“And if we’re able to convince the groom to dance—” Moor started.
“Why if?” Nabeela said.
“If his family agrees,” she went on, “it’ll be appropriate for you to dance one dance with him, maybe two, but you have to make sure you stay ahjez. Ahjez and classy. Ahjez, classy, and respectable.”
“So no ass shaking?” Nabeela asked.
Moor just smiled.
“I’m being serious,” Nabeela said. “I’ve been watching hours and hours of these belly-dancing videos, and now you’re telling me that I can’t shake it a little for my husband? I smuggled those tapes for no reason?”
“You go ahead and shake your ass,” Moor said. “But don’t you cry when you fuck up your dress. Those dancers wear spandex and shorts, not Kochi kali.”
Nabeela laughed and wrapped her arms around Moor, kissing the tip of her nose and hugging her so tightly, she fell away from me. The extra space couldn’t have come at a better time.
As we got closer to Kabul, the scent of the sewers and the smog raced up each of my nostrils and leapt down into my belly, where they joined forces in a terrible tag team of intestinal ass kicking. But, alhamdulillah, when I stepped down onto the concrete streets of Kabul, my bellyaches softened.
We separated near the government districts. Rahmutallah and my khalas went on with the caravan, while me and my parents got a taxi to a clinic in Karte Naw. The doctor there (recommended by Waseem) turned out to be this tiny, bald-headed Tajik guy who had a handlebar mustache and could speak Pakhto, Farsi, and English.
First, he examined my busted finger, real close, to the point where I knew he must have been smelling its stink, but he didn’t frown or cough, and I thanked him in my heart for that. Then, just when I thought he was getting ready to press my wound with a witch hazel’s cotton ball, he stepped back and asked my parents why they hadn’t brought me to a doctor sooner.
Moor told him that her father was a doctor.
“He’s a pharmacist,” Agha interrupted, “who thinks he’s a doctor, and so do all his children, but, Wallah, Doctor Sahib, he’s usually very good about flesh wounds. I’ve seen him patch up bullet wounds like they were knee scrapes. Otherwise, I would never have left my son to him for so long. I thought he could handle it, but here we are, almost three months later, and the gash still hasn’t healed.”
“You should have come to me sooner,” the doctor said. “I’ve dealt with these dog bites a hundred times here in the city. I’ll prescribe an ointment that will heal this wound in a few days.”
Agha was ecstatic.
Moor seemed doubtful.
And when we reached the pharmacy across the street, Agha’s joy turned into a sudden rage, and Moor’s doubts were confirmed. The doctor wrote us a prescription for an ointment Baba had already rubbed onto my wound the very first day I got bit. He was right all along.
Agha ended up buying the same ointment anyway, just in case Baba’s tube had been expired or contaminated or . . . well, I wasn’t exactly sure what Agha’s reasoning was there, but he was so mad, it would’ve been pointless to argue with him. Instead, Moor suggested we get some food, and though I wasn’t too hungry, we happened to be close to Ruhollah’s favorite kabob shop, which, as it turned out, was also Agha’s favorite kabob shop.
Apparently, more than thirty years ago, when he was just a kid and Kabul still had a king, Agha’s older cousin Sayed Ahmad brought him to this very shop.
“Poor Sayed,” Agha recalled, “he was the first shaheed in our family.”
I asked Agha how he died.
“Sayed was a truck driver,” Agha said. “He was making a delivery in Wardak, when the local Communists made a pact with the Pakhtun tribesmen in the area. The Communists told the Pakhtun that if they wiped out the Hazara rebels a few towns over, all the land would be given to their tribes. The Pakhtun eagerly agreed, but as soon as the weapons were delivered to them, they turned on the Communists and killed an entire brigade. In retaliation, the Communists bombed the whole village, and even the roads surrounding the village, where Sayed happened to be driving a tanker filled with fuel. He was obliterated by fire a hundred miles from home. When his father found out, he spent weeks looking for his son’s remains, just a finger or a bone to bury, but by then the entire district had been turned to ash. Sayed was eaten by the war.”
