Qais Akbar Omar was born in Kabul in a time of relative peace during the early years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which began on December 25, 1979. In 1988, when he was six, his family’s quiet, comfortable life was shattered by the Soviet withdrawal and the brutal civil war that followed. As the war’s ever-shifting front lines engulfed their home, the family was forced to take refuge in the Qala-e-Norborja, the fort of nine towers, on the far side of Kabul. His parents repeatedly sought to have the family smuggled out of Afghanistan, but failed. Qais came of age in the middle of war, getting what formal education he could when schools were open and teaching himself what he needed to survive when they were not.
The Taliban rose to power in 1996 in the wake of seemingly endless years of war and lawlessness. A young Talib befriended Qais a couple years after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, when Qais was sixteen. Afghanistan’s land had been destroyed through years of bombing and landmines, while millions of Afghans had fled to neighboring countries to seek safety. The Taliban were on a holy crusade to establish an Islamic state in Afghanistan. They created arcane and bizarre rules for society—for example, women were not allowed to go to school—and enforced them rigidly and violently.
The U.S. army overthrew the Taliban government after the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, which used Afghanistan as its base, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Despite the May 2011 death of al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, the United States continues to battle Taliban insurgents.
WE FIRST HEARD the word “Taliban” several months before they captured Kabul. Everybody had a different story about them, especially my classmates and our teachers. Some said they were people of true faith and represented God’s law and justice on earth. Some said they were cruel and evil–especially to women–and represented Shaitan, the devil. Some said that they were students of madrasas, religious schools, and that they did not go to war for selfish reasons like the warlords who were destroying our country.
Some said the Taliban were young and illiterate village boys who had been dragged into war without knowing what they were fighting for. Some said their army was unlike any army history had ever witnessed, dressed in shalwar kamiz and turbans and long beards. When they marched into a new territory, not even the bravest soul could stop them or stand in their way.
We were eager for them to arrive. For five years, our country had been caught in a cruel civil war that was being fought between many warring factions. They called themselves Mujahedin, holy warriors, but there was nothing holy about them. They had killed thousands of innocent people and looted, stolen or destroyed property all over the country, all in an effort to capture political power or to make themselves rich.
Many of our neighbors were among the millions of Afghans who had been forced to migrate to neighboring countries. One day they would be greeting us as we walked up the street in our Kot-e-Sangi neighborhood, and the next day they would be gone. Nobody spoke of their plans outside the family. It was not safe. The Russians had taught people how to spy on each other. Even though their soldiers were gone, the people they had trained were still controlling the government.
My friend Reza and his family were among those who had disappeared. His family was rich. His father worked at a big job at the airport. Reza always had the best marbles and the biggest kites of any kid in our neighborhood. And the best bike. It came all the way from America and had a siren on a chain. When he pulled the chain as he rode, the siren rubbed against his front wheel, and the siren squealed like sheep being slaughtered on Great Eid.
Some people said Reza’s family had gone to Germany. Some said his father had been taken out and shot, and his mother and older brothers had fled to Iran. Some said other things. Nobody knew. Nobody ever did. Afghanistan was a land of unanswered questions that we knew were better not to ask.
With lawlessness everywhere around us, we could do nothing but wait for this new Taliban faction to arrive and displace the Mujahedin warlords. We believed that anything would be better than what we were enduring.
FINALLY, THE TALIBAN did arrive. It was a Thursday night. We heard cars rushing up and down the streets. We did not know what was going on, and we did not dare go outside to look. We were too afraid. We heard from our neighbors that the Taliban had surrounded Kabul and were about to enter. The Mujahedin commanders, they said, were preparing for a war against them.
When we heard the word “war,” we shuddered and thought, There will be more blood of innocents shed on this land that does not thirst for blood, but for justice.
The sounds of the moving cars continued late into the night. However, by the time the Mullah called for the morning prayers before sunrise, which is when the noises in the streets normally start, an eerie quietness had settled everywhere. After the morning prayers, we fell asleep again since we had been on alert all night, worried about what might happen, and had not slept.
By the time I eventually woke up, the sun was almost in the middle of the sky. Absolute quietness still ruled. My mother had prepared breakfast for my family. It was not much. We did not have much food in those days.
During the rest of that day, as we slowly ventured out and talked to neighbors, we began to understand that instead of a battle between the Mujahedin and the Taliban, the Mujahedin had fled and the Taliban had walked into Kabul unchallenged.
We were overjoyed. The Mujahedin and all their fighting, and especially their murderous rockets, had been driven away. There had been no war, no blood on the streets, and there were no bodies on the main roads that would lie there for days since no one would dare come for them because the snipers on the mountains would take a shot at them if they did.
Soon after, the Taliban conquered the rest of Afghanistan, except for the valley of Panjshir, where the local leader Ahmad Shah Masoud never let them get in, though they tried very hard.
But as the weeks and months passed, we discovered that the Taliban were as cruel in their own way as the Mujahedin had been in theirs. Life became grimmer day by day.
Every morning, we heard new decrees announced on the radio that had been decided by the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar. One day we heard that watching TV was banned. Then, listening to music was banned. The shaving of beards was banned. Before long, women were banned from going to school or universities, or from working for the government or in private offices. Then kite flying was banned, then keeping birds as pets. And so it went, on and on.
When we heard the first decrees, we made fun of them. We did not understand either how serious the Taliban were about them or how brutally they would enforce them. The punishment for breaking any of their rules was very severe. People we knew were being put into prison for no real reason at all. No one dared to stand up to the Taliban and to say they were wrong.
