FOR DAYS we had heard shouts, scuffling and banging sounds from the room in the school where the girls were rehearsing. “You are all infidels!” was one cry that I often heard when I walked past. I was preparing for the coming visit to the refugee camp of a delegation of European parliamentarians. Sometimes I thought the girls were busier than Ameena and I were.
Neither Ameena nor I was allowed to enter the room. Little Shamms was always warning me to stay away. He had managed to get himself mixed up in the girls’ preparations for the play that they would put on for the visitors. The girls he knew as his sisters tried to give him a part in the play, but he was always forgetting his lines—he would stop short and ask, “What do I say now?”—so they gave up and used him as an assistant instead.
The girls were aged between seven and fourteen. They were from very poor families, but they were not short of ideas. Day after day, often several times a day, they sent us Shamms as their messenger to request something for the play.
After he had knocked at my door a dozen times—he always knew when I was in because he could spot my shoes outside the door—I pulled Shamms’s leg: “Tell me the truth,” I said. “You are the one responsible for all this, aren’t you?”
He looked pleased, but he shook his head. “No, no, the older children are,” he said.
“I am sure that without you, this play would not be possible,” I said.
Shamms ran away, fighting hard to hide a big grin.
They borrowed turbans from traditional families, boys’ clothes, a whip that we had made out of plastic and rope for a previous play. For each request, I had to write a note for Shamms to deliver. He didn’t know how to read, but he quickly realized the power that these notes gave him, and he would fold them up twice, very neatly, and place them in the breast pocket of his shirt. He loved feeling like a Very Important Person.
“The older children” even wanted a dozen Kalashnikovs. I wrote to one of the security guards at the camp to lend just one to the children—and would he please make sure there were no bullets in it. One Kalashnikov would have to be enough. It would have symbolic value.
“Are you happy, Shamms?” I asked him one day. “Is everyone treating you with respect?”
“Yes, they are,” he answered, puffing out his little chest.
Shamms informed me that now “the older children” needed me to summon a male supporter who could play the electronic organ to accompany them when they sang. The man was busy with other commitments, but I eventually gave in and asked him to come.
On the day the delegation arrived, the children were in a frenzy. As soon as Ameena and I sat down with the visitors to talk to them about the camp, Shamms knocked on the door and sidled up to me.
“Auntie, when are they coming to our school?” he asked me in a whisper.
I shooed him away, telling him sternly that if he bothered us again I would report him to his teacher.
Late that afternoon, there was hardly an hour left before the visitors would have to leave, and I was still showing them around. They couldn’t stay later, as it was getting dark, and Peshawar was no place to travel around at night. There were many other things I wanted to show them in the camp, but I decided to take them to see the play because the children would have been immensely disappointed if I had failed to do so.
When we entered the schoolyard, we were greeted by two rows of girls who showered us with petals of flowers as a sign of greeting. We all took our seats—on the small chairs taken from the classrooms—in front of the stage, which was made of dried mud. When it rained heavily, the stage had to be rebuilt.
Shamms was running around looking very busy. His clothes had been washed and ironed. He had taken a shower and had also washed his hair. I saw him carefully running a comb through his fringe and grabbed him “You’ll be needing some perfume next,” I teased. “You are becoming like the girls. Don’t forget that you are a boy.” He grimaced and twisted himself free.
I went up to the stage and tried to get behind the curtain. I caught a glimpse of some beards and some veils before the girls stopped me, saying I must not see anything.
I promised not to look but demanded that they tell me what they were going to show us. Despite their protests, I had to cancel several of the sketches, songs, and poems they had prepared because there was so little time.
After what seemed to me to be a very long wait, a hand appeared to pull the curtain open, and the show began. A teenager gave a short speech thanking the foreign guests for coming to the camp. Again, another long wait as some bumping sounds came from behind the curtain.
I suddenly realized that I had no idea what we were about to see. Surely I should have insisted on seeing a rehearsal, I thought.
The curtain parted to reveal Osama bin Laden—or rather, a girl who was dressed in the white robes of a Saudi Arabian, with a beard cut out of a black rubbish bag stuck to her cheeks. Bin Laden was silent and spent his time staring down at the stage. He was surrounded by fawning Taliban guards in their turbans, also wearing beards. The girls’ clothes were deliberately dirtied, to make them as filthy as the ones the Taliban wore. One of the guards carried the Kalashnikov, and I could see that the girl was afraid of it.
