THE TALIBAN CRICKET CLUB

(I HAVE ADDED ANOTHER CHAPTER OF MY COMPLETED NEW NOVEL)

Every tyranny nurtures revolt and a rebellious young woman defeats the Taliban through a game.
This tense, dramatic story explores terror, gender politics, sexual desires, love, the clash of civilizations, geo-politics, family tragedies and the power of a sport.
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The Summons July 2000

The unrequited love of a man will cage a woman from which she cannot escape until she dies. It takes possession of her, without her knowledge or acknowledgment, until it reveals the power to dominate her. The command to attend on the Minister for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was a reminder he had not forgotten me, and that frightened me. I had prayed in the turmoil of these times that I had slipped from his memory. I still could not remember seeing him before our confrontation in the office four years ago, yet, even then, he had looked at me with possessive eyes. Now, the note, delivered by a minion to our home, ordered me to visit the ministry within two hours. “Rukhsana, daughter of Gulab, to appear in person at 11 at the command of the Minister.” No further explanation. I was just to appear.
      ‘I refuse to go,’ I announced.
      ‘You cannot ignore it,’ Jahangeer insisted. ‘I’ll be your mahram, so you mustn’t worry.’
      We tried to hide our anxiety from mother but, despite her illness, she still had an instinct for my moods. I told her of the summons when she pressed.
      ‘You shouldn’t have defied him before in the office, ‘she reminded me.
      ‘I didn’t defy him,’ I protested in a shaky voice. ‘I was just working.’
      ‘Now, what have you done to remind him of your presence?’
      ‘Nothing,’ I said innocently.
      She didn’t believe me. ‘You deleted your copy?’
      ‘I always do. And I never sign my name. I use only an acronym, so how could they know it was me? ’
      ‘You and your acronym,’ mother sighed in exasperation.
      ‘There were around 25,000 to 30,000 people there, and any one of them could have sent the story. I’m told there is even a video tape.’
      ‘But none as reckless as my daughter,’ she replied spiritedly. ‘They must have found out, somehow. Be very careful. I can’t lose you too.’
      We huddled together, feeling threatened in our own home by this slip of paper. They could not know I had written the Zarmina story. I hadn’t signed it, and would deny authorship. What other crime had I committed then? I thought I had lived blameless within my prison. Had I inadvertently transgressed a Taliban law – had I revealed my face accidentally to a strange man? Had I, accidentally, spoken out aloud in the bazaar? Had I, accidentally, brushed against a man (more him against me but that was punishment enough), had I, accidentally, revealed an ankle or a wrist, had I accidentally …Who knew the rules encircling us like serpents in a pit? Why, why why? We worried over the endless possibilities, and each time returned to the cul-de-sac of ignorance and of fear. The panic in my heart seized my mind; I was unable to think, unable to find a cause for my terrible fear. They were the mists of self-deception clouding my mind.
      I waited for my brother to finish with the bathroom.
      ‘You didn’t use up all the water?’
      He grinned and tousled my lank hair, dispirited as weeds. ‘There’s enough, if you don’t wash your hair.’
      Water was as precious as life itself, and we survived on four buckets a day purchased weekly from a tanker. I washed hurriedly. The bathroom was half open to the sky, the roof jagged from the rocket that exploded in our back garden at the start of the 1993 civil war between the Mujahedeen and the Taliban. The Talib were advancing from the south and, in Karte Seh, we were trapped between them and the heart of the city, held by the Mujahedeen. I still remember the thunderclap of the rocket, the house shivering with pain and the crash of the falling masonry. We expected the whole house to fall but somehow it righted itself. My grandparents and I were sheltering in the basement and our servants, Asif and Sima, who had worked for our family for twenty years, and were part of the family too, were not with us. Stubbornly, they had remained in their quarters and, thankfully for them, instantly killed. We mourned and missed them. The bathroom walls remained blackened from the explosion, and the rains had added a touch of slime green to the black. Now, in summer, it was pleasant to feel the warmth of the sun but in winter, the wind hurled down its freezing breath through the opening. Even if we had the money to repair the roof, it was impossible to find the workmen in a city of such ruin. At least the rest of our home still had a roof to shelter us. Defiantly, I dressed in jeans and a blouse. I did not look at my face. It was pasty, the colour of watery flour, and soft as that dough. It hadn’t the flush of exuberant health and exercise, or the light warmth of the sun. I did not want to look into my eyes; they would be listless and melancholic.
Before I left, I held the bed pan for my mother, emptied it in the bathroom and then sponged her. She lay in the large bed, a frail figure framed by the white sheets, and obediently swallowed her morning medications.
‘You’re in the wrong profession,’ mother smiled, after my ministrations. ‘You should’ve been a nurse.’
‘I wouldn’t have the patience with strangers.’ I drew back the curtains and opened the window to let in the morning light.
      ‘But you do have it for your mother who has now become your child. I never expected that from you.’ She sighed loudly. ‘By now, you should have married and had your own children.’
      ‘Then I wouldn’t be able to care for you, would I?’
      ‘You were always too spirited, as your grandfather said.’
      ‘I’m losing that spirit now,’ I leaned over and kissed her. ‘Shall I get the doctor to stay with you?’
      ‘I’ll be fine. I’m not going anywhere.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Even if I could get out of the house.’
      ‘We’ll be back soon,’ I said cheerfully, though not feeling it.
      ‘I pray you will,’ she added then, a command. ‘Take Parwaaze too.’
      ‘I’m old enough,’ Jahangeer protested as he came in to kiss her.
      ‘Just so one will return. Take Parwaaze. Be careful.’
      She didn’t add that if something happened to us, she would be left all alone in the world. One of us must return. We couldn’t disobey her order. We left her door open so that she would not feel imprisoned and went down the stairs. I buried myself in the burqua before opening the front door and stepping out of my prison. I looked down at the garden. The rose bushes grew wild and their fallen petals were wounds on the lawn, some fresh and pink, edged blood red, older ones encrusted a dull purple. The grass, parched for water, begged us for a drink to enchant us with its greenery. I lifted the hem of my burqua so I wouldn’t trip again down the five steps to the ground, and crossed to the gates. Our ancient watchman, Abdul, white bearded with the resigned air of his age, ran his one good eye over us.
      ‘Your ankles are showing,’ he announced with the familiarity of an old retainer. ‘Cover them or you’ll be beaten again.’ I tugged it down as much as I could. A month before, in the market, my bare ankle, the most un-erotic portion of my body, received a slash from an Amere Belmarof-Nahi Anil Munkar’s cable, leaving a welt that took a week to fade. ‘I was also beaten yesterday because I did not pray. What do they expect?’ he asked indignantly. ‘Just stop doing what I was doing and drop down to pray. Five times too, as if I have nothing better to do and God has nothing better to do than listen to us. God doesn’t want to be reminded of our presence so often.’ As always, he tugged at this beard, a straggly mess, a full clenched fist down from his chin. ‘I was handsome without this and now what young girl will want to marry this old man.’
      ‘They’re out there waiting for you,’ I told him, as I did each time. We had a daily litany of Abdul’s complaints. He had lived in the old city, four streets south of the Pul-e-kishti, and his wife and children did not survive the war. Their house, and the lane, had a direct hit from a rocket. Now, he lived in the ruined quarters behind our house.
      ‘And you’ll die happily in their arms,’ Jahangeer added.
      ‘Ahh, if only I could die that way.’ He glared at my brother. ‘You too will be beaten by the Talib. Look at your lungee.’ My brother’s turban perched on his unruly hair. Abdul flattened the curls roughly and then pressed the turban down on his head, down to his ears, so the hair was hidden. ‘They will cut your hair all off if they see it. And don’t forget to pray when you hear the call.’ He approved my brother’s white khurta. He turned back to me. ‘You women are lucky behind your burquas. You don’t have to grow beards and pray every hour.’ He rose from his stool slowly. ‘Where are you going?’
      ‘To see Parwaaze. Mother is alone and Doctor Hanifa will be here in ten minutes.’
      ‘You don’t have to tell every time you step out,’ he grumbled, unlocked the small door, beside the larger one, to let us out, and we heard it lock as we stepped out. He would move to sit in the front hall until Doctor Hanifa arrived.
      The summer in Kabul was hot and, when the wind blew down from the mountains, it would baste us with harsh, brown dust. I lifted my head to the sky; it was clear indigo with little clouds of no particular shape, floating past us. I could not encompass the whole sky beyond those white puffs unless I turned my head side to side. Apart from the sparrows who nested in the eaves of our house, there weren’t any another species of birds to be seen. Over the years, we had chopped down our trees for firewood and they had fled to more hospitable habitations. In the old city, a few pigeons survived on crumbs of our generosity. The other birds, pretty finches, slightly larger than my thumb, and fighting doves, were caged in the Ka Faroshi bird market. Those birds never sang and their mute beaks always depressed me. Parwaaze lived two streets away from our home, and when I stood on my roof I could see his house. Far behind was the Paghman Mountain that, in the night, melted into arms of the sky, but like lovers they were forced apart by the harsh light of day. Hills and mountains, our horizons limited by their uneven peaks, circle us, and I had no sense of the limitless world beyond, until I had lived in another city. They imprison us in this small valley and I have wondered often what it must be like to stand in a desert, or by the sea, and see great distances stretching beyond our imaginations. I blame these natural fortifications for our misfortunes. They should have hermitically sealed us off from the world, a Shangri-La nestled within their folds, but instead they welcomed in a thousand invaders. We cannot even view the length and breadth of our own city because of the hills that divide us from each other. In clear weather, from my roof, I can squint through the narrow pass between Kohl Asyami and Kohi Sher Darwaza and glimpse Wazir Akbar Khan and the rising mound of Tapa-i-Bibi Mahro behind it. I need to be much closer to see the huge abandoned swimming pool, complete with diving boards but no water, built by the Russians. Such is the foolishness of imperial powers in a city that thirsts! Much nearer though, on the edge of Karte Seh, they had also left us, in imperial charity, the towering pale, yellow brick silo that supplied flour to their troops, and subsidised our daily naan. How the rockets missed such an obvious target is beyond conjecture? Jahangeer and I followed the winding pathway through the bomb damaged roads. We had an obstacle course of deep craters and shallow furrows of tanks and armoured carriers that had churned up the landscape around our homes. We passed our neighbours houses, some partial ruins, like ours, others reduced to rubble. Parwaaze’s house had lost its right side, a balcony hung like a dislocated jaw and the front walls bled red dust from the bullet holes. The green tiles along the front were all broken and stuck in shards. Our house had a broad band of flower patterned light blue tiles, and they had somehow survived the rockets and bullets. His windows were patched with plastic sheets or plywood. Like our house, it had risen proudly to two floors and now crouched humbly with its many wounds.
      His watchman, as old as Abdul, peered through the narrow slat and opened the small gate. I didn’t want to go in and waste time talking to my relatives, we had nothing new to say to each other, and waited by the entrance while Jahangeer went in. He came out with Parwaaze, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He was my mother’s nephew, and five years younger than me. At one time, he had exuded a sense of spirit, and an adventurer, a dreamer who would try to build a boat in a landlocked country to sail a distant sea to Australia or England or whatever country away from this one. I’m sure that if I told him the story of Icarus he would have fashioned and attached wings to his back, and flown out of the country. But now, his shoulders drooped and he wore a permanent frown that scarred his forehead and his mouth. Parwaaze was slightly taller than me, and he had clear grey eyes that once withheld a sense of humour. But now they were watchful and aware of the dangers. I would certainly consider him handsome. His beard was a thin stream of hair that flowed down from beneath his lungee, scarcely enough to become a fist-sized mass below his chin. And there was a slight dent in his nose, as if it had broken and badly set. His turban was flat and crouched squarely on his head. At least he looked athletic, his body well balanced for sports and I knew he loved football.
