Letters to My Daughters (9 page)

We rode out of Faizabad and on towards my brother's village house. We had two days of solid riding ahead of us, and the roads were very poor, barely even dirt tracks. I had taken control of the horse, so I was pleased with myself. The burka still made it difficult for me to ride, especially when I had to steer the horse around corners. With my restricted vision, I was very disoriented. And if the horse stumbled in a hole, it was very hard to retain my balance.

As night fell, we came to a village where we could rest. Although we had been travelling only a day, already I could see the differences in the people. The village women were very welcoming and eager to talk to the new arrivals. As we spoke, I noticed how filthy their hands were, black with dirt from long, hard days working in the fields and infrequent bathing. Their clothes were those of simple rural peasants, which I suppose shouldn't have surprised me, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that somehow I had gone back in time. First the burka, then the horse and now the dirty village women who lived their lives in much the same way as their grandmothers and their grandmothers' grandmothers had—it was like watching my country's future unravel before my eyes.

When I woke I found I was very stiff and sore. Horse riding can create aches in places you never thought possible. But I was still pleased with myself for riding unassisted through such tough terrain after a long time out of the saddle. You need to be skilled to ride in this part of Afghanistan. Sometimes your life depends on it.

I HAD been living with Nadir and his family for two weeks when we went to visit an uncle and some of my other distant family in a nearby village. I was sitting with a woman who knew my mother when she asked me if I had been in Kabul when my brother Muqim was killed. I was completely shocked. I hadn't heard anything about this. Everybody in the room could see the look of horror on my face and realized I didn't know. My uncle was first to react. His instinct was to deflect the subject and he tried to suggest the woman was talking about one of my half brothers, Mamorshah, who had been killed by the Mujahideen fifteen years previously.

That brother had been among a group of village men who helped fight off the Mujahideen when they attacked the town of Khawhan. He spent all night firing out of a small bathroom window in his house armed with just a pistol. In order for him to reach the high window, his poor wife had to crouch on all fours as he stood on her back. Both he and his wife survived that battle, but after that he was a marked man. He fled to Tajikistan for a while, but eventually he tried to sneak back into Afghanistan. That was when they caught him. In another sign of the strength of the extended family, my mother spent the night going from local commander to local commander begging for his release. He wasn't her blood son, but she loved him as her own, just like she loved all the other wives' children. But she failed. Like my father he was executed with a bullet to the head at dawn.

But I knew all about this story. And I was only a little girl when it had happened. So why would she ask me if I was there? Despite what the family said to the contrary, I was sick with worry that they were really talking about Muqim. He lived in Kabul and I feared it was he who had been killed. I was in shock. I didn't want to eat anything. My heart was palpitating and I felt sick. I wanted to sprout wings and fly to Kabul to check if he was all right.

On the way back to his house, Nadir continued to insist that the lady had made a mistake. I knew in my heart he was trying to protect me, but I chose to believe the lie rather than accept the terrible truth.

Perhaps it was the uncertainty over whether Muqim was dead or not, but I found life in the village really difficult after that. I was beginning to miss my family very much, especially my mother. I was having trouble adjusting to life in the country too and longed to be back among the bustle and energy of the city, preferably Kabul. Everything was just so unfamiliar. I even found the basic village food of boiled meat and
naan
unusual and inedible. I began losing weight. Most of all, I was missing my classes.

There was no television or radio, so once the evening meal had been eaten and tidied away the family simply went to bed—normally by 7 o'clock each night. It was far too early for me. To occupy myself on those quiet evenings as I lay in bed, I would go over different math problems and formulas for chemistry and physics. It kept my mind occupied and helped me feel at least some connection with the lessons I missed so much. And as I remembered the numbers and symbols, part of me hoped I could soon return to Kabul and find it as it was when I had left it more than a year ago.

It wasn't long afterwards that I asked Nadir to let me return to Faizabad. I missed my mother so much and really needed to be near her. I started discussing this with my family, but it was decided that instead of my returning to Faizabad, my mother, sister, brother-in-law and I would all move back to Kabul together. Mirshakay, my mother's second son, was now a police general in the capital, and he had decreed that Kabul was currently safe enough for us to return. Nadir and I took the horse ride back to Faizabad, and from there we all took a flight to the city of Kunduz.

I was so happy to be back with my family, especially my mother. I did not tell her what I had been told about Muqim's death, because I still couldn't bring myself to fully believe it was true. When I felt the nagging, sickening waves of unease wash over me, I simply shut it out of my mind. My mother was very pleased to have me back too, and although neither of us knew what to expect in Kabul we were both very excited to be returning.

From Kunduz we had to take a three-hundred-kilometre bus journey. That July was very hot, even compared with the usual summer temperatures of Afghanistan. The sun scorched the mountains, and the rocks became so hot around midday that you could not touch them or you risked burning your hand. The wind whipped up the dust so that it swirled around in mini tornadoes, which got into houses, inside cars and machinery and constantly in your eyes. I was becoming used to my burka, but of course I still resented it. The dust had no respect for women's modesty and it would find its way inside the blue cloth and stick to my sweating skin, making me itch and wriggle even more than usual.

At least on the horse ride to and from my brother's house I had been in the breeze, but now I was crammed into a stifling bus with my family and dozens of other people trying to get to Kabul, and the temperature inside my burka was unbearable. The road from Kunduz to Kabul is one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan. It has improved over the years, but even now it can be a nerve-racking journey. The road's narrow rutted surface spirals around the jagged mountains, which on one side pierce the turquoise sky and on the other plunge hundreds of feet down to the jagged rocks of the gorge below. Many unfortunate people have met their deaths down there. There aren't any safety barriers, and when trucks and larger vehicles, such as our bus, meet going in opposite directions, they squeeze past each other a few centimetres at a time while wheels teeter along the crumbling lip of the cliff.

