In My Father's Country (2 page)

The food got cold while his friends sat around the big marble table, awaiting the return of their host. He never came back. Not that day or ever. I was too young to know what was going on, but Mamai and my uncles were crazy with worry—how could a grown man disappear in the middle of the day, out of his front door? No one seemed to know anything about it, and several family friends distanced themselves to the point of shutting doors in my uncles’ faces, and telling them there was nothing they could do to help us. My father had been sold out by his countrymen, who were collaborating with the KGB. Several days later word arrived from one of my father’s friends that my father had been taken to Pul-i-charkhi, the infamous prison on the outskirts of Kabul, for questioning.

What questions? Mamai wanted to know. She was frantic. But even in that more modern part of Afghanistan, a woman would never be allowed to visit a prison with her small children. Instead, every week my uncle would take my father a change of clothes and his favorite food. This went on for many weeks. Then one day my uncle showed up at the prison, at what had become his regular time, and the guard told him that there was no one there with my father’s name, Taher. Mamai’s nightmare recurred: My father had vanished again.

For a while, we remained in our large house in Kabul, hoping my father would return or that at least someone would bring us news of him. Khalid and I took to standing all day at the second-floor window, in order to be the first ones to spot him coming home. Najiba was still a babe in arms. Perhaps because she felt Mamai’s anguish, she cried a lot.

That December, in 1979, Russian tanks openly rolled into Kabul.
Every day jets tore the sky overhead. We would hear their sharp hissing, then an eerie moment of silence, then explosions that shook the walls of our house and hurt our ears. At the time, our house was one of only a few two-story houses in Kabul, and whenever we heard the piercing squeal of the jets I was sure that our house was the logical target for the bombs, and that it was going to collapse on our heads at any moment.

Amid the chaos of the Russian invasion, we held out hopes that our father would somehow return, restoring us to a complete family, ready to make plans to survive the Soviet invasion together. No word ever came. With each passing week, Kabul became more and more dangerous. My Baba, my father’s father, wanted us to come to his village, just a few hours away from Kabul, but Mamai resisted. She tossed and turned at night, worrying that if we left the city, my father wouldn’t know where to find us, which was a silly fear since we had nowhere else to go but Baba’s village. Eventually, Baba, who was gentle but persistent, convinced Mamai that we had to go. In Kabul, children were starting to go missing. Baba said that if she didn’t leave, she would lose her children. One day the front door would be unlocked and someone would snatch us.

It was rumored that the Russians had started kidnapping children my brother’s age—Khalid was six—and sending them to the Soviet Union to train them to be spies for the KGB. After several little boys disappeared from our own neighborhood, Mamai had to accept that Baba was right. We packed up very few belongings and left.

Khalid was at the age when Afghan mothers begin to entertain the hope that their child might survive to adulthood, to marry and have children. Pashtuns believe that at this point a child is old enough to be separated from his mother, if necessary. Some uncles on my father’s side were heading across the border to Pakistan and took Khalid with them. There he would begin his schooling. Later I would learn that schooling was actually not the deciding factor for sending Khalid off to another country without us. The Russian soldiers were especially ruthless in killing off male children because they didn’t want these young boys to grow up and pick up weapons against the Soviet regime. Mamai, Najiba, and I went to live with Baba in Ghazni Province, where both my parents were born.

My grandfather was the mullah of his village, the religious authority and most esteemed elder. During the late seventies, mullahs were still respected and well liked by communities, and as such he was the true
speen gerai
—“white-bearded one”—that I would, almost twenty years later, seek out in each village I visited. He was an accomplished learner and teacher—he taught the male children in the village and at home taught my aunts how to write their names. He had traveled to Saudi Arabia to memorize the Koran. He would make us read it every evening and would translate into Pashtu the parts that he wanted to point out to us, since we could only read the Arabic. Because he was our elder, our Baba, I never knew his name when I was growing up, and it would have been disrespectful to ask. I never knew my own last name until I moved to America. People would ask what my last name was, and I would be confused, thinking they were asking me for a name I had had before. I would say,
But I’ve always been Saima; that is what I was called last, too!

