Refuge (24 page)

Bushra gasps.

“Night Aamir,” Charlie says. “Night Bushra.”

Charlie shoves his chair back and strides from the room.

“I do not know what has gotten into you lately,” Aamir Khan says.

He stands up and leaves the room. Bushra follows him.

“I’m not hungry,” she says.

Noor sits there at the table, staring at the crumbled meatballs. She wants to cry but refuses to.

TWENTY-SEVEN

NOOR SITS ON
the bus, her application essay in her hands. She keeps her head bowed and her eyes on the floor in an attempt to show her face to as few people as possible. She imagines every man that glances in her direction to be one of Tariq’s brothers-in-arms.

When Elma had called and suggested meeting at a tea shop in Qissa Khawani bazaar, Noor hadn’t protested. How could she? If anything she felt fortunate that Elma hadn’t forgotten all about her.

But why here of all places?

At the entrance to the bazaar, she gets off and enters its shadowy warren of alleys. Their very tightness only increases her paranoia. At any moment she fears someone is going to reach out from a doorway and snatch her. She finds the tea shop, squished between a tailor’s and a book store. Up front its owner sits on a raised platform in front of two massive brass urns. Blue and beige teapots dangle above him, and each time one of his boy servers races up, he grabs one and fills it with either sweet, milky chai or dark green kahwah. The tea shop is throbbing with customers. Noor looks for Elma but doesn’t see her. She does, however, see an empty table towards the back. She threads her way over to it and sits down. A boy comes over, and she orders a cup of kahwah. She glances around the tea shop. Every man in the place, and there are only men here, is staring at her. She turns her head away. ‘Never draw attention to yourself,’
her father has often counseled her, yet in this establishment it seems impossible not to.

Her thoughts stray to the previous evening. Even now she’s baffled as to what came over her.

To get worked up by him of all people.

All night she’d tossed and turned, and that morning her father had insisted she apologize to Charlie. As a child her father had scolded her so rarely that when he had she’d retreat to her room in tears for the rest of the day. She hadn’t done that in this instance, but it had shook her up nonetheless. The apology won’t be pleasant; in fact just thinking about it makes her queasy.

But better that
than having to face Baba’s continued displeasure.

A hand rests on her shoulder, and she twists around. She finds Elma standing there in jeans and a jacket, a head scarf draped lazily over her head.

“Sorry, I’m late. I took Rod to get a shalwar kameez next door, and you know how these tailors are; it’s like they have to show you every ream of cloth in the store.”

Noor nods as if she does.

“So is that the essay?” Elma says noticing the pages in Noor’s hands.

“It still needs a lot of work.”

“Well let me be the judge of that.”

Noor hands the essay over and pulls her head scarf tighter. Elma notices and takes a sweep of the tea shop. She curses the assembled throng in Pashtu, and the men look away, ashamed.

“That’s better,” she says.

Elma focuses on the essay. Noor knows it by heart, and she can’t help but recite it in her head as Elma reads it.

On my twelfth birthday my father gave me Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. This may strike you as a peculiar gift from a father to a daughter, especially to a daughter so young, but you must understand my father is a peculiar man, peculiar in all the best possible ways.

To say the book had an impact on me would be a gross understatement. I suspect this was because the subjects that preoccupied it were so prominent in my part of the world. There’s no better example than Afghanistan of Three Guineas’ central message regarding the interconnectedness between male patriarchy, education and war.

I’m an Afghan refugee from a war that’s claimed over a million lives, a war that’s been raging for a decade now and, despite the imminent fall of the Communist regime, looks likely to continue on in some new and reconstituted form.

I’m also a woman from a society that’s never placed any value in women’s work, where young girls can be bartered for the misdeeds of their male family members, and which every day finds new ways to restrict what women can do. Here men rule supreme with women unable to make decisions of even the slightest import. Most of us are forced into burqas when we venture outside, and inside we must labor for our menfolk without reward. The greatest insult of all is that our men tell us they do this out of concern for our honor, but there is no honor to be had in this world unless you have freedom and are treated as an equal.

Despite our history, martial qualities are still celebrated by my people as if they’re the essence of what it means to be a man. It’s ironic that Afghanistan is known for its opium fields, for if anyone is a ruinous addict it’s my country that bemoans this war yet continues to instill in our boys a reverence for fighting.

At present the United Nations ranks Afghanistan as the poorest nation on the planet. When you exclude half your population from productive life and only teach the other half how to fight and recite (rather than understand) the Holy Quran how could that not be the case? Given this situation it is understandable that I was seduced by the words of the outsider in Three Guineas who says “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” And yet as Virginia Woolf predicted I’m unable to abandon my country, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I quote her further with a little artistic license.

“And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of Afghanistan dropped into a child’s ear by the cawing of rooks in a mulberry tree, by the hum of a kite overhead, or by Pashtun voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to Afghanistan first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”

You see despite the indignities I’ve experienced and the tragedies I’ve endured I still love my country and hope to craft a better future for it one day. I fervently believe that if we can promote the education of women we might slowly but surely break our ruinous obsession with war. It should be an education that stresses compassion and non violence to our children because one day that will turn into advice given to imams and tribal leaders, governors and presidents, and aggression and wars over property (or may I be so bold to say human souls) will lessen, and a more peaceful coexistence of humans as equals will result.

This may seem like some fanciful dream but isn’t Germany a country that celebrates such values? If the society that gave birth to the holocaust and the blitzkrieg can achieve this, can’t we Afghans do so too?

