The Taliban Cricket Club

by Timeri N. Murari

  I stood up, brushing back the hair from my eyes. “My father has no objection to my working. He’s proud of me,” I replied. He looked very surprised that I would answer him back. I was proud of my profession, of my degree: a B.A. in journalism from Delhi University, where my father was the deputy ambassador in the Afghan embassy.

  “I am Zorak Wahidi,” he announced softly.

  He stared at me, waiting for me to recognize his name. Was I expected to know him from somewhere? I met his stare with my own, defiant. He looked insulted.

  It wasn’t a large office: a dozen desks squeezed together, papers piled on top of them and scattered on the floor. The other staff in the office were as still as statues and held their breath, waiting for whatever would come next. His men were still as well, and looked surprised that a woman should so brazenly defy their commander. He noticed Fatima and Banu across the room.

  “Call them,” he said.

  “On whose authority?” I asked.

  My defiance infuriated him. For a moment he looked puzzled and then, before I could move, he slapped me. It was so unexpected and quick, and I blinked away the tears, dazed by the sting. “Never speak back to a man. Women’s faces must not be seen and their voices must not be heard.”

  I looked to Yasir for help. He stepped out of his office toward me but then the fighters swung their guns around, motioning him back. He hesitated until he heard the loud click of the safeties being released and he backed away, raising a hand in apologetic defeat. I reluctantly gestured for Fatima and Banu. They crossed the length of the room, holding hands for support, and then clutched mine. We three women faced Wahidi, pressed together like frightened goats awaiting slaughter, knowing there was no escape.

  “Women must be seen only in the home and in the grave,” he said slowly. “Return to your homes immediately. You will not leave your homes without our permission and when you do you will be accompanied by your mahram.”

  I spoke firmly. “We cannot leave our work just because—”

  He slapped me again, harder. He saw the anger in my eyes and smiled, taunting me.

  “Are you stupid enough to defy me and not hear what I said? You must not speak! I must not hear a woman’s voice.”

  “I am not defying you . . . sir, I am working here and—”

  He held out his hand and a fighter gave him the broken-off antenna from a car. With a well-practiced flick, the antenna slashed the air and struck my forearm. No one sprang to my defense; everyone remained rooted in fear. I didn’t even cry out, though it hurt, and he watched me fight to hold back the tears.

  “Go,” he shouted and pointed to the door.

  He tore the paper out of my typewriter and ripped it to pieces.

  Fatima tugged at my hand, not saying a word. But I did not go meekly. I took my time—placing the plastic cover over the typewriter, closing my notebook, tidying my desk, collecting my handbag, covering my head with the hijab, each moment deliberate and slow while Wahidi and his men watched. I didn’t wince when I slipped my arm into the coat sleeve. The only sounds were the whispers of feet shuffling toward the door, and every man in the room avoided meeting my eyes. I heard Wahidi talking.

  “What is her name?”

  “Ru . . . Rukhsana,” someone answered after a long hesitation.

  “Daughter of?”

  After a silence, a man replied, “Gulab.”

  “Her home?”

  “In Karte Seh.”

  “You should have shot her when she opened her mouth,” I heard one of his fighters say harshly as we left the room. I shivered at the cruelty in his voice.

  FATIMA AND BANU AND I hurried along the street, blinking at the sun’s light, feeling as though we were emerging from being buried underground.

  “Are you okay?” Fatima asked me when we were a safe distance away from the building.

  “No, I’m not.” My sleeve chafed against the welt.

  “I thought he would shoot you,” Banu said.

  “I thought so too.”

  We click-clicked in our high heels toward Sherpur Square. I got angrier and angrier as the shock wore away. “You heard what he said—we may as well be dead.” And then I couldn’t help myself, and broke out in a rage. “They are totally mad. If they don’t want to see or hear women, they should live on a ‘Men Only’ island and screw each other.”

  “Shh.” Banu looked around nervously, shocked by my language. “Someone will hear you.”

