Blackbeard struck the ground again, then turned on his heel, muttering something in Pashto. He stalked out of the tent, hitting the entrance flap with his stick as he disappeared. The young Talib turned to me. “There should be no more clapping or laughing, understood?”
I stayed silent. I didn’t dare say a word. The Talib turned and faced the children. “Do you understand me?” he said loudly, although I think there might have been a trace of a smile on his lips.
The children answered in unison, “Yes, Sahib!” The young Talib turned on his heel and left the mosque.
The curtain swung closed, eclipsing the fierce afternoon light, leaving the mosque in darkness and utter silence. I crept to the curtain and peeked out. The two Taliban were standing at the checkpoint, holding their rifles, looking in the other direction. I stepped back into the tent and collapsed onto the ground. I removed my burqa slowly and looked around. I felt suddenly very old and very tired. The poor girls were huddled together, holding on to one another trembling. The boys were wide-eyed and as white as ghosts. Then Yarghal began to laugh. He rolled over onto his back and held his stomach, snorting with laughter. He pointed at me. “You were so afraid, Moalem Sahib, I thought you were going to faint.”
All the boys began to laugh.
“I was afraid?” I said, relief flooding through my body. “You crawled under the minbar. I thought you would burrow into the earth like a hedgehog.”
“How will you ever learn to dance now, teacher?” Faisal asked, chuckling.
“We girls will go to our teacher’s house to provide instruction without you foolish boys,” Zarghuna said, her voice ringing like a bell in the gloom.
I leaned back against the tent pole and gazed up at the canvas ceiling. It seemed so high that no one could ever reach it.
I looked over at the colorful pile of small shoes. Their neon colors glowed dimly in the shadows. I raised the curtain of the mosque to bring light into this dark place. Herat’s warm winds covered us in the dust.
I believe that on that day in that sacred place, God smiled on us and loved us more than ever before.
My dear Siawash,
The first word you uttered was “Mothe.” One morning, you had woken up in your white bed and you called me “Mothe.” My hands froze in place on the laptop keyboard as I was working on my latest book. It was your first resolute utterance, calling me “Mothe.” I kneeled behind your bedroom door. Your voice had sent shock waves through me. Joy and excitement ran through every blood vessel in my body. I deliberately delayed entering your room so you could call me again, “Mothe.” My spirit had been transformed because you were calling me by the most dignified word in any language . . . I came in, stood over your crib, and lifted you up in my arms. Spontaneously I held your hand in mine and I danced with you. You were puzzled by my excitement and were calling me “Mothe” again and again. It took you a whole month to complete your first word . . . “Mother.”
Later I would stand in waiting behind your bedroom door so that I could hear you call me “Mother.” I would place your little ball out of your reach, so you could call me “Mother.” I would pick up my purse pretending to be leaving the house, so you could pleadingly call me “Mother.” At night when your sleepy head would grace my chest, I would gently ruffle your hair, so your sleepy eyes would open and you would object with the word “Mother.” In the mornings when you would open your eyes, I would close mine, pretending to be asleep, so you could attempt to wake me up, calling me “Mother.” In the park of our housing complex, I would hold you back from the rides, so you would demandingly call me “Mother.”
My son, it feels like eons since the last time you called me “Mother.”
Today was Mother’s Day in the United States. After work, I went to the best candy store I could find. I searched for the best chocolate I thought you would like, so when and if I am allowed to see you again, I will fill your mouth with sweets and you will call me “Mother”!
I’ve come to stroll on the beach. At night when the sands become cold, the oceanside becomes dark, my tears are allowed their privacy. On the beach, there’s an occasional seagull, perhaps a lost flip-flop or maybe an apple with a bite mark. There, on the washed sand, a safe distance from the incoming waves, I write “Happy Mother’s Day!”
From my earliest days, Madar called me osiyangar, a rebel. I understand how frightening it must be for a mother to see her daughter break all the inviolable rules and customs of her repressive land. But, Siawash, I want you to be a rebel, to grow up to fight the antiquated, brutal ways of that land.
