Qubad took up the story.
“Droon sent the police to search all our houses. He knew the whole team. He then lined us up on the road. Everyone stopped to watch before getting out of their way. Then we saw Azlam on his motorbike ride past very slowly. He didn’t look, but I could see the smile on his face as he passed. I’ll kill him when I see him.”
I noticed in his fury that he had lost his stutter.
“Droon then slapped each of us very hard,” Parwaaze continued.
“ ‘All of you listen carefully.’ Droon spoke slowly, deliberately. ‘You will die very soon, when I give the order. No one can stop me from killing you, no one will care that you have died except your families. You are hiding a traitor to this great country. But you can live and be well rewarded if you tell me where we can find Rukhsana. I will guarantee that you will be paid a lot of money and you can leave the country to live wherever you wish to live. There will be no loss of honor in serving your country.’
“He stopped. When none of us said anything or even moved, he lifted his hand; the fighters lifted their guns. Royan put his arm around Omaid’s shoulder.
“ ‘I don’t understand the power of this woman that keeps your mouths shut,’ Droon told us. ‘She is only a woman. Why die for a woman? She should die for you. Women are evil.’
“ ‘My mother was not evil,’ Omaid said. Omaid! Who could have imagined! He surprised us with his anger, and surprised Droon too. ‘She was a good woman. Is your mother evil?’
“ ‘I was not talking about her,’ Droon snapped at Omaid and walked over to him.
“We thought he would shoot him.
“Then Namdar stepped forward, and he didn’t speak with any fear. ‘Sir, we are young men and don’t know the world. If women are evil, why then is your brother so anxious to marry Rukhsana?’ ”
“Namdar said that?” I said. Before playing cricket, he would just shuffle his feet and look away. But once I chose him to be our fast bowler, he had gradually become more aggressive, a necessary trait.
“Yes,” Parwaaze continued. “Droon did slap him but not too hard.
“Droon said, ‘My brother is a pious and good man and believes he can save this woman from her bad traits.’ ”
Parwaaze went on: “Don’t forget, his men still pointed their guns at us and I thought now he would give the order. Instead, he gestured for them to lower their guns and, like them, he looked disappointed.
“He said to us: ‘You are fortunate. My brother does not want me to kill any one of Rukhsana’s family, as this will cause bad blood between him and her family.’ ”
Parwaaze paused, holding my attention while he was blinking hard. “We relaxed when we heard that.
“Then Droon smiled and went on:
“ ‘I promised I would not kill you, but those in Pul-e-Charkhi will. After six months none of you may be alive, such things happen there. If you win the final match—and you won’t, as the state team is very good—I cannot stop you from going to Pakistan. My brother gave his word and I will not break it. But when you lose, and I know you will, and stay in the country, you will have a holiday in prison for defying my authority. Don’t think you can run away and hide like that woman. I will find you; my men are watching your homes.’ ”
I still had my hand to my mouth when Parwaaze finished, or at least I thought he had, and didn’t break the silence until he spoke again.
“There’s something else Droon said, but not to us. He talked to himself and didn’t think I’d overhear.
“Droon stepped back and I heard him mutter to himself, ‘I should have shot her in the office if I’d known this would turn into an obsession.’ ”
“I was a fraction away from the bullet,” I whispered. “But I had expected it from Wahidi then, not Droon, who stood behind him.”
Parwaaze remained grim. “He’s not forgotten you either and he will kill you when he finds you.”
I couldn’t even say a word. My throat was dry with fear.
“He won’t do that,” Jahan said fiercely. “His brother will never allow it.”
“His brother won’t even know,” Parwaaze countered. “He finds Rukhsana, kills her, and then tells Wahidi that he couldn’t find her or that she’s gone to Pakistan. He believes”—he stared at me with compassion—“you’ve cast a spell on his brother and the only way to counter it is to kill you and free him.”
None of us spoke a word. The threat was almost visible in our heads and we saw it racing toward us—for them the prison, for me the bullet. I knew that we were lost.
“Shaheen’s sent the money and papers?” Parwaaze asked, breaking into our thoughts.
I told them the story, ending with the money arriving Friday, Saturday at the latest, I hoped.