To do my part I need further education, an education in educating so to speak, and that’s something I’ll never be able to obtain living here in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the most fundamentalist city in Pakistan.

In Virginia Woolf’s other great treatise In A Room Of One’s Own, she contended that an equally talented sister of Shakespeare’s would never have written a word, let alone a play, for all people need a living wage and a private place or else their potential will never be realized. What I humbly ask you to provide me with is just that – an opportunity to broaden my mind at your inspiring university with just enough money that I might live. I might not write Hamlet or Twelfth Night, in fact I can guarantee you I won’t, but I know if you are kind enough to afford me this opportunity that I will flourish and maybe, just maybe, I can be part of a wave that will turn my beloved country into a more equitable and peaceful place for all Afghans, and by extension for everyone in the world.

Yours truly, Noor Jehan Khan

Noor watches Elma for a sign. Elma’s eyes still haven’t left the pages.

She hates it.

“How many words is it?” Elma says.

“Eight hundred and fifty-one,” Noor says.

Elma nods.

“It’s too long, isn’t it?” Noor says. “Too saccharine, too convoluted.”

Elma looks up. Her eyes are wet with tears.

“Don’t change a thing, it’s beautiful.”

“You really mean that?”

“There’s no way they won’t give you a scholarship after reading this.”

Noor feels her heart beat fast.

Calm down
,
you’re not there yet.

“Now we just need to get your Dutch up to speed.”

“I’m practicing every day.”

“Good but you and I need to meet. We start Monday at my house. No excuses anymore. Now how’s your father?”

“He’s getting better, thank you. And how about you? How are you doing?”

Elma seems surprised that anyone would care to ask.

“Can you keep a secret?” she grins.

“Of course.”

“I’m in love.”

“With whom?”

“Have you ever been to the Hunza Valley?”

“I’ve read about it.”

“It’s like the Gods created it as a garden for themselves. I took Rod there to see a couple of girls schools we started. These girls, they don’t even look South Asian. They have fair skin, blue eyes, some even have blonde hair -”

“Alexander’s lost battalion.”

“Exactly. For two days they took us around, through the harvested fields, up the terraced hillsides, past the baskets of apricots drying in the sun, the snow covered peaks jutting into the sky above us, and I felt a connection to him like I’ve felt for no man before. I’m not going to lie to you, Noor, I’ve been with a lot of men, more than I care to remember, but in that valley, amongst those people so cut off from the rest of the world, I felt chaste and pure. It was like I was reborn. We stayed in this hotel overlooking the valley, and each night we’d sit on its balcony, blankets wrapped around us, and stare at the mountains as the sun set.”

Elma takes a sip of her tea, and Noor waits, desperate to know what happened.

“The last night he reached out his hand and took mine in his. That was it, nothing more, yet it was the most magical thing I’ve ever felt in my life.”

Elma blushes.

“Look at me, babbling away like a silly teenage girl.”

“No, I think it’s beautiful,” Noor says. “I’m happy for you.”

“How about you? Have you ever been in love?”

“Me? No.”

“Not even for a moment?”

“Not really.”

“Not really’s not ever.”

“Back in Kabul when I was nine there was a boy, Omar, the son of our cook. I suppose I pined over him for a week.”

“Why just a week?”

Noor blushes at the memory.

“Oh come on,” Elma says, “you’ve got to tell me now.”

“I caught him defecating into a flower pot.”

Elma giggles.

“No way, what was he thinking?”

“It was early, Bjorn, my rabbit had escaped, and I was looking for him. I went into the vegetable garden at the back of the house, and there was Omar with his trousers around his ankles squatting over a flower pot. I don’t think he even knew I saw him.”

Elma collapses into a laughing fit. The men at the table next to them look in their direction. One of them flashes a lecherous smile at Elma.

“Shit, I woke up the creeps,” Elma says. “Come on let’s get out of here.”

Elma drops some rupees on the table and takes a hold of Noor’s hand. She leads her out of the teashop and into the cramped tailor’s next door.

“Rod?” Elma says.

“Almost there,” Rod shouts out from behind a partition at the back.

Elma and Noor sit down on a big roll of fabric lying on the floor.

“So this Omar,” Elma says, “did he put you off boys for life?”

“No, this war did, this situation we find ourselves in.”

“As a woman I have no man. As a woman I want no man. As a woman my man is the whole world.”

“Is it so bad to think that?”

Elma ponders the question.

“For a long time I thought the same way as you. I enjoyed men, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t want to be tied to one, worse yet rely on one. My career is my first love, I suspect it always will be.”

“That’s why I so admire you.”

“But there comes a point that the idea of sharing your life with someone becomes incredibly appealing. ‘No man is an island,’ who said that?”

“John Donne.”

“Right. Well the longer I live, the more I think it’s true, not just in the work we do but in our personal lives. I think you’re going to be surprised, one day you’re going to meet a man and fall in love with him without even realizing it.”

Rod jumps out from behind the partition in a lime green shalwar kameez and grey waistcoat. The proud tailor stands behind him beaming.

“What do you think?” Rod says, twirling around and around.

Elma jumps up clapping.

“Oh my God, you look so dashing.”

“How about you, Noor? You think I look sufficiently Pakistani.”

“You could run for the National Assembly.”

“And I just might. From what I hear it’s a license to print money.”

Rod sits down on one of the fabric rolls, and Elma snuggles up next to him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Rod says, “I had a couple more things I wanted to ask you.”

“Of course,” Noor says, “what do you want to know?”

Rod looks over at the tailor.

“You mind if we hang out here a while?”