The swelling subsided, and the wound healed with time. Soon, it was just a pink jagged line running up from his lip. By the following winter, it was only a faint scar. Which was ironic. Because that was the winter that Hassan stopped smiling.
In Kabul, fighting kites was a little like going to war.
tar – string
moochi – shoe repairman
Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules.
To this day, I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say. And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
Kursi – basically an electric heater under a low table covered with a thick, quilted blanket.
Inshallah – Go wiling
He was so goddamn pure, you always felt like a phony around him.
Ali shut the gates behind us. I heard him mutter a prayer under his breath – he always said a prayer when his son left the house.
Ahmad Zahir had revolutionized Afghan music and outraged the purists by adding electric guitars, drums, and horns to the traditional tabla and harmonium.
“Remember, Amir agha. There’s no monster, just a beautiful day.”
Next to me, Hassan held the spool, his hands already bloodied by the string.
“Boboresh! Boboresh!” Cut him! Cut him!
In Afghanistan, owning anything American, especially if it wasn’t secondhand, was a sign of wealth.
Bakhshida- Forgiven
She was a fair, blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan and she sang you old wedding songs.
They say there is a brotherhood between people who’ve fed from the same breast.
The old man sits against a mud wall. His sightless eyes are like molten silver embedded in deep, twin craters.
I caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It was a look I had seen before. It was the look of the lamb.
10th day of Dhul-Hijjah, the last month of the Muslim calendar, and the first of three days of Eid Al-Adha, or Eid-e-Qorban – a day to celebrate how the prophet Ibrahim almost sacrificed his own son for God.
Baba had handpicked the sheep again this year, a powder white one with crooked black ears.
He sounds annoyed with the endless praying, the ritual of making the meat halal.
Baba mocks the story behind this Eid, like he mocks everything religious. But he respects the tradition of Eid-e-Qorban.
The custom is to divide the meat in thirds, one for the family, one for friends, and one for the poor. Every year, Baba gives it all to the poor. The rich are fat enough already, he says.
The custom is to not let the sheep see the knife. Ali feeds the animal a cube of sugar – another custom, to make death sweeter.My nightmares persist long after the bloodstains on the grass have faded. But I always watch. I watch because of that look of acceptance in the animal’s eyes. Absurdly, I imagine the animal understands. I imagine the animal sees that its imminent demise is for a higher purpose. This is the look…Did he know I knew? And if he knew, then what would I see if I did look in his eyes? Blame? Indignation? Or, God forbid, what I feared most: guileless devotion? That, most of all, I couldn’t bear to see.
Baba told me stories of his travels to India and Russia, the people he had met, like the armless, legless couple in Bombay who’d been married forty-seven years and raised eleven children.
He was telling me how most people thought it was better to plant tulips in the fall and how that wasn’t true.
Baba’s motto about throwing parties was this: Invite the whole world or it’s not a party.
He slaughtered the animals himself in the yard by a poplar tree. “Blood is good for the tree,” I remember him saying as the grass around the poplar soaked red.
Saughat – Souvenir
But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. you steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched than stealing.
Summer meant long school days sweatling in tightly packed, poorly ventilitated classrooms learning to recite ayats from the Koran, struggling with those tongue-twisting exotic Arabic words.
I stepped back and all I saw was rain through windowpanes that looked like melting silver.
Mahipar – Flying fish
The rafiqs, the comrades, were everywhere and they’d split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn’t. The tricky part was that no one knew who belonged to which.
Complain about the curfew to the butcher and next thing you knew, you were behind bars staring at the muzzle end of a Kalashnikov. Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their home, people had to speak in a calculated manner – the rafiqs were in the classroom too; they’d taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.
“Ask him where his shame is.
“He says this is war. There is no shame in war.”
“Tell him he’s wrong. War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”
The second Russian officer, gray-haired and heavyset, spoke to us in broken Farsi. He apologized for his comrade’s behavior. “Russia sends them here to fight,” he said. “But they are just boys, and when they come here, they find the pleasure of drug.”
Baba loved the idea of America.It was the living in America that gave him an ulcer.
Baba would enlighten me with his politics during those walks with long-winded dissertations, “There are only three real men in this world, Amir,” he’d say.
America, the brash savior, Britain, and Israel.
The bit about Israel used to draw the ire of Afghans in Fremont who accused him of being pro-Jewish and, de facto, anti-Islam.
Baba would meet them for tea and rowt cake at the park, drive them crazy with his politics.
“What they don’t understand,” he’d tell me later, “is that religion has nothing to do with it.”
In Baba’s view, Israel was an island of “real men” in a sea of Arabs too busy getting fat off their oil to care for their own.
When Reagan went on TV and called the Shorawi “the Evil Empre,” Baba went out and bought a picture of the grinning president giving a thumbs up. He framed the picture and hung it in our hallway, nailing it right next to the old black-and-white of himself in his thin necktie shaking hands with King Zahir Shah.
Baba was the lone republican in our building.
In Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick.
For me, America was a place to bury my memories.
For Baba, a place to mourn his.
He was drinking cold black tea and chewing cardamom seeds, his personal trusted antidote for hang-over headaches.
Tea, Politics, and Scandal, the ingredients of an Afghan Sunday at the flea market.
Salaam, bachem – Hello, my child
Zendagi migzara – Life goes on
She had thick black eyebrows that touched in the middle like the arched wings of a flying bird, and the gracefully hooked nose of a princess from old Persia. Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine.
Khastegars – Suitors
Yelda – the first night of the month of Jadi, the first night of winter, and the longest night of the year.
The lore: bedevled moths flung themselves at candle flames, and wolves climbed mountains looking for the sun.
If you ate watermelon the night of yelda, you wouldn’t get thirsty the coming summer.
Yelda was the starless night tormented lovers kept vigil, enduring the endless dark, waiting for the sun to rise and bring with it their loved one.
Her heels white against the asphalt, silver bracelets jingling around her slender wrists.
I’d think of the shadow her hair cast on the ground when it slid off her back and hung down like a velvet curtain.
Nang and Namoos – Honor and Pride
“Sad stories make good books,” she said.
Afghan men, especially those from reputable families, were fickle creatures. A whisper here, an insinuation there, and they fled like startled birds.
That night in bed, I thought of the way dappled sunlight had danced in Soraya’s eyes, and of the delicate hollows above her collarbone.
Moalem – Teacher
It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.
“What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”
We may be hardheaded and I know we’re far too proud, but, in the hour of need, believe me there’s no one you’d rather have at your side than a Pashtun.
I owed her the truth on this one. I couldn’t lie to her and say that my pride, my iftikhar, wasn’t stung at all that she had been with a man, whereas I had never taken a woman to bed.
In the end the question that always came back to me was this: How could I, of all people, chastise someone for their past?
Lafz – the ceremony of ‘giving word’
Khoshteep – Handsome
Shirini-khori – Engagement party (‘Eating of the Sweets’ ceremony)
Awroussi – the wedding ceremony
Chilas – Matching wedding bands
Nika – the swearing ceremony
We were seated around a table, Soraya and I dressed in green – the color of Islam, but also the color of spring and new beginnings.
The wedding song, ahesta boro:
Make morning into a key and throw it into the well
Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly
Let the morning sun forget to rise in the east
Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly
hexafu 