Baba was no taller than five feet six, but when I was a little girl, he seemed like a tower. He always wore
shalwar kameez
, a white cotton turban, and a light-brown
patu
, a shawl worn by men. Even now, as you pass through villages all over Afghanistan, you can see men squatting by the side of the road, their
patus
tossed casually over their shoulders. It’s an unsettling sight for the American soldiers, as
patus
are often used by suicide bombers to hide explosives strapped to their chests. But when I was five, I used to go snuggle in Baba’s
patu
and feel invincible, like nothing—not even the Russian bombs falling from the skies—could touch me.

We arrived in the village as winter was approaching. I remember a wonderful fur coat that Baba wore. Against the bitter, bone-chilling cold of Afghanistan, that fur coat was the only defense he had. He was the only man I had ever seen in a fur coat; he had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and so on, so that no one remembered the original owner. It was gold and cream-colored, probably sheep shearling. I could pet his arm for hours, it was so wonderfully soft. In the evening, after he’d spent the day teaching the boys, he would call
Najiba and me, open his coat wide, and let us crawl into his warm embrace. He told us stories. He asked after our day. He teased us. Two little girls receiving the love and undivided attention of the most respected man in the village was unheard-of in Pashtun culture.

At best, Pashtun parenting can be described as benign neglect. Children are largely ignored until it’s time for them to do something for their parents. A son is barely spoken to until he reaches the age of fifteen and is told to go to Saudi Arabia or some other Gulf country to get a job and make some money. A daughter receives less attention than the cow in the yard, which at least needs to be milked every morning; then one day, when she’s thirteen or fourteen, she’s told that she’s going to marry somebody on Friday. Her opinion in the matter is irrelevant.

But Baba was different. In Afghanistan most people aren’t too concerned with what kids eat, but Baba used to make us eat our vegetables because, he said, they were good for us. Carrots, he said, were good for our eyesight. When I complained, he reminded me how important it was to have good vision so I could see the Russians coming and hide before they found me.

Perhaps his attention was an outgrowth of the pity he felt for Najiba and me having lost our father, but he displayed the same generosity to the villagers who worked his land. Even though most of the village belonged to him, and he would have been within his rights to collect food and rent from the people who lived there, he allowed them to keep the food they grew for their own families. God likes us to work for ourselves, he would say, so out into the fields he would go, growing the food to feed us. If he was too busy with the school or something else to get out to the fields to pick vegetables for our meal, we simply went without.

His favorite dish was
kadu
, sweet pumpkin. Sauté some onion, add fresh chopped pumpkin, milk, and sugar, and you have the worst-tasting dish on planet Earth—well, that’s how I felt about it at age five. Now I ask my mom to make it for me in the rainy Oregon winter because it makes me feel warm inside. One day Baba brought home a donkey loaded down with as many pumpkins as it could possibly
carry. At the sight of it I started to cry. Were we going to have to eat all of those pumpkins? I asked Baba when he inquired what was wrong. He laughed and told me he would give some of them away if I would just stop crying. He gave a few armfuls to one of his friends, but there were still too many as far as I was concerned. I begged his friend to take more—the fewer pumpkins, the less
kadu
we had to eat. For weeks afterward whenever a guest came to the house hoping to be lucky enough to eat some of my grandmother’s famous
kadu
, Baba would laughingly confess that I had made him give all of our pumpkins away.

At the end of every autumn Afghans butcher one or two of their animals and hang the meat to dry. With no refrigeration, drying ensures that meat doesn’t go bad, and it gets the family through the long winter ahead. When Najiba and I first arrived from Kabul we were so miserable, so lost. We didn’t know where our father had gone, or why our mother was so heartbroken, and we cried all the time. To comfort us, Baba gave us a lamb to play with. The lamb became our pet. He followed us everywhere, just like in the American nursery rhyme. When the day came to butcher him, Najiba and I were hysterical. Baba took our hands and tried to explain to us about meat, about the reality of our lives. He even tried to use my dislike of
kadu
, saying that since we wouldn’t eat his sweet pumpkin, we
had
to eat lamb. Najiba begged him to take one of the donkeys instead. We would happily eat the donkey. He laughed and explained to us that donkey meat was
haram
, forbidden. In the end, he gave us a few days to say good-bye, and then the lamb disappeared.

