DANCING IN THE MOSQUE
Homeira Qaderi

TRANSLATED BY ZAMAN STANIZAI

An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Homeira Qaderi 2020

Homeira Qaderi asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed by Elina Cohen

Ornamental art by Shutterstock / Anna Poguliaeva

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008375270

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008375294

Version: 2020-10-05

Dedication

To those who value and respect equality

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1: Bread and Bullets

Chapter 2: Migrating Swallows

Chapter 3: The Spinning Gardonah

Chapter 4: Hush—Silence!

Chapter 5: The Red Shoes

Chapter 6: Dancing in the Mosque

Chapter 7: The Schoolgirls’ Bathhouse Uprising

Chapter 8: Khoshhal

Chapter 9: The Golden Needle Sewing Class

Chapter 10: The Girls Behind the Window

Chapter 11: Herat—Dowgharun

Chapter 12: Revolution Boulevard, Tehran

Chapter 13: Divorce, Divorce, Divorce

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as I have remembered them, to the best of my ability. Some names, places, identifying details, and circumstances have been changed in order to protect the privacy and/or anonymity of the various individuals involved.

Once upon a time, when there lived a Merciful God, behind the mountains in a distant city a family was given a son with the nickname Shah-Pesar, “One of Regal Descent.” His real name was Mushtaq. Shah-Pesar was very handsome. He was his family’s lucky charm. One day, to escape his boredom, the family’s lucky charm began rummaging through his granny’s storage closet. Shah-Pesar didn’t know what he was looking for, but something drew him deeper into the dark, dusty interior. Suddenly, his hand closed on a heavy object. It was an old metal lamp.

No sooner had he wiped the hem of his sleeve across the lamp’s smooth surface than it became unbearably heavy and sparks shot out of its spout. Astonished, Shah-Pesar dropped the lamp. It hit the floor with a dull thud, rolled around in a circle, and stopped.

A thick coil of smoke rose from the spout, curling toward the ceiling. A pair of stout legs materialized from the smoke, followed by a large belly, a barrel chest, muscular arms, and a huge head. The giant had a black beard topped with curly black hair. His black eyes glowed beneath heavy black eyebrows and a golden earring dangled from his left earlobe, almost touching his shoulder.

Looking down at the trembling boy, the jinni bent down on one knee, and said, “Hello, Master Mushtaq, I am at your service.”

Shah-Pesar took a quick step backward and said in a quivering voice, “Why at my service?”

“Because you are the Shah-Pesar of the family,” the jinni said. “Your wish is my command.”

“What kind of wish?”

“I am the king of all the jinnis. I am powerful enough to grant you anything you desire. I can take you anywhere you wish to go in the blink of an eye or bring you anything you wish just as quickly.”

“Bring me a black horse with a long mane and a gleaming coat.”

The jinni of the lamp bowed at the knee.

“And a strong hunting bow and eagle-feathered arrows,” Shah-Pesar added.

The jinni spun around three times, then three times more. Clapping his hands, he shouted, “Oh, the long-maned black horse of the gleaming coat, appear from the darkness! Master Mushtaq wants to have fun and go hunting.”

A cloud of smoke enveloped the middle of the room and turned into a black horse with a full mane and a long, graceful tail. The horse held a hunting bow in its mouth. Bowing down, the horse of the gleaming coat placed the bow at Shah-Pesar’s feet and said, “I am all yours, Master Mushtaq.”

Dear son,

My grandmother, Nanah-jan, never told me stories like that. In the stories she saved for me, there were no jinnis or magic wands to make my dreams come true. My stories were populated with wild monsters like Baba Ghor-ghori, Barzanghi, Mard-azma, Dokhtar-khor, and hundreds more. My grandmother had more monster stories than beads on her tasbeh. The purpose of her stories was primarily to keep me from playing with boys, cutting my hair, wearing short skirts, climbing trees, talking to the neighbor girl over the wall, laughing out loud, and ever arguing with Nanah-jan. If I did any of those forbidden things, she would tell me: A monster will appear out of thin air and drag me off to some horrible place where he will eat my flesh and lick my bones, or worse, make me his wife and force me to bear a brood of little hateful ogres.

