The Taliban Cricket Club

by Timeri N. Murari

  “Now . . . the stairs,” I said.

  Still holding her hand, I led her into the corridor to the stairs leading up to the roof. At the first stair, she took a cautious step, forgetting to lift the bottom edge of the burka, and nearly fell over. She pulled the burka off in exasperation and dropped it on the floor.

  “From now on, my husband will have to drive me to the store, guide me by the hand up any steps, and sit me down on a chair when I want to sit.” She crossed to her bedroom and firmly closed the door behind her.

  I too removed that enveloping cape that flowed from the cap on our heads down to our ankles and retreated to my bedroom. I switched on the radio to the only station broadcasting, Radio Sharia, and listened to the commands read by the announcer.

  They banned music, movies, television, computers, picnics, and wedding parties. No New Year’s celebrations, or any kind of mixed-sex gathering; no children’s toys, including dolls and kites, card and board games, or chess. No more cameras, or photographs, or paintings of people and animals. No more pet parakeets, cigarettes and alcohol, magazines and newspapers and most books.

  People were not allowed to be with or talk to foreigners.

  People could not applaud, not that there was anything to clap for.

  My first article for the HT after I left the KD was on our claustrophobic, imprisoned lives.

  The Great Game

  ON LEAVING THE MINISTRY, WE JOSTLED WITH others to get on the bus, as there were no taxis. The boys sat in the front; I took a seat in the back, behind the drab curtain that separated the sexes. My neighbors sniffed loudly and edged away from my smell. I hoped I would dry out before I reached home.

  We got off the bus at our stop and I walked between Jahan and my two cousins. With each step, I felt more and more certain that I would not be able to write another word while I lived here. There was no longer a way for me to publish undetected anywhere.

  “I’d love to teach you cricket,” I announced, breaking the gloomy silence, “and I will teach you. You all have to play.”

  They stopped walking, surprised by my sudden announcement breaking into their thoughts about the game.

  “I’ll play on the team,” Jahan said, with the same excitement as his cousins. “When we win I’ll go away with them.”

  “We haven’t started yet, Jahan, and you’re already flying away,” I admonished gently. He was always the dreamer.

  “We know you can’t play in the matches,” Parwaaze said apologetically. “But if you just show us while you’re still here.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  They shook their heads, but Jahan said, “I saw it played when we were in Delhi, but it was so slow I fell asleep.”

  “It is anything but slow!” I said. They all looked so hopeful, like I hadn’t seen them in years.

  They were right. If the team won, Jahan could be in Pakistan in three weeks. I had been worrying about him—the papers and money Shaheen would send would only provide for my travel, for me to join him as his future wife. Jahan would be left alone here, but now was the chance to get him out too. He could leave even before I did.

  We spoke hungrily about life anywhere but here.

  “We can return to university.” Parwaaze spoke for Qubad too.

  “And I can go to a proper school and then university,” Jahan said.

  “Before we do all that I must get Jahan out with you.”

  “Let’s s-start now,” Qubad said as our house came into view.

  Jahan knocked on our gate; Abdul peered through the slat and let us in.

  “Has Dr. Hanifa come?” I asked innocently as we walked past him.

  “Yes, of course. Every day, same time. You know that.”

  “Go into the garden,” I told my cousins. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

  As soon as I entered the house, I hoisted the burka and ran up the stairs. I looked in on Mother, who appeared to be asleep, and went to my room. I struggled out of my burka and dropped it on the floor. Then I stripped off my wet jeans and panties and hurled them in a corner. The elation I felt at teaching them cricket evaporated in an instant. I hated the man who had frightened me enough to wet myself, and I wanted to burn my clothes to erase the memory. I peered at my shoulders in the mirror, expecting to see bruises from the gun barrels, but the skin was not marked though I still sensed their weight.