  “I said it in English.”

  “And we understood. Others will too. We have to be careful.”

  “He seemed to know me from somewhere.”

  “I remember him,” Fatima said in a shaky voice. “He was the man who scolded you when we came out of Cinema Park after seeing Dushmani in our last year at school.”

  I was fifteen then and remembered the film but not the man. I had come out dancing and singing, imitating the Bollywood scenes. Fatima, Banu, and three others were clapping me on.

  “He shouted at your disgraceful behavior but you laughed at him and ran down the road, still singing and dancing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think it is him. Be careful, Rukhsana.”

  I tried to recall that moment when our lives brushed each other’s but couldn’t. I prayed that Fatima was wrong. It was another man, in another place.

  “What are you going to do?” Banu asked before we parted ways at Sherpur Square.

  “I don’t know. They’ve only been in power a day and I’ll have to wait and see. How can they stop all women from working? It’s against our laws.”

  “They’ll make up their own laws now,” Fatima said.

  “I can work from home if I can’t go to an office.”

  “You’ll get into even more trouble. I’m going to keep as quiet as a mouse until”—she looked around to see if anyone was near—“until I can leave.”

  “When’s that?” Banu asked. “Tell me how too.”

  “I’m going to stay and do my work,” I said. “I won’t write under my own name, I’ll invent one. I have to write and keep writing about this brutal regime.”

  Neither Fatima nor Banu smiled as they hurried away among the other pedestrians, praying to reach their homes safely. As I waited for the tram, I thought of my story, in shreds on the office floor. Suddenly self-conscious, I covered my face to hide the marks on my cheek.

  When I got home, I averted my face from Abdul’s eyes, hurried up the short flight of steps to the front door, and let myself in, hoping I would not see my grandparents. But my grandmother was just coming out of the kitchen. Even in her morning shalwar, she had an elegance that I admired. She had retained her youthful figure despite having borne three sons and suffered a tragedy. Her eldest, Uncle Kambiz, an army captain, had defected to the mujahedeen and died fighting the Russians. His body lay buried somewhere high in the mountains. She told me that in her dreams she went in search of his grave, but there were thousands of rectangular mounds of earth, and she could never find his. She wasn’t smiling when she saw me.

  “Where have you been?” she shouted. “We searched everywhere for you. Terrible things are happening.”

  I edged to the stairs that led up to my room. “Come back here, you’re hiding something!” The slap marks hadn’t faded yet and caught the morning light as I turned to her. “Who did that to you?” she asked fiercely.

  “The Talib.”

  “ . . . and we’re now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” my grandfather announced, walking out of his office. He had a baritone voice that intimidated witnesses, and judges, in the courtroom. “Only three countries recognize our new government—Pakistan, naturally, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. We’re shunned by the rest of the world. I warned them a hundred times this would happen. Would they listen?”

  My grandfather had been in Prime Minister Mohammed Hasan Sharq’s cabinet back before the war. He was the most elegant man I knew. He dressed in gray suits and pale blue shirts and matching ties, and smelled of m
usky cologne. He was shorter than my father but made up for his lack of height with authority. Despite his busy practice, his transport company, and his political commitments, he always had time to help me with my schoolwork in the evenings. When I had announced that I wanted to become a journalist, he encouraged me and declared to my parents that I had inherited his independent spirit. Naturally, I was insufferable for a week after that.

  “I saw the president and his brother, hanging from the traffic-signal posts,” I told them.

  “You’re a brave woman but even you should not have gone out.” He pulled me closer to him, and I winced when he squeezed my arm.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Take off your coat.”

  They grimaced when they saw the angry welt. My grandmother bathed the wound with warm salt water and Dettol soap and then applied cold cream to the welt, cooling the sting.