But we followed their rules, which made us feel like we were living in a box. But as bad as it became, the truth was that we preferred having to endure those rules to living in the shadow of death that had chased us day and night in the five years before the Taliban came.
WE ALWAYS MADE friends with whatever new faction arrived, not because we were fond of them, but simply because it was necessary to have friends among whoever was in control. We might need their help in hard times. We sent them food, talked to them, told them things about Kabul that they did not know.
Months passed. We got to know some of the Taliban a little better. At first they all seemed very serious. But being in Kabul slowly opened their eyes to a world beyond their villages. By the second year they were there, we sometimes saw them smile.
I was fifteen. Many of the Taliban were only a couple of years older than me. I was thinking to make friends with some of them, but I had learned that I had to be careful. They did not seem to be interested in girls like the previous factions, but rather in boys, especially young, pale-skinned boys like me. I had to protect myself from them and not become too friendly.
The Taliban used to come to Beharistan Park every afternoon in our neighborhood of Kart-e-Parwan when young men went there to play volleyball. The Taliban always wore long dark-colored shalwar kamiz with large black or white turbans. They had long bushy beards, dark eyes, thick eyebrows and long eyelashes which they outlined in kohl. They sat on a long wooden bench that belonged to a street vendor who sold small bowls of chickpeas with pickle from his pushcart.
The Taliban ignored his food and feasted their eyes on the muscular young men when they took off their shirts while they were playing volleyball. I sat behind a tree and watched them as they talked to each other. Sometimes they touched themselves between their legs.
Any time the ball rolled their way, one of them would pick it up. Instead of throwing it back to the volleyball players, he would carry it over to them. With a big smile, he would give it to one of the boys—and not to the first one who stepped forward to get it, but to the one who was exciting to him. Some of the young men stopped coming to the park as they began to understand that the Taliban loved boys. Others, though, still came and did not care.
We had heard that the Taliban toppled walls on homosexuals in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium. But who could stop them from harassing the young boys in our neighborhood? They amputated the hands of thieves in public, but we heard they took fat bribes. Who could amputate their hands? They executed murderers, but they killed thousands of innocents. They stoned prostitutes to death, but who could stone them when they raped young boys who had been arrested for carrying video cassettes or listening to music? Through loudspeakers mounted on the back of their pickups, the Taliban were constantly announcing, “We beat the sinners with whips for the minor offences. If they die from the whipping, it means they were the sinner of sinners, and we helped them die clean.” But who could whip the Taliban for their offences and help them die clean?
LIFE WAS GRIM, but I tried my best to find a laugh in it. I did what I could to entertain myself, my parents, my five sisters and my brother. Video cassettes of Indian or American films were everywhere, despite the Taliban decrees. I had several, as did all my friends. We traded them back and forth, even though we knew we would be punished if we were caught with even one of them. Many times at the end of the day, I went to one of my friends’ houses to borrow a video cassette for my family to watch that night. Video cassettes were our only entertainment. I would hide the one I was borrowing inside my baggy shalwar trousers and travel through back alleys to avoid Taliban checkpoints.
I had a friend who used to import Indian movies from Pakistan. His name was Zaki. We were in the same grade in school, though he was a year older than I. Zaki and his brother ran the shop on their own to make some money for their family. It was shabby and small. Zaki ran it in the afternoons when his older brother was in school; his older brother ran it the mornings when Zaki was in school.
The front room was filled with things for school kids like popcorn, candies, notebooks, pens, pencils and whistles, as well as cigarettes and snuff for adults. But it was what was in the back room that brought most of their customers to the store: video cassettes.
One day I went to Zaki’s shop to get a new film. While I was choosing which one to take, he showed me some posters he had just received from his cousin in Pakistan. They showed Sylvester Stallone as Rambo holding a huge gun, posing as if to fire. All his upper-body muscles were flexed and looked like they were going to burst open. Zaki sold posters like these for outrageously high prices since no other shop dared to carry them. Young guys my age bought them to hang on the walls of the gyms we made in our homes.
As I was looking at the poster, a Talib in his early twenties walked into the shop. He was tall and skinny, with a bushy little beard. Unlike many Taliban who had very short hair, his was down to his shoulders, though most of it was covered by his white turban. We had not noticed him until he was well inside the shop. It was too late to hide the poster. I panicked. He looked at me with large eyes under thick eyebrows, read the fear on my face and knew that something was wrong.
He took out his whip and said in Pashto, “What is going on here?” as he looked at us both. His words came out of his thin lips in a funny way. Like most of the Taliban, he had a wad of snuff under his tongue. When the Taliban spoke, their sentences got tangled in their spit.
I showed him the poster without saying a word.
“Who is this? He has a very good gun,” he commented as he rapped his whip against his thigh.
Zaki and I looked at each other in terror.
“Yes, he does,” I managed to say.
“Where did he get this gun?” the Talib asked. “I want to have this gun,” he said.
“I think he bought it,” Zaki said, his voice quivering, because he knew he was in more trouble than I was. He had several hundred of those posters locked in the back of his shop. He knew he could spend several months in a Taliban prison where all kinds of horrible things would happen to him if this Talib found those posters.
“Where did he buy this gun?” he asked more insistently as he took the poster out of my hands.
Zaki stuttered, “China, I think.”
“Does China make guns like this?” he asked very seriously. “Never mind that. Where is this guy? I want to arrest him. I’m sure he has many guns like this. I will give you a small one when I have confiscated them all.”
Zaki and I looked at each other, desperate not to burst out laughing.
“I don’t know where he is,” Zaki said very fast, his voice strong now. “I think he is a Panjshiri with Ahmad Shah Masoud. He is a very strong man. Look at his muscles.”