They both shook their heads. “He’s betrayed the family,” Parwaaze announced angrily.
“He has dishonored you and Jahan,” Qubad added, with the same fervor. “But Friday’s a holiday. The hawala dealer will close.”
“Then it has to be Saturday.”
I turned to Jahan. “Go and see Juniad. Tell him he has to take me out this Saturday night.”
“We have to win all our matches, as Droon promised that he wouldn’t stop us from leaving.” Qubad looked beseeching. “Before you leave, you must help us sharpen our game.”
“Okay. I’ll join you tomorrow.” It was a reckless act, but I owed them at least this.
The next morning, after watching the road for half an hour for any suspicious-looking loiterers, Jahan and I left the house by the side gate and cut through back lanes. We kept looking back for pursuers but saw no one. It was a hazy, warm morning and I felt such pleasure at being freed from the house after days of imprisonment. Soon, every day of my life will be free, I thought. I’ll be with Veer and we’ll live in Delhi, and I’ll work as a journalist again.
The team was waiting, eager to polish their game as much as they could while they still had their coach. We started practice immediately and I worked with them all day—correcting their batting technique, getting them to bowl straighter and bounce the ball in the right place. Namdar was bowling ferociously now, a leap in his stride as he delivered the ball; Omaid smiled and clapped when his ball bounced and turned; Royan was flamboyant, like Parwaaze, in his batting, taking steps down to hit the ball hard. Each one had grown over the three weeks and I saw how much they loved the game and believed they had a chance to win the final match. They were not just cousins but teammates and friends. Yet I was still concerned about that ringer on the state’s team. He looked very good.
As the light began to fade, we had our usual fielding session with me hitting the ball high for them to run and catch. And that was when the accident happened.
Run for the Border
WE WERE LAUGHING AS QUBAD RAN TO CATCH A very high ball. “Faster, Qubad, faster,” we shouted. “You’ll get the batsman out . . .”
He wasn’t going to make the catch, as he was fifteen or twenty yards away.
The ball hit the ground and the earth erupted and tossed Qubad aside like a broken toy. He remained suspended in the air almost forever, a bird in midflight clouded with dirt, the roar of a wounded earth deafening us, before he fell to the ground. We ducked instinctively and fell flat, hands shielding our heads. In the silence, we rose to stare at Qubad, lying still on the ground.
Parwaaze was the first to run to him and the others followed calling out, “Qubad, Qubad,” as if their voices were the miraculous cure for such a tragedy. They crowded around him.
Jahan remained by my side. He could not leave me alone. He saw the hysteria distorting my face, my hands crushing it like putty. I couldn’t breathe.
“Qubad,” Parwaaze called to him, crying.
He did not move, and my pain was unbearable; it swallowed all my senses. Then I saw his foot twitch and many hands helping him to sit up. They were laughing in relief, and kept holding him as he shook like a leaf in their arms.
“He’s all right,” Parwaaze shou
ted, and we ran over to him. I pushed through the little knot of players. There was blood on his clothes, near the heart, and the dirt shrouded him. His left arm, above the elbow, was bleeding badly and he looked at it in puzzlement, as if it wasn’t he who bled. And he looked around, as if it wasn’t he who was alive.
“Qubad, Qubad . . .” I held him, not caring that the blood stained my clothes and crying in relief. “Oh thank god. It was my fault, hitting that ball . . . my fault if anything had happened . . .”
“So you’re the one who buried the mine,” said Royan, the frustrated doctor with half a degree to his name, as he ripped a strip off his shalwar and expertly fashioned a tourniquet above the wound to prevent more blood leaking away. “He’s in shock, and we must take him to the hospital to dress the wound and put in some stitches.”
“What h-happened? My head h-hurts and my ears too,” Qubad said, still puzzled. “I was running and then . . .”
“I hit a high ball to you and—” I began.
“When it fell it triggered the mine—” Jahan continued.
“You were thrown back—” Daud cut in.
“You fell,” Bilal ended.
I still held him. “Thank god you weren’t able to catch it. You would’ve died.”
“We’ll carry you,” Royan said and gestured. His cousins immediately moved to lift Qubad between them.
“I can walk.” He stood, but swayed and nearly fell. He shook his head, trying to clear away the ache.
