The abundance of story-writing classes in Iran was one of the things that made my time there so important. I could go to class without fear of harassment by Maulawi Rashid or the bicycle repairman. I could listen to the various stories of the girls and boys who had experienced the world differently. I was living my stories and they theirs. I often did not have the courage to read my stories in front of them.
Over time, I began to tell my friends Sara and Elaheh a little about my life in Afghanistan; I still remember their awestruck looks as they closed their books and listened to my stories. At that time, no one had yet written anything about women under the Taliban. They hadn’t known that such a place existed and I hadn’t known that outside of Afghanistan, the world was a relative paradise for women.
Dear Siawash,
Tehran was the world of my dreams. It was there that I published the first collection of my stories. Can you believe it? Even now, many years after, I feel a little girl’s joy at the mere thought of it. I was a survivor of Herat. Revolution Boulevard in Tehran redefined my life. I owe many of my joyous days to the streets of Tehran.
But that excitement would not have been possible without your father’s agreement. I was luckier than most, in that I was allowed to study in his house. I know that, in some countries, getting an education is a woman’s right, but from where I came, it was not. I was still an Afghan woman and was expecting to be beaten, insulted, and rebuked by society. I will never forget your father’s kindness to me in this regard.
Iran was obviously a new learning environment for him. In our neighborhood women had the right to live, the right to choose, the right to laugh, and the right to scream. Both of us witnessed this together. His sisters, each one of your aunts, married men of their own choosing and they represented themselves in their matrimonial ceremonies.
Your father opened opportunities in my life. He saw in me, and appreciated, the hard times I’d been through. He looked at me with a mixture of awe and appreciation, and his approval was reinvigorating for me. For many years, I felt like a little girl who finally got the birthday present she wanted.
Still, he was an Afghan man, and as it is for all Afghan men, his primary expectation of me was to bear a child. I was stuck between trying to realize the dreams of Homeira and satisfying the desires of your father. For a long time, I chose the former.
Much as I love you, if I had to do it all over again, I would still make the decision to wait until I was older and a bit established to give birth. I never wanted to define myself solely as the mother of children. Anyway, I felt as if my books were my children—they were like daughters, each of whom symbolized empowerment for women. Come to think of it now, I don’t think your father had any interest in my daughters. But at least he never harmed me or my daughters and he didn’t punish me for them as other Afghan men might have done.
Your father and I shared life for almost fifteen years. Of those fifteen years, there were many days when I loved him and I followed through with every single piece of advice Nanah-jan had offered. I let your father walk a few steps ahead of me and be the master of the house. But there were also days when I came to realize I could not, in the end, accept him as my master. Those were the days Nanah-jan never would have liked.
12
Revolution Boulevard, Tehran
Eventually, Tehran came to accept me as I had accepted it. At the end of the four-year bachelor program, I had grown up and told my classmates that I had a husband, even though I still didn’t tell them I had been married all along. I loved my husband tremendously. It is true that ours was an arranged marriage and I was bound to him through the utterance of a few verses in Arabic whose meaning I didn’t know. But with the passage of time, I grew to love and understand him, and he me.
We were tied together but we were also able to be independent.
I would go to theaters, watch movies, and learn about the way other women lived. I toured the museums and spent hours studying the remnants of the lives of people of bygone eras. I would use my daily passes for scenic bus rides through Haft-Teer Square and explore the big city of Tehran. My husband, who was studying political science at the university, preferred to lie down on the sofa and daydream. The day I received my master’s degree, I went to the beauty salon and styled my long hair. Then I stood in the doorway and said to him, “How about both of us working for our PhDs?”
I passed many an examination and, with fear and excitement, was admitted to the PhD program at Tehran University, one of the best universities in Tehran. I couldn’t believe it myself. The day I received my admission letter to the doctorate program, I knelt down and cried tears of joy and triumph. Triumph over the thoughts of Nanah-jan. It makes me laugh when I think about the frightened little girl who blushed from ear to ear in embarrassment at the border checkpoint when she lifted her burqa for the first time.
But things don’t remain in place forever. Sometimes an earthquake, a flood, or a fire comes from nowhere and washes away all the peace and tranquility you have worked for your whole life. All of a sudden, my husband wanted to return to Afghanistan. He wanted to work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—his dream job. He, too, had studied all these years and wanted to have power and authority. How long could he just survive as a refugee in Iran with no chance for advancement, he complained. He wanted to get politically involved in Afghanistan and work in the government. I was just a writer and all my paraphernalia was the pen I carried with me. But he wanted political power and that was available to him only in his own country.
But for me, returning to a city that fed on the blood of girls was terrifying. I was afraid the city would be the way it used to be. Cruel. I was afraid of Herat. I was afraid to go back to a place that had become a cemetery of my buried friends. I was afraid of the sudden reappearance of Commander Moosa. I was afraid that someday he would knock on the door and say, “I had drawn a circle around this girl.” That secret of the past thirteen years was burning in my chest and its flames were licking my whole body. My husband was a good man, but still, I worried that, deep down, all men were the same as Commander Moosa.
