7:20am
Samira pulled the handle, but it was locked. She tapped her fingernails on the solid wood door. No answer. She knocked lightly. Putting her ear to the door she heard a man grunting. She knocked harder and rapidly. She wished in these moments she knew more english. “Kawka Ian?” she called. She was so excited. It is an honor to be the one who serves breakfast to the guest. She smiled. He is a funny man, she thought. He sometimes performs what he says, talks with his hands, makes crazy faces in class. He leaves his cups all over the house, though, which drives the housekeeper crazy. Still, she doesn’t think he is so bad. He noticed when she first wore her new dress, black with gold trim. She had tied her equally black hair into a special braid, and woven within it a piece of gold elastic. “Beseyar Maghbol!” he exclaimed. “You are queen Cleopatra of Egypt.” Samira shook her head and said in her ungainly deep, hen-pecking voice, “Nay!” But secretly she wanted to believe him. Now she gave his door three good raps. What is he doing? she thought. It is not like him to be so rude. I will make him laugh and he will come out. Thinking this way she eagerly started pounding on the door. She listened for a few moments. She thought she heard water running, but that could have been the girl’s bathroom that was right next to her. She knocked and knocked and jerked on the handle. Other girls gathered around; she explained that tea was ready, and the milk was hot but cooling fast. She leaned against the door and began to monotonously knock to the tempo of her “A,B,Cs”.
I was almost done with my twenty-minute yoga routine when she first tried the door. This workout is the only exercise I get all day. It loosens the cobwebs before my first class. Being in shorts and shirtless, I was not exactly presentable in terms of a conservative Islamic Republic, nor was I inclined to dress before showering. At times like that I wished I had more grasp of the language. Samira hadn’t made much of an effort in english. There was something holding her back. Everything I thought to say in dari seemed rude to me. I’d heard countless girls ignore such knocking before, in much more dire circumstances. I figured Samira would come back later. I disappeared into the bathroom and started pouring water into a bucket. Fifteen minutes later I emerged wrapped in a towel and she was still at it. Not only was she knocking, it seemed to me she was pointedly trying to annoy me. I dried off and dressed quickly, but before opening the door I took a moment to check my attitude. I smoothed my shirt, thought of how innocent the children truly are, and turned the handle. There in the hall stood six or seven of them, but no Samira. “Samira?” I said in a singsong voice. I stepped out of my room. “Samira?” I heard a little giggle. She was there, hiding behind the opened door. I smiled, and in the friendliest, gentlest voice I could muster I explained to her through pantomime and translation (thanks to one of the older girls) that if she tries my door and it is locked, she should leave it be. If open, she may of course enter. I may as well have lowered the boom. Before I could turn my head she collapsed to the floor. “Sameeeraaa…” I tried right away to make her lighten up. No good. She buried her face in her hands and uncontrollably wept.
The distance between standing and falling is slim. When Samira falls it is like going home. Her mother died in childbirth. She imagines a mother in much the same way she imagines having a child herself, a fantasy dependant upon some sort of miracle. Besides, it is not so strange to lose a mother. One in nine will hemorrhage and there will be nothing within a hundred miles to stop it. The thing is, falling, Samira does not feel weak; she remembers muscling food from the world. To her, begging is no weakness. She was never so fiercely alive as when she begged. Even succumbing to the people in her village who enslaved her, she was not weak. If she ever cried she cried because she failed, and on this occasion her failure was on display for the other girls to see.
Ian-jan spoke softly to Samira; one of the other girls ridiculed her for displeasing the guest, but that couldn’t have been the words he spoke. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her new dress, then pushed herself up from the floor. Ian-jan had gone back into his room, leaving the door wide open. She brought him his tray of nan, his decanter of green tea, his cup of now tepid milk. With nary a hesitation she marched out of the room, down the stairs, out the front of the house and into the garden. She heedlessly pricked her thumb on a thorn. She was equally heedless of the guard at the front gate who yelled at her as she plucked three pink roses in the prime of their blooming. She marched straightaway back into the house, up the stairs and abruptly stopped in the doorway of Ian-jan’s room. “Come in?” she asked. Ian-jan’s mouth was full of nan, so he waved enthusiastically for her to come in. Samira walked in, turned left, sauntered into his bathroom, removed his toothbrush from a plastic cup and filled the cup with water. She had nipped the roses too high on their stems, so she stuffed the blooms into the cup like socks into a can. She walked over to the nightstand and placed the arrangement next to all the other little gifts Ian-jan had received from various other orphans. There was one old rose that drooped from an empty jelly jar. She removed it and, pausing at the door, tossed it into the wastebasket before leaving Ian-jan to enjoy his breakfast and admire the new addition to the beauty in his life.