      ‘Where now?’ I told him, and he grimaced. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere near them.’
      ‘Mother said you have to come with us,’ I insisted.
      ‘It’s not another execution?’
      ‘No, it’s only a meeting.’
      He turned to Jahangeer. ‘Never ever look at their faces. Don’t even let them be aware of you. Otherwise, they'll grab you and rape you. I’ve heard stories…’ and his advice trailed off into a shudder.
      ‘I know that,’ Jahangeer said with adolescent arrogance.
      ‘At least they won’t know I’m looking at them,’ I said from under the burqua.
      ‘You could be right. They prefer young boys. Why didn’t you become a doctor or an undertaker? Nice safe jobs.’
      ‘Mother said I should have been a nurse.’
      ‘That too. How is she?’
      I shrugged and he understood.
      Not surprisingly, as we went out, we saw Qubad ambling up towards us. He spent most of his waking hours with Parwaaze, and fell in beside us. Qubad was another cousin, but more distant; he was the Sancho Panza to Parwaaze’s Don Quixote. Qubad was slightly shorter than Parwaaze, with a roll of flesh around his middle, and a pessimist to counter Parwaaze’s once-optimism. He still remained well fed despite these harsh times or they could be natural rolls that sustained him through the lean periods of our lives. His solemn round face with pale brown eyes, masked his good sense of humour. There was no doubt he deferred every decision to Parwaaze and, like a mascot, would follow his cousin anywhere. The glint of worship in his eyes when he looked to Parwaaze was returned with humoured acceptance. I imagined that they had shared a cradle together and still lay side by side emotionally and mentally bound by their past. Young men filled the cities, and the countryside, idling away their lives. The unemployment rate was above 60 per cent, with ambitions seeping away, leaving residues of bitterness and frustration. Parwaaze, Qubad and my other male cousins would make ideal recruits for wars. At times, I sensed they had lost the spirit to live and that worried me. I had grown up with them, survived the Russian occupation, the civil war and we were still alive. But not without personal losses. Qubad’s father was killed in cross fire in ’94 and so had other relatives, fathers, mothers, and children. We had led nervous, claustrophobic lives, yet managed to play together in our gardens, even though we had had sleepless nights, punctured by gun fire and the whine of rockets, broken into pieces by dark dreams.
      ‘Where are you go-going?’
      ‘To be shot,’ Parwaaze said dourly. ‘Rukhsana has dropped herself in the trouble.’ And went on to explain why.
      ‘I’m go-going home.’
      He turned and Parwaaze grabbed him by the tail of his shalwar. ‘You’re coming too.’
      ‘What for? I do-don’t want to be sh-shot or mol-molested by them.’
      ‘Her mother said we both have to accompany her,’ Parwaaze lied.
      We walked cautiously to Karte Seh circle with the four wide roads leading to the compass points. They were as scarred as our roads and there was a wide expanse of park to the south side with a line of shops –bakers, vegetable carts, fruit shops, a restaurant (the Paradise), a car repair shop and the pharmacy.
      ‘It’s a long walk,’ I said. The ministry was in the city centre, just north of the river and diagonally opposite the Afghan Central bank. ‘We’ll take a taxi.’
      Qubad took the front seat, the three of us squeezed into the back of the ancient Toyota. We bounced along the broken Asamayi Road slowly, twisting and turning to avoid the craters and chunks of fallen masonry. I sweated in my burqua, from the heat and from anxiety. Would I return home or be arrested? To distract myself, I stared out of the window but avoided looking at Kabul Zoo, the grounds were neglected and overgrown, and many of the caged animals had been sport for the brave Talib fighters. There was little traffic, a few cars, many bicycles, busses, handcarts and donkey carts, doing what our taxi was doing, zigging and zagging. A long line of goats obediently followed their herdsman to their eventual slaughter. I wondered whether we were any different to them in guiding our destinies. Once great trees lined our roads, watching over us like kind sentinels, flaunting their beautiful shade, for as far as the eye could see. Not even stumps remained. Dust choked the car, smothering us. Qubad tried to roll up the window and it wouldn’t rise.
      ‘You should re-repair your wi-windows,’ he complained to the driver.
      ‘What are you?’ the driver laughed. ‘An Emir? This is good Kabuli dust which gives us our special colour and smell.’
      I laughed with the others, thinking we still had some humour. He heard me and turned, as he avoided a deep hole. ‘Sister, as much as I love the sound of your laugh you must be silent. I must not hear your voice. If you were alone I wouldn’t have taken you. Three days ago, I took a lady from Wazir Akbar Khan to Sherpur and the Amere Belmarof-Nahi Anil Munkar stopped me. They pulled her out and beat her and then pulled me out and beat me for travelling with a single woman who was not my wife or a relation.’
We stayed silent after that when the taxi turned on to Salang Wat.
      ‘Where do you want me to drop you?’ the driver asked.
      ‘On Pastunistan Square,’ Parwaaze said, not wanting to frighten the man by telling him I had been summoned to the very heart of the Amere Balmarof-Nahi Anil Munkar.
      On either side, as we neared the centre, was the wasteland of the war. In its four year rule the Talib had done nothing to heal us. The city, fragile as any human, was gaunt with sickness, blackened ribs jutted at odd angles, craters of sores pitted the skin, girders lay twisted like broken bones and burnt arteries of lanes and streets wound away south to the river, north to the ochre Shah-Doh- Shamshi. Its gangrenous breath smelled of explosives, smoke and despair. Even mosques were not spared the savagery, their skulls explosively opened to the sky. Across the Kabul river, the pale blue dome of the Timur Shah’s tomb was, surprisingly, unscathed. The tomb, obscene in its beauty, rose above the crumpled mud brick homes and shops that once crowded around it for protection. Rising out of those humble ruins were lines of carts selling vegetables, fruits, meat and clothes, with people clotting around them. They were as emaciated as the city, emerging out of the rubble to purchase a potato, a peach, a chicken leg, a sliver of meat, a bowl of rice, dry naan. The river was a trickle of dirty water pulsing through its muddy vein, clogged with garbage. In spring, it hemorrhaged with the melted snows from the Hindu Kush and rose to the height of the walls on either side. The taxi stopped on the curve of the road leading to Pastunistan Square and we tumbled out to face the Ministry. The two storey building behind the broken walls stood aloof in an island of traffic, deceptively humble alongside a scrubby park. Further down the road were the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance and other government offices. From the square, we could look across to the walls of the President’s palace. Pedestrians jostled us and we flowed along with them, reluctantly, towards the entrance of the MPVPV. Even as a people, we were not all whole. The many we passed had missing hands, missing legs, and the wild look of disorder in their eyes. Children too on crutches, jerked around the pavements like marionettes, all play drained from their faces, holding out their skinny hands for alms. The wounds of wars would not heal without years of peace to rebuild the city and us. It was the quiet that I found most disturbing, and which filled me with unease. Once this was a city of music that followed us from one street to the next, we hummed and sang Sufi, Farsi, Ghazals, Qawwali and Bollywood as we wove through the pedestrians and traffic. Every shop, every nook and cranny of the city had enchanted us with melodies; seduced us to enter and listen. The shiny intestines of those cassettes now fluttered in the breeze, knotted around posts, trailing along footpaths, ripped out to teach us how fragile music was. The silence now crushed us. How can any civilization live without music? How can we express our love, our melancholy, our joy, our happiness, our grief without the accompaniment of music to carry us through such turbulent emotions? We had been an exuberant people, loquacious, generous with our smiles and laughter, gossipers and raconteurs, but now we spoke in whispers, afraid to be over heard; suspicion soiled our daily lives. We had become a city of informers, of spies, of betrayers whom the Talib employed to report on dissenters and the disenchanted bold enough to speak of their discontent with Talib rule. If they could but read our minds many of us would not be alive, which was why we moved with our heads bowed so our eyes would not reveal our souls. It was the weight of tyranny that muted our tongues. A soot of despair had settled on all our souls, and we could not scrub it off.
      ‘All ready?’ I spoke bravely.
      I walked a few steps behind my brother, my mahram, who held the letter of our summons as an added protection against the whims of the Amere Belmarof-Nahi Anil Munkar. They padded along the streets, armed with their canes and guns, and watched us from street corners. The slightest deviation and they would strike out, quick as snakes, to punish the transgressor of any one of their laws. As they had the taxi driver.
      We stopped outside the Ministry, scarred with bullet and shell holes. Now, I trembled as we entered the Ministry compound. I had been bold moments before now I was grateful for their company. Jahangeer sensed the vibration and held my elbow to steady my footsteps. I could not glance at him; my burqua denied me even such a simple gesture. I turned my head to peer at him through my bars.
      ‘It will be alright,’ he whispered, though I knew it would not be. We feared what lay ahead even though there had been no reason given for this command to see the minister.
      Two Talibs, surly men with dark, heavy beards, looked at my summons and then at us. They had the hooded eyes of drowsy beasts that revealed a flicker of intent on Jahangeer. He was a handsome boy with a delicate mouth and I wished he had not accompanied me. He so resembled father with his square face, the slim, straight nose and had the same grey eyes, but wide with innocence and not weighed down by a failed career. His long eye lashes were the envy of women, including his sister. He was just sixteen, my baby brother, whom I loved even more in these times. He had father’s height but not his strong build and wide shoulders. Then their eyes pawed over Parwaaze and Qubad. All three looked down, avoiding those eyes in case they turned to stone should they make contact. Finally, they examined the burqua and, despite the masking mesh, I looked down too, as frightened as the boys. They escorted us through the building into the rear courtyard. As a reminder of the Taliban’s edict, large notices were pinned to the walls, tattered, frayed yet menacing in their message ‘Women should only be seen in the home and in the grave’. I had thought about this brutal sentence many times. Why were these men afraid of us? Or are all men also afraid and not so bold to publish their feelings as the Taliban, but think them privately. Is it because we create life within ourselves? The wizardry of our bodies has condemned us ever since we slid out of the ocean soup. We are only reproductive beasts – goats, chickens, cows – fed and watered to await our slaughter should we break free. We carry the future within us, men only their past. They may believe the child is also their future, their name ringing on and on, but they know it is a lie. The child is ours alone, never theirs. Men can invent wondrous things, fly to the moon, delve the ocean, destroy cities, massacre millions, philosophise and justify their actions but they cannot create anything. It’s our power to create, like the trees fruit, the earth our food, plants beautiful flowers, that must frighten them. And so we are controlled, forced into obedience, our role defined only by our womb and not by our thoughts and feelings. How does one believe in God when the conduits of his messages are only men? Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Siva, Moses were all males. Why didn’t God send his message through a woman? Weren’t we on earth too or were we preoccupied giving birth to these holy men and couldn’t hear the message because of our pain? Mary is worshipped not for what she spoke but as the mother of Jesus. Or did God think we were unworthy of hearing such sacred teachings and conveying them to the people? And if we did open our mouths with wisdom, men burned us at the stake or stoned us to death as witches. How can I believe in God’s male messengers when I have no belief in men in my life? I had thought on this since childhood and had yet to decipher an answer. I straightened my back in mute defiance. I could not comment on it to my brother, not even a whisper, certainly not in public, as I always did when I saw the message plastered all over the city.
