The Taliban Cricket Club

by Timeri N. Murari

  “I went to the stadium just to check,” Hoshang said. “They’re practicing there. The team has a Pakistani cricketer named Imran teaching them.”

  “It’s not Imran Khan, is it?” I asked in apprehension. He was one of Pakistan’s best cricketers. “A tall man, well built . . .”

  “No. This Imran’s small and quite round.”

  “What difference does that make?” Jahan cut in. “They’ll win.”

  “Why should they just because they have a professional coach?” I wasn’t in the mood for their pessimism. “He still has to teach them how to play, just as I’m teaching you. You have to beat them, that’s your only chance. We’ll watch them tomorrow before we panic.”

  I reached over and straightened each one’s shoulders, forcing them to stand straight.

  “That’s not our main worry,” Parwaaze said with anxiety. “They will fix it so their team wins.”

  “How can they, with an ICC observer? They have to stick by the rules, and you have to believe in yourselves and win the match.”

  He looked at me with pity. “It’s the Talib, Rukhsana,” he said as they went out.

  Ghazi Stadium was the venue for our cricket matches and the eleven of us squeezed into an old Toyota taxi to get there. I sat on Jahan’s lap, holding the passenger door closed, my lungee crammed down on my head and my hijab up to my eyes, as an added precaution, to protect me from the driver. It was cheaper than the bus.

  I shivered with fear when I saw the stadium again. The Talib regularly executed people during the intervals of the football matches.

  The main entrance rose like a cooling cliff of ice, and was striped with red pillars. Only Talib officials entered through the wide entrance. The huge Olympic sign of five rings was framed high on the cliff, mocking us with the pretense that we were a sporting nation.

  This time the road into the stadium was deserted except for a lone guard, a young man with a cane, who stood at the gate. Hoshang and he greeted each other warmly—they played on the same football team.

  “It’s good to see you all,” the guard said cheerfully. “It gets lonely here. But you must leave before night comes.”

  “Why?” Royan asked, though we had no intention of remaining that long.

  The guard lowered his voice. “The spirits of the dead executed here sit in the stands and call out to each other when the sun sets.”

  “You’ve seen these s-spirits?” Qubad asked nervously.

  “I have heard them. I hide out here and pray they never see me.”

  “What do they say?” Atash asked, also uneasy.

  “They don’t speak in Dari or Pashtu. They talk in the language of the dead.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Parwaaze said as we climbed the narrow steps into the stadium.

  “Why not?” I said and shivered, along with the others. “Where else can they go?”

  Apart from the covered stand by the main entrance, the stadium was open to the sky. It was oval shaped, a shallow saucer, and above the rim rose Paghman to the west and Maranjan to the east. A baleful sun, hazy with dust, watched over us. A neglected dirt track, with faded lane markings, surrounded the football pitch.

  FIVE MONTHS AGO, PARWAAZE had come as my mahram for an execution in this stadium. Mother refused to allow Jahan to accompany us. Normally, women were not permitted at public gatherings, but the government made an exception for the execution of the murderer Zarmina.

  The buses were packed—even the women’s section behind the drab, dusty curtain—and all along the road, crowds moved steadily toward the stadium. We had to get out of the bus and walk the last stretch to the stadium entrance. On both sides of the road were carts selling fresh fruit, smoky kebabs, naan, and children’s cheap toys. I tried to judge the mood of the crowd. Some were excited, with expectation, talking and laughing; many more were silent and solemn, even fearful.

  The Taliban herded us along to the gate, wanting us to hurry and not miss even a moment of their grand spectacle.

  The crowd was funneled to other entrances, and Parwaaze protected me, pushing his way through the mass of people going up the narrow steps leading to the terraced seating area. There was barely a seat to spare, and we pushed our way down to the front and squeezed into a space next to a woman. I looked toward the covered stand, filled with important Talib officials, enjoying a convivial afternoon of entertainment, and then across the football field. Three Land Cruisers were parked at different positions and Talib fighters stood beside them facing the crowd, holding their guns. At either end of the football pitch were the goalposts, sagging in the center from the weight of the many men who’d been hanged there, kicking and struggling. Dark patches spotted the grass, blood being no substitute for water.