  Grandfather moved back into his office. We trailed him like a couple of stray dogs following a scent. His office was cluttered with files piled on every flat surface, including the marble floor. The bookshelves were crammed with legal tomes. The room was already suffocating with the fug of cigarettes. He turned off the radio. “They’ve taken the radio station,” he reported, “and the second edict they announced was that every woman must wear a burka in public and her mahram must accompany her at all times. Otherwise, she will be beaten, and so will the mahram for not controlling her.” He looked to my grandmother and attempted a grim smile. “I don’t think I want that responsibility with you.”

  “Burka!” My grandmother was almost speechless. “I’ve never worn a burka and I never will.”

  “You had better get used to it,” my grandfather said gently, an arm around her. “You can’t leave the house without one. Those Talib are sadistic men and will take great pleasure in whipping women who break their laws.”

  “But my clothes . . .” She had a generous wardrobe of shalwars, skirts, and blouses, and many pairs of high-heeled shoes. “I don’t even own a burka.”

  “Well, someone’s going to get very rich selling burkas to our fashionable Kabuli ladies.”

  “We’ll have to get them made,” I said, starting to feel a depression setting in. “I was told today that the home and the grave are the only places where we can be seen from now on.”

  “The Talib said such a dreadful thing?”

  “Yes.”

  My grandfather lit a cigarette. “I think it’s best for you both to leave the country as soon as possible,” he said quickly. “We still have friends in Delhi.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” my grandmother said.

  “Neither am I,” I echoed.

  “You should never have returned here,” my grandmother said to me, as she had done many times. “You should’ve stayed in Delhi.”

  “I didn’t want to stay in Delhi. What would I do there? Even if I had stayed, I’d have to come home once India orders our embassy closed. Padar and Maadar and Jahan will have to return to Kabul soon anyway. Besides, Kabul is my home. This is my country. And right now they need journalists and reporters like me.”

  “If you are even allowed to write,” Grandmother said.

  My grandfather ignored the interruption. “We could all have fled when the Russians came and now where would we be? Living in tents in refugee camps in Pakistan with Rukhsana and Jahan carrying water every day for miles. I had hoped for better times, but that isn’t to be.” He sat behind his desk, on his throne of authority, a round-backed rosewood chair. “I’ll miss you very much. But it won’t be safe here for any woman. You’ll be a virtual prisoner in this house.”

  “Padar-kalaan, you must be exaggerating.”

  He blew out a loud sigh of smoke to the ceiling and turned to my grandmother. “I have warned you, and God knows you make up your own mind. But I think Rukhsana must leave. I’ll take her to the airport.”

  “I’m staying. I came here to work and not run away because of a couple of slaps—”

  “And a bloody arm,” he cut in.

  “And what’s waiting for me in Delhi?” I had not told them the real reason for fleeing the city—the heartbreak was painful enough to make the Talib seem, at that moment, tolerably less painful in comparison. “I’m not a package you can just send off somewhere,” I protested. “I’m going to keep working here. There’ll be a lot to write about.”

  “And a lot of danger when you do. Rukhsana, please be realistic—listen to what these jihadists want and look at the violence they are using.”

  “Danger! What about you? The Talib must know about your work in the old government.”

  “There’s no question of my leaving. I have my transport business, my legal practice. This is my khawk. I will live and die in my sacred land and not in a foreign country.” He rose and came around to hold me gently, making sure he didn’t press on my tender arm. “But, Rukhsana, you must take a wise old lawyer’s advice. Leave now, don’t go to Delhi, go to Pakistan instead, it doesn’t matter, just let us get you out while we can.”

  “When Padar returns I’ll do whatever he wants me to do. Meanwhile, we’ll order burkas from our tailor,” I said and walked out of my grandfather’s office and up to my room, trailing a hand against the blue tiles in the hall, as I had done since I was a child, tracing them from Jahan’s bedroom on the top floor to my father’s office, below my room. The stairs were in the exact center of the house.

