One day, this Adam Khan happened to attend the same wedding as our Durkhanai, and during the celebration, the guests pleaded with Adam Khan to sing them all a few songs for the sake of Allah. At first, Adam Khan gave a humble excuse, claiming he had a cough, but when every single one of the men from the groom’s side of the family begged him to sing, he finally gave in and began his performance.
He played the rabab and the flute, sang couplets and ballads, and their melodies floated above the wall of the men’s side of the wedding and spilled over onto the women’s. When Durkhanai heard the splendor of Adam’s voice, she felt herself drown in its rhythm. Falling into a sort of trance, she wandered toward the source of the song, as if possessed, until she came to the edge of the women’s side, climbed the bordering wall, and gazed upon Adam Khan for the first time.
Adam Khan—in the midst of his playing, singing, moaning, mourning—happened to glance up toward the sky so as to invoke the beauty of Allah but, instead, met the gaze of Durkhanai.
Promptly, they both fell ill with love.
* * *
—
And just as I was getting into the love story, Gul decided to interrupt my daydream with his announcement of the attan. Rahmutallah Maamaa organized the dance among the men, drew in a few of the boys, respectfully requested the presence of the OGs, and then finally offered the lead spot to Agha, who, of course, denied him exactly three times in a row before taking up his position at the front of the circle.
Some of the butcher’s men played the tabla and the bajah in the middle of the circle as the attan started slow: each step and spin still careful, almost timid. Rahmutallah and my other maamaas and a few of the butcher’s men lined up behind Agha. Most of them danced too stiff or too loose, but a couple of the younger guys—with their beards trimmed and their long locks oiled—were able to imitate the calm grace of Agha.
After a few orbits of the attan, the musicians picked up the pace and the men spun faster, danced quicker, clapped harder, and while the older men and the lesser dancers left the circle—sweating and weary and about to faint—the young guys kept going: now slapping the earth, kicking up dirt, dancing and leaping and spinning to the rhythm of the dhol.
It made me dizzy to watch, but it was hypnotic too.
Near the end of the first attan, only Agha, Gul, and two of the butcher’s boys remained. Agha had at least two decades on all of them, but he still kept pace out of an odd sense of honor. To him, the attan was more than a dance. He used to say that the Pakhtun would perform the attan in the mountains. He said they danced with swords and rifles, that they used machine guns as drumbeats, and that they danced before and after battles. He said that the Pakhtun loves dancing and war more than God. He said that’s why our people are cursed. He said it just like that: “our.”
In the end, the young guys outlasted Agha. With his shirt soaked, he gasped for breath and almost toppled over when one of the butcher’s cousins raised his hand to stop the drums. Agha pleaded with the drummer to keep going, but none of the boys would join him. The attan was over, and the feast began.
We ate quickly, and while all the ladies in the courtyard prepared to head out toward the butcher’s house, me and Gul and Dawood snuck into the den.
There, Gul asked me to put on Nabeela’s stolen burqa.
“At least try it,” he said.
So I did. At first, I could hardly get the garment past my arms, but when the heavy fabric fell over me, and I adjusted the headpiece and arranged the mesh of the eyeholes, my balance steadied and my belly seemed to calm.
That was until Gul asked me to get my camera.
I told him I didn’t know where it was, and he told me to say “Wallah,” and I told him he was asking too much.
“If I have a picture, I’ll last the next few years without anything else, Wallah, I will. It’ll keep me sane while you’re gone, and by the time you come back for my wedding, I’ll have only you to thank. You understand, Marwand?”
“But it’s a sin.”
“Where does it say in the Quran that to take a picture of your love so that you do not die of loneliness in the years before your marriage is a sin?”
“Zia said—”
“You think I’m asking this for nothing. But if it was ever the other way around, would I deny you?”
He wouldn’t. “The photo will be blurred by the veil,” I said.
“Blurry is fine,” he said, “I have a good imagination.”
So I rushed off to get my camera and barely made it back in time to join the ladies on their march.
Even though many of the ladies warned her against it—on account of the recent uptick in T-related violence—Abo was determined to play her dhol on the road, to sing her songs, and to let the whole village know that Nabeela was going to be married off forever. The butcher’s family had marched toward our house pretty much in silence. A quiet song, a thumping of a drum, but Abo was determined to make a ruckus. We all gathered by the gate of the courtyard with base drums, tambourines, burqas, dresses beneath burqas, purses, bags, candies, dusmals, and a solitary old rifle, which Abo hid beneath her chador.
“And when a talib comes to stop us?” Moor asked.
“I have a plan,” Abo said.
Everyone, especially the butcher’s side of the family, was more than a little bit anxious about her “plan.”
“But they might not show,” Abo added.
Of course, they did.