We sat in a small room of red curtains, filled with kabob smoke, and we quietly sipped tor chai until Agha gave us a different memory.
“When Sayed first brought me here,” Agha said, “I refused to eat, as my father instructed, but Sayed didn’t argue or pressure me. He just ordered two helpings of kabob and told me that if I didn’t eat, he would be happy to take both. He knew. He knew that when the kabobs came, I would relent. The idea of paying so much money for two platters of meat seemed wild to me, but then they came, and I understood.”
After we ate a whole pile of skewers and drank three pots of tor chai, we left the shop and traveled toward the government offices, but there were so many checkpoints along the way it took us two hours just to get a few miles. At every stop, there was always a whole flock of soldiers, Afghans and Americans both, decked out in layers of armor and gear, the white boys in goggles sitting atop these behemoth Humvees, almost two stories tall, so high I could never see their faces, which made me nervous, because I wasn’t sure if they were watching me or not.
Agha—who had a big black beard and the dark face of a desert’s nomad—was stopped at every single checkpoint for a pat-down. If it weren’t for his magical passport, we would’ve been stuck all day. “We’re Americans,” Agha had to keep insisting as the soldier glanced from the photo to Agha and back to the photo again. Wallah, it was like a secret key into the city.
When we finally met up with Rahmutallah and my khalas, we found out that absolutely nothing had been accomplished. Rahmutallah Maamaa explained that after waiting for two hours to get to the front of the line at the Marriage Certificate Department, he was informed by a clerk that Nabeela’s tazkira contained a grammatical error. In order to resolve the issue, the clerk told Rahmutallah that either he had to head to the Tazkira Office for an official correction or else he could just pay an extra “fee” and get it fixed right there. Without even seeing how much the clerk wanted, Rahmutallah refused and walked out. But at the Tazkira Office, the clerk claimed that Nabeela’s ID card was a forgery since Nabeela looked much older than what her ID card indicated, and he said he’d be able to fix the birth date right there and then for a small “fee.” Otherwise, they’d have to get a signed confirmation from the Registry of Births and Deaths to prove that the ID card’s birth date was correct. Again, Rahmutallah Maamaa refused to pay the fee and walked out, but, unfortunately, he ended up arriving at the Registry of Births and Deaths ten minutes after it closed one hour early because the manager hadn’t been paid in two weeks (poor Rahmutallah got stopped at every checkpoint along the way). To make matters worse, Pretty Hameed got the balls to suggest he would go back and pay the extra “fee” himself, and if it weren’t for Nabeela’s pleas for raham, Rahmutallah might’ve torn Hameed’s face off right then and there. After arguing for a bit, Hameed proposed that they should come back next week with Ruhollah, since he seemed to have so many connections in Kabul, and in the end, Rahmutallah Maamaa had to admit that was actually a good idea.
“But it’s insanity,” he vented to Agha later on, once we were back in the car and out of Kabul. “In the days of the Taliban, young boys would get beat for shaving, and now grown men are harassed for having beards.”
“There’s no regard for the sunna,” Agha said.
“For the sunna. For my age. For our lives. None of it,” Rahmutallah said, and spat out the window. We drove in a hurry onto the Kabul–Logar highway, which was the smoothest part of the ride. Nabeela lowered her window and my car sickness ebbed.
“How did it go with the doctor?” Na
beela asked Moor.
“The Doctor Sahib prescribed the same ointment that Aba already gave him,” she said. “The one we’ve been rubbing on Marwand’s wound since the day that dog—God curse him to hell—first attacked him. I don’t know what it is. His finger just won’t heal.”
Neither, I thought, would my belly.
As we rolled onto the bumpy trails of Naw’e Kaleh, my seasickness rose back up in a way that made me mourn for my lost days of health.
Wallah, I missed being well. I could hardly remember it.
