Dancing in the Mosque Read online

  For two years, we held our breath, unaware that this lull would soon be followed by a storm of discord and civil war.

  My fondest memories belong to a time after the Russian retreat. In those days, we took short excursions to Kababian village, where I ran in the meadows with no fear of bombs. This village where Nanah-jan had spent her childhood was a place I could let my mind roam free in childhood fantasies. We went twice each year, once during the mulberry season and again in the fall when the wheat was cut and threshed.

  When the mulberries were ripe, I would spend all day up among their leafy branches, picking the ripe red and milk-white mulberries. The sparrows were my rivals, stealing my harvest. I ate my fill before the birds arrived. Except sometimes it was the other way around.

  The women spread their shawls beneath the trees. We children would climb like monkeys, kicking and shaking the branches, so the mulberries would fall like purple and white snow in the scarves stretched to collect them below.

  Women would put the collected mulberries in baskets that were then lowered in the clear flowing stream so the water would cool them.

  Afterward, the village women sat in the shade, leaning their heads together and gossiping while they ate the cool, ripe berries and doogh, a yogurt drink. And I hid in the branches above them, eavesdropping on their small talk and chirping with the sparrows.

  Once in a while, Madar would call me. “Sparrow, come down now.”

  “Madar, the sparrows are protesting. They are complaining that we have picked all the ripe berries and left nothing for them.”

  “Homeira, tell the sparrows to stop complaining. They have wings and can fly from tree to tree, wherever their desires take them. Tell them, child, that the sun is shining and will soon ripen more berries for them.”

  I tried to explain to the birds exactly what Madar had told me, but they just chirped their protests and blinked their beady eyes at me. “Madar!” I said. “I understand what they are saying. I just can’t speak to them.”

  Madar’s laughter rose among the shiny leaves. “Understanding them is not enough, my daughter. You should be able to speak to them as well.”

  My six-year-old brother Mushtaq chimed in, “Yes, Homeira, you must be able to speak to the birds. Everyone knows what they are saying.”

  “And you know how to speak to them, I suppose?” I said to him in astonishment.

  “Yes, look,” Mushtaq said. He took off his shoe and threw it up into the branches. The sparrows exploded into the sky in a noisy cloud. “That’s how you speak to them!”

  In Nanah-jan’s village, my favorite pastime was to slip away in the heat of the afternoon and explore the narrow streets. I believed that one of those narrow streets would turn a corner and I would suddenly end up in the round part of the earth.

  Madar told me that the world was divided between light and darkness, the night on one side and day on the other. One day I searched and searched that labyrinth of streets to find an alley where one half was in darkness and the other half in light.

  Pale and out of breath, I finally reached home just as the crescent moon was suspended above the high walls of the compound.

  “I was searching for the other end of the world, Madar-jan.”

  The best part of my visits to the village was riding the gardonah, the wheat-threshing wooden chassis hauled around in circles by a team of oxen over wheat sheaves spread on a floor of rammed earth. As the gardonah circled around, loosening the wheat hulls away from the harder kernels, we kids sat on the gardonah as it went around and round, our weight helping to thresh the grain. I always managed to find a place on the gardonah with the older children.

  When the wind was blowing, the chaff from under the threshing floor and the gardonah would rise in a dusty cloud, covering my face and hair. In excitement, I would burst into joyous screams. I wished that when the spinning of the gardonah came to an end, I would open my eyes on the other side of the world. My mother was always complaining about me and watched me closely. She would say, “You are a lot of trouble, Homeira. Why aren’t you like the other village girls? Why must you always be in the very middle of things?”