My grandmother believed that one of the most difficult tasks that the Almighty can assign anyone is being a girl in Afghanistan. As a child, I didn’t want to be a girl. I didn’t even want my dolls to be women. In those days, apparently, I knew more ways that led to hell than streets that led to my house. Nanah-jan had told me so many stories about hell that I could describe every neighborhood in hell with my eyes closed. Which is why, when you were born, I was finally accepted and acceptable. At least I had done my duty: I was a mother in this tortured land, and I had produced a son—you, my dearest.

But my motherhood didn’t last long. I lost you early on, to the cursed laws of the city, when you were still a breastfeeding nineteen-month-old baby.

It has been 985 nights since you were taken from me. It has been 985 nights since the howling wind wolves have ripped through my lullabies. Now that I am thousands of miles away from you, from all of you, in this small room in California, the only mark of the joy of your birth is the scar gracing my abdomen. It is my badge of motherhood.

I heard that they’ve asked you about your mother and that you cried when told that your mother is dead. Do not believe them! I haven’t died. I am living a life of exile, in a place that has its own beauty, its own laws, and its own problems. But to my eternal pain, it does not have the most important element of my being, of my soul. It does not have you.

Afghanistan is the land of invisible bullets and the land of a death foretold, the land of doomed destinies, and the land of dejected and disgruntled youth, waiting forever for dreams that will never come true. This is how Madar, my mother, Ansari, and Nanah-jan, my grandmother, Firozah, described my homeland to me when I was barely four years old. In their eyes, Afghanistan was divided between the Russian occupiers and their communist government allies on the one side and the mujahideen on the other. But for me, Afghanistan was divided between the street in front of our house where I played during cease-fires, and the dangerous world beyond our walls when war returned and kept me stuck inside.

I was a bright, playful child, too young and energetic to understand fear, whether of invisible bullets buzzing through the air or of Russian tanks rumbling in the street outside our house. Inside those walls, there was a courtyard filled with apple and mulberry trees, and red and green grapes growing on the vine. We were three generations living there: Baba-jan and Nanah-jan, their four daughters, my aunts Kurbra, Hajar, Zahra, and Azizah, my uncles Naseer and Basheer, Agha and Madar, plus my baby brother, Mushtaq, and me.

Nanah-jan always said, “A girl should have fear in her eyes.”

I spent a lot of time in front of the hallway mirror, examining my eyes to discover where the fear was hiding.

Aunt Zahra told me, “A girl’s fear is right on her eyelids.”

I would turn my eyelids inside out, hoping to detect the shape or color of fear.

Madar often said, “The night this girl was born, we were surrounded by fire. It felt like the city was giving birth. Before Homeira heard her own cries, she heard other people’s screams. No wonder she isn’t afraid of anything.”

Zahra was seventeen when she was struck by one of those invisible bullets while she was trying to pull me out of the grapevine and carry me to safety in the basement. My poor aunt fell down on her face. I could hear her gasping for breath. Blood was pouring out of her eyes. I stopped searching for the kittens and tried to find the invisible bullet in her eye, the place where a girl’s fear is hidden.

I can’t remember a time when my homeland was not at war. My childhood began with jet-fighter attacks, bombs falling from the sky, and me trying to count invisible bullets. War and hunger, those are my earliest memories. I remember Madar trying to breast-feed my brother, even after he was past the age of two, because there was no food left to eat. Mushtaq chewed and bit my mother’s breast. I heard Madar’s quiet whimpering when she knew she had no milk left.

During each attack I watched Nanah-jan tie her hijab tighter so that she wouldn’t die without her veil and be thrown into hell in the hereafter. Even though she was illiterate, she often pretended to read the Holy Qur’an as she would run her index finger over the written lines of the scripture. She wanted to die a Muslim, holding the Holy Book close to her chest. And when I heard Baba-jan reading Surah Yaseen, the chapter on God’s sovereignty, the Day of Judgment, and a warning to nonbelievers, I knew that another bombing attack was coming.

My childhood world was within the bounds of a small window, low in the wall of our house, and a mother who was always trying to keep me away from that window. She knew bullets could pierce glass. She tried her best to keep me surrounded by four solid cement walls. My mother was like a spider trying to safeguard me within her web. But I was a wild, stubborn baby spider. I kept tearing her web apart to escape. I never tired of the struggle to get outside. I was always looking for a chance to sneak into our walled garden. I wanted to be the first to discover the new bullet holes in the walls. I wanted to be the first one to touch the damaged trees and the burnt timber. To be the first to find the kittens hiding under our grapevine. Finding those invisible bullets was my most secret wish. I asked my mother, “Where do all these invisible bullets come from?”