“You have a slight concussion.” Royan held up three fingers. “How many?”
“Three.” He held up four fingers, and Qubad said, “Four.”
Royan looked relieved. “It’s not a bad wound, but I don’t want it to open up any further by you walking; you must rest.”
Qubad sat on his cousins’ linked hands and the procession hurried out of the campus. I followed, glancing back at the crater that could have killed him. It was a shallow hole, scorched around the sides and blackened at the bottom. The air was bitter with the stench of explosives. How innocent it had looked moments before Qubad nearly stepped on this spot, nothing at all to distinguish it from the surrounding area, which I scanned, looking for another mine.
It could be there, it could be here, it could be under a clump of grass. How long did they wait before they exploded? Forever? Or did they have a life span, like a torch battery, as they waited for that fatal footstep? I tried to think of the man who had buried it. He must have knelt on the earth just there, on the edge of the small crater, and dug his death hole, lowered the mine down into it tenderly, and then, lovingly and carefully, replaced all the earth he had removed. He would have smoothed that out with the flat of his palm, scattered a few pebbles across the disturbed grounds, and then stood back to admire his handiwork. He would not have thought about whom his device would kill or when, only certain that it would commit the murder for which it had been invented. I felt a surge of terrible fury at the possibility that any of us could be next—and it could be so much worse.
At the Malalai Hospital, a nurse cleansed the wound, probed it to check that there wasn’t a sliver of metal still remaining, and put in eight stitches. Then she bandaged it and discharged him. The hospital didn’t have any painkiller tablets left.
All the way home, surrounded by his escort, Qubad could not stop repeating himself. “I was just a few feet away and I could h-have easily stepped on it. There was only a few feet . . . I could be dead by now.” He blinked back tears, more from fear than from anything else. “Just a few steps to my left and I would h-have been blown to pieces.”
“It’s a hard ball,” Atash, the frustrated engineer, said. “It was falling at thirty-two feet per second from a height of at least thirty feet. So when it hit the ground, it had the same weight as a man stepping on the mine.”
The cousins discussed the laws of physics, but we knew what each of us was thinking: I could have stepped on that mine.
“No more fielding practice,” Parwaaze the captain announced. “Only bowling and batting tomorrow.”
“We’ll be one short,” Royan said. “Qubad can’t play with that arm.”
“You’ll just have to find another player. I told you there should be twelve or thirteen on the team.”
“I know, I know,” Parwaaze said, rightly distraught. “But he won’t know the game.”
“Hide him near the boundary then, and he’ll bat last.”
They all accompanied Qubad to his house except for Jahan and me. We returned home by the back lanes, deserted except for wandering dogs and a lone cyclist.
“I’ll try to find Juniad again,” he said. He had gone the evening before and Juniad’s relative told Jahan that he was away and wouldn’t say where. “Lock this gate behind you. I’ll come back through the front gate.”
I let myself in through the kitchen and hung up the keys. When I climbed the stairs, I heard Dr. Hanifa open the door to Mother’s room.
“How is she?” I asked as she came out, closing the door behind her, blocking my way.
“She’s sleeping, don’t disturb her.” Dr. Hanifa gently stroked the fake beard. “She worries all the time about you. Why are you still here?”
“I want to leave tomorrow night, or Saturday at the latest,” I said as we walked slowly down the stairs, Dr. Hanifa leaning on me for support. “But how can I leave Maadar?”
“I’m here,” she said gently. “And she’ll be at peace when she knows you and Jahan are safe.” At the front door, she added, “I increased the dosage again. I’ll be back early in the morning to see how she is.”
I made dinner and waited in the dark for Jahan to return. I thought that by this time tomorrow I would be squeezed into Juniad’s car with many others, praying we would be carried safely across the border and find a new life in a foreign country. I would carry a small bag with a change of clothes to reclaim my identity. All along those dangerous roads, I knew I would think only of Mother and pray for her forgiveness. If I left Saturday night, Jahan would join me on Sunday, after winning the preliminary Saturday game and, I prayed, the final match. I would wait in Karachi for him and we’d leave for Delhi.
I was so lost in thought I didn’t hear Jahan return until he was standing beside me, scaring me for a moment.