      Five men stood along the wall in the shade, and I recognized Yasir among them. The others were reporters from the Dari and Pashtu newspapers, and would write only what was permitted. They all looked as dispirited and cowed as Yasir in this gathering. He glanced in my direction, the only woman, and knew it was me under the burqua. He lifted his small finger in cautious greeting. Despite our political differences, I would have liked to talk to him, to learn what was happening and gossip too as all journalists do when they gather. He could have told me inside stories on the regime that I could not hear under my burqua.
      I nudged Parwaaze and whispered. ‘Ask Yasir why we’re here.’
      Parwaaze hesitated until I gave him a push. Head down, he shuffled past the other men to stand beside Yasir. They both stared straight ahead, as they spoke. It was a brief dialogue, and Parwaaze returned to my side with a shrug.
      ‘He doesn’t know,’ he whispered, looking down. ‘They will make an announcement for the press. He said to tell you – be careful. Better still, get out.’
      ‘I can’t leave mother.’
      ‘We’ve told you, your mother, can live with us.’
      ‘And she told you, she wants to stay in her own home until…’ I said, and when I saw the Land cruiser race into the open space, I finished. ‘Oh god.’
      In the open rear lay a man and a woman, their arms and legs bound. The woman wore her burqua; the man had a sack over his head. They were anonymous. They could be people we knew, drank tea with, laughed with, our lives may have touched in a shop or on the street, but we would never know now. Two Talibs, with two women police officers, with guns stood above them. The vehicle stopped, the Talibs jumped down and pushed their prisoners out as if they were sacks of grain onto the dusty ground. They fell and we heard their muffled cries. The minister, Zorak Wahidi, stepped out of the passenger seat, and walked slowly back to the fallen couple. His beard was whiter since I’d last seen him four years ago, the few black hairs vanquished by age, and there was a stoop to his shoulders as if a thousand dead souls pressed down on him. He carried a pistol and looked down at the prisoners, and then across to us. I wanted to shield Jahangeer from what was about to happen but he was on the other side of Parwaaze and watched with the fascination of any teenager. He had never witnessed an execution before, while Parwaaze and I had last November. I wanted to protect him from the horror but didn’t dare to move. ‘Look away, look away,’ I whispered but he didn’t hear me. Then, as now, the act of violence on a helpless person, and unable to save them from sudden death, hypnotized us. The minister pointed the pistol down towards the man, and shot him in the head. With the bullet’s impact, the man appeared to rise briefly, before falling back. Methodically, the minister moved to the crying woman and shot her in the head too. The shots sounded flat and harmless in the empty space surrounding us. He walked towards us as casually as a man crossing a drawing room to greet his guests, still holding his pistol. The Talibs and the policewomen followed him. He turned to speak to a police woman, and then turned back to us.
      The minister addressed us. ‘Do you know why they were executed?’ We remained silent. He stared intimidatingly at each bowed head, pausing for long moments on Jahangeer, Parwaaze and Qubad and then looked at me. I felt his eyes penetrating the veil, remembering the face he could not see. He answered his own question, angrily. ‘They were traitors to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. They were committing adultery which is against our laws and deserved to die for the vices. We will not tolerate such traitors. The press too…’ Here he paused and surveyed us, noting each one present, pausing again on me. ‘…are responsible for projecting a very bad image of our legitimate government in the foreign media. The foreigners hate us as we’re the true believers and all they write are lies, lies and more lies.’ He paced in front of us, and controlled his anger. ‘You will write exactly what I tell you.’ The men took out their note books. I hadn’t brought one. ‘Our image is bad and we have decided to correct it, to show we’re a fair people. We had banned ker-ricket as it was a legacy of the evil Britishers. But now, our government has decided to promote ker-ricket in Afghanistan, and we have applied to the International ker-ricket Council for membership.’ Like the others, even I raised my head in surprise. ‘We wait to hear from them on this. The Pakistan ker-ricket Board will support our application. Ker-ricket will show them that we too can be sportsmen and we will play against other countries. As our young men have much time to spare, we wish to occupy them to prevent any vices. We studied all sports and ker-ricket is the only game which is modest in its clothing and can entertain them all day without harm. The uniform covers the man from his neck to his feet and covers his arms to his wrists and covers his head too. We will encourage the sport, strictly according to Islamic rules of dress, and will hold a tournament in three weeks. The official ker-ricket team will play a match against any other team, and we will send the winning team to England to perfect their playing skills. They will return to teach other young men to play this sport. Women will not be permitted to play this game.’ He beckoned to someone behind us and a young man with a straight, haughty back passed us to stand by the minister. He turned to face us too. He looked in his early twenties from the length and thickness of his beard. Standing side by side, I noticed a faint resemblance between the minister and the man. ‘Ghafoor will captain the State team and he too is learning the game.’ He ended the announcement and dismissed us.
      When I moved to leave with the others, the policewomen grabbed me. They were middle aged, stocky, with impassive faces. Their bellies and hips bulged nutritiously. Jahangeer tried to stop them and a Talib hit him in the stomach with his gun butt. I struggled to help him but they dragged me away. The women took me into a small, bare room and forced me to kneel. Their canes pressed down on my shoulders so I could not move. They said nothing, and we waited. I thought that how easy it was for them to collaborate with the men who oppressed us. They obeyed orders, and in exchange were given power over our lives, and excused from wearing the burqua. I wanted to ask them: did you flinch when he shot the women? Did you experience compassion? Or are you so immunised against violence that you are beyond feeling? Has the constant clamour of death deafened all your emotions? Was the price worth it? The silence was oppressive. I sensed someone enter the room and tried to lift my head but a hand pressed it back down to supplication. I smelt the perfume, a cloying sweet odour. I knew it was a male as I glimpsed his dusty feet slyly circling me, and then he trailed his cologne out of the door. I wondered who he was and what his interest in me was. Finally, the minister walked into the room to stand a foot away from me. I heard the rustle of a paper, and he held the sheet before my eyes. The English headline ‘Taliban Execute Mother of Five in Football Stadium’. I peered but couldn’t read the small print beneath as the paper wavered. Was it my story? I did not speak; I wasn’t expected to. He crushed the paper deliberately into a small ball and dropped it on the floor. Then, he lowered a pistol to my line of vision, and I smelled cigarette smoke. Through the mesh, I saw his finger around the trigger, the gun a natural extension of his hand. The black barrel was worn grey, the butt chipped along the edges. His finger curled and un-curled, as if it had a mind of its own, thinking over a decision. Surprisingly the finger was long, almost delicate, and manicured, the nails polished and filed smooth. The hand lifted the gun out of my eye level; it was somewhere above my head. I shut my eyes, and waited. I tried prayers but I couldn’t form the words or sentences that would accompany me into the next life. I opened them when the sting of cigarette smoke rose into my nose. The half smoked cigarette lay on the floor, the serpent of smoke curling up. The ball of paper began to burn. He knew I saw it. Then he crushed it with his foot, mashing it and the singed paper to shreds. I wanted to lift my head and ask him the names of the man and woman, whether they had families, whether they had children, why were they committing adultery. I stayed silent. Abruptly, he turned and left. The police women lifted the canes off my shoulders and followed him out.
      I remained kneeling, waiting, and when I heard no further movements raised my head. The door was partially open. I struggled to stand, my foot caught in the edge of the burqua and I fell. I pushed away from the floor and moved to the door. I stepped out into an empty corridor. To my left, men loaded the corpses into the back of an old Land Cruiser, methodically as heaving garbage. For once, I was thankful for the burqua. I had wet myself. My jeans stuck to my thighs. My legs were rubbery and I leaned against the wall to strengthen them. I moved cautiously out of the building, back into sunlight. Jahangeer, Parwaaze and Qubad were sitting on the low wall flanking the river. They jumped up and hurried over. I was more concerned for Jahangeer and though he walked cautiously, he appeared all right. He lifted his arms to embrace and dropped them quickly in embarrassment, checking to see if such an intimate gesture was noticed.
      ‘Are you okay?’ they chorused.
      ‘Oh yes. Jahan, are you all right?’
      ‘Just a stomach ache. It’ll go.’
      ‘I didn’t want you to see…that,’ was all I could say. ‘I didn’t know this would happen.’
      He had a strained smile, as he was remembering the impact of the bullets. ‘I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t move my eyes, I couldn’t even shut them.’ He blinked rapidly to check the tears, a man his age starting to cry, out of pity, out of fear too. ‘I thought he was faking it until the bullets hit the poor people. How could he do that?’
      ‘That’s the way they are.’
      ‘Then I better get used to that.’
      ‘No, I don’t want you to be like everyone else and stop feeling. It’s better to cry for them than just look away.’ I looked at the other two. They too had moist eyes, flickering with fright at what they had witnessed, and their faces a shade paler. “Are you okay?’ I asked them, thinking how inadequate my concern sounded.
      ‘You said I wouldn’t see another execution,’ Parwaaze complained, bitterly.
      ‘I didn’t know that it would happen.
      ‘We didn’t think we’d see you again,’ Parwaaze said, leading us away, looking back, wanting to run and hide. I couldn’t blame him, but our feet felt leaden as we dragged ourselves along the broken pavement. ‘Did they hurt you?’’
      ‘No, and they didn’t say a word.’
      ‘Then why did they take you inside?’
      ‘I don’t know. The minister came in to the room, smoked a cigarette and left.’ I didn’t mention the canes on my shoulders, the stranger, the headline and the pistol at my eye level; it would frighten them too.
      ‘Ru-Rukhsana, next time we’ll be carrying out your co-corpse,’ Qubad said, dread in his tone. ‘I’ll miss you very much, so please don’t do this ag-again. You must leave. Go to Sh-Shaheen, he’s waiting for you.’
      ‘I told you a hundred times, I can’t.’
      ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jahangeer said.
      They hurried away, not looking to see if even I followed. I fell back, entangled with the burqua and my distress. He could have shot me. Again, he hadn’t. I didn’t want to think of him or the pistol. The canes still burned my shoulders; the marks would take time to fade from memory. I still felt their weight and tried to shrug them off. My mind wandered, looking to escape the confines of fear, thinking of something else, looking at the street, the living people. I hurried to catch up with them as I remembered the ending of the macabre morning.
      ‘Am I imaging it or did the minister say something about promoting cricket in Afghanistan, and that there will be a match?’ I spoke in a whisper.
      ‘Yes. In three weeks and the winning team will go to England,’ Parwaaze whispered, and lowered it still more to add. ‘I told you, they’re mad.’
      Cricket!! I had not imagined the ending of the farcical ‘press conference’ in which two people were executed. It was so…surrealistic and absurd. In his thoughts Murder and Cricket seemed as seamlessly connected as 'tea and biscuits' and 'salt and sugar' in my mind. It was an attempt at deception, a façade for their brutal rule. They wanted to join the exclusive club and gain acceptance by wearing white flannels and the right tie. They would stroll into Lords’ cricket ground, wearing the yellow and red stripped tie under their beards and, instead of cricket bats, they would carry their guns as they inspected the pitch on a sunny morning.
      I spoke carefully, thinking my way through the minefield of insanity. ‘You must form a team, challenge, defy and beat them, and fly away. You must grab the chance.’