  TALIBAN EXECUTE

  MOTHER OF FIVE CHILDREN

  Today, a crowd of around 25,000 people has gathered, many coerced by the police, to watch the Talib execute Zarmina, the mother of five children. She was accused of murdering her husband by beating him to death with a hammer. Her husband, Alauddin Khwazak, a policeman, had also owned a shop in north Kabul. Their marriage was arranged when she was sixteen and it had grown into love. She had one-year-old twins, Silsila, a female, and a male, Jawad; another son, Hawad, age eleven; and two other daughters, Shaista, fourteen, and Najeba, sixteen.

  The government told everyone that the strain of the violent events in the country had affected Alauddin Khwazak, and by participating in the continued brutality, his mood had grown darker and threatening. He started to beat Zarmina frequently in front of the children. The elder girls, no longer able to bear to see their mother abused and mistreated, decided to kill their father. Najeba mixed a sleeping potion into his night meal, and when he slept, she killed him with a hammer. Zarmina claimed a robber had broken into the house and killed him.

  The Taliban judge did not believe her story. To protect her beautiful daughters, Zarmina confessed to the crime when she was tortured in prison, beaten continuously with cable wire, the normal method of torturing women who could have broken a Taliban law. Although the government claimed the murder took place a few months ago, my sources informed me that Zarmina had been in prison for the last few years, tortured and starved. Her daughters had taken her food daily, until the day they vanished.

  According to custom, the two elder girls and the boy were left in the custody of Khwazak’s brother, a Talib supporter. Two months ago, he told Zarmina that he had sold her beautiful daughters Shaista and Najeba for around 300,000 Pakistani rupees each to a brothel in Khost, on the Pakistan border. Zarmina had cried in despair, knowing she would never see her beloved daughters again, and beat her head against the prison walls.

  On this cold November day in 1999, an open jeep entered the stadium. Zarmina, in her blue burka, stood in the back, supported by two Talibs. The crowd remained silent as the jeep circled the stadium. Then we heard the thin cries of her twin children coming from somewhere in the crowd, calling out to her, “Maadar, Maadar . . .” Her head turned, searching for her children in the crowd. “Silsila . . . Jawad,” she said, trying to comfort them, but she was silenced by her captors. As if this was a sporting event, an announcer broke the silence. “Zarmina, daughter of Ghulam Hasnet, is to be executed for killing her husband with a hammer.” The jeep stopped. The guards carried Zarmina down from it and escorted her to the goalposts. They forced her to sit, but she struggled to crawl away. She could see little through her burka.

  The crowd now awakened. “Spare her . . . spare her . . . ,” they called out, but the Talib ignored the chants. The crowd fell silent. Zarmina tried to crawl away again, a moving blue bundle. A tall Talib came to stand behind her with his rifle. His hand was unsteady. His first shot missed her, though he was only a few feet away. As she could not sit or kneel without falling over, Zarmina cried out, “Someone, please take my arms.” No one moved to help her.

  The Talib took a step forward, aimed more carefully, and fired a 7.62-millimeter bullet into her head. It was a flat s
ound and we could barely hear it. The executioner was Zarmina’s brother-in-law, the one who had sold her daughters into prostitution. (SENT BY LBW)

  The crowd was silent, only the shuffle of feet was heard as we flowed out of the stadium, each cocooned in his own thoughts, and we avoided all eye contact with strangers. Even those who had come for the “entertainment” remained quiet.

  We waited until we were some distance from the stadium.

  “I feel sick,” I whispered as a huge wave of nausea surged up into my mouth. I bent over and, hurriedly lifting my burka, puked on the street. It had been waiting from the moment I heard the children cry out for their mother. I was vomiting out my uncontrollable rage at what I had witnessed. My throat and stomach hurt as nothing heaved out. I remained bent like an old crone and waited until the wave receded. I felt Parwaaze’s sympathetic hand resting on my back and finally straightened and returned to my faceless anonymity under the burka.