“Homeira,” she said, smoothing my hair, “we cannot see where they come from and we never see where they will go until they strike a tree or a wall or, God forbid, a person.”

But there were good days, too. I remember sneaking out of the house with Azizah on a day when there was no shooting. I remember the bright sunshine and the flow of a gentle wind of the season. I sat with my back against the sun-warmed wall of our house, playing in the dust and watching people passing by. I was totally unaware of the Russian tanks approaching on the nearby streets.

During cease-fires, I had the habit of going to the smoldering rubble of the bombed houses to see the new ruins and how the gardens had been laid to waste. I wanted to see the crumbling walls, the broken windows, the smashed closets, and the shattered china.

Once, in one of the houses that had been destroyed three or four days earlier, I saw a Russian soldier with his pants down; he was pressing his hand on the mouth of a neighbor’s daughter. From behind the wall I laughed at the Russian soldier’s bare bottom. He heard my laughter. He quickly got up, put one hand between his legs, and with his other hand he slapped me on my face until it burned. Then he spat in front of me. The girl used that moment to get up, put on her head scarf, and run away through the ruins.

Later I would laughingly tell everyone this story about how red the Russian soldier’s buttocks were. Upon hearing my account of the event, Uncle Basheer punched the wall with his fists in anger. Baba-jan didn’t laugh at the story. He just wiped his tears.

In those days, Herat was a very strange mixture of heaven and hell. Sometimes, when the city was at peace, you could hear the returning birds chirping in trees. Sometimes, I could hear sweet musical notes as our neighbor’s son, Shuaib, sat on the wall playing a reed flute. I would dance to his music on our terrace, but Nanah-jan feared that melody, believing that the sound of the flute foretold early death. And soon, indeed, Shuaib died in a fire that consumed his house.

Nanah-jan once said, “I wish we were all birds, so we could fly out of this place.”

Almost every morning there was a long row of olive-green Russian tanks on the street in front of the hospital near our house, their engines idling under the tall pine trees that lined the road in a cacophony of noise. They would disappear in the haze of dusk. I asked my grandfather, “Baba-jan, tell me, where do the tanks come from every morning and where do they go every night?”

Baba-jan looked and whispered under his breath, “They come from hell and they go back to hell.”

I told Azizah that we should follow behind the Russian tanks so we could discover the path to hell.

“It’s too far away, Homeira,” she said emphatically. “We would get very tired.”

I told her she was afraid of the Russian tanks.

When Nanah-jan no longer had nuts in her pockets, she could no longer bribe Azizah and me to stay in the house. As soon as the city lapsed into silence, we would escape into the street when Madar and Nanah-jan weren’t looking. Once, a soldier gave me a tin of canned food. Because we were always hungry, I brought it home. Nanah-jan was horrified, shouting, “Ḥarām! Ḥarām! These cans are filled with frogs,” she said. “That’s what the red soldiers eat.”

When Azizah and I heard this, we ran into the backyard and threw up.

A few frogs lived in the small stream in our garden, jumping around during the day and croaking their special songs in the evening. On the nights when there was silence, my heart broke for those poor little frogs. I knew the Russians had eaten them. I cried for them under my blanket.

During the cease-fires, our entertainment was collecting pinecones or running among the tanks, playing hide-and-seek with the boys. When the boys hid and I couldn’t find them, the Russian soldiers sitting on the tank turrets would point to the boys’ hiding spots. I remember that whenever I found a boy, the soldiers would clap and shout, their faces growing red with their laughter. Then I understood why we called the Soviet Army the “Red Army.”

One day, when it was my turn to hide, one of those red soldiers beckoned me over, a big smile on his round face. He bent down from the top of the tank, reaching his arms toward me. I held my arms up to him. He took my hands and pulled me up into the tank, scraping my shoulder against its hot iron side. My shoulder hurt, but I forgot the pain as soon as I looked around. I stared in amazement at the hundreds of buttons and blinking lights. It was stuffy inside and very hot. Another soldier was sitting on a metal seat. When he caught sight of me, he leaned toward me and said something to the first soldier, who answered quickly. They both started laughing. Then the seated man put his face against a round object.

I crawled over and began to touch some buttons beside him. Looking at me over his shoulder, he said, “Nyet. Na, na.”