      ‘We don’t know how to play cricket,’ he said in annoyance at my stupidity.
      ‘I know we don’t,’ Jahangeer said. ‘But you’ve forgotten that Rukhsana does.’

The Confrontation September 1996

      Fatefully in September four years ago, when winter hovered beyond the Hindu Kush and sent a warning chill through the streets, Rukhsana first saw Zorak Wahidi. The rumour had spread swiftly along the streets, slipped through keyholes, slid under doors, over windows and into her sleep, wakening her while it was still dark. It told her of a crime committed, that they had long expected to happen, and which none could prevent. Hurriedly, she dressed in jeans, a blouse and shrugged into a jacket. She wrapped a chequered hijab that partially covered her head and fell around her shoulders. She left home, quiet as the dawn through the back door, and the side gate, while the others slept on. She had thought briefly of taking the silver grey Nissan parked in the garage but starting it, and opening the main gate, would waken the whole household. There were no taxis waiting. She caught the small, white and blue tram at Karte Seh Square. A few men sat in the front, three women at the back; two were nurses on their way to work, the third was a teacher with her bundle of books. Rukhsana sat beside her, and, after exchanged glances, they ignored each other and she sat huddled as the tram swayed and tilted on its rubber wheels along Asamayi Wat towards the city centre. The air was a gloomy silence. The tram stopped frequently, either to pick up and drop 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 to Ariana Square, continued straight on along Awali May.
      ‘Why are you going straight?’ she demanded.
      The driver looked back, and she only saw the fear in his glance. She jumped down and walked towards Ariana square as it was on her way to her office. She kept close to the high palace wall, pock-marked with bullet holes, as on the other side of the road was a large bagh, dense with bushes, and she feared someone would jump out and drag her into the forest. The mist spun a ghostly cobweb over the city, and muffled figures materialised out of the wispy net, looking back fearfully as if pursued by demons. They vanished in an instant, leaving her lonely. She wished she had stopped her ears, pulled up the covers and remained in bed. The guns and rockets had fallen silent, and the city was still as an interrupted conversation waiting to continue. The ravages of continuous wars had defiled the beauty of her city and her country with corpses. Now, the Talib had defeated the mujahedeen. They had liberated the people from the corrupt regime and promised them clean governance, promised them peace, promised them justice, promised them freedom. On this September day, the citizens emerged furtively from their shelters, like optimistic rabbits cautiously scanning the hostile landscape, to continue with their daily lives. They had to cling to normalcy although it could be so brief, live their moments the best they could. They expected the unexpected, a whining rocket, a humming bullet, an explosion, and prayed they would die in that instant, and not suffer terrible wounds to live with the pain and suffering that Rukhsana had witnessed among the survivors.
      She saw what she had heard of in her sleep. The mist unravelled to reveal the shame. A handful of people crossed the road to hurry past the Dilkusha Palace gates, and turned their faces away from the mutilated corpses of President Mohamed Najibullah and his brother, Ahmadzai, hanging from the traffic signal posts at Ariana Square. She crossed the road too, though she didn’t avert her head. A quick glance recorded the terrible damage to their faces. They wore trousers, their mouths and ears stuffed with money, and dead cigarettes stuck between their fingers. Najibullah had been a heavy-set, imposing man in life and had shrunk in death. She had a Nikon in her bag, and thought briefly of taking a photograph, but she could not film such terrible humiliation of human beings. Instead, she wanted to weep. Five Talibs, with AKs and canes, lounged by the wall, as proud of their exhibits as children would be of their paper puppets dangling from strings. They stopped those who had not had the presence of mind to cross the road, and forced them to stare at the corpses. A whack from a cane moved them on.
      Their commander sat in the passenger seat of the parked Land Cruiser. He recognized the woman, with a finger-thick C of hair curling down to fall over her left eye, who had paused to stare at the exhibits and now hurry up the road, not looking back. He thought about her for a long moment, surprised that she remained embedded in his memory, got out, signalled to his men, and trailed after her as she turned off the road. Two left their posts; the other three remained guarding the corpses as if they were precious relics that could be stolen.
      It was her misfortune that exactly eight months and twelve days of working as a correspondent for the Hindustan Times, that Zorak Wahidi had recognized her and decided to follow her. She caught a bus-e-millie towards Sherpur Square, and did not look at the ruined buildings on either side. Blackened walls reaching up to the sky like fence posts. Some homes were untouched by the war, miraculously protected by fate. She sat depressed, despairing at what she had seen. She hopped off nimbly at her stop and went into a building on the corner of Flower Street, also unscarred. On either side of the entrance were a cloth store and a grocery shop, still shut. Steps led up to the second floor and Wahidi looked up, as if expecting to see her appear on a balcony. He glanced at the name board of the The Kabul Daily. He didn’t follow immediately but instead lit a cigarette, and puzzled over the insistent memory of this woman. He paced the entrance, waiting for her to emerge. His men squatted patiently, guns resting against their shoulders.
      Rukhsana hurried into the office, excited at the opportunity to report breaking news. Yasir, the editor of TKD, was a friend of her father and had granted her a small desk, and a chair. She didn’t have the same communist leanings as Yasir, and contributed only non-political features – profiles on musicians, women’s issues, education, civic problems, - and movie reviews for the paper. The room stank of cigarette smoke and, even at this hour, her eyes watered as the others smoked and spoke in low whispers.
      ‘You heard..’ one asked her.
      ‘I saw,’ she replied. ‘It’s terrible for the poor men to be exhibited like that.’
      ‘What difference does it make to them, they’re dead.’ a man laughed, and others joined him.
      They pecked at their machines between puffs. The only other women in this male dominated office were Fatima and Banu; they had yet to come in, and she wondered whether they would. She slipped off her jacket and dumped the hijab on the desk. She sat down, removed the plastic cover of the typewriter, an ancient Underwood, and wished she could write on her laptop. The office had a fax, though not an internet connection, and she prayed the telephone line was working. She re-read old files and jotted down her notes. She rolled in the paper and stared at the blank space, thinking that if she smoked her thoughts would flow. This was a dramatic event, and another tragic one in their long bloody history.
      She typed. “The ex-president of Afghanistan is dead. The Taliban, supported by Pakistan’s ISI, captured the ex-President, Muhammed Najibullah, and his brother, Ahmadzai, 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. 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. However, the PDPA was not united and Mr. Najibullah was in opposition to Nur Mohammed Taraki who was president and prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, and the party’s general secretary. The Soviet invasion triggered an anti-communist uprising, backed by the United States. The war between the rebels, the mujahedeen, and the occupying Soviet army followed a pattern. The Soviets held the cities; the rebels the countryside. The mujahedeen fought a guerrilla war, very reminiscent of the Vietnam War fought against the Americans. The mujahedeen controlled Eighty per cent of the countryside. Apart from the US, the British, the Chinese, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported the rebels. The rebel movement also attracted fighters from the Arab countries who wanted to wage a jihad against the atheist Soviets. A young Saudi, Osama Bin Laden, who formed the organisation called Al Qaeda, led them. On becoming president, Mr. Najibullah, had introduced a new constitution that embraced a multi-party assembly, freedom of expression, and Islamic law with an independent judiciary. However, as president and leader of the Homeland Party (Hizbi-Watan), he retained command over the army and the police. He formed a National Compromise Commission to contact counter-revolutionaries. This move cemented his political position enough to force Moscow towards withdrawal. The Soviets announced the withdrawal of their troops from the country in July 1987…’
      ‘You actually saw them I heard,’ Banu interrupted her.
      ‘I did,’ Rukhsana felt guilty for such a macabre boast.
      ‘We heard also their heads were chopped off,’ Fatima said excitedly.
‘      No. It was their private parts,’ Banu corrected her and looked to Rukhsana for confirmation.
      ‘They had their heads and wore trousers.’
      Fatima was her age, married, a friend from their school days, her husband an engineer. She had studied journalism at Kabul University and reported on women’s issues for the Times; Banu was a year younger, a business graduate from Kabul University too, an accountant, a clever woman with numbers. They were dressed in shalwars and head scarves. She considered them beautiful with their gentle oval faces, pale skins and expressive eyes. They wanted to chat longer.
      ‘Let me finish and I’ll tell you everything,’ she said and, disappointed, they drifted away to their desks.
      She re-read what she had written and then continued. “At the same time, to reconcile with the mujahedeen, he offered them twenty seats in the State Council, the prime ministership and twelve cabinet posts. However, he would not relinquish his control over the military and police and the moderate mujahedeen rejected the offer. Forced by this rejection, Mr. Najibullah reorganized his government to face the mujahedeen alone. In November 1987, a new constitution took effect. The name of the country reverted to the Republic of Afghanistan, and a National Assembly for which multiple parties could freely compete replaced the State Council. He nominated Mr. Mir Hussein Sharq, an independent, as Prime Minister. On the Soviet withdrawal, Mr. Najibullah dismissed Mr. Sharq and his cabinet. In exchange, the Soviets pumped in military equipment and food supplies. By 1993, this aid amounted to over $3 billion, and included Stinger and Scud missiles that blunted the attacks against the cities. Missiles fired from Kabul defended Jalalabad, and that victory boosted the government’s morale. In the war against the Soviet army, an estimated 1,000,000 Afghans were killed, 5,000,000 million fled to Pakistan, Iran and other countries, 1,200,000 Afghans were disabled and 3,000,000 wounded or maimed. Land mines alone killed approximately 25,000 people, and maimed four percent of the population, many of them children. Over half the famers’ irrigations systems were destroyed by Soviet aerial bombings, and their livestock killed by Soviet troops. Afghanistan lay in ruins and once the Soviet forces withdrew, the US 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. They de-forested the nation and encouraged the cultivation of poppies. The children growing up in the period had known nothing but war in their young lives, with the result that they were easily recruited into the Taliban. Mr. Najibullah’s presidency ended four years later when General Abdul Rashid Dostum defected…”
      She stopped writing when she sensed the silence, and looked up. Three men stood at the door, silhouetted against the morning light, black as shadows. They carried AKs and the leader scanned the room, until his eyes settled on her. He did not smile as he strode to her desk. Her colleagues faded back at his implacable advance. She remained seated, fingers poised over the typewriter’s keys, like a pianist awaiting the conductor’s baton. The man wore black from head to foot; a black lungee coiled like a snake on his head, and his chest length beard was grey. He was a handsome man, over fifty she 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. That part of his face was immoveable as a rock. He stopped a foot from her desk and only looked at her with feudal eyes. She smelt 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 the badges of a warrior with arrogance. Behind the man came the other two, smelling the same, also with a finger missing here, an eye there. All wore heavy beards and, with them all so hirsute, it was difficult to tell one from another. Only their eyes and noses distinguished them. She was to recall this thought much later when her life was in jeopardy.
      ‘Your father must be ashamed of you letting strangers look on your face,’ he said finally in a smoke ravaged voice.
