The Taliban Cricket Club (3 page)

“Are you okay?” they chorused.

“Yes. Jahan, are you all right?”

“Just a stomachache. It'll pass.”

“We didn't think we'd see you again,” Parwaaze said, leading us away, our feet leaden on the broken pavement. “Did they hurt you?” he asked me, checking back over his shoulder.

“No, and they didn't say a word.”

“Then why did they take you inside? What did they want?”

“I don't know. Wahidi came into the room, smoked a cigarette, and left.” I didn't mention the gun barrels on my shoulders, the article, or the pistol. I was frightened and I didn't want to frighten them more.

“I didn't want you to see . . . that,” I said to Jahan.

He was almost in tears, as he was remembering the impact of the bullets. “I didn't want to watch, but it was so sudden and I couldn't move my eyes, I couldn't even shut them.”

“It's better to cry for them than just look away.” I looked at the other two. They too had moist eyes, flickering with horror at what they had witnessed, and their faces were a shade paler. “Are you both okay?” I asked them, wishing I could take back everything they had seen.

“Another execution. How many more will I see before I can get out of this country?” Parwaaze asked aloud.

“Rukhsana, next time we'll be carrying out your c-corpse,” Qubad said. “You must leave Kabul. Go to Shaheen, he's waiting for you in America. He was lucky to get out.”

“I can't—there's just no way. I'm not going to leave Maadar while . . .” I didn't want Mother to die. Somehow, I had to survive and see my mother through her illness, and then escape. I prayed hard.
Please let me make it safely through Maadar's death and I will leave an instant later. Please protect me until then—just a little more time before I join my betrothed.

“Let's get out of here,” Jahan said.

We hurried toward home. My shoulders still burned from the gun barrels and I felt Wahidi's breath on my face. Why had he called me? Was he setting a trap to see if I'd report today's executions and write about the cricket announcement? If he was certain I'd written those other stories, I wouldn't be walking home. I'd be in prison.

In my preocupation, I wasn't listening to the boys until Parwaaze's excited voice broke through my thoughts.

“ . . . in three weeks and the winning team will go to Pakistan,” he said. “We get out if we win that match . . . go to Australia . . . America . . . to university . . . finish our studies . . . work . . . wasting our lives here . . .”

“Then we'll have to come back here to teach the others,” Jahan said.

“I'll keep going and going,” Parwaaze said.

“But we have one small p-problem with that brilliant idea,” Qubad said.

“We don't know how to play cricket,” Parwaaze admitted, crestfallen.

“We don't,” Jahan said. “But Rukhsana does.”

The Confrontation

I
T WAS FOUR YEARS AGO, WHEN WINTER HOVERED
beyond the Hindu Kush and sent a warning chill through the streets, that I first saw Zorak Wahidi.

A rumor had been spreading along the streets, slipping through keyholes, sliding under doors, over windows, and into bedrooms. It woke me while it was still dark. It told me about a crime, one that we had long expected to happen, and which none of us could prevent.

I dressed quickly in jeans and a blouse and shrugged into a jacket. I wrapped my head in a checkered
hijab
that only partially covered my head and fell around my shoulders. I left home, as quiet as the dawn, through the back door and out the side gate while the others slept. There were no taxis waiting. I thought briefly of taking the silver gray Nissan parked in our garage but opening the main gate would wake up the whole household. So I caught the small white-and-blue tram at Karte Seh Square. A few men sat in the front, four of us women in the back. Two were nurses on their way to work; the third was a teacher with her bundle of books. I sat beside her and, after exchanging glances, we ignored each other and she sat silently as the tram swayed and tilted on its rubber wheels along Asamayi Wat toward the city center. The tram stopped frequently, either to pick up and drop off passengers or when it lost contact with the overhead cable. At Pastunistan Square, it hesitated a long time and then the driver, instead of moving north along the road like he was supposed to, continued straight on along Awali May.

“Why are you going straight?” I demanded. “What's happened? Is it true about ex-President Najibullah. Tell me . . .”

The driver looked back, and I saw the fear in his glance. The guns and rockets had fallen silent, and we sensed the eerie stillness of the city. I jumped off the tram at the next stop and walked toward Ariana Square, on my way to the office, keeping close to the high palace wall that was pockmarked with bullet holes. The mist spun a ghostly cobweb over the city, and muffled figures materialized out of the wispy net, looking back fearfully, as if pursued by demons. They vanished in an instant, leaving me alone. I wished I had ignored the rumor, pulled up the covers, and remained in bed.