  I managed a cynical smile to myself. Cricket? We were not an athletic or sporting nation. As the turnstile for invading armies over the centuries—Alexander, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, the Persians, the Mughals, the British, the Russians—we didn’t have the time to cultivate a national sport apart from buzkashi. In buzkashi a headless goat is the ball and two teams of horsemen battle to carry the corpse through distant posts to score a goal. Other sports use balls of different sizes, we use dead goats. Only men played it, even before Alexander, until the Taliban banned the game.

  But that the Taliban would choose this sport made it all the more insane. I could not imagine a Taliban cricket club. They would stroll onto the field wearing yellow-and-red-striped ties under their beards but, instead of cricket bats, they would carry guns as they inspected the pitch on a sunny morning. No, they could not have picked a worse sport, and that advantage was one Jahan and I could use. I dressed quickly in a shalwar before returning to the garden. The boys sat down in front of me.

  “Why is the Taliban promoting cricket?” I said, thinking it through aloud. “You can’t play cricket without understanding the essence of the game. Do the Talib know that they’re encouraging the kinds of behavior they have been trying to suppress all these years? Because they are presenting us with the freedom to express who we are, to discover ourselves, to express our defiance on a playing field. It’s a game that takes time, a few hours, even days, not just ninety minutes like in football, and we can roam in our thoughts and feelings without them being aware of what we’re thinking and doing, even if they watch our every move. We’re out of their reach on the cricket field, and when I played, I loved the freedom of a huge space with only the sky watching us. Each one is alone, yet part of something larger. It’s a game that promotes individual excellence and depends on the actions and the confidence of each player. You have a captain but he isn’t a dictator ordering what you must do. Cricket is a democracy of actions and reactions, and every player can question their captain’s suggestions and counter them. You have a constant dialogue on the field and any player can even change the course of the game midway.”

  “But how do we play it?” Parwaaze asked, impatient with my introduction.

  “You must understand the rules first, and the codes of behavior. For example, you can’t disobey an umpire’s decision—right or wrong—which is another way the sport encourages individualism over team spirit. When you play the game, the two most important individuals are the two ‘warriors’ battling it out on the pitch.”

  “It sounds like a war g-game,” Qubad said warily.

  “But no one’s killed, of course,” I said impatiently. “The two warriors are the bowler and the batsman—they are pitted against each other and only one can win. You define yourself at the batting crease or as the bowler running up to defeat the batsman.” I paused, lost for a moment in thought, wanting them to fall in love with the game as I had. “Think of cricket as theater in which an action repeats itself over and over again until one character is defeated.”

  “So now it’s like theater?” Parwaaze said. “We’re getting confused.”

  “I mean that the other fielders do not play a role until the act of batting and bowling is over. The act then starts over again, and again. Cricket is theater, it’s dance, it’s an opera. It’s dramatic. It’s about individual conflict that takes place on a huge stage. But the two warriors also represent the ten other players; it’s a relationship between the one and the many. The individual and the social, the leader and the follower, the individual and the universal.”

  There was a long, puzzled silence.
/>   “Rukhsana, you do realize that we’ve heard about cricket but never seen it,” Parwaaze said finally. “We need to learn, win that match, and get out. Do we really need to know about the warriors and the theater and the universe to learn how to play?”

  I took a deep breath. Maybe he was right. This was not essential to getting on the field, but once you’ve played, it is impossible not to know these things deep down, like you know the feel of the ball in your glove or the bat in your hand.

  How to distill a complex game into simple actions they would understand? They had only watched football matches. I picked up a twig and sketched on the ragged lawn. “Cricket is played on a large field and in the center is a flat strip sixty-six feet long and ten feet wide called the pitch. At each end of the pitch are three sticks, called the wickets. There are eleven players on each team. One team, call it Team A, is the batting team, Team B has to field. Team A has to score as many runs as it can by hitting the balls thrown, we call it bowled, by Team B.”

  “How do you score these runs?” Parwaaze asked.