The first part of the march went by all right. Abo and Nabeela and Moor and some of the elder ladies led the parade, singing love songs, playing the dhol and the tambourine, while the younger ladies sang quietly in the middle, echoing the elders. Me and the guys trailed in the back, cooing softly, imitating the ladies, and trying not to get noticed. Beneath the blue veil, with only clusters of eyeholes to see through, the roads and the fields and the trees passed me by in glimmers, in little cuts or shards, as though I weren’t seeing the country there before me but only remembering it as it happened. I huffed in big gulps of air through the mesh of the cloth. It smelled of mint, cut grain, and new smoke.
As we marched through the first maze, strolled down the main road running through Naw’e Kaleh, and made our way through the center of two intersecting fields, we were met by a trio of Ts. They moved slowly through the wheat, in a uniform pattern and at an equal distance. They wore black kali, black pakols, but the dusmals that covered their faces were white. They carried machine guns, and out of all the would-be Ts I’d met on the road and spotted in the countryside, these guys seemed like the realest deal.
The procession slowed down a bit. Some of the ladies were unsure whether they should stop marching or stop singing or just stop altogether. Abo wouldn’t have that, though. She led the procession forward, but instead of singing another love song, she sang the story of Dasht-i-Leili.
It went like this:
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
Will you return to me my brother?
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
He is all I have on God’s great earth.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
Eight years have passed and still I wait.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
I sit on the road and watch for his eyes.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
I’ve heard that he has been buried.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
That he has been planted alive in the gardens of heaven.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
Like the white blossoms of God.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
Our mother has gone blind with grief.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
His wife will not speak.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
His sons do not sleep.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
Our father will not walk.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili.
And he onl
y calls me my brother’s name,
Wa Dasht-i-Leili.
I work on broken leg.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
There is never enough to eat.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
Return to me my brother.
Wa Dasht-i-Leili,
And I will never sing again.
Abo crooned by herself in the fields, nearly weeping, and the Ts knelt where they were and listened quietly. They didn’t stop us. As Abo led her procession of guests past the Ts, through the field, and onto the road toward the butcher’s house, I kept looking back to make sure they weren’t following us. When the Ts were out of earshot, Abo wiped her tears, smudged her eyes, and switched to a love song so popular even I knew the lyrics. It was about a missing Kochaay named Laila, who was sick the other night. All the other ladies, including me and Gul and Dawood, joined in too.
On the Ninety-Seventh Day
Once we got inside the butcher’s courtyard, many of the women took off their burqas, including Nabeela, who wore her purple ensemble with a trailing skirt, puffy sleeves, a violet bouquet, and purple makeup to match. Abo and Moor and a few of the butcher’s women led Nabeela to this makeshift throne in the beranda.
The butcher’s courtyard was much too small to hold all of the guests at once, so after getting a good look at the bride, smaller portions of the party split up into different rooms in the compound and started their own dances. Most of the guests stayed out in the garden, decorated with flowers and linens and carpets. Toshaks were arranged along every single wall. The bibi hajjis and the anaas sat upon these, playing drums and tambourines, singing of old love, while the péeghla girls gathered in the middle of the courtyard and began to dance for the bride in the beranda.
I sat near the dance floor with Dawood and Gul and a few other ladies clad in burqas. We watched the girls. I didn’t know any of them. Had never seen them and wasn’t supposed to have seen them. They wore Nabeela’s special dresses etched in flowers or gems or hundreds of little mirrors cut into circles, which when they spun reflected their watchers a thousand times. With only the mesh holes of my burqa, I couldn’t really see the girls all at once, especially as quick as they moved. I watched either their hands or the stepping of their feet or their faces. My heart thumped in my belly. My fingers itched, especially the wounded one, and without really thinking, I kept picking at its scab until my blood began to drip. Just a drop or two, but still.
After the first song, I turned to Gul and asked him which of these girls was the butcher’s daughter.
“None of them,” said the voice of a woman I did not recognize. “They must be in one of the other rooms. How are you related to the bride?”
“My cousin,” I squeaked.
“She’s a lovely girl,” the woman in the burqa said, “but with little purdah.”
Disguising my voice as best I could, I thanked her, excused myself, and went off to find Gul or Dawood. I wandered from chamber to chamber, fluttering about in my blue fabric, squeezing past guests who shot me sidelong glances. But under the cover of the veil it was difficult to scope out an entire room or a dance floor, especially with how crowded the compound had become. I had to look at each and every face, one at a time, in order to understand who was where, but it being a party and all, everyone was too mast to stay in one room, to watch one set of dancers, to listen to just one singer, and so all of the guests were flowing about the entire compound. The women sang, danced, chatted, drank chai and soda, ate candies and almonds, some of them laughed and made jokes, some of them argued, and after a few minutes of wandering about in a dizzied rush, I just knelt down near the farthest corner of the courtyard and hoped to Allah that Dawood or Gul might notice me in my solitude.
Instead, Miriam and Bibi were the ones to approach me. They wore Kochi dresses with billowing green skirts etched in threads of golden flowers. Bibi’s hair was long and straight and Miriam’s was loose and curled, and both of them wore the slightest dabs of blush.
Bibi put her hand on my shoulder. “Mother,” she said, “are you all right?”