I pointed at the tube. He leaned back in his seat and motioned for me to stand in front of him. I put my eye against the end of the tube. Inside I saw a small, round city. When the soldier turned a knob, the city became smaller. He turned the knob more, and the city inside became tiny and far away. I got scared and pulled my eye away. I looked around. We were all still the same size inside the tank. The soldier laughed and turned the knob again. He gestured with his chin, asking me to look into the tube again. The city came closer. The trees got bigger. The size of people standing and crying in front of the hospital grew larger. I saw Azizah, who was still looking for me. Her face was big enough in the tube to see the fear in her eyes. I saw girls in flowery dresses collecting pinecones. The boys had lost the game; they couldn’t find me.

I was five when I saw my city from inside the viewfinder of a Russian tank, my small city, my big city, the city that was very far from me and yet very close to me again. The soldier gave me chocolate. I looked at him and felt ashamed.

On one of those days, one of those tanks fired at our neighborhood and left half of our street in ruins. Another hit our grapevine. We then went to the basement and were living there for a while. We covered the floor with two large rugs and brought down blankets and slept there at night.

I played for hours with a doll that Nanah-jan had made for me. I asked Nanah-jan, “Can you make another dress for my doll so she becomes happy again?”

Nanah-jan promised that she would, as soon as she found some nice fabric.

So I was overjoyed when the tailor shop down the street took a direct hit. As soon as the jets disappeared from the sky, I ran outside and searched the ruins for some beautiful cloth for my doll. Rummaging through the debris, I found a few nice pieces that were only a little dusty.

I ran home and showed them to Nanah-jan. I was so excited about getting a new dress made for my doll that I forgot to tell her I saw a hand moving in the rubble. My grandmother looked at the fabric and her eyes widened. “Take it back! This is ḥarām!”

“These aren’t frogs!” I said.

I never gave them back to the moving hand. I hid them under the grapevine.

During the war, there was no flour, so Nanah-jan couldn’t bake bread anymore, not even the usual two small cakes for Azizah and me. It got even worse later when the roads to Herat were all blocked by the fighting and we didn’t even have potatoes to eat.

Nanah-jan said that the mujahideen were starving as well.

“They can eat frogs,” I said. “Or those big Russian chocolates with honey inside.”

“Homeira,” a startled Nanah-jan said. “How do you know what’s inside Russian chocolate?”

In an attempt to survive the Russian onslaught, people had learned how to pretend to be sympathetic to Russians by hoisting red banners on their front doors or roofs. Aunt Hajar hung a bright red cloth from the clothesline in the yard, so when the Russian jets were spinning above they would see our household as being sympathetic to them and wouldn’t bomb us. My grandmother, who considered any sympathy with the communists a sin, cursed her, saying we would all die as kaffirs, nonbelievers, and end up in hell. “We are not communists! Take down that red cloth from the clothesline,” she said.

“Does being a Muslim or a kaffir depend on a red cloth? She considers the hoisting of the red cloth an act of blasphemy and doesn’t understand these murderous Russians. Does she really think God is that unmerciful?” Hajar said. “I just don’t want to be killed.”

At night, it was the mujahideen’s turn. They did a house-to-house search for communists and collaborators, climbing walls and jumping into gardens and courtyards. Aunt Hajar hung a green cloth from the clothesline. I teased her, saying, “Should I tell the mujahideen that you hang a red cloth out in the daytime?”

“Homeira! I will tell them you ate Russian chocolate,” she said.

I became frightened and ran to my grandmother. “Tell Aunt Hajar not to scare me, Nanah-jan.”

My aunt laughed and stuck out her tongue.

Uncle Naseer was a mujahid, a resister of the Russian invasion. Mujahideen were labeled rebels by the government, but people liked them and supported them and called them “the defenders of the faith.” They fought the Russians and suffered a lot, but they were eventually able to expel the invading Soviet forces from Afghanistan. That’s when they were also considered the defenders of the homeland.

Uncle Naseer came and went like a ghost, jumping into our yard after dark and hiding on the roof with his Kalashnikov. I’d hear his footsteps overhead and then hear him land in the yard. Every night my grandfather took a mattress, a pillow, and blankets up to the roof. He always looked worried when my uncle was nearby. “Where did Uncle go, Baba-jan?” “Hush, child; he’s gone to count the stars.”

“Where does he sleep, Baba-jan?”