  “You get runs by hitting the ball and running up and back between the wickets. If the ball reaches the stands then you’ve scored four runs automatically. Team B has to get Team A’s batsmen out before they score too many runs.”

  “What do you mean by out? How do they do that?” Qubad asked this time.

  “When you hit a ball and it’s caught, that’s out. If the bowler’s ball hits your wicket, that’s also out. And when you’re running to the other wicket and don’t reach it before a fielder hits it, you’re out. The captain of the fielding team strategically moves his players around, like chess pieces, to stop you from getting runs or tries to get you out with a catch.” I smiled at them. “There, that’s easier to understand, isn’t it?”

  They looked down at the scribbled sketch then back up.

  “When did you l-learn?” Qubad asked.

  “Shaheen taught me. Remember, then I tried to get you to play with me?”

  “We’d never heard of the game then,” Parwaaze said.

  Shaheen had introduced me to cricket. He’d learned to play visiting friends in Lahore during school holidays. He wasn’t an athlete—he wouldn’t play hockey, football, or wrestle with us since these games could soil his clothes—but cricket had a genteel air that pleased him, and not too much physical contact. He returned from Lahore with a bat, balls, pads, and gloves, and conscripted me into his new game.

  “This is our secret,” he told me as he showed me the mysterious objects. “We’ll play in my garden so no one will see us. If you tell anyone, I will never let you in my garden again.” His family was on the same street but six houses away from us. I was just eight then and did most of the bowling. He delighted in smashing the balls to the far corners of the compound for me to fetch.

  With all that bowling to Shaheen, I had become a good off-spinner and could bowl pretty fast, though my speed was never as great as his. I practiced batting a ball that I hung from a branch. I decided I would devote my young life to mastering this game.

  Although Shaheen had introduced me to cricket, he did not necessarily like my excelling at it. Years later, when I told him I played cricket for my college team, I detected a strong note of disapproval in his laughter. I learned then that even good men found it hard to escape the powers that they had granted to themselves.

  “She was good at it,” Jahan said.

  “Can we learn to play and win in three weeks is what I want to know,” Parwaaze said.

  “You won’t be brilliant. It will take a lot of practice to learn the basics of the game—catching, throwing, hitting—but cricket really demands individual creativity, it encourages experimentation, it encourages a rebellious spirit, all within the boundaries of the game. As a batsman you hit the ball in your style, while another one will hit the ball in the way that suits him best. And as a bowler, you create your technique of bowling the ball, either fast or slow. You don’t have to conform to one method.”

  My cousins looked dumbstruck again.

  “I don’t think the minister has thought about the game as you have,” Parwaaze said softly. “If he thought about cricket the way you describe it, he would cancel his plan immediately.”

  “Well, thinking about the game this way already puts us at an advantage—this is how the best cricket is played. But more important, where will you find eleven people crazy enough to want to learn this game?” I asked.

  Parwaaze waved the question away. “We have our cousins all doing nothing. Just sitting around getting depressed every day. This will be their chance.” We had twenty-eight cousins scattered across the city. Ten were girls. He ticked off the boys who were around the same age. “There’s Atash, Royan, Omaid, Bahram, Darab, Fardin, Namdar, and Shahdan. How many is that?”

  “Eight.”

  “Nine,” Jahan said, raising his hand.

  “But not all of them will want to play,” I said, deflating their enthusiasm gently. “And will they want to leave?”

  “Some of them definitely will want to. We talk about nothing else but how to get out and do something with our lives.”

  “What do we play with?” Qubad asked.

  “Bat, pads, a ball. I still have Shaheen’s old kit in the basement. Just remember that the other teams have to learn the game too,” I said. “So you’ll be on the same level. You won’t master the sport, but at least you might be better than they are. Besides, you’ve got me. I bet I know a lot more about cricket than any of their guys do. And I want you to win.”

  “What a-about you?” Qubad asked in concern. “Okay, if we we win and l-leave, you’re still here.”