      She stood up, brushing back the curling C for it to only fall back down again. ‘My father has no objection to my working, and is proud of me,’ she replied, and he looked very surprised that she should answer him back. She was proud of her profession. She had her degrees, a BA in Journalism, from Delhi University where her father had been the charge d’affaires, and now the deputy ambassador in the Afghan embassy for the last six years
      He stared at her, yet not surprised at her bold reply. She was a splinter of memory that he thought he had removed. She had not changed over the years since he had first seen and spoken to her. Even then, she had not been afraid. But he was insulted that she did not remember him, as she met his stare with her own, not with recognition, but defiance. He felt spurned. A woman could sometimes intimidate a man with her eyes. Hers met his, unflinching. She sensed from his frightening eyes that he had seen her before. But, she could not remember having seen him before. Where? In the park while she strolled with her parents? On a street corner? At a wedding, a funeral, a feast, a mosque? He did not exist in her memory, and he read that in her face. His eyes sparked with anger at her unintended sleight.
      ‘I am Zorak Wahidi,’ he announced softly, and saw that even his name did not stir any memory of him. Had he not mentioned it to her nearly four years ago? He couldn’t recall, but surely she should remember his face. He had been in his mid-40s then and unscarred. It was early ’93 and he had been sent to reconnoitre the defences of the city. Passing Cinema Park, he had heard the laughter of girls emerging out of the theatre. They wore black shalwars and coats with white hijabs draped casually around their shoulders and not even attempting to cover their heads. Their laughter had lightened him; he had not heard that for many years. At the same time, he was angry that the girls had seen a Bollywood film, polluting their young minds and the girl in the centre was re-enacting a scene from the film. She swayed, sang and danced and her friends were laughing to encourage her. She had mischievous grey eyes, her movements were graceful and she repeated words from the film, in Hindi. He had watched her with dreadful fascination despite himself and noted how, before she laughed, she bit her sensual lower lip and her eyes were merry. He had first felt excited, then ashamed and finally angry with himself. He was a married man with two young children, and a good, dutiful wife, plain as a potato, in his village, Paktika, east of Kandahar. He could not understand why this girl had mesmerized him and it was his anger that woke him from her enchantment. He had stood in front of the girl, spoken harshly, (he could not remember now what he had said but had scolded her for her lewd behaviour), and, instead of being cowed, she had laughed, made a remark to her friends, winking at them, and ran up the road, with the other girls following, laughing at him. Laughing at him! She hadn’t even glanced at him.
      The obscenity of power lay in his choked words; others lay in wait to punish her for forgetting him. He turned away to the office to gather himself. It wasn’t an expansive area, a dozen desks squeezed together, files piled up on them and scattered on the floor. The others were still as statues, waiting for whatever the outcome, holding their breaths. His men had their heads cocked, also surprised that a woman should defy their commander. He knew what they thought: shoot the bitch. Fatima and Banu were across the room, poised at their desks, looking fearfully at the man.
      ‘Call them.’
      ‘On whose authority?’
      Her defiance infuriated him. He would teach her a lesson; teach her to obey his every command without question. His instinctive reaction was to put a bullet in her head. But then, she would be gone, forever. Instead, he slapped her, though not hard. It stung and she blinked away the tears, dazed by the sting. ‘Do not ever speak back to a man. Women’s faces must not be seen and their voices must not be heard, they’re of Satan.’
      She looked towards the small cubicle for help, as Yasir stepped out cautiously. He was a small, burly man, more of a rooster with his combed black hair and flushed face. He stepped quickly back into his cell, leaving her to deal with the man. She gestured for Fatima and Banu. They looked fearful, and edged past the man who did not make way for them. They faced him, 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 pronounced the sentence and she had never ever heard such dreadful words spoken before. They were condemned to death, without a trial, without a hearing. ‘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.’
      She spoke firmly. ‘We cannot just leave our work just because…’
      He slapped again, harder, and she stopped the tears. No one had ever hit her before and such a fury surged in her that she took a half step towards him. He saw her eyes on fire and smiled, taunting her.
      ‘Are you such a stupid woman 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’ she added the ‘sir’ not with any respect. ‘I am working here and…’
      For the first time she noticed he carried the broken off aerial from a car. It appeared in his hand. It swished and landed on her forearm, stinging. No man sprang to her defence, they remained rooted, afraid. She held back her tears through sheer will power, refusing to cry out. She wanted to hit back at this monster; it would be her last act if she did raise a hand to him.
      ‘Go,’ he shouted.
      He tore her copy out off the typewriter and, staring at her, ripped it to pieces, without even knowing what she had written.
      She knew he was tearing her apart too.
      Fatima tugged her hand, not saying a word.
      She had not gone meekly. She had taken her time – placing the plastic cover over the typewriter, closing her notebook, tidying her desk, collecting her handbag, covering her head with the hijab, all deliberate and slow in motion. She didn’t wince when she slipped her arm into the coat sleeve. He didn’t make room for them to pass him and they had to walk around the other side of her desk. The only sounds were the whispers of feet shuffling out of their way, and she couldn’t catch a sympathetic glance as every man avoided eye contact with these contaminated, condemned creatures.
      Zorak Wahidi watched her leave; her walk deliberately provocative. He thought of his wife, a woman for whom he felt overwhelming indifference, and puzzled why this woman should arouse such a helpless anger, and yearning, in him. If only he had not seen her then, he would not be haunted by her. He believed now she had cast a spell on him those years ago and he would have to exorcise that. He turned to the man standing at the next desk.
      ‘What is her name?’ His eyes pinioned the man against a blackboard of sheer fright.
      ‘Ru…Rukhsana.’
      ‘You should have shot the bitch when she opened her mouth to you,’ his younger brother, Droon, said, loud enough for everyone to hear. His beard was sleek black and not as bushy as his brother’s. He had seen the look in his brother’s eyes and it had both puzzled and worried him. It revealed an unexpected weakness, and he had to protect him. The slap had not been hard at all, more a pat. Droon had slapped a girl a few months back in Quetta so hard that he broke her neck. When the brothel owner asked for compensation, Droon had shot him.
      ‘I will…next time,’ his commander replied to silence him. His walkie-talkie crackled and he switched it on, listened and then switched it off. ‘We return to Kandahar,’ he said and led them out of the room
      Rukhsana, Fatima and Banu hurried along the street, blinking at the sun’s light, feeling its healing touch on their faces.
      ‘Are you okay?’ Fatima asked when they were a safe distance away.
      ‘He cut my arm, I think.’ The sleeve chaffed against the welt.
      ‘I thought he would shoot you for one moment,’ Banu said.
      ‘I thought so too.’ It was much later that she discovered the reason he hadn’t.
      They click-clicked on their high heels towards Sherpur Square, too depressed to talk, sunken in the worry for their future.
      ‘You heard what he said – the home and the grave’ Rukhsana shivered at the sentence passed on them.’ We may as well be dead.’ And then could not stop herself, and broke out in rage. ‘I believe 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.’
      ‘Shhhh..’ Banu looked around nervously, shocked by her language. ‘Someone will hear you.’
      ‘I said it in English.’
      ‘And we understood. Others will too. Just be very careful.’
      ‘He looked familiar,’ Fatima said. ‘But I can’t remember from where. It’s hard to tell with all that beard and those scars.’
      ‘He seemed to know me,’ Rukhsana said, puzzled too.
      ‘What are you going to do?’ Banu asked, before they parted ways.
      ‘Keep working. What else?’
      ‘Don’t,’ Fatima said in panic. ‘You’ll get into even more trouble. I’m going to keep quiet as a mouse until I can leave.’
      ‘When’s that?’ Banu asked. ‘Tell me how too.’
      ‘When I do I’ll tell you.’
      ‘I’m going to stay and do my work. I won’t write under my own name, I’ll invent one.’ Rukhsana smiled. ‘I’ll call myself Bat woman.’
      Neither smiled as they hurried away, scuttling among the pedestrians, praying to reach their homes safely. She waited for the tram to get her home and sitting in it, thought of her story, now in shreds, and had no doubt that the others would have filed their versions. By the time she reached home, the news of the ex-president’s death would be across the world. She knew she should have stayed in bed. She muffled her face to hide the marks on her cheek. No one had struck her before, and she would never purge the humiliation, and the rage, from her heart.
      She had grown up in this house, and had only left it to join her parents in Delhi when she had finished school. She averted her face from Abdul’s eyes and hurried up the short flight of steps to the front door, and let herself in, hoping she would not see her grandparents at this hour of the day. But her grandmother, Muzghan, was just coming out of the kitchen. She carried herself straight and wore a regal air of authority. To strangers, on first sight, she could be intimidating with her firm jaw line, which Rukhsana had inherited, but she was a kindly woman. Even in her morning shalwar, she had an elegance that Rukhsana tried to imitate, which was why her grandmother disapproved of her wearing jeans. She had retained her youthful figure despite having borne three sons, and suffered a tragedy. Her eldest, uncle Kambiz, an army captain, had defected to the mujahedeen and died fighting the Russians. His body lay buried somewhere high in the mountains. She told Rukhsana that in her dreams she went in search of his grave, but there were thousands of rectangular mounds of earth, and she could never find his one. Uncle Koshan, the youngest son, lived near Mazar-e-Sharif, looking after the family estate.
      She wasn’t smiling when she saw Rukhsana. ‘Where have you been? We searched the whole house for you. Terrible things are happening…’ She was relieved at seeing her granddaughter but wished she had chosen a more docile profession. Or better still married, and given her great-grand children. By her age, she had married and borne Kambiz.
      Rukhsana wasn’t the only one woken by rumours. ‘I know. The Talib hung Najibullah and his brother from the traffic signal posts outside the palace,’ she said and hoped to avoid her scrutiny. For an old woman she had the eyes of a hawk and an acute sensory perception for any frailty.
      ‘Oh god, you saw such a terrible sight! Poor men.’
      Rukhsana edged to the stairs that lead up to her room as she told her grandmother what had happened.
      ‘Come back here, you’re hiding something like a thief trying to escape.’
      The slap marks hadn’t faded yet and caught the morning light as Rukhsana turned to her.
      ‘Who did that to you?’ she asked fiercely.
      ‘The Talib.’ She did not mention his name to her, nor that his predatory eyes on her had frightened her more than the slaps or the switch. She had not imagined that and, although she had suppressed the thought on the journey home, she knew he would continue to haunt her.
      ‘…and we’re now the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,’ her grandfather announced walking out of his office that was adjacent to the front door. He had a baritone voice that intimidated witnesses, and judges, in the court room. ‘I warned them a hundred times this would happen. Would they listen?’ Her grandfather, Suhrab Rafi, had been a minister in Prime Minister Mir Hussein Sharq’s cabinet. He was the most elegant man she had ever seen. He dressed always in grey suits with pale blue shirts and matching ties, and smelled of musky cologne. He was shorter than her father was but made up for his lack of height with the authority and confidence he projected to the world. Despite his busy practise, his shipping company and his political commitments, he had time always to help her with her school home work in the evenings, if her parents were too busy. Between him and her mother, she had learned to create her essays on the life around them and he instilled in her the need for researching her stories. And when she announced one day that she wanted to become a journalist, he encouraged her ambitions and declared to her parents “this girl has inherited my spirit and will be very independent.” Naturally, she was unbearable company for a week after that. She was expected to understand politics too when he discussed it with her father, who diplomatically remained neutral.
     Her grandfather had accepted the invitation to join Prime Minister Sharq’s cabinet to counter the Soviet influence on one side, and the growing American one on the other. Afghans, he told her, had to find their own, independent identity without the constant interferences by foreign powers. His portfolio in the ministry was Industry which was, as he said, like giving him the Oil and Gold ministry, in a country which had neither. The corruption he witnessed, “unimaginable wealth stolen from us”, broke his spirit. He had resigned from the cabinet, as he could not influence the vacillating men, and, in his final address, warned them against the growing threat of the Taliban.