My son, nothing can diminish this sense of motherhood in me. Let your uncle Jaber refer to you as “his son,” but you and I both know the truth.
7
The Schoolgirls’ Bathhouse Uprising
The popularity of needlework among Herati girls flourished during the Taliban house confinement of the women because it gave them something to do at home. But it is an art form that my sister and I never learned, in defiance of Nanah-jan’s wish to turn us into model brides. Years earlier, when Madar did not have permission to attend painting classes, she took up embroidery as an outlet for her creativity. But for me, needlework was an impediment to reaching important goals in my life.
Our life was compressed to stifling obscurity behind those curtained windows. Girls could only see the light when they parted the curtains to thread their needles. In such circumstances, there was only one place left for the women: the hammam, the public bathhouse. Hammams were safer than our homes, which the Taliban often raided, searching for televisions, radios, and even books.
It didn’t take long for an idea to begin to germinate in my head. Maybe we could band together to study secretly.
I spoke with two of my classmates, who suggested I speak to the older girls, who crowded into a different corner of the bathhouse. I found my courage one day, and crawled between them on the tiled floor. “Hi,” I said quietly.
They were talking about makeup and henna, a new color of nail polish, and whether to file their nails round or square. It made me sad that these same girls who last year were competing over half a grade difference on their exams were now gossiping about love marks and having babies.
One of my classmates asked me, “So, Homeira, you want to find a husband now because the schools are closed?”
I lowered my voice. “No! A husband is not the solution to our problem. We have to do something to return to our studies.”
A few weeks later, one Wednesday around noon, I stood on my stool and said “hello” in a loud voice. They all turned and looked at me.
“I am Homeira,” I said. “I am one of the girls from the lower grades.”
For a second everyone was quiet. Then, one by one, they began to laugh.
“Well, dear,” one of them began, “we are not in school anymore, we are in the hammam. Why are you talking like that?”
One of the girls held a plastic shampoo bottle close to my mouth like a microphone. “Here you go, Homeira-jan. Speak. We are all listening.”
The girls began laughing hysterically. “Calm down, little chick,” someone shouted. “We can hear your peeping without the stool.”
It took a few minutes for the older girls to realize that I wasn’t going to sit down until they heard me out. Finally, they quieted down.
“Imagine the day that the Taliban finally leave,” I continued. “The schools will be reopened, but the world will have passed you by as you will all be in your husbands’ homes. Won’t that be a shame? The world will say that Afghan girls were all waiting for the Taliban to come along so that they could get married and avoid an education.”
I had planted a seed of rebellion in the girls in the bathhouse. Now we had to be patient and gather more allies to our cause.
The next time I returned to the bathhouse, everything was as usual. The girls were all sitting on their bathing stools, congregating. One of the upper-grade girls pointed at me. “Our chick commander wishes to address us.”<
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I straightened my shoulders, placed my stool in the middle, and stood on it for a stump speech. The laughing got louder. I laughed with them and then waited for the clamor to subside. The chamber grew quiet with expectation. I thought to myself that I must be the only rebel who had ever given a public speech without a single stitch of clothing to a convocation of stark-naked girls.
“I am not a commander, but I do have a question: For how much longer are we willing to accept these tyrannical laws without a fight?”
“The Taliban make the laws, not you,” somebody shouted.
“It’s time we make our own laws,” I said. I raised my voice. “We should think about matters beyond the threads and needles we use for embroidery.”
A voice called out, “Seriously, what can we do when all the men have fled the battlefield?”
I raised my hands for silence. “Good question. The past wars were between men, but now, the Taliban have declared war on women, so we are a party to this war and must fight for ourselves.”
“I agree with the chick commander,” a girl called out. “They have shut us up in our houses because they are afraid of us.”
“You are wrong!” someone else shouted. “They think we are intellectually inferior to them. What can we possibly do so they will take us seriously?”