  “I have Shaheen. He’ll send the money and ticket as soon as I write him for it. He knows I must wait for Maadar before I can join him in the States. Who knows? I may not be here for the full three weeks to see the final,” I said sadly. “But let’s focus on the game. I’ll give you a good grounding no matter what—we’re not going to miss this opportunity.”

  “Let’s start now,” Parwaaze said, jumping to his feet.

  “I’ve got to look for the kit. Tomorrow. Don’t tell Maadar about what we saw today,” I warned them. “I don’t want her worrying.”

  When Jahan and I went back inside after bidding the cousins good-bye, Mother wasn’t in bed but had negotiated her way down the stairs and was in the kitchen. She looked so normal sitting at the table, as if nothing was wrong. Her energy came in cycles, it seemed. She was making a quorma, chopping onions with the plums at her side. She would fry the onions first, and then add the meat, the plums, the vegetables, and the spices. Finally, she would add the water and allow it to simmer until it became a delicious stew. She had sent Abdul to the bakery for the naan and they were piled on the table. As always, there was enough for Abdul too and he would collect his plate and eat in his room.

  She put her knife down as soon as she saw us and opened her arms for an embrace. “You’re back! What happened at the ministry? What did he want?”

  “Everything was fine, Maadar,” I said, falling into her arms. “They summoned several of us journalists. Yasir was there. Apparently my name is still on some old list—I shouldn’t have been summoned, I think.”

  “But what happened?” she pressed. “Are you okay? I’m so glad you’re home safe.”

  “Yes, I’m fine! It was an announcement—apparently the government is trying to correct its image problem.”

  “Don’t be so glib. You aren’t going to write anything, are you?”

  “Of course not.” I saw Wahidi’s gun again, felt his cigarette smoke stinging my eyes. The silence pressing down on me. He wanted me to understand that he controlled my life, that he could impose his will on my body and my mind. He was trying to imprison me in the burka, in my home, and in my thoughts. I would stick to my vow and not write another word until I left, but only to ensure our safety.

  “They’re going to promote cricket.”

  “Who?”

  “The T
aliban. Wahidi. He’s going to hold a tournament in three weeks and the winning team will go to Pakistan to train professionally.”

  “Cricket! Of all things.”

  “For men only, of course. I’m going to teach Jahan and our cousins to play and win. Once he’s out, he can join me in the States.”

  “You’re making it sound so easy.” She frowned, mulling over our plan. “And if they lose?”

  “Then I’ll send for him when I’m with Shaheen,” I added with forced cheerfulness. “Of course, I’ll only leave when you’re well again and you will come too.”

  “That may not happen,” she said quietly. “But it will make me so happy knowing you’re both together,” she said and smiled. “I was depressed because with you gone too, who would look after him here?”

  I put my arm around her shoulders and felt her trembling. “Don’t you think you should be resting? I can do the cooking.”

  “While I feel well, I want to cook. You do it every day. We need more vegetables for the quorma and a few pieces of chicken. Give Abdul the money.”

  I left her in the kitchen, humming to herself, without pain for this brief moment.

  Outside the kitchen, Jahan stopped me and threw his arms around me. For the first time since his return to Kabul from Delhi, he looked, and even felt, exuberant.

  “I’m leaving, I can’t believe it!” he whispered.

  “You haven’t won the match yet. There’s a long way to go. You’ll have to apply for a U.S. visa in Pakistan before you can get there.”

  “We will win, with your coaching. I’m sure there’s no one else in Kabul who knows cricket as well as you.”

  “We’ll have to see,” I said, hoping he was right. “I was so worried about how you would leave, and now you will. You could be out even quicker than me.”

  “I’ll wait for you in Pakistan so we can travel together.”

  “No, you must go on to the States as soon as you can to join Shaheen. I won’t be far behind.”

  “You must write to him and get things in order—who knows how soon . . .” His voice trailed off.