The Talib nodded slowly. He was about twenty years old, but he did not seem to understand things that any twenty-year-old in Kabul would know. “I have been wondering why we have not been able to take control of that small valley in all these months. It must be because they have more guns like this.”
“And strong soldiers like this guy,” Zaki added, sounding as if he were trying to be helpful.
“Maybe,” the Talib said. “But one day we will capture that valley, and we will kill them all: men, women and children. We lost too many men and too much ammunition fighting them.”
We did not say anything. I looked out the window toward the street to avoid having to look at the Talib.
“I’m gonna keep this picture,” he said.
“Sure,” Zaki said, as if he had been saving it for the Talib all along.
“What is he thinking?” I asked myself. I snatched the poster from the Talib, and said defiantly, “No, you can’t have this picture.”
Zaki grabbed it from me and gave it back to him. “Yes, he can have it.”
I narrowed my eyes and took it again from the Talib and told him, “No, you cannot have this. This man in the photo killed my friend’s cousins.” I pointed to Zaki. “He wants to track him down to kill him. It is a matter of family honor.”
Suddenly, Zaki understood what I was doing: if the Talib took the poster from the shop and learned later that we had fooled him into believing that Rambo was living in the Panjshir valley, he would throw us both into prison and with no chance of mercy. It was easy to be thrown into a Taliban prison and very hard to get out.
Zaki knew what he had to do. Even though his round face seemed to have been fixed in a permanent smile, tears welled up in his eyes as he said, “What he says is true. I can’t give you this picture. This is the only picture I have of this guy. He killed several of my cousins. He shot my brother in the left leg, and now he has only one leg. He shot my father in the thigh, but, thank God, he is okay. I can’t let him live while we have lost so many. We won’t be at peace until we kill him.”
“No problem,” the Talib sympathized. “You can keep it. If you need a gun, I can give you one to help.”
“No,” Zaki said, “I’ll kill him with these hands. They are weak compared to his hands, but mine are much stronger with the power of revenge. I want to rip his chest open and eat his heart.”
I did not know until then that Zaki was such a good actor. A mad rage was filling his eyes.
“After you kill him, you won’t need his gun,” the Talib said, pointing to Rambo’s M-16. “But I’ll need it to kill more Panjshiris. Bring me his gun.”
“Sure, you have my word.” They shook hands. “Pray for me, so I may kill him,” Zaki said, with blood lust rasping his voice.
“I will,” the Talib said.
From outside, we heard the Mullah in the mosque announcing the evening prayers.
“Give me a packet of snuff,” the Talib demanded. Zaki gave him some, and we walked out of the shop together to go to the mosque to pray. Under the Taliban, all men were obligated to go to a mosque for the five times we pray during the day. Lists were kept of who came to pray and who did not.
Later, when Zaki and I had returned to his shop by ourselves, he stuffed all his posters of Rambo into a large bag and hauled them quickly off to his house in another neighborhood, where he burned them. It broke his heart to see such easy profit going up in flames, but if the Talib had seen one of those posters in some other place and heard a totally different story about Rambo, we both would have faced great danger. The next day, he moved his shop to a different part of Kabul in case the Talib ever saw a picture of Rambo somewhere and tried to come back to his shop and arrest him.
SEVERAL WEEKS PASSED. One day as I was standing in a long queue outside a bakery, someone tapped me on my shoulder from behind. I looked around, and there was the Talib with a big grin. I smiled uncomfortably.
“What happened to your friend?” he asked. “He suddenly disappeared. Do you know where he is?”
“No,” I said, feeling ashamed for lying, even though it was to a Talib. “Why?” I felt myself becoming increasingly taut.
“He had the best snuff,” he replied. “The snuffs from the other shops are like sheep shit.”
“I think he went to Panjshir,” I said, my voice breaking a little. Why had I said that? It had just come out, though Zaki was from Shamali, the province next to Panjshir.
“To avenge his cousins and his brother?” he asked.
“Yes!” I was relieved at the help he had given me.
“I will pray more for him,” he said. “So he succeeds.”
We talked about other things. As soon as it was my turn to get my bread, I said goodbye and left, happy to get away.
Several days later, we met again in front of that same bakery. He was even friendlier and asked about Zaki again.
A few days later, we met a third time when I came to the bakery, as if he were waiting for me. Now I was beginning to be afraid that perhaps he was stalking me. We had heard stories of the Taliban doing that to boys they found attractive. I explained the situation to my parents at home. My father went to get the bread for several weeks after that.
One Friday morning a few months later, as I was standing in front of our gate with Zaki and some of the other young guys in our neighborhood, the Talib guy passed our street with three of his fellow Taliban. When he saw us, he came towards us with a big grin. He was very friendly. He gave me and Zaki a big, long hug.
Zaki had spotless white skin with the very first growths of a little beard whose hairs had never been shaved since they had appeared on his face. Like me, he was the kind of young man whom the Taliban would arrest on some pretense to use them in prison for a few weeks.
It was a hot day. None of us were wearing a hat or turban. We were all terrified that these Taliban would drag us to their prison for not having covered our heads. But they did not. Instead, the Talib who had seen the Rambo poster started asking Zaki if he had found the man who had killed his cousins and been successful in killing him.
Zaki told one lie after another. “I tracked him down in the valley of Panjshir, but when I got close to him, he had his big gun on his shoulder. I thought to myself that as long as he has that gun, I can’t kill him with my bare hands. So I came back to Kabul to find weapons. But all I can find in Kabul is a Kalashnikov, which is much weaker than his gun. You tell me how one can kill such a strong man with a tiny Kalashnikov?”