Just then, a girl who was celebrating her birthday entered carrying a huge cake, followed by another girl striking a tambourine. Everyone cheered. The hammam went crazy; all the girls began screaming and clapping. Were they really going to dance? It may seem like a little thing to someone who has never lived under the threat of bullets and rocks and truncheons, but for all of us, this was a huge act of defiance. In an instant, the entire hammam was alive with dancing and clapping, like that day in the mosque. Except here, everybody was naked.
The hammam walls were thick masonry. I prayed the girls’ uproar wouldn’t be heard outside. I began to move toward the showers. An arm grabbed my wrist. “Don’t you dance, chick commander?” Sima shouted.
She dragged me to the very center of the dancing. I covered my breasts with my hands. “What kind of a commander are you? Come on! Dance!”
Sima whirled beside me. “Sima, is this really resistance?” I said, as we turned and turned together. She laughed, her dark eyes blazing. “If the Taliban find us dancing here, what do you think they will do to us, Homeira-jan?”
“They will kill us.”
“So, this is our resistance!”
The following Wednesday even more girls packed into the hammam. “Who will begin today?” I said.
“Let me try,” Sima said. She was tall; she didn’t need my stool. Fresh love marks covered her neck. “We should organize a big demonstration. If we can gather one hundred or two hundred girls to stand together in front of the amir’s headquarters, the whole city will know. We’ll wear our burqas and demand that they reopen the schools. Does everyone agree?”
“Yes! How can we even begin to fight when our fathers and brothers won’t let us out of our own houses?”
The hammam echoed with discussion and argument for a while and then the muttering subsided.
“Commander, will you let us dance now?” a young girl asked.
“I’m not the dancing commander,” I said, smiling. “I’m only in charge of the uprising. And besides, no one has brought a tambourine this week.”
One of the girls began drumming on the hammam metal door. The girls began to sway and spin.
Damn you all! I said to myself. I wish you were as eager to rebel as you are to dance.
Walking home, I asked Mushtaq, “If I decide to fight the Taliban, will you stand by me?”
Mushtaq stopped abruptly. His eyes scanned the street. “Quiet!” he hissed. “Have you lost your mind? If somebody hears, they will think we are plotters They will skin us alive and hang us on the butchers’ rack.” Mushtaq’s face went green. “What more do you want from God? You girls sleep in every morning. Do you really think I study science or have painting classes in school these days? All I get are Arabic lessons in Qur’an and sharia . . . and the beatings.”
The following Wednesday, I was late arriving at the hammam. Smiling, Sima pushed through the crowd to stand next to me. “Don’t get angry, chick commander. These girls need to dance to relieve their frustration. Let them tire themselves out; then we can scheme together.”
A while later, Sima clapped her hands for silence. “OK, girls, dancing is over. Time to begin our jirga, our gathering.”
“So next week, let’s all stand together in protest in front of the amir’s headquarters.”
Someone called out, “What if they shoot us?”
A deadly silence enveloped the hammam.
I took a deep breath. “I’m as afraid of being killed as you are,” I said. “But I’m even more afraid of getting buried alive for the rest of my life without realizing my dreams.”
That day, our meeting didn’t end with laughter and dancing. The room was silent and gloomy when the girls showered as they murmured among themselves. Under the shower, I imagined the water was blood washing over me. Dizzy, I sat down on my stool. All of a sudden, I felt like weeping. What have I begun? I wondered. Sima was washing the henna from her hands. The water circling the drain was red. I closed my eyes and gathered my resolve. Finally, I stood up again on my little stool and shouted. “Next Wednesday! In front of the amir’s palace!”
A cheer rang out.
“By the way,” I called out, “don’t come naked.”