We lived in Baba’s village for a year. There were bombs being dropped on our village day and night, causing an ever-present layer of dust to settle on everything, no matter how often Mamai and Grandmother cleaned. As the days passed and my father failed to materialize, Mamai grew increasingly certain that she was going to live the rest of her life as a widow. When I tell my close American friends the story of what happened to my parents, how my mother became a widow with three children before she was even thirty years old, they feel sad for me. Sadder for me, however, is the reality that my mother was only one of thousands
of Afghan women who were dealt the same fate as a result of the Russian invasion.

Mamai moved slowly, in a state of shock, unable to believe that her husband, who had carried their children on his shoulders around the house and who loved to cook with her, would never return. She looked at us, but I knew she didn’t really see us, her mind off in happier times. Having our grandparents was a blessing, not just for us but for her, because it gave her time to adjust to the harsh reality of her new life. The only time she became alive was when we would hear the sounds of the jets, because we all knew that bombs would follow within seconds. She would grab my hand, throw Najiba on her hip, and run fast for shelter in the small caves that pocketed the surrounding hills as the bombs rained down from the sky.

Even with all of the bombs dropped and mines left by the Russians, I felt safer in the village than in Kabul. Baba protected us the best he could. I felt he was so divine that God would watch out for him and, by extension, us. But more than that, he gave us so much attention and love that for hours I could forget where I was and what had happened and simply enjoy the serenity of his company.

Then the day came when my grandfather realized that life in the village had gotten too dangerous. He made the painful decision that Pashtuns dread more than death: He would leave the land that had belonged to our family for as many generations as could be traced back. He did it, however, to keep his word to my father—that his daughters would be allowed to have a life different from the one we were destined for.

For our journey out of our forefathers’ land, Baba secured camels for Najiba and me. But we were city girls. We rode in cars and electric buses. We had never seen a camel and were terrified of them. They were impatient, irritable. They pawed the dust with their giant feet. We rocked back and forth toward the mountain trail that would take us to the border. I remember looking back at Najibas, thinking her camel was trying to bite my back as it got close to mine, and I screamed, “It’s trying to eat me!” Had we been boys, my grandfather would have yelled at us for shrieking and acting up, but we were fatherless daughters, homeless half-orphans.
So he found a couple of donkeys the next day, and we were hoisted onto their backs. They were much gentler, even bored with the task of taking us to join Khalid and our family in Peshawar, Pakistan.

We were part of a small caravan that consisted of our family, our two camels, our two donkeys, and several other donkeys that belonged to families from the village. There was safety in numbers, but too large a group trying to cross the mountains into Pakistan would draw the attention of the Russian jets, which were known to bomb whole caravans, killing every man, woman, and child in them. The danger was so great that we traveled during the night and slept in caves and holes in the ground during the day. The lucky ones were the refugees who would find hosts in the villages on the way to Pakistan, who would give them a bite to eat and a place to sleep for a few hours.

The trip from Ghazni to Peshawar now takes just hours by car, but it took us over ten days and was a consistently grueling journey, during which we didn’t know if we would make it to the next day. Crossing the vast desert and mountains with Russian jets often flying overhead, we were terrified that our end was near. I remember hearing the jets far away, and shutting my eyes tightly, hoping that if I couldn’t see them, the Russians couldn’t see me either. Miraculously, we found our way to the rest of our family in Pakistan. But the journey that began my new life was spent with my eyes tightly shut, hanging on to the back of a donkey, fearing that if I opened my eyes, I would be bombed to pieces.