So, for the next four Fridays straight, I drank Abo’s potions on time and in front of her. But with each dose of the remedy, I swear to God I felt sicker than before. Abo said this was natural. Explained to me that purging was painful, and though I didn’t argue with her, she chastised me for not keeping faith. I tried to see it her way. Wallah, I did. But on the morning of the fifth Friday, which was also the morning of Nabeela’s wedding, I woke up to an ache in my belly that left me questioning all her visions.
3
On the Ninety-Seventh Morning
The day of the wedding arrived, and I was not ready.
With my belly swirling and aching like never before, I lay back on my toshak, stared up at the ceiling, and whispered the Kalimah under my breath ninety-nine times in a row, until my vision steadied, my belly calmed, and the pulsing of my finger softened. That was when Gul barged in.
Almost dragging my whole toshak, he took my good hand and led me out the room, through the courtyard, into the orchard, past the lines of cauldrons and campfires being prepared for the first feast, and toward the very corner of the orchard where Budabash once ate the tip of my index finger. Dawood was there too. He cradled a big black bag, looking suspicious. I wanted to explain to them how shitty I felt and how I really couldn’t handle another scheme, but as soon as I sat down, Dawood pulled three burqas out of his big black bag, and Gul began to explain his proposal. I was too curious to interrupt.
It had been more than sixty days since Gul had last seen his fiancée. In that time, he’d become a little obsessive about her absence: got into the habit of spending more time with the butcher’s son just to look in his face for the places that reminded him of his little sister. Dreamed about her too. And in these dreams, she was always saving him from one little calamity or another. A runaway cow. A poisoned Coke. A quick flood.
Nabeela’s wedding was going to be the perfect opportunity for him to get near her. His plan went like this: After the butcher and his guests arrived at our house for the first portion of the wedding celebrations, and after we did our part entertaining and feeding them, and while all of the ladies prepared for the march back to the butcher’s house, the three of us would slip into burqas, pretend to be girls, and blend in with the ladies just as they headed out on Nabeela’s final march. When we reached the butcher’s house, we’d sneak onto the ladies’ side of the wedding, where Gul might finally get another chance to gaze upon his beloved.
“And you two could pick out your own ladies to love,” Gul added.
“But why do you need me?” I asked, and just as I did, Abo shouted that she needed me in the beranda. Before I left, Gul warned me to keep my plan a secret from Zia, who might get too suspicious too quickly and try to stop us. And like he predicted, when I reentered the courtyard, Zia was there to meet me.
The compound was a bustle with ladies dressed, half-dressed, hair up, hair down, wearing old-fashioned dresses of the red-and-green or purple-and-pink ensembles designed by the bride herself. The younger girls rushed to help the older girls get perfumed and powdered. Almost all of my khalas, who were already pretty light skinned to begin with, had caked their faces with layers of this white paste made in China, shipped through Peshawar, sold in Kabul, and snuck into Logar. The butcher’s guests were set to arrive within the hour, so while most of the ladies were still rushing to prepare themselves, Zia’s mom was in the tandoor khana with Bibi, preparing the cauldrons.
Zia pulled me aside and asked what we were up to in the orchard. I told him we were just planning the attan for the first part of the wedding.
“But you can’t attan,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“You told me.”
I didn’t remember. It must have been in the beginning. Before Budabash got loose, when he wanted to know everything about me.
“You’re lying,” he said. “Say Wallah.”
“Wallah.”
“Wallah what?”
“Wallah,” I said, peeking back on the beranda, “I got to go see Abo.”
Before he let me leave, he recited a hadith about a man who emigrated from Mecca to Medina not for the sake of the Prophet but in order to see a woman he loved. She was called Umm Qays, and because the man’s hijra was made for her sake, his true name was forgotten. From that day on, he was known only as “the emigrant of Umm Qays.”
“Do you understand?” Zia asked.
I told him I did, three times in a row, and then rushed off toward the beranda, where Abo sat in her corner as Miriam painted her eyes with kohl. Moor sat beside her, doing her own makeup with a little kit she bought in SF. Abo had her eyes closed and Moor drew mascara. They discussed Abdul-Abdul. Apparently, he was missing.