8:00 am
Samira headed downstairs again. There was much to be done. The kitchen, some stray laundry, and if she inquired she was certain to pick up a few chores from the house parents. Maybe they needed someone to clean rice, or at the very least watch Marwa.
“Samira!”
It was Zainab at the bottom of the stairs. She was making the rounds. Half the girls had gone off to school, the other half were expected to spend two hours in the library doing homework or preparing for exams. Zainab is the morning librarian; she knows who is struggling in school. She keeps record of the minutes and hours in her domain, and how much in that time students spend actually reading and writing. Samira is on her “hit” list. It seems the girl would sooner work the lines from the palms of her hands than study. She was one of those grade eight kids who arrived at the orphanage having never been to school. Zainab tapped a pencil on the ledger she carried with her, full of names and dates. She is short for a sixteen-year old, four foot four. She bears the stigma, but sometimes it gets to her that no man could be expected to pursue a short wife. Even so, she is a spark plug, and not even Samira would shun her leadership.
Zainab hopped onto the tables and still had to stretch to open the curtains. With her brown hair tied into two pigtails she could be mistaken for a life-sized doll on a shelf. She made her way around the library, turned on the three computers, dusted off the books, and then arranged the chairs neatly around their stations. She pulled one chair out and left it there, a not so subtle gesture toward Samira. Other children straggled in and soon the room was full. In her role as librarian Zainab gets to sit at the desk up front, facing the room. She came to the orphanage from Nuristan as a little girl. Nuristan; a place cut off from the world, high in the mountains to the east. The people there only recently turned to Islam. In parts they still worship the elements, fire, water, earth, air and any other God-worthy aspect to life. Isolated, their blue eyes and fair skin hardly milked through the centuries, when it comes to Alexander the Great no statue or monument in Greece compares to Nuristan’s homage in the flesh. One day Zainab will return home worldly, a doctor or philosopher of one sort or another, just as the inspired General himself might have first stepped foot in the land in which he would fall in love, raise children, spread civilization and never wish to leave.
10:00am
The children closed their books and scampered away, all but Nagina and Saeda sitting in back. Something was wrong. Zainab respected their privacy as long as she could, tidying up the room, pulling the curtains. Finally she had to close up the library. She strolled over and stood beside the two twelve-year olds. For the moment she held her tongue. Saeda is one of the few kids plucked directly from the streets. She and her brother had lived virtually on their own, their decrepit father unable to care for them. The orphanage is not a shelter concerned with saving a handful of children from the streets. Those urchins are often wild, their extended relatives disagreeable; the chance of holding onto one for any length of time is slight to none. The children at this orphanage have a contract with the future, to one day save their communities, perhaps even a country. Those still alive in their families have signed off on that future. Saeda teeters. She often hangs her head, sleeps in school. But not this morning, this morning she was alert. Word had gotten out before an appropriate time and place could be arranged. Her father had suddenly died. The news was scant. Not even a cause of death, but given the man’s constitution it could have been a simple cold. Nagina, uninhibited and sprightly as a wood-nymph, whispered to Saeda in a cadence barely audible even to Zainab standing right beside them. She could have merely empathized. Years ago her father was killed by the Taliban in the Shamali Valley just outside of Kabul, a place that was once a fertile bastion of grapes, walnuts and almonds; now it is home to destroyed mud brick homes and abandoned orchards tagged as either “mined” or “cleared of mines”. Still, something lilting in Nagina’s whisper suggested she was not postulatizing, but singing; maybe a lullaby, maybe a prayer, maybe a lovelorn ballad from Bollywood. All the more meaningful to Saeda, given that Nagina is known for her mischievous laugh, pulling pranks like fake handshakes and crying wolf; for her to become nurturing, even soulful was something indeed. There was no closing the library until the end of that song.