As another girl translated for the visitors, the Taliban burst in on a class in which the children were learning English.
“What is this?” the Taliban exclaimed in deep voices, holding a book upside down to show they were illiterate. “What are you being taught? Do you want to become infidels and prostitutes?”
The Taliban arrested the children, their parents, and the teacher and dragged them before bin Laden. “Cut their heads off,” he commanded, without looking up.
But the teacher, together with the children, fought back against the Taliban, pulling at their beards, kicking and slapping them. Bags of red ink exploded on the stomachs of the Taliban, but the beatings looked as if they were for real.
When the Taliban realized they were being overrun, they turned against bin Laden, shouting at him, “Get out of our country!” He fled from the stage, humiliated, his robe flapping around his legs.
After a few songs and poems that were against both the Taliban and their fundamentalist enemies in the Northern Alliance, the curtain closed again to loud applause from us all. I felt proud of the children because they had done this on their own. Their play was childish, but it was a powerful message of resistance and of defiance against a terrorist whom the West had labeled the world’s most wanted man. Even the Taliban, if defeated, would rid themselves of bin Laden as fast as they could, the children were saying.
For days afterward, the girls had strips of black stuck to their cheeks. The glue they had used was so strong that it was some time before they looked normal again.
NO ONE in the refugee camp was sorry to see the Taliban defeated. But no one rejoiced when the Taliban fled Kabul and the fighters of the Northern Alliance, which was made up of several veteran Mujahideen groups, took over the capital. Across the camp, people said, “Condolences,” to one another and shook their heads, as if someone had died in the family. We all knew that although they now spoke of democracy, elections, and even women’s rights, the Northern Alliance leaders who had taken power had blood on their hands. They were the same warlords who had bombed their own people in the early 1990s.
I spoke to three widows who live together in the camp. All three of them had lost their husbands to the Mujahideen. “What can we do now?” they asked me. “We have lost all the hope we had that one day we would be able to go back home.” They had been counting on the return of the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, once the Taliban were defeated.
No one told me they wanted to return to Afghanistan. Some men of the Hazara tribe—the tribe Shamms belongs to—told me that if they returned to Kabul now, their eyes would be gouged out by the men of the Northern Alliance, or their necks would be cut with the technique of “the Dance of the Dead Body.” Some refugees said that now the world was watching Afghanistan, perhaps these crimes would not be repeated.
In the days that followed, more refugees arrived at the camp. They had endured the American offensive, but now that the warlords had returned, they had fled because they had not forgotten the crimes committed only a few years earlier and feared that their daughters would be raped.
Whatever their promises, I do not believe that the Northern Alliance will bring peace and democracy to my country. The only goal of each faction is to have power for itself, and none of them are ready to share it. A civil war is the most likely outcome. Only a United Nations force could end the wars in my country by disarming all the warlords and overseeing free elections. And only a democratic and secular government could guarantee human rights, including women’s rights.
THERE IS a very old song of Afghan folklore that I have always liked. It is in Pashto, and the refrain says, “I am ready to die for my love, but I want my love to be ready to die for my country.”
I was stunned when I learned that Farah, who had studied at the school with me and then joined RAWA, was to marry a boy who had been chosen for her by her father. When Farah told me she was engaged, I could not believe it. The boy was studying in the madrassa Islamic school, and she barely knew him.
“How can you do this?” I asked her. “Do you know what it means, the fact that he studies in the madrassa?”
“If he goes to the madrassa, it’s because his parents want him to,” Farah said simply.
I thought that love—and I doubted this was real love—was not enough. “How can you be sure that this boy will respect you, if he is being taught in such a school? Have you forgotten all the ideas you were taught, and that you tried to spread among our people? I never expected this of you,” I said.
She was silent.
There could be no greater gap between two different worlds than that between the boy’s school and the school where Farah had been taught about women’s rights and freedom throughout her teenage years. At the very least she knew that she should be the one to choose her husband, not her father.
Farah was betraying her principles. Perhaps she had grown tired of our work. Perhaps she was no longer prepared to risk her life, and she was seeking a normal life instead with a home, a husband, and children.