  Parwaaze looked around before he burst out, “There were thousands of us, only a few Talibs, and we could have rushed down and saved her. Rukhsana, you must not write anything.”

  “I have to. I can’t have her death on my hands or in my mind.”

  We remained silent on the bus going home and parted at my gate without speaking anymore, burdened by melancholy. I told Mother and Jahan every detail.

  “Does conscience exist anymore?” I asked Mother.

  “Not as far as I can see. In Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s punishment, at first, is not the state’s punishment for his crime of killing the moneylender but is his own conscience. His conscience haunts him through his life until, no longer able to live with it, he surrenders to the police and confesses his crime . . .”

  “But that’s in a novel,” I protested. “The brother-in-law will not even think anymore of the woman’s life he’s taken. He will sleep peacefully, even as other murderers sleep like innocents.”

  “Conscience controls our impulses to do harm,” she said, taking hold of my hand to comfort me. “Our religions are meant to instruct us in what is right and what is wrong, but they can be misinterpreted, words twisted in their meanings, by those who wish to justify their killings in the name of their religion and in the name of God. Conscience does and must exist among us, as otherwise the whole world would go up in flames. You must believe in it, as I know you possess it. Never lose it.”

  That night, in the secrecy of my bedroom, I wrote the story, and spent half the night trying to fax it from Father’s office to my contact in Delhi, the telephone sullenly unresponsive until nearly dawn, when it came to life. I disconnected, hid the modem and computer, and took to my bed. I was sick for two days after witnessing Zarmina’s murder and cried for her lost daughters.

  NOW, I WATCHED THREE men lethargically cut the grass for the wicket in the center of the football field.

  It would be an uneven pitch with a variable bounce, it would take spin because of the surface and runs would be hard to get. Remembering Zarmina, I wondered whether the dead would awaken to watch the match. Would they recognize the particular black patch of grass on which a ball landed, and think that is where they had died?

  From an entrance at the opposite side we saw five men drift in and take their places in the stands. I thought I recognized Azlam as one of them, and paid no further attention. There was another group of six men also watching the government’s team practicing their game in the nets. Jahan, Parwaaze, Qubad, and I sat together, the others of our team scattered around as if we were just idlers, passing the time of the day, with little else to do but watch a new sport. But we weren’t idle. I had coached them to study every batsman and bowler, watch for their strengths and weaknesses, and to remember everything they saw. I jotted down notes in my book.

  Parwaaze pulled out a scrap of newspaper, torn out of the Kabul Daily. “See . . . the preliminary cricket matches will take place on Saturday and . . .”

  I took the brief report. “. . . the final match will be played on Sunday the twenty-third and the winning team will be sent abroad for further training.”

  “It doesn’t say Pakistan.”

  “Abroad can only be Pakistan,” Parwaaze insisted. “Where else is abroad?” He looked across the stadium.

  He turned his attention to the team practicing. “What do you think? Are we as good?”

  There were thirteen on the state team, young men around the same ages as my cousins, dressed in green tracksuits. Only one man was immaculate in white trousers and a cream shirt, with a cap pulled low over his face to protect him from the sun. The coach. He was portly, bearded too, and he strode busily among his team. From the size of his paunch, he must have been a spin bowler. Pakistan had great spinners, and fast bowlers too, but this one in particular didn’t have the build for speed.

  They also had professional equipment—a few real cricket bats, many cricket balls, pads, and gloves. They had laid and rolled half a pitch, and had nets erected on either side and behind the stumps. They had chairs on which to sit and straps on their pads. The scene reminded me of our practice pitch in Delhi where we met in the late afternoons, when the sun wasn’t so brutal, to hone our batting and bowling skills.