“Not easy,” the Talib guy agreed, “especially if you don’t have any killing experience. You should give me that picture. I will give it to one of my brother Taliban who are on the front line. When they capture him, they will let you kill him.”
“Who has a picture?” one of the other Taliban asked accusingly, a very tall man who was speaking for the first time. A decree had made pictures forbidden.
“There is no picture. I destroyed it because it is forbidden,” Zaki said.
“What a pity,” our Talib said.
None of the other guys from my neighborhood standing there had any idea what we were talking about. They did not dare ask, though, or even say a word. Like all of us, they knew they could be beaten or arrested for not wearing a hat. We had seen men being flogged in the street until blood stained all their clothes for doing less.
“You should reopen the shop that you had,” the Talib suggested. “I miss your snuff. You had the best. All the snuffs in other shops taste like sheep shit.” The other two Taliban moved their heads in agreement. A small crisis had passed.
The tall Talib said, “You should give us some snuff if you have some with you, or I’m gonna arrest you all for not wearing a hat or turban.”
The blood ran out of our faces.
He laughed. “Just joking.”
We all laughed, sheepishly.
“Seriously,” he said. “Do you have some snuff?”
“No, I don’t use it myself,” Zaki said. “But I can bring some for you tomorrow.”
They looked at each other. “Great!” our Talib said. “You know where to find us? We are staying in Fahim’s house.” Marshall Fahim was a Tajik, one of Masoud’s close allies. He owned a large compound in our neighborhood. The Taliban had seized it when they took over Kabul. “When you come over, ask for Mullah Ghafar,” he told us.
His tall friend added with a hard look that might have been meant as a joke though we were not sure, “If you don’t come, we know where to find you.”
We pretended that it was a joke. Zaki and I made fake laughs as if he had told us something very funny, as we both said in one voice, “Sure.”
They said goodbye and left as his tall friend said, “Don’t come to our place without a hat or a turban.” From his tone, we accepted that he was trying to be helpful. But we also knew he was very serious.
We nodded.
When they got a few steps away, Zaki looked at me and said, “We are done, my friend. We are in a big trouble.” Though he was very strong, he looked like he was going to faint.
“What can we do?” I asked.
“We just have to go to their place and give them the snuff,” he said.
“It is not the snuff I’m worried about.” A cold fear was rising inside me.
The other guys standing there knew exactly what I meant and laughed. One of them said, “Good luck to your backsides.”
“If we lose our backsides, we will take you down with us,” Zaki said. They stopped laughing. A couple of them quickly said goodbye and left. Two others excused themselves, walked away and stood under a tree on the other side of the street. The one who stayed with us implored us, “Guys, I did not make fun of you. Please don’t tell them my name and don’t show them our house.”
“Go, you coward,” Zaki said. “We just saved your asses, and you are laughing at us instead of helping.”
As he walked away, Zaki looked at me and said, “Maybe you can ask your father to take the snuff to them.”
“No, no,” I said, and explained that my father had warned me many times never to go out, except when I was sent out to buy groceries or bread. “Every night when I bring a new video cassette home, he gets angry with me that if a Talib captures me, the whole family will go down. I can’t tell him about this! No, my friend.”
For a minute, we did not say anything.
“What about your father?” I asked, suddenly.
Zaki looked at me with one eyebrow up and one down. As if he was very offended he said, “Don’t you know the Taliban burned the whole plain of Shamali? Those bastards destroyed our grapevines, our mulberry trees, my grandfather’s compound and all my relatives’ houses, everything. My father hates their guts and shoots even their shadows.”
“Then we just have to do it ourselves,” I said.
Zaki nodded.
THE NEXT DAY, late in the afternoon, Zaki and I took a couple of small bags of snuff to Fahim’s compound. We were sick with fear, not knowing what might happen to us. I had been unable to sleep all night. I knocked on the door. A few minutes later a man in his fifties opened it. He was not a Talib, but a worker. Zaki asked for Mullah Ghafar, but declined the man’s invitation for us to come inside the gate. “We’ll wait here,” he said nervously.
A few minutes later, Mullah Ghafar appeared. We shook hands, and Zaki gave him the snuff. He accepted the plastic bags with a big smile and started to take some money from his pocket to pay us, but Zaki refused. Mullah Ghafar insisted that we should come in and have tea with him, but we made polite excuses and quickly left.
As we walked away from the compound and down the street, we were elated. Nothing bad had happened to us. We had never believed that all Mullah Ghafar wanted from us was snuff. Yet, he had seemed normal and had thanked us in the proper manner.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Zaki met Mullah Ghafar again as they were walking out of the mosque after the Friday congregational prayers. Mullah Ghafar took hold of Zaki’s hand and pulled him gently to the side as he whispered to him, “I want to talk to you about something important. Maybe you can help me.”
Zaki told me later, “I said, ‘Sure, why not. What is it?’” Mullah Ghafar led him by the hand away from the others milling around in front of the mosque. He took Zaki across a small cemetery to a spot where no one else was standing. When he was sure that nobody was nearby, he looked at Zaki with deep emotion and held his hand even tighter than before.
“I think I’m in love,” Mullah Ghafar said.
Zaki made a fake cough as he felt a cold chill run down his spine. “In love,” he said. “With whom?” He was terrified of the answer.
“Someone I don’t think you know,” Mullah Ghafar said. Zaki began shaking, and Mullah Ghafar’s grip increased its intensity.
“Tell me the name,” Zaki said, his heart racing.
“I don’t know it,” Mullah Ghafar said.
Later, Zaki told me, “My terror eased a bit, because Mullah Ghafar did not mention my name or yours.”