  On my wall were two large posters, side by side, my act of defiance against this regime. Like all who inhabit a police state, we live bland and obedient outer lives, while our inner ones seeth in rebellion. On the left was a color photograph of the Long Room of the Trinity College Library in Dublin, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of ancient books. I longed to visit it and roam among those shelves, reading as many books as I could. The other photograph was black and white, a view of the Taj Mahal reflected in the Yamuna River, with a rowboat, lost in the shadows, approaching the great monument. Opaque light streaked the sky. It was sometimes hard to believe that a man, with a Muslim mind, had raised such an astonishing work of art for a woman he loved.

  There was a narrow bed, a cupboard for my clothes, and a desk for the work I was supposed to never do again. And on a small bookshelf by my bed were novels, works of nonfiction, and a dozen or so well-worn books about cricket from my college days in Delhi—from Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. James and The Cricket Match by Hugh de Selincourt to a collection of essays on cricket by Sir Neville Cardus. Through my readings, the game had seeped into my heart, and I dreamed often that I stood all alone, clothed in white, on an emerald oval. They reminded me of my university days and how happy I had once been on the cricket field, surrounded by my teammates, and falling in love. It seemed so long ago.

  A FEW METERS OF fabric, soft, fragile, and pliable, became our cell. No granite wall was more impregnable, no bars more unbreakable, no dungeon darker or more dreadful. I vanished from sight, as if a magician had passed a wand over me. I was no longer Rukhsana with a distinctive nose, a mouth, eyes, a forehead, a chin, a head of hair, but a walking shroud, identical to every other shamed and shrouded woman in the street. Under the burka it was clear that this Afghanistan had no place for women.

  “Can you see at all?” I asked my grandmother. We were practicing wearing our burkas in the zanaana, our women’s private space in the house. The floor was a rainbow of Persian carpets and divans, and bolster pillows lined all the walls. She peered out at me through the narrow mesh of her window, an opening barely large enough for her eyes.

  “Just a blur. Why do they all have to be the same color?” Our burkas were pale metallic blue, stitched with a cap that fit on our heads. The corduroy-like fabric flowed down to our ankles. The tailor had made our burkas, needing to know only our heights from the top of our heads to our toes, and no other measurements.

  The burka decree had come from Mullah Omar’s council, through the newly created Ministry to Propagate Virtue and Pr
event Vice. But that was just the start—the Talib rode into our lives in their armored cars and Land Cruisers, like the Saracens on horseback, and they carried us to a land that had never existed. They had invented this new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan through their menacing interpretation of the holy book. Everyone had to behave exactly alike. We could not think for ourselves. We had to look alike: the women in their matching burkas, indistinguishable from one another; the men with their uniform beards and dress. We could not express any individuality in our actions. We could not speak our thoughts without punishment. The Talib sheared our personalities, like fleece from sheep. The people would begin to forget themselves and live only by their fears.

  “Try walking in it.”

  My grandmother strode forward, as she would normally in a shalwar. She avoided the silvery bukhari stove in the center of the room, but tripped over a bolster cushion and, luckily, fell on a divan. She sat there, fuming.

  “I can’t even see where to put my feet. Or what’s in front of them.”

  “We’ll have to practice. Come on, get up.” I helped her to her feet but we bumped into each other, like circus clowns. “It’s going to take a little time to learn how to navigate in these things.”

  “I won’t live that long,” my grandmother moaned. “Once upon a time,” she said dramatically, “I could see all around me, up and down and from side to side! Now my neck gets a workout every time I try to take a step.”

  “Surely two women of such elegance and brains can handle walking,” I said, teasing her. “Let’s try again. If we’re not careful, we’ll be run over in the streets. Two women were killed by a car just yesterday because they didn’t see it.”

  “Don’t worry about me—I refuse to be seen in public in this . . .” She plucked at it disdainfully. “This . . . thing.”

  I held my grandmother’s hand and we walked around the room without tripping or bumping into each other.

  I too hated the burka. Besides being all but blind, it was difficult to breathe. But I wasn’t free even without it, for the walls of my grandparents’ house, with its rooms and enclosed garden, were just another prison in which we existed.