11:30am
Time to eat lunch, get into her black uniform and pack her satchel for school, but first Nagina had to help Farzana Nori carry the tub full of nan down to the kitchen, parcel some flats out for the boys who any minute would arrive to retrieve their portion for the day. Farzana was in high spirits; Nagina switched to “on”. Clinging to the tub’s handles they spun around like a top bumping its way through the orphanage, bumping, bumping until they practically ran into Omid. Tallest of all the orphans, the sight of him prompted the girls to drop their load and run away screaming a feigned alarm. Omid had arrived. Omid who likes to dance, shake his shoulders and extend his arms. Omid who loves to flaunt his Obama belt buckle. Omid who tells tall tales, that he is second in his class, or there is a frog in the toilet, or he is happy when he is sad, sad when he is happy. Once, when he was home in Farah visiting his ninety-year old grandmother, he “read” her palm and divined that soon, a week or maybe two, a young man would fall in love and ask her to marry him. Being superstitious and given Omid’s uncanny ability to hold a serious tone and face, she believed him. He has that kind of effect on people, and if being a six foot two inch fifteen year old frames that effect, that’s just fine with him.
It was beans and yogurt for lunch and he loves beans and yogurt. He collected the nan and hauled a pot of steaming red kidneys out to the front of the orphanage and placed them precariously in a shallow wheelbarrow. The sun had turned summery. It was already hot and dust had begun to rise up, weightless and stifling. Omid hates the heat, so he wrapped his head in a checkered white scarf, the kind some Taliban wear. Jokingly, he wrapped it across his face, leaving only his eyes exposed, peering. He hates everything about the Taliban. They killed his father. This costume of his? to him it was mocking, not emulating. He bid the orphanage “khodafez”, then again to Sosan and Masuda as they opened the gate for him. He took hold of the wheelbarrow’s handles and practically danced into the street.
12 noon
Sosan checked fingernails and shoes. If either were dirty she’d turn the girl away. After ten or twelve she traded jobs with Masuda who, after letting the morning students in was now letting the afternoon ones out. Farzana Nori approached them with confidence. She was impeccable. Her white scarf tucked around her face just so, her hands soapy smooth, her black smock and pants clean and ironed, her shoes brushed shiny, she didn’t have to break her pace to exit the orphanage. Walking the three hundred yards to school she kicked stones and hopped gutters and glanced at the blinding sky. She didn’t want to talk to any of the other girls; she had important things to think about. Not the formulas and theorems needed for her math test; she was thinking about drama class. She is going to be an actress one day. Ian-jan had given her a part in two different plays; one is a tragedy adapted from a famous story about a mother named Courage, the other is a comedy about a woman with two husbands, both thieves, one who works at night and one during the daylight hours. Farzana will be a general in the first play and an innocent bystander in the second. She is also learning how to play guitar; though Ian-jan only affords her a half hour here and fifteen minutes there, she is determined to make the best of it. There is nothing to hold her back because there is nobody there to pull the reins. She is twice orphaned. After her parents died she was adopted by a couple in Kabul. The husband once had a home of his own but all of it was destroyed in the civil war. Even though he and his wife live a meager existence in a one-room apartment, being unable to produce a child of their own brought great pressure from those around them. Thus they acquired Farzana. She would have done just as well being adopted by ghosts. Now she is free to simply look forward, imagine something great awaits her. She is talented, driven, and has the looks of a dark heroine, eyes that penetrate and high cheekbones like one of those princesses she’s seen on music videos from India and Pakistan. Sometimes she looks for a sign, when the feeling is right. This day was such a day. She turned into the schoolyard and before she even entered the building one of the other orphans, Maqbola, came running up to her with news. Their math teacher had gotten a terrible headache and gone home. The test would have to wait.