“Juniad’s not at home,” he said wearily, and my stomach knotted. “I asked when he’d be back, but no one would tell me.”
“You’ll have to try again tomorrow.”
We sat and ate in the gloomy light, both fatigued and depressed by the day. He had a boy’s appetite and finished all the rice and chicken, while I could only manage a mouthful with a cold salad.
The Good-bye
IN THE MORNING, HAVING DOZED FITFULLY IN THE cramped space, eyes burning from tiredness, I made tea and took it to Mother’s room.
A pale glow, falling softly across the bed, filtered through the drawn curtains, and it was from the silence that I knew my mother had passed from this world to the next. I placed the glass and the plate of biscuits down on a table with surprisingly steady hands and stood by her bedside.
Mother was beautiful, the pain lines vanquished, and she even seemed to be smiling. Her right hand crossed her chest, the left lay by her side. I leaned down to kiss the cool forehead and brush my palm against the chilled cheeks. Mother could have died early in the morning, even while I lay hidden in the room far below. If only I could have been beside her to hold her hand, a last touch before life left. I didn’t cry, the tears would come later, and was relieved Mother had finally escaped the pain that had ravaged her.
Mother had given me so much and now whom could I talk to? No one. I would still tell Mother everything, even though my words would fall into silences. I had revealed my deepest secret to my mother—Veer—and she understood and blessed me. I wished they could have met, Mother would have liked Veer.
I went to Jahan’s room. He was huddled in sleep and I watched his strong, steady breathing before sitting on the bed. I shook him gently awake and he knew
from my face why I woke him. He sat up and we held each other, the orphans now alone in the world.
“When?”
“In her sleep. When I went to give her tea, she wasn’t with us. How are you feeling?”
“I dreamed I was Qubad and had taken those twenty or thirty steps, and the earth had opened its jaws and swallowed me.”
I led him downstairs to Mother’s room and Jahan leaned over and kissed her cold forehead. He looked steadily at his mother’s face, wanting to remember it and carry the serene image with him for the remainder of his life. When tears blurred his vision, he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and sniffled into it.
“You must call Uncle Koshan in Mazar and tell him. And then send Abdul to go to our cousins’ homes and inform them.”
He went to the telephone; he would probably spend the morning there, while I sat beside Mother. I wept after kissing her again but made sure that not a tear dropped on her body, as its bitterness would be carried into the next world. Dr. Hanifa came in, looked down at Mother with just a slight smile, and then held me in her arms so I could cry against her.
“It’s for the best,” she said.
“Did you help her . . . ?”
“As a doctor, I did not,” she protested, with little conviction, and I didn’t press her. I knew they had conspired in this eventual moment.
She helped me perform the ghusl, gently bathing Mother with scented water. I caressed the shrunken frame, remembering Mother as a robust woman who once had heavenly warm flesh to cuddle and cradle me.
“You must think only that she has escaped from this world finally and left her pain behind,” Dr. Hanifa said as we performed the rituals.
“I know. I only wish I’d been beside her at the time.”
“You are now, you are saying your good-byes.” Dr. Hanifa sighed. “Who will say farewell to me when I go? My children are so far away.” She saw me about to reply. “And don’t tell me you will look after me, because your mother wanted you to leave. You must get away.”
“I will, tonight or tomorrow.”
When we finished the ghusl, we dressed Mother in clean clothes and then tenderly wrapped her in a pure white sheet, again, not allowing a tear to stain it. We covered her face and tied the straps around the ankles, across the stomach, and over the chest to keep the sheet in place. We stood back to study our handiwork, a white shroud vaguely shaped like a woman lay on the floor beside us. Jahan came in and we knelt on either side of our mother. We looked down at her earthly outline and then up at each other’s distressed face. Jahan wiped away his tears with his sleeve, head averted, reminding me of him as a small boy. We were alone now, forever, with no parent to witness him grow into a man or to witness my marriage. We lifted her tenderly, Mother as light as a soul in flight, and then, alone, refusing my outstretched arms, he carried her down the stairs to place her in the zanaana for our female relatives to pay their last respects. Dr. Hanifa accompanied him downstairs to receive the female mourners in my place.
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