“Uncle Naseer’s house is on the moon, Homeira.”

“Can one sleep better on the moon, Baba-jan?”

Baba-jan sighed. “Yes, Homeira, but you must wake up before the moon sets or it will swallow you.”

Every night I watched the moon, worried that if Uncle Naseer overslept, the moon would swallow him.

That very night, agents of KhAD, the State Intelligence Agency, stormed into our house looking for Uncle Naseer. Terrified, I pointed to the roof and said, “Stars! Stars!”

My dear Siawash,

I am sure that someday when you learn that your mother has been alive all these years, you will be angry. You will ask yourself, “How could a mother just walk away and leave her child behind?” It was never my wish.

I wish that neither of us belonged to a society that victimizes mothering and motherhood. I hope that by the time you grow up, this attitude will have changed or disappeared. I, my mother, my mother’s mother, and my mother’s mother’s mother have all spent our lives hoping for that change. Please don’t think that my yearning for you and even for your father has left me completely. Not so … but I have learned to pay a price for my ambitions. I don’t regret the sacrifices I have made, for I know that through this suffering I am, I hope, making a difference for other women, the ones who will come after me.

Trust me and believe in the history that I’m trying to make. Try not to be angry at me for this separation. Instead believe in yourself, for it is you and I together who must create a new Afghanistan. I look forward to the day when the two of us will live in a society of equals. Even from the darkness of this dungeon, I look forward to the day when a blue sky will unfurl its bright and beautiful horizons. Nobody is going to give us this blue sky for free. We must take it by and for ourselves.

Every season came and went, but the season of war was endless.

During the seventh summer of the Russian invasion, our half-burnt mulberry tree was heavy with fruit. The sparrows pecked at it, scattering berries across the yard. From behind the window, I pointed to the fallen berries to help the sparrows find them. But they paid no attention. They were fighting with the mynah birds chattering in the branches.

For two nights, the sky was peaceful, filled only with stars and a thin moon. Uncle Basheer came home late, after being out most of the night. “Did you go to the moon with Uncle Naseer?” I asked.

“No, I was standing in front of Wali’s window, watching his television. I couldn’t hear the sound, but I saw Russian men and women dancing together. And then I saw pictures of our mujahideen who had been killed …”

“Uncle Basheer, what is television?” I asked.

“It is a box, and in it you can see lots of different people.”

“But, Uncle, how can all those people fit inside a box?”

Nanah-jan called out from across the room, “There are only short people in that box, Homeira.”

After dinner, I noticed that Uncle Basheer had disappeared again. I took my shoes and snuck out of the house. I wanted to see that box and see those women dancing inside it.

The veil of night spread darkness over the streets. We were forbidden from going out after dark. Nanah-jan had warned us, “When it gets dark, the infidels hunger for blood.”

I looked for Uncle Basheer, but I couldn’t see him. I looked in both directions, making sure there were no bloodthirsty infidels lurking. Nanah-jan’s voice whispered in my ear, “The infidels bite the vein in your neck and suck all the blood out. They like to grab a bunch of children all at once. And they like girls’ blood the most, Homeira!”

I heard a man running down the street. I shrank against the wall. Was he one of the bloodthirsty infidels or a neighbor running away from them?

My heart was pounding in my chest. Could the infidels hear it? I didn’t want to attract vampires. Hearing the sound of flowing water, I remembered the culvert built into Wali’s wall where a stream emptied from his yard into a ditch beside the street. In the fall rains, it was full of water, but now there was only a trickle. I crawled into the culvert.

I covered my mouth with my hand in case a frog would try to jump onto my face. I crawled forward. The culvert opened into a corner of the courtyard. I stood up and looked around. Uncle Basheer was standing in the yard, silhouetted by a window that flickered with a soft blue light. I crept up to him. “Uncle?”

Shocked, my uncle whirled around. “Homeira! What are you doing here?”

“I want to watch television, Uncle.”

“You’re too short to see in the window. Go home right now!”

I clung to my uncle’s leg. “Please, just once! Just once!”

Uncle Basheer looked at me with one eye, while he kept the other glued to the television. A woman’s singing reached us from inside the house. My uncle hoisted me onto his shoulders. A gentle breeze wrapped its cool breath around my sweaty neck.

“Careful, Homeira. We don’t want Wali’s father to see us.”