  Like my brother, I was a rebel, but a very different kind. Madar and Nanah-jan usually approved of his mischief. Even when he broke Nanah-jan’s winter bedroom window. Or when he would displace the broken clay pitcher that Nanah-jan had placed in the tree for the sparrows to nest in. He would say, “Let the birds struggle to find their eggs.” Nanah-jan would even tolerate Mushtaq playing with her prayer beads, using them as a harness around my neck. He would kick me saying, “Hey, lazy horse, move it.” And when I would free myself from his harness screaming and shouting, Nanah-jan would say, “It wouldn’t kill you if you let your brother play with you as his horse. He is much younger than you.” And when that same younger brother would eventually become bigger than both my sister, Zahra, who was named after my aunt, and me, he would be given a bigger share of meat at dinner. When I would say to Nanah-jan, “I want the same size piece as Mushtaq,” she would look at me and say, “Since when has a girl’s share become equal to a boy’s?”

  This kind of double-standard treatment infuriated me and led me to break rules. Even though I was a girl, I would walk swiftly and even run around the courtyard. I got a great kick out of the fact that I was able to climb a tree and Nanah-jan couldn’t climb after me to pull me down. I had learned to climb up the tree very quickly and would do everything possible to make sure I climbed a higher branch than Mushtaq. I remember always trying to climb the highest branches, and then one day I fell down from the tree. Nanah-jan shook her head with some gratification and said, “It was God’s doing.”

  I was crying. Madar lifted me up from the dusty ground. My knees were bloody and bruised. Madar said, “May God keep your destiny in safe hands. You always do things you are not supposed to.”

  Nanah-jan said, “In ancient times they would chain a girl’s feet together so that she wouldn’t stride wider and wouldn’t become a source of shame for her family.”

  I was never concerned about the chain on the feet or the family honor. I didn’t even understand what that meant. I was in my own world. Away from the eyes of my grandfather, my uncles, and my father, I would spend half the day climbing the walls with Zarghuna, the neighbor’s daughter. Whenever we would hear a knock on the front door of either house, we would jump from the wall down to the veranda. With Shakiba, our other neighbor’s daughter, we would polish our nails and hold our hands in the sun to dry. We would enjoy the sunshine on our light skin. We did this in spite of Nanah-jan’s frequent nagging that this was the behavior of girls destined for hellfire. I would convince Mahjabin, another neighbor’s daughter, to play seesaw with me. We would ride timbered logs that would definitely bring shame to the past seven generations of a girl’s family and stain the honor of the mothers in any household. Years later, when Mahjabin was rejected and returned to her family by her husband because her virginity wasn’t intact, Nanah-jan fainted by the side of the wall and said, “May God save the destiny of this other log rider.”

  In those days I committed my own sins and led the neighborhood girls to commit theirs. Especially on days when we couldn’t reach the raw grapes on the trellis. I would persuade the other girls to hold the bricks and climb like cats so our hands could reach the raw grapes that we loved so much. Mushtaq called me “the frightening creeper climber.”

  “You have a thousand feet, but you won’t be able to step outside of the four walls of this house,” he would say.

  I remember when he was not quite a teenager, I said to him, “I would leave the house even if I didn’t have feet to walk on.”

  He said, “Where would you go?”

  I said, “To the other side of the world, far away from you.”

  We loved each other even though my share of the meat never became the same size as his.

  My reputation as a troublemaker lives on, even all these years and miles away. It was just the other day that Mushtaq
messaged me: You always wanted to be on the other side of the planet. Now that you are there, are you happy? Is there anything else you are wishing for?

  I sent him a message in return: I wish there was a magic gardonah that I could ride on and it would spin and spin until I am on your side of the world once again.

  He wrote back immediately: Girl, you need to settle down in one place. One day, with all this spinning around and around, you will become so dizzy that you will lose yourself altogether.

  My little Siawash,

  As I am thousands of miles away from you, and your father doesn’t even let me talk to you on the phone or through a video call, I begged my mother to go to Kabul four months ago to see you and represent me in the courtroom. For going to such a place is taboo. She doesn’t like to walk in the hallways among people who condemn women, always, as guilty. If the ignominy of her daughter’s divorce wasn’t bad enough, she now has to endure further suffering in these courts of shame. But Madar entered this realm of injustice without hesitation, on my behalf, and on behalf of motherhood.

  At two thirty in the morning in California, I heard the court verdict on the phone line with my own ears. The judge said in a commanding voice:

  “This woman is no longer a mother. There is no need for the mother and child to know each other.”

