior. See what’s left of that finger?” The wound had healed and the remaining fingers were cleaned of any nail polish. I dragged Jahan to interview Frozan: “We’re from Jalalabad and we fled here to escape the fighting, abandoning our home. The other day, I was passing a shop and I saw our family clock for sale in the window. I went in and told the owner that it was our clock and that he should return it. Just then, a religious policeman came in and beat me for being out without my mahram and then beat the shopkeeper for talking to me.” I also found lighter, and defiant, stories of how we survived. A woman named Zahra told me, “We love watching smuggled tapes of Bollywood films on our television and we’d spend hours just doing that, as there was nothing else to do. One day our neighbor reported us to the religious police and they raided us. They picked up our television, threw it out of the window, and warned us not to do that again. We lived three stories up. So we moved out of that flat and into another, bought a new television, and watched our movies. We learned to keep the volume low so our neighbors wouldn’t hear us.”

  I wrote whatever I could and I signed them all with my pseudonym. Despite what Yasir believed, I wasn’t the only woman sending out scraps of news to foreign publications. There were others out there and we were a small tribe of rebellious scribes in hiding.

  And under this regime, no one knew on whose side anyone was and Yasir could be tempting me to boast. Our press was putty in this regime’s hands.

  “I am sure there’s nothing to worry about.” Yasir’s voice was bland in disbelief. He lowered his voice further. “But you know, print one wrong word and they beat you or imprison you.”

  Then he turned fractionally to me for the first time and spoke quickly. “I am sorry that I didn’t defend you the day Wahidi came into the office. If I had, he would have shot me. We’re not brave.”

  “Shot you! I thought he’d shoot me.” I shivered—I was younger then, unafraid and ignorant of the nature of such men and their misshapen beliefs. “When did Wahidi become the minister?”

  “Two days ago,” he said, looking ahead again. “After you saw him in Kabul in ninety-six, he returned to Kandahar to serve Mullah Omar on the ruling council for two years. I heard the mullah did nothing without consulting Wahidi. Wahidi was then made governor of Kandahar province and served for another two years before the mullah sent him to Pakistan.”

  “Why Pakistan?”

  “To be his representative in talks. He gave Wahidi the post because three or four months ago, someone attempted to assassinate him. They blew up his house, with his wife and two of his children, but he wasn’t home.”

  “I never heard about that. So even the Talib ministers aren’t safe.” I wasn’t that surprised, as the Taliban’s cruel regime had massacred thousands of our people, creating an army of enemies.

  “You still haven’t,” he whispered harshly. “We can’t publish such stories. He returned from Pakistan a month ago, and we don’t know how the talks went because nothing was announced. The mullah doesn’t like Kabul at all. He believes we are a decadent people and prefers to rule from Kandahar. So now he sends us Wahidi to keep us in line.” He took a breath. “I hear he is as pious as the mullah.”

  “No one could be—” I stopped when I saw the Land Cruiser race into the c
ourtyard in front of us. “Oh god.”

  In the back lay a man and a woman, their arms and legs bound. The woman wore her burka; the man had a sack over his head. Two Talibs, along with two police officers who had guns, stood above them. The vehicle stopped, the Talibs jumped down and pushed their prisoners out onto the ground as if they were sacks of grain. When they fell we heard their muffled cries.

  The minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, Zorak Wahidi, the man who had summoned us here, stepped out of the passenger seat and walked slowly back to the fallen couple. I felt a shudder of recognition. His beard was whiter since I’d last seen him four years ago. There was a stoop to his shoulders, as if a thousand dead souls pressed down on him. He wore a black shalwar, a black lungee, and new black sandals. He also carried a pistol. He looked down at the prisoners and then across to us. I wanted to shield Jahan from what was about to happen but he had moved to stand between Parwaaze and Qubad and watched with the fascination of any teenager. He had never witnessed an execution before—Mother had forbidden him to accompany me and Parwaaze last November when Zarmina was executed. “Look away, look away,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me. Wahidi pointed the pistol down toward the man and shot him in the head. The man appeared to rise briefly before falling back. Wahidi moved to the crying woman and shot her in the head too. The shots sounded flat and harmless in the empty space surrounding us. He walked toward us holding his pistol, as casually as a man crossing a drawing room to greet his guests. The two Talibs and the policemen followed him. He turned to give them an order, and then turned back to us.