I sat in my bouncing, swaying seat listening to the roar of the bus's engine, as the driver worked his way furiously up and down the gears, occasionally tooting his horn to remonstrate with passing motorists. Fortunately, I had my physics calculations and formulas to distract me and happily drifted off in a trail of numbers. Anything to keep my mind from the rivers of sweat that ran down my back and matted my hair inside the hood of my burka.

As the heat of the day began to wear off, the mountains turned lilac. The landscape softened, and now and then we passed a shepherd squatting near his flock as it grazed on the sweetest grass around the riverbeds and shadier spots. Donkeys snuffled among the wild poppies, and every few miles the burned and abandoned remains of a Soviet tank or truck littered the side of the road.

When we approached the outskirts of Kabul, tired, damp with sweat and irritated by the layer of dust that tickled our noses and made our skin itch, our bus slowed to a crawl in a long line of traffic that stretched out in front of us. Hundreds of cars, packed bumper to bumper, blocked the road. We waited, uncertain of what was happening. Without air flowing through the windows, it became unbearably hot once again. Many of the children were crying, pleading with their mothers to give them water.

A man with an AK-47 rifle approached the bus, sticking his bushy black beard and brown
paqul
hat through the door. His
shalwar kameez
was sweat-stained and dirty. The passengers strained their ears to hear the conversation. The delay, the gunman told the driver, was because a Mujahideen commander, Abdul Sabur Farid Kohistani, was being appointed prime minister of the new government and the roads in the capital had been closed as a security precaution to let his convoy through. I took it as a bad omen of what was to come. Not even the Russians had needed to bring an entire city to a halt to move dignitaries around. Afghanistan was in the control of the Mujahideen, who were veteran fighters, not politicians or civil servants. Yes, they had bravely relieved our country of the Russian invaders, and for this I respected and admired them. But I wondered how men with zero political experience could run the country efficiently.

When the roads were eventually reopened, we made our way through the city. There were signs of recent fighting—destroyed buildings and burned-out vehicles. Mujahideen fighters stood at checkpoints, guns at the ready. We went to my brother Mirshakay's apartment in an area called Makrorian, a series of Russian-built apartment blocks. He lived on the fifth floor.

Mirshakay had been given a very senior job at the Ministry of the Interior, where he was helping run the police force. When we entered the apartment, the living room was full of guests, mostly men, waiting to speak to him. Some were there on official police business, some to plead the case of jailed friends or relatives who were in jail and others, many from Badakhshan, to make a social visit. It was a chaotic scene.

My brother came to meet us on the third floor, and I burst into tears. The city had changed so much since the last time I was there. I was really afraid of what it meant for my family and my country. But I was most concerned that Muqim wasn't there to greet us too. His absence confirmed my worst fears, yet nobody seemed prepared to acknowledge the fact of his death. When I asked where he was, I was told he had gone to Pakistan and planned to go to Europe. “When?” I asked. About forty days ago, I was told. But I knew I was being lied to. Then I saw his photograph on a shelf in the living room. The frame had been decorated with silk flowers. It was an ominous sign, the first outward confirmation of Muqim's fate.

“Why did you decorate the photo frame with flowers?” I asked my sister-in-law. She squirmed uncomfortably. “Because, you know, since Muqim went to Pakistan, I just miss him so much,” she replied. I knew she was lying. In Afghanistan, we decorate a photograph with flowers as a sign of mourning, as a tribute to the dead. My family was trying to protect me. But I didn't need protecting—I needed the truth. My mother, who had absolutely no idea of the truth yet, believed the story about his going to Pakistan.

Later that evening, I was casually exploring the apartment, picking up the books and photographs that lined my brother's living room. I found a diary and opened it out of bored curiosity rather than genuine suspicion. Inside was a poem. It laid out the terrible truth in verse. Written by a man called Amin, who had been my brother's best friend, it was a poem of lament, describing how Muqim had been killed. I had read only the first three lines before a scream exploded from my lips. It was more a wail of anguish than rage. Here was eloquent proof of Muqim's murder. My mother and brother rushed into the living room to see what was the matter. I was crying uncontrollably and barely able to talk. I just stood there, holding the journal in my hand, waving it at my mother. She took it from me with trembling hands. My brother looked horrified, as my mother stared uncomprehendingly down at the poem. The time for lies, no matter how well intentioned they were, was over. When my mother finally heard the truth, her scream was heartbreaking. Its piercing crescendo echoed off the concrete walls, drilling down into our brains. The irrefutable evidence of my brother's death had struck me like a hammer blow. For my mother, it was almost too much. My family gathered in the room, the secret of Muqim's fate now in the open.

That evening, our grief bonded us—I, my mother, my sister, my brother and his two wives plus my three aunts wept and asked why such a good, healthy young man had been taken so unjustly from us. Why? Another of our family's brightest shining stars had gone.

Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,

Family . . . It's a simple word but possibly one of the most important a child will ever learn. Family is the home that a child is born into, the place where it should be kept safe, warm and protected. Whether hail or rain or even rockets and bullets pierce the night air, a family should be there to protect a child. Safe in the house, a child should sleep soundly in its mother's arms with a father standing by.

Sadly, many children, you included, don't have two parents. But at least you have a mother who loves you and tries to make up for the loss of a father in your lives. Some children don't even have that. So many poor Afghan children lost everyone in the war and have no one left to care for them. Siblings are also such an important part of family. I had so many brothers and sisters I almost lost count. Our extended family had rivalries and jealousies, especially among my father's wives. But never were the children made to feel unloved. Each mother loved all the children equally, and it was a wonderful thing to know I was loved by so many mothers. When my father, your grandfather, died, my mother took responsibility for trying to keep all the children together so that we stayed a proper family.