The World is a Carpet (22 page)

The white sun of August had veiled the Hindu Kush with stagnant haze and flattened the Khorasan into a two-dimensional eggshell pancake. It had blanched thistle plants down to translucent rattling husks among which sheep and goats kept their heads tucked low into the stark blue pools of their own shadows. Humans squatted against clay walls that threw miserly slivers of shade. Excruciating days were spent waiting for the slightly cooler nights, when it was thinkable to unfold, to stretch, to stand tall again. When it was possible, at last, to drink.

I moved at a crawl. So did everything else. The few cars that were out. The occasional horse-drawn cart. The rare pedestrians—men in clean
shalwar kameez
, women in burqas or in the white Ramadan headscarves of chastity, of schoolgirls—crept down the streets, clinging to the rope-thin strips of shadow that hemmed bone-white walls. Even the sunlit dust that, stirred by passing trucks, rose from the potholes in a slow pink motion hesitated to billow and then hung above the road long after the trucks had gone. Ramadan decelerated all movement, congealed time, rang in the ears with the white noise of thirst, like the aura of an approaching migraine.

On Dasht-e-Shor Street, which bounced south from my neighborhood toward the Blue Mosque, most shops were shuttered. The shopkeepers in the stores that did stay open were lying on their backs on clammy carpets or charpoy rope beds in the thin light that seeped through half-open doors, trying to expend as little energy as possible and not to sweat the precious liquids. There were no customers. No one spoke except to wish one another a peaceful Ramadan: to open your lips was to dry out your tongue, and then how to survive the ten hours till iftar? An intolerable hush sifted through the city. Women who gathered to fast together stopped talking one by one after a few minutes of lament, pointing with their forefingers at their mouths, and then sat fanning themselves with the fringes of their scarves in dehydrated silence. The sorriest were the child vendors who stood under improbable awnings of ripped canvas beside large plastic coolers full of individual packets of pomegranate and cherry juice, the packets soggy from the melting ice and no longer very cold. Little old men with crow’s-feet of disillusionment and suspicion around their dull and exhausted eyes, underage breadwinners who worked in the stalls of their fathers, their uncles, their widowed mothers. Who would buy their juice at this hour? Even those who did not observe the fast—the travelers, the sick, the pregnant or menstruating women, the lackadaisical Muslims—would have been ashamed to drink in public.

And it was hot, hot, unforgivably hot. I lasted two hours on my walk. Then I went home and shut the door to my bedroom to read Rumi.

Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

When you’re full of food and drink, an ugly metal

statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast,

good habits gather like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon’s ring.

Perhaps so. I was very thirsty. I prayed a heathen’s prayer for the night to come.

•   •   •

At four in the afternoon the women of the house emerged from their rooms again to get going on the iftar dinner.

Iftar in Qalam Nissa’s house, invariably, was
bolani
, the savory, deep-fried stuffed pancakes made fresh each night. Sometimes the women would serve
dogh
, the salty drink of diluted yogurt and garlic; dates, which the Prophet Mohammed had eaten to break his own fast; and lemonade made with powder imported from Iran. Occasionally someone would prepare rice or veal pilau, and once I dared to cook a large vat of chicken curry, which the family said was good but a little too spicy.

(The grainy rice I had made to accompany the curry was rejected. It was not sticky, and difficult to eat by hand. My hosts unanimously agreed that it was undercooked. “Do you feed this to your children?” one of the brothers asked. “Is it even safe?” And, when I blushed in embarrassment, he offered this comfort: “You should watch our women sometimes. They will teach you to make rice properly.”)

But
bolani
were a Ramadan staple in Northern Afghanistan. In my house they were prepared collectively on a large tarp covered by a clean white bedsheet and spread on the hallway floor next to the kitchen. One of the women kneaded the dough and shaped it into balls the size of a fist; two rolled the balls into thin round crepes; the rest arranged the stuffing on them, folded them in half, pinched the sides together. The ritual was the same in every city household, though the number of cooks varied. Each afternoon thousands of thirsty and sweltering women knelt on the floors of their kitchens and hallways in an inadvertent unison, a city-scale ballet of flour puffs. The wife and teenage daughter of Satar Bigzada, sweating, smiling, joking in whispered Uzbek. The mother and sisters of the young Hazara woman who worked as my translator that month. Qalam Nissa’s two married daughters and their own teenage girls. The wife and daughters of her oldest son who lived separately, four blocks away. Qaqa Satar’s wife.

And then the families would sit together around the oily golden piles and fan themselves and wait for that magical moment of gloaming when the city would hang suspended from a double layer of lace: of holiday prayer streaming horizontally from a hundred crepitating loudspeakers, and of old light streaming down from myriad stars.

•   •   •

“Bolani,”
said Amanullah, and closed his eyes, and imagined the bubbling half-moons of deep-fried dough, the delicate, thinly layered stuffing of minced garlic greens, or of pureed potatoes, or of crushed pumpkin, or maybe even—delicious, unbelievable—of spiced sheep tripe. Imagined folding these pies in half with burning fingers and dipping them in cool fresh yogurt. Imagined the way they must crunch and melt in his perpetually hungry mouth.

He smiled, eyes still shut.

“Would be nice.”

O
nce upon a time the moon was white, and the sun and the moon had a fight over who was more beautiful. The sun said it was more beautiful because its beauty illuminated the entire world. The moon said it was more beautiful because its face was completely white. Then the sun got angry and collected desert sand, dust, and the ashes from its
bukhari
and threw them at the moon. The dirt soiled the moon’s face forever. The moon became embarrassed and stopped coming out during the day. That’s why the moon comes only at night and its face is blemished.”