Uncle Basheer raised me to the height of the window. I saw something lit up in the corner of the room. I squinted my eyes … I couldn’t believe it … the woman’s voice was coming from that box, a woman with bare legs, wearing a short dress, not trousers. I squeezed Uncle Basheer’s neck. The Box Woman looked nothing like Nanah-jan. She looked like Samira’s mother, a teacher, who walked to school without a hijab, wearing a skirt and a sleeveless blouse.

Suddenly, the night exploded. Stuttering bullets shattered the silence.

Uncle Basheer’s friend Wali appeared at the window, placed a finger on his lips, and closed the window. A frightening noise hissed by my ear—a hot breath of wind. I heard glass breaking. Wali was still there, standing at the window, right in front of me, staring right at me, his eyes opening wider and wider. And then, suddenly he fell over.

Watching, my uncle fell to his knees. My face was burning in a hundred places as if I had been stung by a swarm of bees. My hands were wet and sticky. Inside the house, Wali’s mother and sister were screaming.

“Uncle?” I asked.

Basheer didn’t answer.

I jumped off his shoulders and stared into his eyes. Uncle Basheer was looking at me, his eyes wide and unblinking.

I pulled on his arm. “Let’s go home, Uncle.”

He stood up. I pulled him toward the culvert. I crawled in; he followed. We slithered under the wall. Baba-jan’s voice was calling from down the street.

“We’re here, Baba-jan!” I shouted.

Baba-jan ran toward us; Madar and Nanah-jan were right behind him. Uncle Basheer fell down. Lifting him up, Baba-jan carried him to our house. Once inside, Agha knelt beside me, examining my hands and face. “It’s Uncle Basheer’s blood,” I said. “The bullet passed right next to us. It hit Wali’s stomach.”

Screaming, Uncle Basheer jumped up and ran toward the door. Baba-jan caught him, holding him tightly, while Uncle Basheer screamed and screamed. Madar washed my bloody hands and cleaned my face, removing bits of glass with a pair of tweezers. The sky blazed brightly; then fell dark … light … darkness. I could feel the tanks’ rumbling outside.

When I woke up in the morning, Uncle Basheer was sitting in a corner with his face in his hands, crying. I crawled toward him.

“Uncle Basheer, what happened to Wali?”

Uncle Basheer cried louder. My face began to burn again.

Neither my grandfather nor my grandmother went to Wali’s funeral. “They were communists,” Baba-jan said. “They wouldn’t like us reciting Fâteha at the funeral.”

Crying, Uncle Basheer said, “But Wali wasn’t a communist!”

Madar said, “A bullet doesn’t care whether you are a mujahid or a communist. The smoke from the fires that started in this country scorches everyone’s eyes.”

Wali was buried in his yard under a burnt pomegranate tree. They couldn’t take him to the cemetery because the streets were packed with both communists and mujahideen.

Baba-jan said to Agha, “Wakil Ahmad, take the hands of your wife and children and go. They will come for you next. This land doesn’t belong to you or me anymore.”

That night, Baba-jan wrapped me in his arms. “Come to me, Homeira.”

I fell asleep in his arms. I don’t remember anything he said, I only remember that he was repeatedly drying his eyes with the tip of his turban.

When I awoke, it was very warm. My mouth was filled with dust. My face was burning. I rolled over and sat up. The blazing sun was directly overhead, shining. I looked around. I was surrounded by a flat, empty desert, without a single shadow—a dun-colored landscape with thorn bushes scattered all the way to an incandescent horizon.

I thought that our house must have been flattened by a rocket; that our entire neighborhood had been destroyed. But there was not even a pile of adobe or a burnt tree branch to be seen.

“Where is Baba-jan, Aunt Azizah, Nanah-jan …?”

Agha put a finger to his lips. “We are emigrating.”

It was my first time hearing this word. I crawled over next to Madar. Shading her eyes with one hand, she gazed at the small thorn bushes in the distance. “Madar, what does ‘emigrating’ mean?”

Still searching the horizon, Madar said, “It means becoming a stranger in a foreign country … It means dying alone.”

I had a thousand questions, but neither of my parents was looking at me. “Madar, when we emigrate, can I still sleep next to Baba-jan?”

Madar’s eyes were fixed on the distant rocky plain lying at the foot of the mountains. The hot wind scoured the soft soil, lifting it high into the air, creating whirling funnels of dust that danced across the landscape.