     ‘She saw Najibullah and his brother, hanging from the traffic signal posts,’ grandmother announced.
     ‘No man, not even him, deserves such a humiliating death,’ he said. He tried to imagine Najibullah hanging from a lamp post but couldn’t. He hadn’t seen the ex-president for many years and remembered him as an over-powering, manipulative man, impossible to deal with, a man bent on self-destruction. Well, it had come and he felt a little pity for such an ending. He put an arm around her.      ‘You’re a brave woman to have gone out.’ He pulled her closer to him, and she winced when he squeezed her arm.
     ‘What is it?’ Grandmother had seen the wince.
     ‘Nothing.’
     ‘Take off your coat.’
‘Now let’s see the damage,’ he said gently and helped her. They grimaced when they saw the angry welt. ‘Get the cold cream.’ They first bathed the wound with warm salt water and dettol and then applied the cream to the welt, cooling the sting. ‘They’ve taken the radio station. The second edict they announced was that every woman must wear a burqua in public and her mahram must accompany her. Otherwise, she will be beaten, and so will the mahram for not controlling her.’ He looked to grandmother and smiled. ‘I don’t think I want that responsibility over you.’
     ‘Burqua!’ almost left her grandmother speechless. ‘I’ve never worn a burqua and will never wear one.’
     ‘You had better get used to it,’ grandfather said gently, an arm around her. ‘You can’t leave the house without one. They’re sadistic men and will take great pleasure in whipping women who break their archaic laws. God knows from which hole they dug those out from.’
     ‘But my clothes…’ she had a generous wardrobe of shalwars, skirts and blouses, and many high heel shoes. ‘Besides, we don’t have a burqua in the house.’
     He laughed cynically. ‘Someone’s going to get very rich selling burqua material to our fashionable Kabuli ladies.’
     ‘We’ll have to get them made,’ Rukhsana said. ‘Home and the grave is only where we can be seen from now on.’
     ‘The Talib said such a dreadful thing?’
     ‘Yes.’
     ‘I think it’s best for you both to leave the country as soon as possible,’ her grandfather said quickly, moving back into his office.     They trailed him like a couple of stray dogs following a scent. His office was cluttered with files piled on every flat surface, including the marble floor. The book shelves were crammed with legal tomes. Her grandfather lit a cigarette, the room already suffocating with the fug.
     ‘I’m not leaving you,’ grandmother said.
     ‘I’m not leaving,’ Rukhsana parroted her stubborn tone.
     ‘You should never have returned here,’ her grandmother said, as she had done many times. ‘You should’ve stayed in Delhi.’
     ‘I didn’t want to stay in Delhi,’ Rukhsana repeated herself too, having fled the city in panic. ‘What would I do there? The Times wouldn’t hire an Afghan girl, even though I had been an intern. This is my country and at least here I am their corr-es-pondent.’
     ‘I agree with Rukhsana. She grew up here, she’s aware of the dangers…’
     ‘And be killed…’ her grandmother said sharply, thinking we have a brutally tragic history and the attrition of my family and friends was not through graceful old age and natural causes – heart attacks, diabetes, brain tumours - but unnaturally, suddenly, as our flesh was shredded by metals. One moment here, the next gone, dreams dead. ‘She must leave.’
     Her grandfather ignored the interruption. ‘We could all have fled and we’d now be living in tents in refugee camps in Pakistan. You’d just have one shalwar and Rukhsana and Jahangeer would have to carry water for kilometres.’ He sat behind his desk, his throne of authority, a circular rosewood chair, well padded. ‘The mother of my sons you should leave. I’ll miss you very much. It won’t be safe here for any woman. And you’ll virtually be a prisoner in this house.’
     ‘I’m sure you’re exaggerating.’
     He blew a loud sigh of smoke to the ceiling. ‘I have warned you. But I think Rukhsana must leave. I’ll take her to the airport…’
     ‘I’m staying. I came here to work and not run away because of a couple of slaps…’
     ‘And a sore arm,’ he cut in.
     ‘..and I won’t return to Delhi. There’s nothing for me to do there.’
     ‘You can’t, anyway. Your father will be returning soon. The Indian government announced that it will not recognize our new government and we must close the embassy. It’s early still and I’m sure other governments will also refuse to recognize the Talib.’ He stroked his face and then ran his fingers through his full head of white hair. ‘We’ll send you to Karachi to stay with Latif Iqbal. You remember him. He’s a Supreme Court lawyer and a good friend. He’ll look after…’
‘I’m not a package you can just post off somewhere,’ Rukhsana protested. ‘I’m going to keep working here. There’ll be a lot to write about.’
     ‘And a lot of danger when you do. Rukhsana, please think carefully. I said you were spirited but I hope not stupid.’
     ‘Danger! What about you? The Talib know about your stand against them.’
     ‘I have my work here too, both in my profession and as chairman of the Afghan Red Cross, so I have to stay.’ He rose and came around to hold her gently, making sure he didn’t press on the wrong arm. ‘Rukhsana, take a wise old lawyer’s advice. Leave now, while you can.’
     ‘We’ll order three burquas from our tailor,’ she said and walked out of her grandfather’s office and up to her room, trailing a hand against the blue tiles that lined the wall. It was a child’s habit when once her fingers just reached the top edge of the tiles but now they were at eye-level.
     Her bedroom was above her father’s office and she too could look down on the roses. The stairs and tiles continued up to the next floor which had one bedroom, Jahangeer’s, and a door led out to the balcony that opened to the sky and all around the house. On her wall, facing the door, were two large posters, side by side. To the left was a colour photograph of the Long Room of the Trinity College library Dublin. The room receded into shadow, and, on either side of this corridor, from floor to ceiling, were shelves of ancient books. She couldn’t read the spines and only knew there lay such knowledge she could never access. The other photograph was black and white, a cloudy view, of the Taj Mahal reflected in the Yamuna River, with a row boat, lost in the shadows, approaching the great monument. Opaque light streaked the sky. It was hard to believe that a man, a Muslim mind, had raised such an astonishing work of art for the love of a woman. They were her tenuous grasp of an alternative reality beyond the borders of this country. The room had a narrow bed, a cupboard for her clothes and a desk for the work she could never do. Beside it was her bookshelf and, among her academic books, novels and non-fiction works, was half a dozen books on cricket, ranging from ‘Beyond the Boundary’ by C.L. R. James and ‘The Cricket Match’ by Hugh De Selincourt to a collection of essays on cricket by Neville Cardus and biographies of famous cricketers. Through her readings, the spirit of the game had seeped into her heart, and she dreamt often that she stood all alone, clothed in white, on an emerald oval. In the basement was the locked trunk and, for all she knew, the key lost forever, even as those memories of Delhi.

# # #

     A few metres of fabric, soft, fragile and pliable, became their coop. No granite wall was more impregnable, no bars more unbreakable, no dungeon darker and more dreadful for a woman. She vanished from sight, as if a magician had passed a wand over her. She was no longer Rukhsana with a distinctive nose, a mouth, eyes, a forehead, a chin, a head of hair, breasts, a tummy, thighs, legs and feet, but a walking shroud, resembling every other concealed woman in the street.
     ‘Can you see clearly?’ Rukhsana asked her grandmother. They were practicing wearing it in the Zanaana on the ground floor. The floor was a rainbow of carpets, Persian, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kashmiri and divans, with their bolster pillows, lined all the walls. She peered out at the world through the narrow mesh of her window, an opening barely large enough for her eyes.
     ‘Just a blur. And do they all have to be the same colour?’ The burquas were pale, metallic blue, stitched with a cap that fitted on their heads, and the corduroy-like fabric flowed down to their ankles. The cloth shop’s tailor had made their burquas, wanting only to know their heights from the top of their head to their toes, and not their other measurements, hips, chest and waist that he once needed when he made their clothes. ‘Can’t we have reds, greens and pinks?’
     ‘I hate this colour too. It reminds me of the shalwar aunty Delruba gave me as a present and forced me to wear it at her daughter’s party. It was exactly the same colour as that horrible girl’s too.’
     ‘In our burquas, we look exactly alike, except you’re taller than me.’
     ‘That’s what they want.’
     The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was the medieval façade of Talib menace. Through the MPVPV, the Talib wanted to mould everyone in their image, through force and terror. They had ridden into their lives on their armoured cars and land cruisers, as if Saracens on horseback, only to carry the people back through time to a land that had never existed. And in which women had no space. They had invented this other country through their malignant interpretation of women in the holy book. Everyone had to behave exactly alike. They could not think for themselves but think only their thoughts. They had to look alike – women in their matching burquas, indistinguishable from each other, the men with their uniform beards and dress. They could not express any individuality in their actions, unless they conformed to their dictates. They could not speak their different thoughts, without punishment. The Talib sheared every one of their personalities, even as sheep their fleece, and the people would never re-discover themselves under this enforced regimentation.
     ‘Try walking in it.’
     Her grandmother strode forward as she would normally in a shalwar. She avoided the silvery bukhari in the centre of the room, but tripped over a bolster cushion and, luckily, fell on a divan. She sat there, fuming.
     ‘I can’t see where to put my feet. Or what’s in front of them.’
     ‘We have to practice. Come on, get up.’ Rukhsana helped her to her feet and they bumped into each like clowns in a circus and couldn’t help laughing at their clumsy movements. ‘It’s going to take a little time to learn how to navigate with such a limited vision.’
     ‘I won’t live that long,’ her grandmother moaned. ‘I could once see all around me, down and up. Now I have to exercise my neck up and down and side to side just to take a few steps.’
     ‘It’s good for your neck then.’
     ‘I don’t need neck exercises. I know some women wear the burqua voluntarily because they want to, or so they say. So let them. Why should I, just because a man orders me to?’
     ‘I can’t even breathe in it. Now let’s walk up and down and not bump into each other. If you’re not careful, you’ll be run over in the streets. I heard two women were killed by a car because they didn’t see it.’
     ‘I refuse to be seen in public in this…’ she plucked at it disdainfully. ‘…this shroud.’
     Rukhsana too resented this suppression. She could not dream, she could not imagine in this suffocating cell. She wasn’t free even without it, for the walls of the old house, with its many rooms and enclosed garden, were just another prison in which they existed. They could pace it freely, only a larger cell, from wall to wall, door to door, window to window but not step beyond these solid boundaries that imprisoned them, without written permissions, and accompanied by their mahram. The window shutters were painted black so everyone knew women existed within the walls, and barred sunlight from contaminating these gloomy rooms. And should she open them, she could only reveal the masked face to the world outside.
     They walked without tripping or bumping into each other.
     ‘Now the stairs.’
     ‘There are no stairs in Kabul.’
     ‘Steps then. When you go into a shop there are steps.’
     Rukhsana took her grandmother’s hand and led her into the corridor to the stairs leading up to the roof. Her grandmother took a cautious step, forgetting to lift the bottom edge of the burqua and nearly fell over. She pulled it off in exasperation and dropped it on the floor.
     ‘My husband will drive me to the store, guide me by the hand up any steps and sit me down on a chair in the shop,’ she announced and crossed to her bedroom, which was above her husband’s office, and firmly closed the door.
     Rukhsana too removed her burqua and retreated to her bedroom. She switched on the radio to the only station broadcasting, Radio Sharia, and listed the commands read by the announcer.