  I watched the young men bowl and bat; despite their equipment, they were as new to the game as my team. The bowlers were erratic, and we could hear the coach shouting at them and pointing to the spot where they should bounce the ball. The batsmen swung clumsily or their feet got tangled up when they tried to defend. But one bowler drew my attention. He was fairly tall, a shade or two darker and older than the others. He ran up to the wicket smoothly, had a high action, and the ball whipped down the wicket to hit the stumps.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “They don’t look better than us,” I said truthfully. “Except one of them. Now watch that bowler. See how he runs up and bowls. It’s a coached action, he’s played cricket before. He’s the one we must watch out for. But the others are all on our level.”

  The tall pace bowler worried me the most. He could run through the other teams like an AK-47. The match was fixed already, with the ringer on their side. I didn’t confide my fear to Parwaaze and the others when we rose to leave the stadium after a half hour. The other young men remained watching, hoping to learn the game. On the way to the university, we stayed silent in the taxi. When we reached the grounds, we sat in a circle and I waited for one of them to start the discussion. If they believed they could be beaten now, I had wasted my time. I hoped that all the training and talking I had done would influence their thinking and attitude.

  They had keen eyes and had learned enough of the game to read the nuances and, without my telling them, knew the pace bowler would cause them problems. I wanted them to work out how they would play him.

  “We’ll have to be d-defensive when he’s bowling,” Qubad said. “Play him on the back foot, as the bounce could be high on that wicket.”

  “Wait for the change bowler and hit him then,” Namdar said, smiling.

  “We should also try to hit him,” Royan suggested. “He won’t be accurate with every bowl, and if we hit him around, he could start bowling badly.”

  “He looks too cocky,” Parwaaze said, also starting to smile. “We’ll deal with him, so we must not worry now. We must only think of winning.”

  “He looks like a P-Pakistani too,” Qubad said dourly. “Who’s going to lead us?”

  “Parwaaze should be the captain,” I said.

  Parwaaze grinned. “Yes, I’m the captain.” He straightened and threw me a glance of gratitude for electing him as their leader.

  “Why can’t he be a general?” Qubad mocked. “A c-captain is very low down in an army. Generals are the ones in charge, leading from b-behind.”

  “Do any of you want to be captain?” I said, stopping the discussion. They hesitated and remained silent. “Then Parwaaze must be the captain.” I nudged Jahan.

  “I think he should,” he said quickly when he caught my eye. />
  “What does a captain do?” Parwaaze asked, pulling me aside when we started to practice.

  “He goes out with the opposing captain for the coin toss. If you call right, then you decide whether to bat or field first. That depends on the pitch. On the stadium pitch, you should bat first as it will break up after a few balls and hopefully be harder to play on in the second innings. And the captain leads the team out onto the field for a start.”

  “I’ll never remember all this,” he wailed.

  I smiled in sympathy at his dilemma. A captain who knew nothing, leading his men, who knew less, into battle and off the cliff. Yet, I felt he would have an instinct for the role. “Don’t worry. I’ll write it all down.”

  We joined the others at practice and I saw how excited and motivated they had become after having seen how vulnerable the state team was. They cheered themselves when they hit a good shot and when they took a wicket. Each one had acquired different skills that rose out of their personalities. Once more, they were individuals, even in the way they walked, the swagger of their steps, turbans at an angle, the grins on their faces. As the hills melted into the arms of the sky at dusk, we practiced our fielding and catching. Where once they had been lethargic, they now ran like hares to the ball, scooping it up and throwing it back.

  “We’re going to win,” they shouted to each other until it grew too dark to practice.

  On our street corner, Jahan and I heard the motorbike behind us and kept walking, expecting Azlam to pass. Instead, he switched off his engine and, as he drew parallel, stopped.

  We exchanged salaam aleikums, my greeting only a whisper, and waited for him to talk.

  “I want you to bring the book and teach my team to play cricket,” he announced, looking at me. “How much is Parwaaze paying? I’ll double it.”

  “He’s not paying us anything,” Jahan said. “He’s our cousin.”

  “You should be paid, cousin or not.” Azlam hooked a leg over the petrol tank, preparing for a long bargaining session. “I’ll give you ten thousand. It’s a lot of money.”