“I’m a little lost,” I said in the creakiest voice I could manage.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
But before I had the chance to tell her, we were distracted by an argument between two of the guests. For a second or two I thought it might have been Gul, but it turned out to be a real girl—of no relation to Nabeela or the butcher’s son—who was filming the dancers near the corner of the courtyard where me and Miriam knelt. A woman from the butcher’s side of the family caught her in the act, called on some of her sisters or cousins, and, after smashing the camera, escorted the girl out of the courtyard. When I asked the girls why they did what they did, Miriam answered me with a story.
The Tale of the Girl in the Blue Dress
I heard of this girl whose name I won’t share for the sake of her mother. A pretty Logaray with a respectable family, a pious father, and an unblemished reputation, who one day decided to attend her cousin’s wedding, where, after much insistence from the other guests, she began to dance before all the women. Though she couldn’t have been much older than fifteen, this girl was already well-known for her talent as a dancer. Her measured grace never intimidated the other guests and only ever drew them in. Like this, she could almost single-handedly revive a dying party. But on that particular day, as she slowly and carefully brought her cousin’s wedding back to life, a secret camera hid somewhere amid the guests, recording her every step.
Some way or another, the video of the girl found its way into the hands of a boy from the village, and he, overexcited about the content of the film, shared it with some of his friends, who shared it with some of their cousins, who shared it with a few interested customers, who shared it with a few hustlers, until the short, grainy clip of the girl in her blue dress, her hair unveiled, dancing beautifully in the summer’s light, had made it from camera to camera, computer to computer, chip to chip, before it finally reached the bootleggers in Kabul. These lowly men then proceeded to copy the video of the poor girl a hundred times over, selling them in the markets for coins.
With time, the loveliness of her dancing, of her calm, attractive grace, set a sort of spell on a large mass of the perverts in Kabul. Many men were smitten. Brawls were had over her honor. Fiends were stabbed. Jaws shattered. Hearts too. Until a small squadron of her most loyal followers united in the determination to find the pretty village girl, wherever she might be, and to steal her for themselves so that she might be forced to choose a husband among them. Eventually, word of the girl’s infamy reached all the way back to her little village in Logar, where all the men in her family prepared themselves for the onslaught of the perverts by acquiring many weapons and staying armed at all times of the day. The fear and the embarrassment of the whole ordeal nearly drove the girl mad.
But, by the will of God, the perverts never came. It was all talk. Maybe they moved on to a different girl. Maybe they couldn’t figure out her exact location. Maybe they drank too much and forgot. Whatever it was, though, her brothers stayed armed, and as armed boys are apt to do, they got into unnecessary quarrels with their neighbors and with some soldiers, and two of them ended up dead. Executed in some field or on some road. Their father went mad. Their mother blamed her daughter and fell into a cruel depression. The poor girl never danced again.
* * *
—
“What a sad story,” I said, feeling the weight of the camera on my chest.
“People still watch the video,” Miriam said. “Even now, it’s still famous.”
“Have you watched it?”
“My apologies, Bibi Hajji, but I’ve completely distracted you. Who was it that you were looking for?”
“Oh, it was the butcher’s daughter,” I said. “The one marrying—”
“Gulbuddin,” Bibi said.
“You know him?”
&nbs
p; “He’s our kaakaa,” she said. “Come. We’ll show you the girl.”
And with that word, Bibi took my hand, the butchered one, and squeezed my wounded finger, which nearly made me scream, and the two of them led me through the party, past the ladies, over the pastries, away from the dancers, until I noticed, sitting at a wall by herself, the old Pakhtana, Khaista, who came to our house that one day and whose story I never got to finish. I told Bibi and Miriam we should go and say our salaams to Khaista Khala and they agreed. I sat on one side of her and the girls sat on the other. We greeted her at the same time. At first, she was a bit suspicious of us, especially me, whose name she didn’t recognize, but when I asked about her son, she relaxed.
“My boy,” she said, “is doing all he can, so that Allah does not abandon Naw’e Kaleh.”
The Tale of Khaista Khala and Mullah Mansour
Apparently, sometime after her husband died and she fled Logar with his extended family, Khaista Khala was able to find work sewing garments in Pakistan. From the meager wages she accumulated and by never sleeping, hardly eating, and remaining patient with the will of Allah, Khaista was able to raise up her son, Mansour, all on her own. When her child wasn’t hustling tesbihs at the market, Khaista was able to convince a local mullah to accept him into a madrassa, where he would be fed at least one meal daily.
The poison she drank and the beatings she suffered as a young girl had done nothing to retard her child’s mind, and, in fact, her son was exceedingly curious and bright. He took quickly to the Quran, enjoying the lyrical quality of the verses, the philosophical implications of the message, and the emphasis Allah always placed upon reserving justice for the oppressed and the abandoned. The Prophet, too, grew up with no father, he used to tell his mother, and she would say that the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, knew many hardships and sorrows and that each one only made him more beloved to his Creator, and this filled her son with a joy, which was her life.
99 Nights in Logar Page 17