  I couldn’t cry any louder. My anger shredded my heart into pieces. Is it even possible for a mother to forget her child?

  Siawash,

  No scrap of paper will ever be able to forbid me to love you.

  I told Madar to return to Herat. She did all she could—not just for her daughter, but for her daughter’s motherhood as well.

  4

  Hush—Silence!

  There were plenty of happier days in those early postwar years, too. Days in which I sat by the river, my hair gathered into two fluffy ponytails, eating a big piece of naan without needing to save any for Mushtaq. Older kids played hide-and-seek among the ruined houses, running across the roofs as night fell. For a child who had seen nothing but war and darkness, Herat was suddenly extravagant and spectacular.

  Once the Russians were gone, families began to send their children back to school to catch up on the lost years of their education. Never mind that the schools were piles of rubble, the tombs of thousands of children. If they had gates, they lacked walls. If they had walls, they didn’t have windows. Tents were set up in the school yards, steamy saunas under the blazing sun.

  I was still young enough to run carefree through the streets, playing my loud games. It was still no one’s business where I went or when I came back. I had escaped from the dark basement with its spiderwebs and unseen thunder overhead; that was all that mattered.

  Both in times of peace and times of war, reading the Qur’an has always been more important than a general education in Afghanistan, especially for girls. At a very young age, children are taken to the mosque so that a mullah can teach them Qur’an. Even if a girl couldn’t attend school, she had to study Qur’an. There were no exceptions

  When my sister, Zahra, was in first grade, my grandparents insisted that after her daily studies at Mehri Herawi High School, Zahra attend the mosque in the afternoons in order to study Qur’an from Maulawi Rashid.

  On Zahra’s first day, Nanah-jan wrapped a dozen sugared almonds in a handkerchief and walked us to the mosque. It was late afternoon and the shadows were creeping up the walls. A gentle breeze shook the leaves of the mulberry trees along the river. Holding hands, Zahra and I walked along behind Nanah-jan, as carefree as sparrows.

  When we entered the mosque, the maulawi was sitting in a corner, while the children sat before him in the courtyard holding their Qur’ans on their laps. The afternoon wind circled the walls, lifting the girls’ scarves, ruffling their hair, and fluttering the pages of their sacred texts. The girls struggled to keep their hijabs from blowing off with one hand while they held their Qur’ans open with the other. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine blooming along the walls.

  Nanah-jan greeted Maulawi Rashid. “I am from the family of Haji Sahib Faqir Ahmad Khan. I would like to have my granddaughter begin her studies here.”

  Staring at me, the maulawi scratched his beard. “But she is all grown up!”

  Nanah-jan pushed Zahra forward. “It’s already too late for my eldest granddaughter, but I brought her younger sister.”

  Zahra’s hijab had fallen to her shoulders, revealing her light brown hair and exposing her light complexion in the sunlight. The maulawi frowned. “Girl, why aren’t you wearing your shawl properly? A hijab is for covering your hair, not your neck.”

  Zahra hid behind Nanah-jan. The maulawi pointed at me. “That one is a woman. She needs to be taken care of. Next time she comes, make sure she wears a dress with long sleeves.”

  Nanah-jan gave the maulawi her handkerchief full of noqol. “Yes, Maulawi Sahib. When can Zahra begin her lessons?”

  “She can start today,” he said, never taking his eyes off me. His eyes crawled over my body while his words were directed to Nanah-jan.

  Nanah-jan smiled, tears welling up under her burqa. “God bless you, Maulawi Sahib.”

  “Learning the Qur’an isn’t important for that one,” the maulawi said, lifting his chin in my direction while his gaze never left my body. “But covering her shame is. Find her a bigger hijab to hide her hair and body. She is, what, eleven or twelve? Her breasts are beginning to show.”

  Nanah-jan nagged me all the way home. “Homeira, you will ruin our family’s honor.”

  But I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about the maulawi’s staring eyes.