“I can’t seem to be able to sleep anymore,” Mullah Ghafar went on. “I think about love all the time.”
“Where did you meet this person?” Zaki asked.
“I only saw her face once, when she pulled up her burqa in the shop to look at some cloth.”
“A girl?” Zaki asked with surprise.
“Yes, she lives in our neighborhood,” Mullah Ghafar went on, lost in his lovesickness.
Suddenly Zaki laughed with relief.
“Why are you laughing?” Mullah Ghafar asked angrily as he flung Zaki’s hand aside.
“Nothing, nothing.”
“No, tell me,” Mullah Ghafar insisted.
“It is not so important,” Zaki said.
“No, I want to know,” Mullah Ghafar insisted.
“Well, not to offend to you,” Zaki said, “but I thought you were in love with a boy.”
“No, I’m not in love with a boy. I don’t like boys. It is against Islam to have sex with your own sex.”
“Right,” Zaki said, but he did not dare to say that many Taliban kept boys and proudly went around and boasted to each other that they had boys with such and such a quality.
“So, can you help me?” Mullah Ghafar asked.
“I’m not sure,” Zaki said. “I don’t have the experience of talking to strange girls, and I don’t know what I can tell you to help. But maybe my friend whom you met can help.”
“Let’s go to your friend,” Mullah Ghafar suggested, meaning me.
Quickly, Zaki invented an excuse, saying, “I think he went to a funeral ceremony. He won’t be home until late tonight or maybe not even come home. Why don’t we meet here again tomorrow, after the afternoon prayers?”
Mullah Ghafar agreed and left.
Zaki came to our house straight away. When I opened the door for him, he could not stop laughing. He told me the whole story. I was shocked and amazed. Several times I asked him if he were not joking. He assured me that Mullah Ghafar was serious. I suggested that maybe it was a trap, but Zaki told me that I had been reading too many Iranian detective novels, and I should not suspect everything people say. But I had to be cautious, because with the Taliban in control one mistake could quickly end a person’s life.
THE TALIBAN WERE teaching me how to deceive. This was against everything that I had learned from my parents and my grandfather, but being honest with the Taliban was to invite danger. We are serious Muslims. Everyone in my family—women as well as men—prays five times a day. We understand that it is a great privilege to be among those who have heard the message brought to us by our Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. We read the teachings preserved in the Qur’an and the Hadiths over and over. Each time we take new strength from them. Each time they reveal something new. Islam is our great joy.
Yet in the same way the Taliban twisted everything we had been taught, they twisted the decency that is born in every person.
At supper that night, my mother asked me why I was not eating. She had prepared my favorite aubergine dish that she made better than anybody. But I had been tossing over and over in my mind what might happen when we saw Mullah Ghafar. I was not hungry. I practiced lies in my head. I wanted to be ready for everything that he said. And I felt ashamed. This was not what I had been taught. This is not what I believed was the right path. I ate some aubergines to please my mother, but I did not really taste them.
THE NEXT DAY we met Mullah Ghafar. He was very happy to see us both, though he looked very pale.
Before saying hello, he said, “Look at me, I’m like a sick bird, weak and pale, because I can’t think about anything but her. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t do anything. Help me, or I may die.”
This was not an Iranian detective novel.
“Do you know where she lives?” I asked.
“Yes, I do. Why?”
“If she lives in a fancy house, there may be no hope for you, because you’re just a village boy, and she might be a girl from a very high class.”
“But I love her,” Mullah Ghafar insisted. “How can I live without hope?”
Zaki nudged my shoulder with his shoulder as he laughed, “He is just joking.”
“Are you joking?” he asked in a serious, threatening tone.
“Yes,” I said as I laughed as if in embarrassment.
“It is no time for jokes, but for a solution to my problem. I’m sick with love. Find me a cure.”
“Maybe you should send a suitor to her house,” I suggested.
“But I have two older brothers who haven’t gotten married yet. I can’t just send suitors to ask for her hand. My turn is after my two brothers, but I don’t want to wait. Besides, my family is in Helmand. They would totally disagree with my choice if she is not a Pashtun. But I don’t care if she is Pashtun or Tajik or Uzbek or Hazara or Sikh. I love her to the depth of my heart, and I want her to be my wife.”
“It seems that you are ninety-nine percent in love, while she doesn’t know one percent,” Zaki said, which was a joke, but Mullah Ghafar did not seem to get it.
He told us that she lived in the house next to Fahim’s. He saw her every day from Fahim’s second-floor windows when she worked in her family’s courtyard. He watched her when she was washing clothes, sweeping the courtyard and doing other things. Like the sick bird he said he was, he perched behind the windows which had tinted glass that allow somebody inside to see without being seen. It is very bad manners in Afghanistan to look into somebody else’s yard and especially to look at the women in the family. But we did not say anything about that to him even though he knew that himself.
“What can I do to make her love me as much as I love her?” he asked.
“Maybe you should change your style a little bit,” I suggested.
“What do you mean by style?”
“Dress like us,” Zaki suggested. “Cut your hair like us, exchange your black turban for a simple white hat like ours or even don’t wear a hat or a turban at all.”
He was listening very carefully.
I added, “And you should put on a little weight. You look very skinny.”
“How?” he asked. “I eat like a hungry cow at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I just don’t get any heavier. And how can I eat this yoghurt in Kabul? It is not as good as what my mother makes. And the butter and milk sellers in Kabul are infidels. They mix water with milk and sell it as real milk. They mix cheap Pakistani cooking oil with butter and sell it as real butter. But it is not just me who is skinny; my brothers and father are the same.”