Nanah-jan said, “You must keep this secret in your chest until the day you die.”
I had spent half my life in the rather small city of Herat—the bitter half. Why should I return to a place where my husband had to put on kohl eyeliner and I had to wear a burqa? Herat had not progressed enough during the years of democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights to prevent female suicide in the city. The girls of Herat still had the highest self-immolation statistics in the world.
I went to Iran in a burqa and returned to Afghanistan with a few boxes of books. The sky of my homeland was blue, bullets weren’t flying, and the Taliban whips weren’t piercing the air. My mother’s hair had all turned gray. Nanah-jan’s back had arched farther and Baba-jan had left us eight years earlier.
My husband and I settled in Kabul, which seemed at first to be a more modern city. We got a house in the Arya Housing Complex, a gated community where you were born. I established my own niche in society by working as an adviser in a ministry and a professor at the university so I could equally contribute to the family finances. Nanah-jan continued to be dissatisfied. Her repeated phone calls conveyed this.
“Why are you trying to become a man? Put on a floral embroidered scarf. Put on red lipstick and wait for your husband to come home at night. Men prefer women like that.”
But life with my husband seemed to prove that love can exist without red lipstick. Many of the men in the city still were troubled if their wives brought in a second income; they considered it a source of shame for their manhood. But my husband had no problem with that. The lifestyle in Iran and the sensibility of gender equality in that country had a positive effect on him. The relatively forward thinking life in Iran had affected both of us. So I was happy. I had a PhD, I had published several books and had received several awards. I was no longer like my own mother, who could only whisper her frustrations, but never in my
father’s ear.
O Siawash, you so dear to your mother’s heart,
From those first days that you announced your presence in my body and soul, I began telling you stories. I sang you lullabies in the hot summers of Kabul. In the autumn, when leaves of life fell more frequently than leaves from trees, I sang you lullabies to block the sound of explosions. I hid you under my shawl so you wouldn’t get hurt. I had been afraid to become a mother. But your birth showed me that motherhood is just a different kind of womanhood.
Kabul is the city where they lust for power and wealth. It didn’t take much time for your father to change with the prevailing winds there. When I bought a car so that I could drive independently in the city and avoid the risks that taxi passengers take on the streets, he would not allow me to drive. He didn’t show up at the unveiling of my new novel, because he was embarrassed by the presence of other men. We weren’t in Tehran any longer; we had returned to Afghanistan, the land that has always suppressed its women. Your father seemed to have returned to his roots. Shortly after that, he began preventing me from attending social and official functions. But I was no longer the seventeen-year-old naive girl who would give in to his every whim. The era of Taliban suppression was over for me.
Even though I had only one class to teach after you were born, he was treating me harshly. He pretended to be concerned about my mothering duties, but that was all a ruse to keep me in the house. I just liked to go to the university and teach; it didn’t matter how many hours I taught. Being in the university environment, even for two hours, had a pleasant and calming effect on me. But your father didn’t like it. Every Wednesday I went to the university, and every Wednesday afternoon he would pick a fight with me. It was Kabul, it was all a man’s world.
13
Divorce, Divorce, Divorce
One day, in the summer of 2015, I was returning home from work, counting down the moments until my eyes would fall on you. On that late summer Tuesday in Kabul, I remember the sun had lowered itself so far that it almost touched the rooftop of the car that I drove so rebelliously. The wrath of thunder was threatening in the west, where dense clouds kept crawling. The wind was lifting up debris from the unswept streets and dust whirled in a rising tunnel around and above pedestrians. Scraps of paper and plastics were doing their crazy tango.
A woman holding the edge of her scarf between her teeth was struggling to keep her skirt around her body. Tree branches swayed down left and right like fearsome monsters, until the rain finally made good on its threat. The drainage system in Kabul had been messed up in the war years. Even a patchy drizzle turned the city streets into mud puddles and pedestrians were challenged to negotiate the many pools of water to find their way through the muddy maze.
In those days, I was trying not to take you out of the house unless it was absolutely necessary. I didn’t want Kabul to become your graveyard, as it had been for so many.
In addition to the Taliban threats, Da’ish-ISIS had penetrated city streets. ISIS operatives were chopping off people’s heads in back alleys while the Taliban were drenching people in bloodbaths on the main streets. Every time I returned home, I repeatedly recited all the prayers I had inherited from Nanah-jan. Sometimes, my white-knuckled hands would freeze on the steering wheel out of fear. I continued to drive in Kabul even though my husband didn’t like that I did so. Behind the steering wheel, I was no longer a passenger in the city, I owned as much of the city as any man did.
During my work breaks, I would close my eyes and think, What will I do when it is time for my son to go to school? Is it possible that in order to protect those beautiful eyes I will keep him within the four walls of the house? I couldn’t help but think of my poor mother, who tried to keep me in the house but I, like a stubborn spider, would do everything possible to cut the protective strings of the web she had spun around me.