     The Talib banned music, movies and television, computers, picnics, wedding parties,
     New Year celebrations, any kind of mixed-sex gathering,
     children's toys, including dolls and kites; card and board games;
chess
     cameras; photographs and paintings of people and animals;
     pet parakeets; cigarettes and alcohol; magazines and newspapers, and most books.
     People were not allowed to be with or talk to foreigners.
     People could not applaud, not that there was anything they could clap for.

The Great Game 2000

     As there were no taxis, we caught the bus-e-millie back to Karte Seh. The boys sat in the front half, I took a seat at the back, behind the drab curtain, and my neighbours sniffed loudly and edged away from my smell. Despite their burquas and the dust, they appeared to have ultra sensitive noses. I hoped I would dry out before I reached home. The idea of teaching my cousins cricket entranced me and helped me forget, briefly, my own frightening humiliations. We were not an athletic or sporting nation, as the turnstile for invading armies over centuries – Alexander, Timur-i-leng, Genghis Khan, the Persians, the Mughals, the British, the Russians - we had not had the time to cultivate a national sport, apart from Buzkashi. It reflected our history, the violence of our society, as it should, and only men play it. A headless goat is the ball and two teams of horsemen battle to carry the corpse to score a goal through distant posts. Other sports use balls of different sizes, we use dead goats.
     Jahangeer knocked on our gate; Abdul peered through the slat and let us in.
     ‘Has Doctor Hanifa come?’ I asked as we walked past him.
     ‘Yes. Why would I sit at the gate if she hadn’t?’
     ‘Wait, don’t go away,’ I ordered Parwaaze and Qubad.
     I went in demurely, then hoisted the burqua and raced up the stairs. I looked in on mother, she appeared asleep, and went to my room. I struggled out of my burqua, like a bird escaping a net, and dropped it on the floor. Then I stripped off my wet jeans and panties and hurled them in a corner. I hated the man who had frightened me so much and would burn them later to erase some of the memory. I peered at my shoulders, expecting to see the scars from the canes; the skin was not marked, though I still sensed their weight. I dressed in a shalwar before returning to the garden to sit on the lawn in the shade of the house. The boys sank down in front of me.
     ‘I have to wonder why the government is promoting cricket’ I said, having thought it through. ‘You can’t play cricket without understanding the inner meaning of the game. It is a very democratic game in which everyone contributes his opinion to a captain, whether it is accepted or not, but he or she does have that right. Do the Talib know that they’re encouraging the very behaviour they are supressing? Also, cricket has strict codes of behaviour. You can’t cheat, you can’t lie, you can’t disobey a decision, right or wrong. It’s “not cricket”. You have to be a strong individual and have a belief in yourself, as there is no one else to depend on in the field, other than yourself. It encourages individualism over a team spirit; it’s about the two ‘warriors’ battling it out between themselves.’
     ‘It sounds like war ga-game,’ Qubad said.
     ‘In a way but no one’s killed. The two warriors – the bowler and the batsman – are pitted against each other and only one can prevail. You define your character at the batting crease or as the bowler running up to defeat the batsman. You have to discover your inner self and bring that out. Think of cricket as theatre in which an action repeats itself over and over again until one character is defeated.’
     ‘Now it’s theatre,’ Parwaaze said. ‘We’re getting confused.’
     ‘Like theatre, I said. The other fielders, though not bystanders, do not exist until the act of batting and bowling is over. The act then starts over again, and again. Cricket is theatre, it’s dance, it’s an opera too and a movie all at the same time. It’s about individual conflict that takes place on a huge stage. But the two also represent the ten other players; it’s a relationship between one and the many. The individual and the social, the leader and follower, the individual and the universal.’
     There was a long silence after my enthusiastic explanation of the game’s ethos. Our cousin Shaheen had introduced me to cricket. He was my mother’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s son, an only child, and we had known each other since childhood. We were meant for each other, as even from a young age, we were told of the future arrangement for our lives. We had met at a cousin’s wedding when I was six-years-old and Shaheen ten. We were expected to bond like two small magnets, but didn’t. He had been a quiet, solemn child with a square face, defined eyebrows and a superior air. Unlike me, he was always neatly dressed and ensured that his clothes remained clean through any games we cousins played together. His parents pampered him and he expected this service whenever he visited our home. His father was a very successful businessman, chairman of his export-import company that traded with Iran, Iraq, Dubai, Pakistan and India. However, with the Taliban rule, his business was suffering losses but he remained determined to see it succeed again. To my surprise, Shaheen had learnt to play cricket when he had visited friends in Lahore during school holidays that year. He wasn’t a sportsman, he wouldn’t play hockey, football or wrestle with us, as these games could soil his clothes. But cricket had that genteel air and not the physical contact of other sports. He had returned with a bat, balls, pads and gloves, and, as he did not want the others to learn the game too, he had conscripted me into cricket. “This is our secret,” he had told me as he showed me the mysterious objects, “and we’ll play only in my garden so the others won’t know. If you tell anyone I will never let you in my garden again.” His family lived two streets behind our house. I was just eight then and did most of the bowling and he delighted in punishing the balls to the far corners of the garden which I had to then fetch. “How many players in this game?’ I had asked, tiring after a few days. “Only two,’ he had lied but when he saw the rebellion in my face he taught me to bat – elbow facing the bowler, the bat straight, back and down, as I played a shot, to swivel and hit ball down to fine or square leg, to block on my back foot and punch through if the ball was short of a length. With all that bowling to Shaheen, I had become a good off-spinner and could even bowl ‘fast’, though my speed was not as great as his when he bowled to me. When he saw how well I was learning the game, he lost interest and bequeathed the equipment to me. I had ferreted out that a match could stretch over a day, three days, five days and I was enthralled at that expanse of time for playing a game, and decided to explore the limitless possibilities. A whole day, even five, not just an hour or two as with other sports. I would devote my life to mastering it. I found I became obsessed with the skills and practised batting against a ball that I hung from a branch, and bowled in the garden against a wall. Although Shaheen had introduced me to cricket, I discovered that he did not like me excelling in it. When I had shown I had some expertise in flying kites, taught me by Parwaaze and Qubad, he had relegated me back to holding the reel for him, and would not let me hold the string again. Kite flying was a man’s pastime, he said firmly, not a girl’s, and I had accepted the conventional wisdom as natural. However, he had appeared delighted that I had my degree in journalism, though my choice of that profession puzzled him, and that I had played for my college. He had teased me that I should move to Pakistan to play for the test team and, though I laughed along with him, I had detected the note of disapproval that I had disported myself on playing fields in Delhi. Despite knowing that the players covered themselves from head to foot with white trousers, wrist length shirt sleeves and I always wore a baseball cap, the NY Yankees, as my team didn’t have a cap with the college logo on it. I might have imagined the disapproval for he never mentioned it again. I thought then that men found it so hard to escape the powers that they had granted to themselves. But, I did believe Shaheen could be the exception.
     ‘When did you le-learn?’ Qubad asked.
     ‘Shaheen taught me. Remember I tried to get you to play with me when he stopped and you wouldn’t.’
     ‘We’d never heard of the game then,’ Parwaaze said. He frowned. ‘So it’s theatre and it’s war. How well did you do when you played?’
     ‘I would not have survived one ball without the confidence in myself at the crease, the concentration and the belief. The game nurtures individual creativity, it encourages experimentation in styles of play; it encourages a rebellious spirit, all within the boundaries of the game. Some players are dour, another exuberant, one cautious, another reckless but through the way they play, we can know their personalities. I cannot think of any other team sport that is so open to discovering one’s own spirit within a hostile environment. Defiance is the spirit I had carried on to the field along with my bat, against the authority and the powers imposed by the opposition. Does the minister understand that in this team sport, freedom to think, to act, for the individual is the very essence of the game? It is a democracy in which every player has a right to express himself in the individual way he thinks and feels.’
     I felt embarrassed at my passion now. I had wanted to infect Parwaaze and Qubad with the spirit of the game, to inspire them into taking it up. I would teach them the game, and watch them win from the boundary. And then watch them fly away. Parwaaze had to impose his character, his beliefs, onto the others. Cricket wasn’t just ‘hit the ball and run’; it had its spiritual side, the inner workings of a moral code.
     ‘You applaud the feats of the other team, and they will do the same for you,’ I rushed on. ‘It’s an unbreakable rule in playing cricket; it imposes courtesy, even if you don’t feel it. That’s what I don’t understand in his announcement. How can a rigid, unbending mentality encourage the subtle anarchy of cricket?’
‘I don’t think the minister has thought about the game as you have,’ Parwaaze said softly. ‘To him it’s just getting acceptance for the Talib rule and cricket as a way to occupy all us young men who have nothing else to do. If he thought about cricket the way you describe it he would cancel his plans immediately.’ He scratched at his beard as if it itched, and asked calculatedly.
     ‘And cricket has a captain?’
     ‘Yes. A captain doesn’t just lead his side, he’s also the director. Cricket is a drama; it’s a play that changes the story with every ball bowled. And the captain must direct this play from instant to instant. He’s the director, the actor and the audience in the play. When a batsman faces the bowler, those two are the side; they’re the only two who count. The bowler bowls, the batsman plays. He can score a run, score no runs or be out. Those are the only three alternatives. In football, the captain has very little control over the game as it depends so much on where the ball is, how the players are passing and, it’s only when they’re near the goal, that something can happen. Have you seen baseball?’
     ‘No,’ he smiled. ‘I haven’t even seen cricket.’
     ‘I saw it on television.’ I had seen the game played, a world series, at the US embassy in Delhi. Father had been friends with Harry Saint and he had invited us to this event. ‘In a small way cricket and baseball can be the same. A batter in baseball can change the game, even as a batsman. Or the pitcher and bowler. But baseball is a short drama; cricket is a full length play with ups, downs and outs. In cricket, as the captain, he can shape the way the play develops, change the actors, if you like to see whether you can get a more dramatic ending.’
     ‘How many in a cricket team?’ he asked.
     ‘Eleven.’
     ‘Eleven!!! Where will we find eleven?’
     I waved the question away. ‘We have our cousins, like you, all doing nothing. Just sitting around getting depressed every day.’ We had 28 cousins around our age, five in Karte Seh, others scattered across the city. Ten were girls. I ticked off the boys around the same ages. ‘There’s Atash, Royan and Omaid, Bahram, Darab, Fardin, Namdar, Shahdan…How many is that?’
     ‘Eight.’
     ‘Nine,’ Jahangeer said. ‘At least I’ve seen the game.’
     ‘What do we play with?’ Parwaaze asked.
     ‘Bat, pads, a ball, that’s all. I still have Shaheen’s kit in the basement.’
     ‘I think you’re ma-mad,’ Qubad said.
     ‘We live in a mad world, so we will not be any different,’ I said.
     ‘The Ta-Talib will send their team only, win or lo-lose, and they’ll fi-fix it that way too,’ Qubad said cynically.
     ‘You just have to believe you’ll win,’ I said, smiling. ‘It will happen.’
     ‘It’s a complicated game,’ Parwaaze protested. ‘You can’t teach it to us in three weeks.’
     ‘The official team has to learn it too,’ I said. ‘So you’ll be equal. You won’t master the sport but at least think of winning the game. You will fly away to England, a place in the picture books, a place in our bloody history together, and return to your studies. You will miss Kabul, mourn its loss but how else can you live here?’
     ‘What ab-about you?’ Qubad asked in concern. ‘Okay we win and le-leave. You’re still here.’