Then the mist dispersed, and I saw what I thought I had only dreamed. A handful of people crossed the road to hurry past the palace gates, and turned their faces away from the mutilated corpses of ex-President Mohammad Najibullah and his brother, Shalpur Ahmadzi, hanging from the traffic-signal posts at Ariana Square. I crossed the road too, though I didn't avert my head. They wore clothes, their mouths and ears were stuffed with money, and there were unlit cigarettes stuck between their fingers. Najibullah had been a heavyset, imposing man, but death had shrunk him. I felt a sense of dread now. I had believed, like many others, that the Taliban, with their religious beliefs, would bring compassion, justice, stability, and good governance to our poor nation, but the lynching of Najibullah revealed their murderous intentions.
What would they do next?
I wondered in fear. I had a Nikon in my bag, and thought briefly of taking a photograph, but I couldn't film such terrible humiliation of human beings. Instead, I wept. Five Talibs with AK-47s and canes lounged by the wall, as proud of their craft as children would be of their paper puppets dangling from strings. They stopped those who didn't have the presence of mind to cross the road, and forced them to stare at the corpses. A whack from a cane moved them on.

When I turned the corner, I looked back. A fighter climbed out of a pickup and began to walk in my direction. Two of his men trailed him. I looked around. Apart from me no one else was in sight at this hour. I hurried now and caught a bus toward Sherpur Square, where the blackened walls on either side of the road reached up to the sky like burnt fence posts. The bus moved slowly, avoiding the potholes, and when I looked back, the three men were still following. I jumped off nimbly at my stop and ran into the office of the
Kabul Daily
on the corner of Flower Street. I was sure the men wouldn't follow me inside.

I hurried into the office, devastated by what I had seen, but aware of the responsibility I had to report breaking news. Yasir, the editor-in-chief of the
Kabul Daily
, had been a friend of my father's and granted me a small desk from which I reported on nonpolitical features: profiles of musicians, women's issues, education, civic problems, and movie reviews. But last September after I had nagged him insistently, he had permitted me to accompany him to Jalalabad to report on the fighting. We had crouched and scurried through the ruins together, talking to the wounded, tripping over the dead, being afraid and trying to stay alive. I learned that war was chaos and no one knew who was winning and who was losing.

Even at this hour, the room stank of cigarette smoke and my eyes watered. The other reporters were speaking in low whispers.

“Have you heard . . . ?” Yasir asked me.

I nodded. “I saw. It was terrible.”

“Write eight hundred words to start with,” Yasir said. “Then you can do a longer piece. Every detail of how they looked, readers want that.” He retreated to his office, stopped at his door, and added, “Let's see what this new government will allow us to report.”

“It's going to get worse, much worse, I know that. Poor Najibullah, he didn't deserve such a death,” another reporter said, and they all hurried to their desks.

They pecked at their machines between puffs. The only other women employed by the paper were Fatima and Banu. They had yet to come in, and I wondered whether they would. I slipped off my jacket, dumped the
hijab
on my desk, and removed the plastic cover from my ancient Underwood typewriter. I wished I could use my laptop, on which I could cut and paste easily . . . I prayed the telephone line was working—I would need it later to fax my story to the
HT.
I reread old files, jotted down some notes, rolled paper into the Underwood, and stared at the blank space, wondering if my thoughts would flow better if I smoked.

Finally, I typed.

TALIBAN EXECUTE
EX-PRESIDENT NAJIBULLAH

The president of Afghanistan is dead. The Taliban, supported by Pakistani intelligence, captured the president, Mohammad Najibullah, and his brother, Shalpur Ahmadzi, from the UN compound and executed them. Their bodies hang from the traffic-signal posts outside the presidential palace. Fortunately, his wife and three daughters fled to New Delhi in 1992 and remain there to this day. Mr. Najibullah had been president of the Republic of Afghanistan from November 1986 to April 1992 and was supported by the Soviet Union. Prior to that, he had been chief of Afghan Intelligence (KHAD). He joined the Communist Party (PDPA) on the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979. On becoming president, Mr. Najibullah introduced a new constitution that embraced a multiparty assembly, freedom of expression, and Islamic law with an independent judiciary.

“I heard you actually saw them,” Banu said, interrupting me.

“Hello, Banu,” I said without looking away from the typewriter. She didn't go away.

“Well?”

“Yes. I did,” I said.

“We heard their heads were chopped off,” Fatima added.

“No, no. It was their . . . private parts,” Banu corrected and looked to me for confirmation.

“They had their heads, and they were wearing clothes.”

Fatima was my age, a friend from our school days. She had studied English literature at Kabul University and was a very good subeditor for the
Daily
. Banu was a year younger than us, a business graduate from Kabul University who worked in accounts. Fatima was married to an engineer, but Banu—like me—was single.

“Let me finish and I'll tell you everything,” I said. They didn't return to their desks but went into a huddle at the far end of the room in the accounts section.

I reread what I had written and then continued.

In the war against the Soviet army, an estimated 1,000,000 Afghans were killed; 5,000,000 fled to Pakistan, Iran, and other countries; 1,200,000 Afghans were wounded or maimed. Land mines alone killed approximately 25,000 people, and maimed 4 percent of the population, many of them children. Over half the farmers' irrigation systems were destroyed by Soviet aerial bombings, and their livestock killed by Soviet troops. Afghanistan lay in ruins once the Soviet forces withdrew. The United States lost interest in the country and would not help in the reconstruction. This was left to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who formed alliances with the warlords who rose from the ashes.