4:00pm
By the garden is a well. Maqbola filled a bucket and rinsed the dust from her shoes. Other girls admired the flowers. African daisies had come into bloom, and geraniums and of course the roses continuously uncoiled in pink and white. Maqbola did not dally. Finishing her task she walked briskly to the front porch and disappeared into the orphanage. She was late for ‘Asr. She dropped her book-bag onto her bottom bunk and scuttled to the bathroom before anyone else could. She closed the door and locked it, stood at the sink, took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. She could only see her face from her nose up. She examined the birthmark on her cheek; it is a cookie sized freckle one shade darker than her already dark skin. She placed her white scarf on a hook and turned the faucet on. Cool water splashed over her hands. In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. She took a bar of soap from its dish and scrubbed her fingers, her palms, her wrists, rinsed, then washed them twice more. She cupped her clean hands, filled them with water and brought the water to her lips. She cleansed her mouth three times. She sniffed water into her nose three times, using her right hand to bring the water up, her left to expel it. She washed her face three times, rolled up the black sleeves of her smock, first the right and then the left, washing her arms to her elbows three times. Then with wet hands her brow to the back of her head three times, her ears, her right foot and then the left. Three times.
At the orphanage religion is not enforced, taught or even encouraged. Nor is it discouraged. If a child wants to pray she prays. Maqbola emerged from the bathroom, aimed low with her eyes so as to avoid undue conversation as she walked down the stairway into the basement. She took a thin blanket from a pile in the corner and folded it into a small rectangle, then spread it facing west-southwest. She stood as tall as her little body could, recited her supplication to God and raised her arms toward the ceiling. God is Most Great… And so Maqbola prayed. She is by nature not somber. If she’s going to do something she wants to do it right. Other kids might come into the basement and make noise. It is of no matter. She loves the orphanage, loves her classes. She’s as tomboyish as Peppermint Patty with black hair, plays leapfrog with the best of them. Doing prayers for her is a way to be alone. Especially living with forty other girls, twelve to a room. In a culture where lineage and home are paramount to identity, Maqbola prays. In the story of her father being killed by Americans dropping bombs over Ghorband, Maqbola prays. Remembering the day her mother became a servant and like so many widows dissolved into the cityscape, committing her child away from her life and into a future, Maqbola prays. She turned to her right and whispered to some imagined pilgrim, “Peace be upon you, and God’s blessings.” Then she turned to an imagined pilgrim on her left. “Peace be upon you…”
5:30pm
Ian-jan calls them the munchkins. Maqbola and Alina held hands and ran through the veils draped across the open front door like circus performers bursting into the ring. Again and again they did this, in and out, but one too many times. They ran smack-dab into Dariush as he entered. He and the older boys had arrived for photography class. Maqbola suffered a bump on her head. Nevertheless she got right up, gave Dariush a thrashing with her tongue, grabbed Alina’s hand and pulled her from the cement floor where she too had fallen, and the two skipped to the stairs and down to the basement for a game of dodge-ball.
Dariush and the six other boys entered the girl’s orphanage with a mix of smiles, charm and bewilderment written on their faces. If they looked at anyone it was as a brother to a sister. Single file they walked upstairs to Ian-jan’s room. He was there, as were seven of the older girls, waiting in great anticipation; Ian-jan had developed their latest pictures and was going to share them in a slide show. The boys shook hands with him as they entered, squeezed together on the couch at the back of the room. Their determination to keep separate from the girls rendered them varsity teammates packed in the back seat of a Volkswagen on their way to a drive-in movie. Just then the wind kicked up and the balcony door blew open. Papers and notebooks fluttered across the room. As if on cue one and then another military helicopter flew over the orphanage. Always two, and always low. The kids are not quick to shouting out omens, but here they were unanimous. In a flash Masuda closed the door, Malalai the curtains. Having restored the order they sat with their sisters on the floor in front of the screen. The novelty of girls and boys sharing the same class for a whole hour was captivating enough; even with the outside world crashing in, Ian-jan hardly needed to speak words to what the images themselves were about to teach.
“Tell me what am I about to say?”
“Make the strange familiar,” Mahbooba said.
“The familiar strange,” Farzana added.
“You make me very happy. Now I want to give you something to go along with that. Ignore the obvious and exaggerate the particular.” Four of the last six words meant nothing to the students. Their faces went blank. “Look at this picture taken by Fawad.” It was a close-up of a kitchen pot and ladle. “This is familiar, right? But here, somehow it’s a little strange. It is also a very particular thing, yak thing, but now it is very, very big.”