“There are other ways that you can look a little stronger,” Zaki suggested.
“How?” he asked.
“You should go to a bodybuilding gym,” Zaki said.
“You mean that dark room across from the roundabout where guys go and lift heavy weights that make the veins stand out on their neck and shoulders and arms?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“I don’t know how to do it,” he said.
“The trainer will teach you,” we both said.
“I’m a bit shy. I have never been to such places before. Can one of you go with me?”
We both looked at each other and did not know what to say.
“Help me,” he said. “Have pity on me. I’ll help you when you need help.”
His distress was real. I volunteered, “I can go with you.”
He smiled broadly for the first time since we had met him. “What else should I do to attract her attention besides going to the gym?” he asked.
Zaki and I looked at each other and did not know what to suggest.
Zaki said, “Let’s start with the gym. We will do one thing at a time.”
By then it was getting dark, and I had to buy some bread and go home or my parents would get worried. We said goodbye and left him as Zaki and I walked toward the bakery. We did not dare say a word to each other until we were far down the street, and when we did speak, the laughter poured out of us.
When we could finally catch our breath, we started making plans for the next day. I convinced Zaki to come with us to the gym, though he had a gym of his own in his house where several of our friends joined us every day. We would exercise for hours with loud music playing and with many posters of famous American and European bodybuilders staring down at us from the walls, including the poster of Rambo with his big gun.
The next day we went with our Talib to the gym. All the guys in the gym put down the weights whenever we moved towards them. They had seen Mullah Ghafar in the street with his Taliban friends whipping men who had not gone to the mosque for prayers or women who were wearing only a scarf and not a burqa. They were not happy to see a Talib in the gym and kept their distance.
We taught Mullah Ghafar a few moves. Though he was thin and weak-looking, he could even lift heavy weights without any difficulty. But the next day when we met him again at the roundabout, he could barely walk or move any part of his body. All of his muscles were sore and stiff. We convinced him that the only cure was to exercise more and to take hot showers afterward, though few houses had enough water for a shower. He accepted our advice, and, though we could see that he was in pain as he exercised, he never complained. Instead, he talked nonstop about his beloved, about her looks, her body, the way she walked and her melodious voice. He sounded like a poet.
We forced him to speak Dari, because we had discovered that the girl he was in love with was a Tajik. She was Zaki’s neighbor. He knew her well. She used to come to their house to visit his sisters. She was from a very high-class family. All her brothers and sisters were living in America or Europe. She was the only one of her parents’ children to still be living with them in Kabul. They may have got stuck there, as so many did during the fighting, including my family.
Zaki never told Mullah Ghafar any of that. We had to keep it a secret. Zaki was worried that Mullah Ghafar might find ways to force his family to arrange a marriage with the girl.
We told him he must learn Dari and speak it fluently if he were going to have any chance with her. The poor guy tried very hard, both to lift the heaviest weights and to speak Dari.
When he spoke Dari, though, it was very funny, though he did not intend for it to be. The problem was that he thought in Pashto, and, when he spoke, he was translating his Pashto sentences into Dari. They came out sounding very strange. Sometimes they did not make sense at all. By then we had known him for several weeks so we could understand him, but I doubted that this girl he loved would.
AFTER WE GOT to know Mullah Ghafar a little more, we began to realize that he was not an ignorant man. We talked about other things beside his beloved. He spoke about the farm his family owned in Helmand, making it sound like a magical place. Both of his parents were from Helmand. They were cousins and had been married when they were both fourteen years old. Besides his four brothers, he had three sisters.
He loved ice cream. He told us about the first time he had eaten ice cream, soon after he came to Kabul. He did not know what it was. He put it on hot bread he had just bought from the bakery. “It melted right away. I was very angry. I slapped the baker for making the bread so hot. The poor guy did not say anything because he was afraid of me. Later I had to laugh at myself.”
He did not like other people laughing at him, though. When we made a few ice cream jokes, he did not like it.
One day Zaki asked him, “Why did you become a Talib?”
He said, “Because the local Mujahedin commanders were doing too many bad things in the name of Islam in Helmand and Kandahar. We couldn’t take it anymore. When my brothers and I heard about the Taliban, we went to Kandahar and joined them to fight the evils. A few months later, we brought peace to Helmand. People supported us and gave us money because we protected them and their families, their lives, their property and honor. We were not fighting for wealth or fame like those who claimed to be Mujahedin and did many un-Islamic things in the name of Islam.”
“But what you and your fellow Taliban are doing now is not in Islam either,” Zaki said. I was shocked by his boldness. We had reached a level of friendship with Mullah Ghafar, but he was still a Talib and at any time he could have had us arrested.
“What do you mean?” he said, but not harshly as I had feared.
“What the Taliban are doing in Shamali and other provinces, killing innocent people because of which tribe they belong to or how they pray, burning their gardens, these things are not in Islam. Killing another human being—whether he is a Muslim or of another faith—if he does no harm to you, is forbidden.”
“I know and I’m against it,” he said. “But I’m only one man and I can’t stop it.
“When the Taliban started,” he went on, “they did some very good things and gave justice to people. Later, though, many others from different countries got into the network.
“When I first joined the Taliban, I was only a teenager and, like every teenager, I never thought about the consequences of what I was doing. Now it is too late. I was convinced that I was fighting and going to war for a good cause. But now I know I misunderstood, because there is no war against my own countrymen that can be for a good cause.
“If anyone says that this kind of war is good, it is only so they can misuse us against each other, to divide us, to destroy us and to get what they want. The right way to solve a dispute is to talk together for as long as it takes and to come to a solution. You can only end a war with talks. You can’t wash blood with blood.”