Finished with the story, Amanullah wiped his forehead with the loose end of his turban, and in an instant his skin was beaded with sweat again. It was very hot in his cob house. Outside it was hotter still. Weather forecasts showed the mercury at one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, dipping to one hundred at night. The desert throbbed in the dry heat. Amanullah squinted at the cigarette he was holding between his thumb and forefinger to gauge whether there was any more tobacco left in it worth smoking and took one last drag and tossed the squashy butt in the direction of the door.

He could not recall the last time he had eaten
bolani
. Few people in Oqa could.
Bolani
were a rich-man’s food. Who in the village could bear the exorbitant expense of the stuffing—of pumpkins, of heart-red tomatoes, of the piquant jade bouquets of garlic shoots that sweated tangy green juice where they were bruised by the butcher’s string that bunched them together? Not to mention how much precious oil was required to deep-fry the pancakes. My hosts in Mazar would use half a liter just to cook each night’s batch.

“The oil we use for cooking—what’s it made out of?” Amanullah asked once. We were sitting on the
namad
with his daughter, Leila, who had squirreled a handful of sunflower seeds between her thighs and was plucking them one by one delicately with her thumb and forefinger and shucking them with her teeth. Amanullah reached under her legs to pilfer her batch, but she squeezed her thighs together and corkscrewed her bony buttocks deeper into the felt rug to stop her father’s hand. He always was trying to filch her snacks—candy, a piece of chewing gum. She always was possessive of them. All toddlers are.

I pointed to Leila’s seeds.

“Probably sunflower.”

“I doubt it. We could never make as much oil as we use out of sunflowers.”

Amanullah closed his eyes and took a quick imaginary journey around the rectangular carpet-world. “I think there is some animal in the river or the mountains that they kill and make oil out of.”

In his landlocked hamlet, Amanullah envisioned Moby-Dick.

Then again, the iftar
bolani
carried little significance in the empty bowl of Oqa. Like the paroxysms of cyclical violence that concussed the Khorasan, or the twenty-first-century infrastructural advancements that veneered parts of Afghanistan’s largest cities, Ramadan seemed to reach Oqa only in echo. The silver stroke of the shamefaced moon over the desert that month announced to the villagers no holy observance.

“Here in Oqa there is no fast,” said Amin Bai, and chewed his cigarette butt over to the corner of his mouth.

“Why not?”

The Commander smiled. His beige skullcap was dark with sweat.

“Why keep fast in this heat?”

And Baba Nazar added with the special patience one reserves for explaining simple truths to an obtuse child: “Look at us. Here in Oqa we fast every day of the year.”

He had taken his shotgun to the dunes twice that week, and twice he had come home empty-handed. Not even a rabbit for Boston to cook into a dark cottony stew. Each year the barren land around the village became more barren, he said—for want of water, maybe, or maybe because all the animals had been hunted and eaten. The spindly-legged gray chickens that had hatched upon Thawra’s carpet in July were still too small to eat. For days the family’s only sustenance was homemade bread and foamy camel yogurt and the almonds Boston would shuck with a large rusty pestle on the piece of tarp Amanullah had used that winter to roof Thawra’s loom room, and tea. In the house of Choreh and Choreh Gul the
dastarkhan
was emptier still—tea one day, bread the next, no almonds. Opium to take care of the hunger pangs. Baby Zakrullah had developed a respiratory infection, and his mother was too stoned to wipe the crust of green mucus off his upper lip. Only Hazar Gul remained buoyant through the hunger and the heat, and spent long hours in the half-light of Thawra’s loom room, squatting on top of the carpet, weaving sometimes, always smiling.

And in the loom room, which Amanullah had shielded from the hard sun with fresh armloads of dusty thistle, Thawra was running out of tan thread, the thread that made up the background for her carpet’s stylized flowers and trees and eagles, the thread that tied into the most knots.

“We need a kilo more,” Baba Nazar said. That was almost four dollars he had to produce—from where? “One meter is left. Winter is coming, we don’t know whether she’ll be weaving then. Maybe it will take her a month to finish. Maybe she’ll have a baby in a month.”

Thawra squatted upon the loom. Her calico dress hung off her thin shoulders and bulged very slightly around the compact swelling of her pregnancy. Behind her, the recently hatched chickens loped upon the tan weave between discarded candy wrappers and long-bladed scissors, and clucked. Baba Nazar leaned against the doorless entryway and clucked also, with worry. His eyes watered past the chickens and past his daughter-in-law, past even the striations of the room’s hand-slapped walls, fixed on the invisible boundaries of his village’s paucity.

•   •   •

Amanullah had his own reasons for not observing the fast. They were vintage Amanullah.

“Fasting and prayer are for old people,” he announced. “I’m young, so I don’t fast and I don’t pray. I’ll start when I know that I’m going to die soon. Pray and fast later, when you’re old and stay in the house all day. When you’re young, you should enjoy life, you are so full of strength.”

And to illustrate his point, he went on to explain how a friend who had traveled all the way to Kabul and back had brought him a special blue rhomboid pill that allowed him to keep an erection for more than thirty minutes and how with that erection he, Amanullah, had sex with Thawra until she begged him to stop, and how he would like to get his hands on another one of those special blue pills.

“Would be nice,” he repeated.

And added, on the subject of fasting: “I heard it says in the Koran that we shouldn’t hurt ourselves. So I’m not hurting myself.”

In fact, the Koran says the following: “Allah intends every facility for you; He does not want to put you to difficulties.” Even Archangel Gabriel, in the almost twenty-three years he had spent dictating verbatim the word of God to the Prophet Mohammed, must have forgotten to consider the privations of Oqa.