Earlier that morning, after a bit of interrogation, Abo found out from Ruhollah that Abdul-Abdul’s commander had called him in on a very important mission. Ruhollah assured her that it was a matter of national security and that Abdul-Abdul would not miss his sister’s wedding for anything less. But Abo admitted she did not believe Ruhollah. “He said it much too quickly. Like he was reciting it.”
“Ruhollah doesn’t lie,” Moor said.
“No, he doesn’t. But he did.”
“If anything, Abdul told him the story and Ruhollah repeated it to you, just as it was, which is why you don’t believe it.”
“Maybe,” Abo said, and then, without opening her eyes, she placed a little plastic bottle of my antidote before me. “Drink,” she said. “This will be the last one.”
So I plugged my nose, twisted the cap, and downed the bottle.
For a few minutes afterward, I wandered about the courtyard and the rooms of the compound in a miserable daze as each of the ladies in the household ordered me to do one thing or another, all of which I kept forgetting. Just as soon as I forgot what one khala wanted me to do, another khala told me to do something else, and I went about like this for a while, being ordered and forgetting my orders and setting out to finish tasks that had already been completed hours ago. Eventually, I abandoned my forgotten chores altogether and went off in search of Gul. That was when the butcher’s guests finally arrived.
The men came in through the orchard with a legion of donkeys, each of them stacked to the limit with raw meats, veggies, fruits, soups, stews, and bread. Me and Gul and the other guys stripped the donkeys of their supplies and handed them over, conveyor belt style, to the makeshift cooks near the cauldrons. Agha had offered to take charge of the meats, while a few distant cousins, or maybe neighbors, were in charge of preparing the veggies, the rice, and the other platters. Rahmutallah Maamaa led the butcher’s men toward the shade of the apple trees, where toshaks and carpets and kettles of chai were already laid out. The butcher’s son walked in the front of his parade of guests and sat smack-dab in the middle of all the big-bearded men. He seemed so pale, sitting there among the OGs, he looked almost ugly. I wondered if he even wanted to get married.
The ladies came in through the main gate, and while the men were still drinking their chai and waiting for food, the ladies in the courtyard sang love songs, drummed dhols, and, I imagined, began to dance for the pride of Nabeela. I leaned against the wall of the courtyard, still dizzied in my stupor, and listened for a bit.
Shireen’s voice rose above the rest.
Wallah, Moor wasn’t lying when she said that Shireen could croon with the be
st of them: with the sorrow of a young Naghma and the range of an Ustad Mahwash. Had she wanted, Moor claimed, Shireen could’ve been famous, but she hated crowds and the eyes of men and only ever sang at special occasions and for the ones she loved.
And so, for the sake of Nabeela, she sang the song of Durkhanai.
The Song of Durkhanai
The tale within the song told of this old Pakhtun chieftain named Taus Khan. Early on in his life, Taus Khan suffered the woe of falling deeply in love with the woman he married, and when she died—at eighteen and in childbirth—leaving him just one daughter, he couldn’t ever bring himself to marry another woman. With time, this one daughter he had, whose name was Durkhanai, grew up to become a reflection of her once beautiful mother. Taus Khan loved her dearly and denied her nothing, so much so that when Durkhanai, at the age of about ten, asked if she could study the Quran in order to more thoroughly understand the beauty of Allah, Taus Khan, with great hesitation, agreed to hire her a tutor. And though she always maintained her purdah by sitting behind the protection of a large curtain, she learned quickly from her Quranic teacher and was allowed to study other subjects.
Eventually, Durkhanai grew to become a scholar of great intelligence, beauty, piety, and kindness. For that reason, after Durkhanai turned sixteen, a wealthy and well-respected suitor by the name of Payu Khan came calling for her dusmal, and so, by the will of Allah, and with the consent of her father, Durkhanai was engaged to be wed.
Growing up in the same village as Durkhanai was a young man named Adam Khan. A chieftain’s son who by all accounts was spoiled and lazy and uninterested in power, but who was also blessed with a singing voice that made beggars throw their coins, ladies throw their scarves, and brought great warriors to tears.
99 Nights in Logar Page 16