“Then you should leave the Taliban,” I suggested tentatively.
“It is not as easy as you think,” he sighed. “Our lives, the lives of our whole family, are at stake, because I’m not the only one who joined the Taliban, but my two brothers, cousins and distant relatives did too. We don’t share one idea anymore. My next older brother thinks totally unlike me, but my oldest brother shares my thoughts. Several of our cousins also share my thoughts, but they are also stuck like us.”
“Then how will you get out?” Zaki asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m in an ocean that has no shore—and no easy way to get drowned and die either. But I believe God is great. He will open a door to us.”
“God is great!” Zaki and I echoed sincerely. We had just heard things we had never expected to hear a Talib say.
AS THE WEATHER grew warmer, we got to know Mullah Ghafar a little more. One day Zaki suggested that we should stop going to the public gym because it was always crowded and stunk of too much sweat in the rising summer heat. Sometimes it was almost hard to breathe there, though Mullah Ghafar never complained about anything.
The next day when we met at the roundabout, Zaki said, “Mullah Ghafar, from today on, we will go to my family’s house to exercise. I have made a small gym there. We have better equipment, and it doesn’t smell like this gym here.”
He accepted. As we walked into our old, homemade gym—which I had been missing so much all these weeks we had been helping Mullah Ghafar—I was surprised to see the walls were empty. All the posters had been taken down. Soon several of our friends showed up, the ones who had met Mullah Ghafar that day at the gate. They were surprised to see us and to see Mullah Ghafar.
We had bought some of the equipment in the gym from a shop in Kabul. Most of our weights, though, we had made ourselves by putting cans of cement on the ends of steel rods. Other weights were made out of left-over pieces of metal that somebody had welded together.
Most of the guys took off their kamiz shirts in the gym and exercised in their T-shirts. Partly, we did not want to get our clothes sweaty, and, partly, we wanted to show off our muscles. I was not as tall as some of the others, but they could see that my chest and shoulders were very strong, so none of them ever wanted to get in a fight with me. Zaki had more muscles than any of us. He was a little taller than me and had a very slim waist and very broad shoulders.
Even though we could see that Mullah Ghafar was very strong, he looked like he did not have any muscles at all, and he never took off his kamiz. He unwound his turban, but always wore the cap that was under it, even when he was exercising. He liked lying on his back on the plank we called a bench and lifting weights above his chest. But he did not like thigh exercises and never did them. Zaki joked with him one day, “Your upper body will look like a large atan drum, and your legs will look like the drum’s stick.” We laughed, but he did not. He stopped coming on the days when we did thigh exercises.
On the days he did come, though, we exercised and talked about many things, made jokes and listened to Mullah Ghafar. He could not say enough about his beloved, though he had still never actually spoken to her or even knew her name.
EVEN THOUGH MULLAH GHAFAR was very friendly with us every day in the gym, we sometimes saw him with his Taliban friends walking the streets with their whips. We decided to try to plant some ideas in his head, but we knew we had to be discreet.
One day, I said something like, “According to the Holy Qur’an and the Hadiths of Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, ‘Islam’ means ‘submission to the will of God.’ To force Islam on someone would not be submission. What do you think, Mullah Ghafar?”
Then he would give us long explanations that Islam was about peace and brotherhood and sisterhood, equality and so on. Then one of the guys would ask, “But why do some of the Taliban beat women if they are on the street by themselves because they have no male relative to accompany them and they need to go somewhere urgently?”
Mullah Ghafar would smile and say things like, “Order should be kept in society. Orders should be obeyed by juniors when seniors issue them, for they are the rulers, and we work for the rulers.”
We never debated him in these issues. We knew that even though he knew more about Islam than many of his fellow Taliban, he was not broadminded. We were afraid that he would turn against us if we beat him in a debate. We kept asking him questions, though, and slipping in thoughts of our own. Slowly his behavior in the street began to change. He stopped beating men who had failed to appear in the mosque. Instead, he talked to them and warned them. He was stern with the women, but tried to be helpful to them in solving their problems. People in the neighborhood began to notice the change in him and preferred to deal with him when they had to do something with the Taliban.
THE SUMMER WAS coming to an end. We had slowly managed to bring some small changes to Mullah Ghafar. He started to sound a little bit urbanized when he spoke Dari. We worked on his accent, though it was not easy. Sometimes he asked us the meaning of Dari words when he saw them on signs. He could write and read Pashto a little, but not Dari.
The guys who came each day to the gym kept making the same small suggestions to Mullah Ghafar about trimming his beard and cutting his hair and changing his clothes and so on. For weeks, he ignored everything they said. Then one day, he asked us to help him trim his beard—a thing which was totally forbidden by the Taliban—and make himself look tidy. Then he let us call an old man who was a barber to come and cut his hair a little, but he insisted on wearing his hat and turban. We took him to a tailor and had a shalwar kamiz made for him that was shorter than the kind the Taliban usually wore. The tailor gave it to Mullah Ghafar as a gift. Mullah Ghafar acted as if he had never received a gift before. He kept looking at all of us and smiling.
A few days later, when he entered the gym, he handed me a cassette.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Play it. I’m sure you have a cassette player somewhere,” he said.
Before I could say anything, Zaki rushed out of the room and brought a cassette player from another part of their house, though it was forbidden. He put the cassette in it. To our amazement, the tape was full of good Indian songs that had been sung by Shah Rukh Khan in their movies. Mullah Ghafar sang along with some of the songs. We were astonished. He knew all the words in Urdu. He had a sweet voice that made the sad songs extra sad.