  A month had passed since Zahra and Mushtaq had enrolled at the mosque. One Thursday Nanah-jan asked me to bring her water from the river for her ablutions. It was noon, the streets were empty, the shadows had disappeared beneath the walls.

  When I reached the river, the maulawi was standing in the water, his pants around his knees. I hesitated for a few seconds, then knelt on the riverbank and bent down to dip the aftabah, the pitcher, in the water. I watched the water filling it up, gohloob, gohloob, gohloob.

  Suddenly I heard hush—a very quiet hush, like a bird settling on a branch in springtime or the wind blowing through mulberry leaves. Hush. A fish blowing bubbles from deep in the river.

  Hush.

  I looked up. It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t a fish beneath the river. The maulawi was trying to get my attention:

  Hush.

  He’d tucked his shirt beneath his chin. His pants were around his knees. His hand was between his legs, rubbing himself.

  Staring straight at me, the maulawi rubbed himself, grunting and sighing.

  I turned to run away. My feet slipped out beneath me. I fell into the water. The red plastic pitcher dropped from my hands and sank. My sodden dress stuck to my body.

  Hush.

  Trembling with fear, I scrambled up the riverbank. My mind was filled with the image of that thing between the maulawi’s legs. I ran home, leaving a dark trail of water in the dusty alley. Nanah-jan was sitting in the yard next to our garden. “Where’s my water? What happened to my pitcher? Can’t a twelve-year-old do anything right these days?”

  I didn’t reply. I collapsed in a corner. Still shaking, I leaned my head on my knees. I was a small branch bent by the horror of an ugly wind.

  Nanah-jan sent Mushtaq to search for the aftabah, but he never found it.

  I hid from Nanah-jan every time I heard the adhan. I never wanted to go to the river for her.

  One day, Zahra came down with a high fever. Madar said that she should stay home from school and mosque, but studious Zahra didn’t want to miss even one day of class. Coming home at noon, her fever was worse, and her eyes had turned red. She lay down on the rug with her shoes on and slept for an hour. When she woke up, Madar gave her some medicine and fed her a bowl of lamb soup. “You must rest this afternoon, dear. If you don’t feel better by tomorrow, you shouldn’t go to school then either.�
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  Dropping her head onto her pillow, Zahra slept. Madar went out to bake bread. Engrossed in my reading, I forgot completely about my sister. “Homeira, where’s Zahra?” Madar asked when she returned to the living room.

  Zahra was gone. We searched the whole house. Her Qur’an was missing as well. “She must have gone to the mosque,” Madar said. “She is always afraid of being whipped for missing class.” Madar covered my hair with my hijab. “Go! Bring your sister back; she is too sick to be going anywhere.”

  I didn’t want to face that maulawi, but I had no choice. Madar blamed me for not watching Zahra; I had to go after her.

  Stupid girl! I said to myself. This was the wrong time to burrow your nose in a book. Wrapping myself in my shawl, I ran down the street, terrified that I would have to speak to the maulawi.

  My steps slowed as I neared the mosque. The hot sun was heavy on my head. The mosque’s courtyard was empty. There was no one around to help me. The maulawi had probably taken the children inside because of the heat. Wrapping my shawl tighter around my body, I entered the mosque, filled with dread. Inside, I hesitated. I could hear the children chanting surahs from farther within, a hubbub of mumbled Arabic. I waited a few minutes by the entrance, gathering my courage. Then I heard Zahra. She was crying. I rushed inside.

  The boys were sitting on one side of the mosque, their bodies swaying as they chanted. Mushtaq looked up, surprised to see me. A curtain hung in the middle of the room. Zahra’s crying was coming from the other side.

  All the boys were staring at me. In a soft voice, I asked where Maulawi Sahib was. They pointed to the curtain. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the curtain aside. I saw Zahra and another girl lying next to each other on the carpet, their trouser cuffs rolled down past their knees and their legs raised in the air. I was shocked. The maulawi held a thin stick raised above his head. His other hand was fondling the other girl’s thigh. Maulawi Rashid startled when he saw me. He snatched his hand away. “What do you want, older sister? How dare you barge into God’s house like this.”