“Not good picture!” Farad Gul said. “Fawad is not good photographer!” Fawad reciprocated. Shouts, tossed crumpled paper, laughs.
“What about this?” It was an extreme close-up photo of Mastura, Mahbooba’s little sister. “See what I mean? Now, look at this,” it was a photo of Fati running in front of a ruined shack. “And this,” another of Ulfat balanced horizontally on his hands. “And this one,” a photo of a kid playing as if behind bars on the street. “Don’t these somehow make the strange familiar? But they also seem to ignore the obvious; what is so much fun about this ruined building in such a desolate place? How does Ulfat defy gravity? Why is there barbed wire across the top of that gate?”
“Please?” Mahbooba asked politely, though she knew she would be called upon. She translated for the sake of clarity. The boys concurred with unhuhs and the girls ahh yesed. The distinctions between one approach and another dwindled. There was a picture of a boy carrying nan down a street, girls making nan, Ghani squatting in front of a perfectly reflected rain-pond, the girls dressed for school. Gradually, like the attention of a child pulling away from a television, the students grew less and less concerned with seeing their own images. They began to praise one another’s work. They were thinking together.
8:15pm
Shola. A lumpy mix of steamed rice and lentils wetted down with a chalky dressing. I stuck my spoon into the middle of my portion and let it sit there like a screwdriver in the mud. I’d finally had enough. Leema noticed first. In the midst of the cacophony that comes with the echoing voices of forty girls in the basement, she stood up and yelled, “Please be quiet!” Amazingly, silence. Leema looked down at me sitting cross-legged on the floor, forlorn and defeated. “Ian-jan, you don’t like shola?” I shook my head. Instantly, uproarious laughter filled the room. Half of them also hate shola. The rest love it. What I hadn’t realized is the debate about shola has gone on for years, maybe generations. For weeks I’d pretended to relish it, devoured every lump of it. Now at last I could be honest. But the joke was on. One after another they brought their leftovers, Oh Ian-jan, you want the rest of my shola? They even scraped it onto my plate, creating a mound that resembled a model volcano.
Amidst their teasing voices and laughter I slowly got to my feet, walked heavily to the stairs and pulled myself up along the railing, step by step. They ran past me in a steady stream. Joyful it seemed. Half way to my room I stopped for a minute and gazed out the huge window in the stairwell. Kabul was dark but for house lights twinkling up a mountainside, and then pitch-blackness erased the division between mountain and sky. Nagina and Saeda were there, huddled close, watching what I was watching. “Shobakhai Ian-jan.” Goodnight. I climbed the last flight of stairs, passing Samira in the doorway to the kitchen, a pile of dirty metal saucers in her hands. “Shobakhai!” Then Zainab, Farzana and a few others watching a Chinese soap opera dubbed in dari. “Goodnight Ian-jan.” Just before stepping into my room, the girl’s bathroom door swung open. It was Maqbola, her toothbrush sticking from her mouth. She bid me a muffled goodnight, and then attempted to pronounce my own usual phrase. “Have dreams!” she said, her eyes grinning. This sounded better to me than wishing for them to be sweet.
I closed my door and turned the lock. I washed, brushed my teeth, dressed into a pair of shorts and flopped onto my bed. I thought of pictures I had seen of this country, not all of it war; spectacular yellow-green valleys and impenetrable white-toothed mountains, ancient mosques adorned in tiles every shade of teal, mystic graybeards riding camels and octogenarian women carrying loads of pistachio. There are tribes living in yurts made of yak hair, and there is a spring-fed lake so clean and blue as to heal all wounds. I’m not likely ever to see those things in person, or even to leave the orphanage until the time comes for me to fly away. I listen for the same sounds every day; the mule-driven cart, the ice cream man. I look out my window when the wind blows the dust, and sometimes I sneak up to the roof under the cloak of night and listen to the calls for prayer. In between are the girls and boys of Mehan and Sitara II. Maybe I don’t have to take my own pictures. Every day is an unfolding. I do not have to go to it; it has come to me. Afghanistan. I pulled the blanket to my chin, turned onto my side, squeezed a pillow between my knees, and opened my mind to yet another chance to have dreams.