We pumped up the volume like we always used to do before the Taliban came and started exercising with extra energy as we talked. We made jokes and told Mullah Ghafar more things about how to talk to a city girl. Mullah Ghafar told a lot of jokes too.
The next day, Zaki put some of the posters back on the wall. By then we knew that Mullah Ghafar was not so ignorant and naïve as to believe everything we had told him. When he asked us who those guys in the photos were, we explained that they were movie actors. He did not understand. That was when we discovered that he had never seen a movie.
FOR NEARLY TWO weeks, there was only one thing that we talked about on the days when we did thigh exercises and Mullah Ghafar did not come to the gym. Mullah Ghafar had never seen a movie. After long discussions, we decided to take a very big risk and show him a video cassette of movie, so he could understand what we were talking about. We believed by then that we could trust him, and that he would not report us, though some of the guys were nervous.
We wondered which movie should be his first one. Zaki and I eventually chose Rambo III from the back room of his shop, which by then he had relocated to his old location where he had lots of customers. The film was made in Afghanistan and shows Afghans fighting against the Russians.
The next day when Mullah Ghafar arrived, we told him that we had a big surprise for him. We gave him tea and some of the good snuff from Zaki’s shop and made sure he was very comfortable in a large soft chair that we had brought to the gym. Then we drew a cloth off of the TV that we had set up in the gym, and put the video cassette into the player. The image of Rambo filled the screen.
Mullah Ghafar jumped out of his chair and said, “Look! He is that guy who killed your cousins.”
“Yes, he is,” Zaki said. “Watch, watch. But you will see that he is not such a very bad guy after all. He killed many Russians and helped the Mujahedin.”
We watched as Rambo heads to Afghanistan to rescue his American friend who had been captured by the Russians while supplying guns to the Mujahedin fighting them. We had to explain the story to Mullah Ghafar as it went along, since we had all seen it many times before. Even though we did not know much English, we had figured out what was happening.
When Rambo first arrives, the Mujahedin do not know what to make of him. The next day, however, Rambo leads an attack against the Russians—and then another and another and another. Hundreds of Russians get killed, but Rambo only gets wounded and keeps on fighting. He rescues his friend, then gets trapped by the Russians only to be rescued himself by the Mujahedin who have come to respect him. Throughout the movie, there is nothing but violence, killings and endless explosions. Mullah Ghafar was overwhelmed as Rambo repeatedly survived the impossible. He did not say a word during the entire movie. His mouth was half open as he was staring at the TV in bewilderment.
The movie ends. Rambo says goodbye to the Mujahedin and leaves Afghanistan to go home. By then, Mullah Ghafar was so impressed by what he had seen that he said very enthusiastically to my friend, “I am very sorry for your relatives who died, but this man Rambo is not a killer. He is a fighter for a good cause, a real Mujahedin. Where is he? I want to see him and thank him for what he did for this country.”
It took us couple hours to explain the concept of a movie, of acting and of actors.
“What we saw was not real?” he kept repeating, surprised and disappointed.
“No,” we told him, and then he would ask us again. We had first seen Mullah Ghafar as a Talib with a whip, but now we knew he was just a young guy from a village who had never had a chance to learn many things about the world. We were slowly coming to understand that many of the other Taliban were the same. Some did wicked things because that made them happy. But many of them just did not seem to know any better. Though it did not make me like the Taliban, at least it helped me understand them a little better.
He said, “Nothing seems to be what you think it is—not this war in this country, not that man in that box who killed so many infidel Russians. And now I’m having doubts about my beloved.”
Zaki said kindly, “Your love is true. But I doubt that she will ever love you because you’ll never meet her family’s expectations, no matter what you do or what you become. You two grew up in totally different circumstances.”
Mullah Ghafar’s face filled with sadness.
One of the guys tried to cheer him up by suggesting, “You can always marry her by force, like so many other Taliban and warlords who did the same and are doing everyday.”
Zaki glared at him as Mullah Ghafar replied in a sad voice. “No, I don’t want a forced marriage. I could have done that long ago. I don’t want her to hate me. I want her to love me as much as I love her. But now I know it is not possible. I just have to forget about my love and find a new life.”
“What do you mean?” one of our friends asked.
“I want to start all over again. I want to learn how to read and write. I want to get a job. I want to move my family from Helmand to Kabul and encourage my younger brothers to get an education. Now I know that education is the key to a better future. It is maybe too late for me to get a good education like you guys, but it is still not too late for my younger brothers to start. I may have lost my chance at life, but I don’t want my younger brothers to lose theirs.”
We nodded. We felt both happy and sad for him. Happy, because we had made him understand some things. Sad, because he felt so heartbroken about the woman he loved so much.
FOR A FEW MORE months, Mullah Ghafar kept coming to Zaki’s house, though not on a regular basis and not to exercise. He came whenever he wanted to talk or spend some time with us. He never mentioned the girl he loved again. Then one day when the first cold wind of the autumn was blowing across Kabul, he came to say goodbye. He told us that he was going to Helmand to talk with his family about moving to Kabul. One by one, he hugged us, and then he left. We never saw him again.
Slowly, though, stories about him began to circulate around the neighborhood and then all over Kabul. Mullah Ghafar became famous for wanting Rambo’s gun, even though most people who told the story did not know his name. Somebody from Australia even mentioned him in a television series and claimed that Zaki had been put in jail, though that was not so.
Zaki closed his shop after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul and every other shop owner could sell openly what he had been selling secretly. Then we stopped seeing him on the street. Some guys said he had moved to Germany. Others said he had gone to Karachi. His family by then had moved to another part of Kabul.
That is how things are in Afghanistan. We never know how stories end.