In the narrow street on the way home, that atmosphere of fear and grief within the hammam caught up with me. I stopped. I couldn’t take another step. I fell to my knees and burst into tears. I sat crumpled against a wall, weeping. The street lay abandoned under the merciless sun, the hot wind scorching my eyes through the face mesh of my burqa. Nanah-jan’s voice whispered in my ear, Herat’s wind spreads around hopelessness.
“What’s going on?” Mushtaq asked. “Did you have a fight with your school friends?”
I began to cry even louder.
Mushtaq took my elbow and lifted me to stand up.
I cried all the way home.
That fateful Wednesday finally dawned. I gathered up my shower pack and stool.
Madar looked up from her embroidery. “Is everything all right, Homeira?” I didn’t say anything. I just gazed at her beautiful face, wondering if I would ever see her again. She had made her choice, so I had to make mine.
Mushtaq was not waiting for me outside. He wasn’t supposed to. I wasn’t going to risk his life.
I reached the amir’s palace just before ten. I had expected to see hundreds of blue burqas darkening the plaza. There were only about ten.
How many girls had raised their hands in the hammam? More than two hundred.
At least I had my ten.
I reached the line of frightened girls. Under their burqas, I couldn’t recognize who had come.
I said to the burqa next to me, “I’m Homeira.”
The burqa replied, “Sima.”
I held her hand. “Shall we do this, beautiful Sima?”
We stepped forward. The shivering line of girls stepped up right behind us. We walked up to the front gate. My heart was pounding in my chest. I heard a girl beside me weeping under her burqa.
Two Taliban walked toward us, rifles slung over their shoulders. “What do you want!” one of them shouted.
My mouth felt as dry as a desert. My tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. I took a breath. “We want the girls’ schools reopened,” I said in a quavering voice.
One of the Taliban swung his head from left to right and back in indifference, looking along the line of trembling burqas. He then stared at me dismissively. He didn’t get mad. He looked at our tiny group quaking in their burqas and smiled.
Another guard appeared, a senior commander. He was a tall man in a huge black turban with a black beard that covered his chest. He had a scowl that could have turned a newborn baby to stone. He ra
ised his arm and pointed a long finger right at me.
“If you ever come here again,” he said, growling like a fighting dog, “I will dig a grave for each one of you and bury you alive, right here.”
Turning on his heel, he walked back toward the headquarters. The Taliban guards laughed at us as we scattered like frightened mice. God knows why they didn’t beat us to the ground; there was not a single man around to defend us.
I cried all the way home. The stool under my arm was as heavy as a tombstone. The smell of henna and halvah was whirling in my head. I cried even louder.
By the end of the week, Herat’s public hammams had all been closed, by order of Amir Abdu-Razzaq. I never saw the bathhouse girls again. I never had the chance to tell Sima that she was my hero.
My son,
These days the gloomy sky is depressing. This morning I went for a walk in the more secluded streets behind Sunset Boulevard. There were cracks in the ground below some ancient spruce trees from where big flat mushrooms had sprouted. The mushrooms and the gray sky reminded me of the story of Baba Ghor-ghori that I heard in my childhood.
In Afghanistan, the seasonal rains begin in September or early October, at the end of autumn, and continue until the middle of March. The topography of Afghanistan is mostly high mountains, with very cold winters. According to Madar, our homeland is held hostage by those mountains. Every escape route is narrow and dangerous or impeded by heavy snow. Each spring, the rain melts the snow and the sloping valleys turn to patches of green pastures that give way to brown deserts in late summer. Our mountains are generally naked and rocky, their slopes barren of green forests.
Madar says that the soil of my homeland is full of disappointments. Even if it rains for a year, the green quickly fades, leaving barren stones exposed.
In the countryside around Herat, after every spring rainfall and thunderstorm, thousands of mushrooms pop up from beneath the ground on the banks of streams and rivers, where the soil is softest. The areas where the mushrooms appear resemble burial grounds with the graves cast open. Madar says that each mushroom is like a decaying woman—a woman buried alive and her name lost to memories. The largest mushrooms are the mothers surrounded by their lost daughters.
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