     ‘With mother. At least I know Jahan and you all will be safe.’
     ‘And they’ll get a Pakistani test cricketer to teach them…’
     ‘Parwaaze,’ I said, exasperated. ‘What’s wrong with you? You were always so positive. Now, you’re… negative, like Qubad. I won’t be as good but remember his team won’t be any better than yours.’
     ‘Thank you,’ he sighed dramatically, there was no dissuading me now, though I had no pretentions I was as good as a test cricketer. He continued sweetly. ‘And can you tell me how you’re going to teach us wearing a burqua?’
     ‘I’ll think of a way.’ A mere garment wouldn’t deflect my determination.
     ‘She wi-will too,’ Qubad said mournfully. ‘And drop us all in more tr-trouble’
     I had known them, and my other male cousins, since childhood. I had wrestled with them, played marbles with them, raced my cycle with them, and both Parwaaze and Qubad had even allowed me to hold the string for their kite battles in the season. I still hear the ‘whrrrr’ of the wind rippling through the paper as the kite dived into the attack of another one. My right index finger carried the scar of the thread cutting my flesh. But as we reached puberty a barrier of modesty grew between us, and they wouldn’t let me fly their kites again. I had to play girl games, dolls and hopscotch, with my female cousins. Parwaaze and Qubad had been friends since that childhood, through Qasaba School and now wasting away their lives in the dark world of our new rulers. They had both planned similar careers – Qubad in mechanical engineering, Parwaaze in electronics. His father had a successful business in Shar-e-Now, selling televisions, stereos, VHS tapes, CDs, audio tapes and computers. I bought my audio tapes there when I was in school and, as family, I had a discount. Four years ago, the religious police had invaded their stores with their machine guns, and smashed all the television sets and stereos, broke every CD, unwound the cassettes and VHS tapes and burned them. They had watched this destruction of their livelihood helplessly. There was nothing they could do. It was the new law – no entertainment. Qubad’s father had owned the Ford dealership in the city and that had collapsed like a torn kite, even before he had died. No one could afford motor cars in this shrunken economy. So their ambitions vanished, as if some power had pressed delete buttons in their lives. With just a year at Kabul Polytechnic, their studies had stopped.
     ‘Don’t tell mother anything,’ I warned them. ‘I don’t want her worrying herself.’
     ‘By tomorrow you will have forgotten your brilliant idea,’ Parwaaze said.
     ‘I won’t. Think about. This is your chance to fly away.’
     ‘And if we lo-lose, they’ll probably ex-ex-execute us,’ Qubad said mournfully, and they waved goodbye, heads together like conspirators. ‘Dr-drama, da-dance, war. What kind of a ga-game is that?’
     Mother wasn’t in bed but had negotiated her way down the stairs and was in the kitchen, slicing plums. She looked so normal, sitting at the table, as if nothing was wrong. She had always sat in that chair, facing the back window that opened onto the courtyard. She had cycles of energy and tiredness, and was in her energy mode. She was making a Quorma, chopping onions with the plums at her side. She would simmer the chicken in the Quorma alou-bokara. She had sent Abdul to the bakery for the naan and they were piled on the table.
     ‘What happened? What did he want?’
     ‘Nothing happened,’ I said. ‘Except, he shot two people, a man and a woman accused of adultery, for our entertainment.’
     ‘Oh god, you’re not going to write about that, are you?’
     ‘I promise I won’t,’ even as I composed the opening sentence. I was drained of defiance and this would be my last piece. How could I not write on such a personal experience that happened to me? This would not be a piece of detached journalism, the observer of horrors standing a safe distance from terrible crimes, but a first person narrative of a nightmare.
The minister had taught me one lesson – that silence can instil fear.
     The gun was dangling before my eyes, the cigarette smoke stinging my eyes, and not a word spoken. I had wanted to touch the pistol, feel it still warm from the murders, and, as I thought more about this, the pistol had been more aligned to my mouth. He had held it lower deliberately, as if wanting me to kiss it, to lick it, before lifting it above my head. I gagged even at the thought. I believed he intended to kill me then, and could not understand why he had walked away. He had twice revealed his malignant power to me. He wanted me to understand that he controlled my life, that he imposed his will on my body and my mind. He was trying to imprison me not only in the burqua and my home but also in my mind now. From within prison walls, men and women have created great literature that has haunted us through all ages. We have not learned any lessons from those writings; they do not deflect the paths of tyrants, whether here or elsewhere in the world. We read those writings with detachment, sympathising with the prisoner’s plight, surrendering to his bravery. I wasn’t one of those prisoners, yet, and did not want to be another one writing from a cell.
     ‘Oh, I forgot. The Taliban are going to promote cricket.’
     ‘Cricket! That should make you happy.’
     ‘For men only. I’m trying to persuade Parwaaze to form a cricket team with our other cousins.’ I looked at her with concern. ‘I think you should be resting. I can do the cooking.’
     ‘While I feel well, I want to cook. You do it every day.’ She looked at Jahan. ‘It must have been terrible to see that.’
     ‘I never thought he’d do it so callously. They were just…sacks he shot.’
     ‘That’s how the Talib are.’ She sorted the vegetables. ‘We need more vegetables for the quorma and a few pieces of chicken. Give Abdul the money.’
     We left her in the kitchen, humming to herself, contented at feeling no pain for the moment.
     ‘Lift your shirt front,’ I told Jahangeer outside his room. He did. There was a rectangular, deep pink mark, the size of a gun butt perfectly centred. ‘We should put an ointment on that.’
     ‘We don’t have any,’ he said dryly, then continued quietly. ‘I’ve been thinking we have to get you out…’
     ‘How many times have I said…’
     ‘Mother isn’t going to live much longer, we have to face that,’ he said sadly, to interrupt me. ‘When she… passes away, we must get out of the country as fast as we can. We must be ready.’
     We stood looking at each other, and there were tears in his eyes too. He was right and, all of sixteen, his maturity moved me at this moment. I had deliberately closed my mind to her mortality. I put my arms around him and we drew each other close as we could. I didn’t want mother to die, ever, and prayed she would recover and we would leave together. Prayers don’t have the power of miracles; they leave our lips unheard by any great power, if there is one watching over us.
‘We’ll not talk about that,’ I whispered, inhaling his smell that reminded me of father’s when I hugged him. ‘Dr Hanifa said she could live a few weeks or she could go quickly. She can’t predict it. We will stay until…’
     ‘We must be ready,’ he whispered. ‘Where can we find a smuggler? How much will it cost?’
     ‘I heard around 500 US dollars,’ I said. ‘At least, that’s what Fatima told me. We should ask Parwaaze too, he may know.’
     I hadn’t seen my closest friend for over a year now. She had left the country and I missed her very much. Once, we saw each other daily, travelling to work, sharing our work, gossiping about friends, having lunch together and travelling home together after work. On the weekends, we would browse the shops together, along with her mother and mine, touching the clothes, deciding on colours and fashions of the day, buying pretty shoes, perfumes, powders, lipstick, audio tapes. We had spent our own money, as we wanted. We had bought presents for friends, cousins, parents and for ourselves. Our lives were so natural, we took it for granted. Now we know how precious even the simplest act of buying a pair of shoes is a forbidden pleasure. And to visit any friend now I had to prevail on my brother to accompany me, to attest to the prowling Amere Belmarof-Nahi Anil Munkar that we were related so I could just walk down a street to see a friend. I missed her company, even as I knew she missed mine in another country.
     Jahangeer groaned in despair. ‘Where can we find that much money?’
     We had spent most of our savings on mother’s hospital bills, and medications. By pawning our jewellery, we had enough for our day-to-day needs but not a thousand dollars for a smuggler. We still owned works of art but we hid them in a basement as it was against the law to have wall hangings. When the necessity arose, we could sell them, along with the old television set (one channel only) and the stereo in the black-market. We had accumulated these possessions over the years in our flat in Friends Colony in Delhi where we had lived, not too far from the Embassy in Chanyakapuri. Father had loved to sit out in the garden in the evenings to meet with his friends, diplomats, writers, journalists, visiting Afghans, students and businessmen, and share his whisky with them. That was if there wasn’t a party at one embassy or the other – an Independence Day, birthdays, national days. My parents could be out every evening of the week and I would remain home, looking after Jahangeer and studying. The past continually collides with the present when least expected, and I could not escape the memories of waiting up for their return from their evenings out. Mother would go to bed and I would question father about whom he had met and what they had discussed. He would tell me how important that person thought he was, and what they had said to each other. He could even mimic their voices and their gestures deliberately to make me laugh, and I felt I was there beside him at that party. When it was time for bed, he would hug me and wander away to his room. I had copied his way of laughing – head thrown back and the laughter rising from deep within. I couldn’t laugh now, even if I tried, and felt a bitter anger for what had happened to him and my grandparents. We missed them so much. I wished I could delete memories as easily as I could a file from my computer, but I had learned that even the machine cannot totally forget. It just hides it out of sight. Now, all that was past and we would have to sell father’s possessions.
     ‘Is that for just one person? Or for a family?’
     ‘I don’t know. For so much money, it could be for a group.’
     ‘Ask Parwaaze to find out then. But be very careful.’
     ‘He is our cousin.’
     ‘Who else can betray us but those close to us? As long as we can get you out before they kill you.’
     ‘I will not leave without you,’ I repeated stubbornly. ‘How can I live without you? You’re all I have left of our family after mother has gone.’
     ‘You’ll find Shaheen. I know he’s waiting.’
     ‘You know more than I do,’ I said sharply, and then felt remorse. He was trying to buoy me with hope, keep a love alive despite the thousands of miles that separated us.
     ‘You must write to him. He could loan us the money and we will repay him when we reach America. I know he’ll help us. Also, he can send us the name of his smuggler.’
     Our hope of escape was now resting on Shaheen in his distant country. Would he help? Would he have so much money to loan us? Will he remember his Rukhsana? Those who had the money, had already fled to Australia, Pakistan, Iran, the States, England, anywhere where they could find a safe refuge. That was, if they could gain admittance to such sanctuaries. Many countries denied them entry, and they drifted around the peripheries of those nations like lost souls seeking a final resting place. Exile, at least was acceptable but to have fled into this limbo was heart breaking. I thought of them as desperate, tiny mice trying to nibble their way into a safe burrow. This had been our fate for decades. We suffered in our homes; we suffered in our attempted exiles. We crowded the borders of those safer lands, pushing on the barriers and they resisted, not wanting us. They did not want our pain, our hunger, our dreams, our fears. We would contaminate their lives, their societies, their cultures. All we wanted from them was a small share of their future. Jahangeer and I could become one of those who haunted the borders, trying to wriggle in, without Shaheen to help us over those obstacles. I needed him to stretch out his hand half way and grasp mine to pull us across. Without Shaheen, we too would be in that ghostly land of hope, eking a living among hundreds, thousands of others. Dying too was waiting there for so many. That frightened me more than making the journey, only to hit the brick barricades erected against our entry.
     ‘The journey will be dangerous,’ he continued quietly.
     We stood, entombed in silence. An avenue of escape just another cul-de-sac. I thought I too could be lying in that compound one day, a bullet in my head, betrayed, no longer caring what had happened. Death was never so welcoming. But I knew we would have to risk that.

©Timeri N. Murari

(I WILL ADD A FURTHER CHAPTER NEXT MONTH)