I do not want to give birth to a child. If there is one thing I have learned from my own life and from the refugee camp, it is that you can love a child even if it does not come from your womb. It is not important that the child is of your own blood. What is important is that you bring it up properly and love it. There are too many orphaned or abandoned children whose only home is the street. Perhaps I could adopt one of them.
I HAVE NEVER SEEN Shamms cry. He still doesn’t know that his parents are dead, and he never asks us what happened to them. But a couple of the teachers have seen him cry a few times as he lies in his bed. They ask him why he is crying, but he never tells them the reason. We dread him asking about his parents and hope he will not ask for a while yet.
One day we will tell Shamms the truth about them and about his fourteen sisters. It may be left to me to do this, when he is about ten years old. I have no idea how I will tell him. Perhaps I will say that many people have lost their parents in the war, and that although we cannot have our parents back, we can have our country back. Perhaps I will tell him about my own parents, about the example that they gave me. But I will never forget that I was lucky enough to spend much more time with my parents than he did with his, that they taught me much more than his parents ever could, and that I have always had Grandmother.
I keep Mother’s white nightshirt in my room. Sometimes I take it out and press it to my face. I have never forgiven the men responsible for the deaths of my parents and of so many of my people. I cannot even begin to imagine forgiving them. If these men were to be taken before a court, I would like to see them punished not only for the deaths of my parents but also for all the crimes they have committed against my country.
When I think of my parents, I think of what they wanted me to accomplish. They did not want a daughter who would think only about herself. Sometimes, but not often, I wish that I could show them what I am doing. I know that I have not done enough in my life so far, and sometimes this saddens me, and I hope I will achieve something in the future.
But I am grateful that I was never alone. Grandmother was there when I lost my parents, and now she has come to live in the refugee camp where I sometimes work to be closer to me. “I didn’t want to stay in an empty house all on my own,” she said to me when she moved to the camp.
She is now in her seventies. She still reads the Koran and prays, using the same beads she had when I was a child. But because of the pain in her back and in her feet, she is no longer strong enough to stand up during the prayer, so she simply rocks backward and forward, touching the carpet with her forehead.
When I am away for a few weeks, she gets very little sleep. She is angry with me when I return, and tries not to speak to me to show her anger. She is very weak and very tired. She cries a little and says that if she cannot see me more often, she might as well die. She would like to see me every week.
I apologize to her. I tell her that I love her and that I cannot stop my work. Soon she breaks into a smile and asks Allah to forgive me for what I put her through. She pulls me over so that I can rest my head in her lap, and massages my head. I still have the little red knife she gave me when we celebrated my birthday in the shelter. When I can, I bring her some perfume.
I cannot imagine living any other kind of life than the one I have chosen. When RAWA sends me to Kabul or anywhere else, I do not go because I have to, but because I believe in what I am doing. I thought a great deal before choosing this kind of life, and I will not go back on that decision.
I have learned to live with fear. When you believe that danger is always present, you no longer feel the fear.
When I travel to the West, I never forget that my friends are in danger. I am always so worried, so sad, and feel under so much pressure that I never really enjoy the places I go to. I know that they are beautiful. When I was a child, I read about ancient Rome in the history books, and I remember seeing pictures of the Colosseum. I have been to Italy six times, but I have never gone inside the Colosseum. I would love to go, but not now.
Before I left Afghanistan, I thought my future was very dark, that there was no hope of a better life for me or for my country. I thought that my people were exhausted after suffering war for so many years. They had thrown out the Russians, but they no longer had the strength to rise up against the fundamentalists. But the school I went to gave me hope. It taught me that education and respect for the rights of both men and women could change society. I am a little over twenty years old, and my greatest desire is that peace returns to my country. I wonder whether, after more than twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan, the world has understood the real nature of fundamentalism, whether I will again hear the sounds of foreign soldiers marching into my country, of the Kalashnikov, of people crying. But I know that I will never lose hope and that I will continue to battle for the ideals I believe in, the ideals for which Meena, the founder of RAWA, sacrificed her life.
If peace returns to my country, I would like to go back and walk the destroyed streets of Kabul, the sun shining not on a burqa but on my face. I would think not of the past but of the future. I would show Shamms the streets of my childhood, take him into my house, and teach him how to fly a kite from our roof. And I would tease him when the kite slipped from his grasp and flew away on its own, higher than the mountains.