I stopped writing when I sensed the silence, and looked up. Three men stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the morning light, black as shadows. They carried AK-47s and the leader scanned the room until his eyes settled on me. Buried in my writing, I had forgotten about them and never expected to see them here. The leader did not smile as he approached my desk. I remained seated, frozen, fingers poised over the typewriter's keys like a pianist waiting for the conductor's baton. The man wore black from head to toe; his turban coiled like a snake on his head. He was a fierce man, over fifty, I guessed, with unusually thick lips and dark brown eyes. A scar slashed down the right side of his face, and part of his right ear was missing.

He stopped at my desk and looked down at me with impassive eyes. I smelled the dust of war and blood on his clothes, mingled with sweat. Two fingers of his left hand, the small one and the fourth, were missing. He carried these badges of a warrior with arrogance.

“Your father must be ashamed of you, letting strangers look you in the face,” he said finally in a smoke-ravaged voice.

I stood up, brushing back the hair from my eyes. “My father has no objection to my working. He's proud of me,” I replied. He looked very surprised that I would answer him back. I was proud of my profession, of my degree: a B.A. in journalism from Delhi University, where my father was the deputy ambassador in the Afghan embassy.

“I am Zorak Wahidi,” he announced softly.

He stared at me, waiting for me to recognize his name. Was I expected to know him from somewhere? I met his stare with my own, defiant. He looked insulted.

It wasn't a large office: a dozen desks squeezed together, papers piled on top of them and scattered on the floor. The other staff in the office were as still as statues and held their breath, waiting for whatever would come next. His men were still as well, and looked surprised that a woman should so brazenly defy their commander. He noticed Fatima and Banu across the room.

“Call them,” he said.

“On whose authority?” I asked.

My defiance infuriated him. For a moment he looked puzzled and then, before I could move, he slapped me. It was so unexpected and quick, and I blinked away the tears, dazed by the sting. “Never speak back to a man. Women's faces must not be seen and their voices must not be heard.”

I looked to Yasir for help. He stepped out of his office toward me but then the fighters swung their guns around, motioning him back. He hesitated until he heard the loud click of the safeties being released and he backed away, raising a hand in apologetic defeat. I reluctantly gestured for Fatima and Banu. They crossed the length of the room, holding hands for support, and then clutched mine. We three women faced Wahidi, pressed together like frightened goats awaiting slaughter, knowing there was no escape.

“Women must be seen only in the home and in the grave,” he said slowly. “Return to your homes immediately. You will not leave your homes without our permission and when you do you will be accompanied by your
mahram
.”

I spoke firmly. “We cannot leave our work just because—”

He slapped me again, harder. He saw the anger in my eyes and smiled, taunting me.

“Are you stupid enough to defy me and not hear what I said? You must not speak! I must not hear a woman's voice.”

“I am not defying you . . . sir, I am working here and—”

He held out his hand and a fighter gave him the broken-off antenna from a car. With a well-practiced flick, the antenna slashed the air and struck my forearm. No one sprang to my defense; everyone remained rooted in fear. I didn't even cry out, though it hurt, and he watched me fight to hold back the tears.

“Go,” he shouted and pointed to the door.

He tore the paper out of my typewriter and ripped it to pieces.

Fatima tugged at my hand, not saying a word. But I did not go meekly. I took my time—placing the plastic cover over the typewriter, closing my notebook, tidying my desk, collecting my handbag, covering my head with the
hijab,
each moment deliberate and slow while Wahidi and his men watched. I didn't wince when I slipped my arm into the coat sleeve. The only sounds were the whispers of feet shuffling toward the door, and every man in the room avoided meeting my eyes. I heard Wahidi talking.

“What is her name?”

“Ru . . . Rukhsana,” someone answered after a long hesitation.

“Daughter of?”

After a silence, a man replied, “Gulab.”

“Her home?”

“In Karte Seh.”

“You should have shot her when she opened her mouth,” I heard one of his fighters say harshly as we left the room. I shivered at the cruelty in his voice.

F
ATIMA AND
B
ANU AND
I hurried along the street, blinking at the sun's light, feeling as though we were emerging from being buried underground.

“Are you okay?” Fatima asked me when we were a safe distance away from the building.

“No, I'm not.” My sleeve chafed against the welt.

“I thought he would shoot you,” Banu said.

“I thought so too.”

We click-clicked in our high heels toward Sherpur Square. I got angrier and angrier as the shock wore away. “You heard what he said—we may as well be dead.” And then I couldn't help myself, and broke out in a rage. “They are totally mad. If they don't want to see or hear women, they should live on a ‘Men Only' island and screw each other.”