By the time I got home, the rain had stopped. I opened the bedroom window a little to let the rain-washed fresh air flow in. I put the baby’s red hat on him and wrapped him in an orange blanket and sat by the windowsill.
The fresh and young weeping willow branches of the Arya Housing Complex had drooped under the rain. Kabul was like an orphan in tattered clothing. Siawash was in my arms for a long time and nursed for quite a while, until he fell asleep around six o’clock, clutching my finger in his baby grasp. The minute I put him down in his bed, there was a knock on the front door. It was a friend to the two of us, a woman professor who taught at the same university as my husband. I brought her tea. She asked me to sit down and listen very carefully.
“Your husband wants to have a second wife. There is a girl in his class; she is his student. He has talked to her family. She doesn’t have a father, but her brother has given his consent. When her brother and mother return from the Hajj pilgrimage, they will do the ceremony. I thought you might want to know.”
She was very nervous. She didn’t drink her tea but left. Well, actually, she fled.
The world sank into deep darkness. Time stood still, as if I were having an out-of-body experience. Images of the shared life of the past fifteen years were perpetually parading before my eyes.
Around nine o’clock, the key turned in the door lock. My husband was home. He took off his shoes by the door. His white socks appeared wet.
He usually turned on the TV to catch up on the latest news.
That night they were showing the ten soldiers killed and decapitated in a Taliban night raid in Farah Province.
He lowered the volume and said, “I want to share some news with you. Homeira, every land has its own specific laws. You pay no attention to the state that Kabul is in, nor do you pay any attention to my manhood. By being yourself, you call it into question.”
He had accepted the whole world we had built—or so I thought. What had changed?
In Kabul I was no longer his ideal wife. I was a wife who published books, a wife who spoke in public, a wife who came home late from teaching at the university, a wife who was recognized in her own right. A woman who behaved like this was never going to be an ideal wife to the average Afghan man.
I don’t blame him. This was Kabul and not Paris, after all. Besides, one can’t expect the traditional cultural norms to change in a mere fourteen years. It takes years and generations for men to accept strong women. And in the end, he felt more accountable to society than to me.
It wasn’t long before we arrived at that fateful night, the night he summoned me and spoke in a portentous tone.
I may never be able to tell you exactly what happened to me then. I had heard the last part of your father’s sentences as if they were echoes from a very deep well into which I was falling. I could scarcely breathe—I was suffocating. I had drowned. I was trying to call someone to get me out of the well. Only God knows how much I must have screamed. I don’t remember. I don’t remember at all.
It’s been years since I have thought about that night, but it hangs over my head like a crumbling roof. I can barely let myself remember it, but as I sit here in California I can’t help wishing that you were in my arms. I wish your father was on his way home and that I was sitting here writing stories without any worries. Yes, I still write, but I pay for these stories with your absence and I am anguished that they aren’t worth losing you in the process.
But that night, you were there and you were crying and it was your crying that saved me. I went over to you. I held you in my arms and I sat on the edge of the bed and breast-fed you as I watched your father breathing comfortably in his sleep under the dim bedroom light. My eyes fell on the clock. It was two thirty. Beyond the window, the city was slumbering without apology. The big moon and star of the wedding hall neon sign were visibly blinking. Yes, the wedding hall that had stolen your father’s heart. Could his needs really be that silly, and that superficial? I guess they were. He wanted a place where he would be throned as a groom for a second time.
I went to take a shower. The water ran over my hair and face and down on my bre
asts and stomach. I touched my belly and felts the ribbed cesarean scar under my fingers. Then I sat on the shower floor and covered my face and mouth with my hands. After several hours in the grip of shock, in the pangs of pain, and in utter disbelief, I began to cry. I cried my heart out in that unblessed morning in Kabul. I cried quietly so I wouldn’t disturb your morning sleep. As for me, there was no sleep and no delusion.
Like a bird drenched in the rain and unable to fly, I had knelt on the floor of the shower. I was so drained I didn’t even have the energy to turn off the water that continuously poured on my head. I wished that just once, the phoenix could rise from the ashes of Herat and fly to Kabul and bring my mother on its wings.
I looked at myself in the mirror. There were dark rings around my eyes as if someone had punched me. My lashes had entangled and my lips were dry. Old age was staring me in the face.
That morning, after your father left, I lay down beside you to breast-feed you. You sometimes liked to play with my hair while you were nursing . . . You would pull my hair and I would say “Ouch” and you would laugh. This time, you pulled my hair. I looked at you. You pulled my hair again and I wept bitter tears. You let my hair go and looked at me with a sense of shock.
I called my mother. In gulped sentences punctuated by frequent sobbing, I told my mother what had happened and how my tears were drenching us in sadness. There was no response from the other side.
I asked, “Mother, do you hear me?”
Her shaking voice came back. “I wish I weren’t hearing this.”
Again, the three of us cried . . . but Madar could not comfort me from so far away. Those were the most painful days. I am happy that you would not remember them.
Dancing in the Mosque Page 15