In the distance, I saw a motorcycle, a tiny speck trailing a huge plume of dust, growing larger and larger, ripping the heart out of the plain with its roaring.

With the two boghcha on his shoulder, Agha began to run faster. “Agha! Why didn’t you bring Baba-jan?” I ran after him.

Madar was trying to reach us. I shouted, “Madar, what happened to Nanah-jan?”

The wind threw the sand against my face, filling my mouth with dust. It didn’t taste like anything.

The motorcycle reached us. The driver shouted, “Hurry up! Hurry up!”

I raised my arm and waved good-bye at the invisible home. The driver was driving as fast as he could.

The thornbushes flew by, big and small.

I wished I had kissed Baba-jan’s face before we’d left. I thought to myself, The wars were not this bad. At least we were all together.

I decided to count the steps that were taking us farther and farther away from everything I knew. One, two, three … Faster! One, two, three … One, two.

A year later, in the depths of the winter, after the Russians left Afghanistan, we returned to Herat, eagerly awaiting the return of spring, eagerly awaiting the return of peace. I knew about the seasons, but I didn’t know what peace was. For me, it was enough to feel once again surrounded by Baba-jan’s embrace. It didn’t matter what little of the house and the garden remained intact.

My dear Siawash,

The only things I have received from the fourteen years of shared life with your father are a few pictures of you that I’ve hung on the walls and the door of my room here in California. In the mornings my eyes open to your sweet face and at night my eyes close looking at that same face. Even though you must have grown past the age of breast-feeding, at your nightly feeding hour I still wake up, afraid I may have missed it. I stare at all the pictures of you I have on my wall, but the one I look at most is the picture on your birth certificate. It takes me back to the day this certificate was issued.

On the day after you were born a frigid wind burst through my open window. Out on the street, people must’ve been collecting the scattered body parts of their dead relatives. A yellow-orange water tanker had come to help the snow wash away the crimson streaks of human cruelty.

But I didn’t want to think about the blood and bodies I had seen the day before. All my thoughts were with you as you were sleeping comfortably in my arms, and looking at your little pink face had taken away all the despair of Kabul from me.

It was eleven thirty in the morning. I heard the coughing of a man behind the curtain of my room. I hurriedly pulled a blanket to cover my bosom. A man dressed in a blue uniform came from behind the curtain and greeted me. He had a pen and a folder that seemed to contain thick yellow cards. The man looked at my mother and me and asked, “Don’t you have a man around?” My mother kept quiet, but I replied, “He has stepped outside, but we can talk, too.” The man shook his head at my audacity and said, “I’ll come back.” He had hardly left the room when your father entered. The man introduced himself to your father behind the curtain and said that he had come to fill out the birth certificate of the newborn to complete the record. The man asked your father, “Is the newborn a girl or a boy?” I could hear your father’s excitement. “It’s a king-boy,” he said. The man asked, “His name?” Your father responded, “Siawash.” Obviously, the man was filling out those yellow birth certificates behind the curtain.

The man asked for your father’s name and then for the name of your father’s father. Then he asked for the gynecologist’s certification papers. Your father picked up those papers from the table next to the bed and gave them to the man. I could hear him flipping through the papers. Moments later, when the man was done filling out the information, he congratulated your father and left.

You were busy nursing. When your father came through the curtain, he had the yellow birth certificate in his hand. I took the birth certificate from him and read it. It contained your name, your father’s name, and your grandfather’s name. But nobody had asked for my name. I was irrelevant. I looked at you and I wanted to hide you back in my womb so that once again you could belong to me, too.

I gave the birth certificate to my mother. As she was reading it, she sighed deeply. Although she was clearly upset, she was not surprised; she had lived as a woman in Afghanistan all her life.

Later, when your father brought in the identity registration card, once again my name, as your mother, was nowhere to be seen. Even in your passport, they didn’t ask for my name. Your mother’s name does not appear in any paper document. My son, in your motherland the mentioning of a woman’s name outside the family circle is a source of shame. And no child is known by its mother’s name.

But don’t worry, dear son. Should you one day want to find your live-buried mother, I have tried to leave you a sign, a clue, a hint. On your birth certificate next to your name, when no one was looking, I wrote in a bright color, “Mother’s name: Homeira.”

In February 1989 the Russians left our country. One day helicopters were hovering overhead like huge, angry, flying dragons as we cowered in darkness; the next day, the endless blue sky was filled with flights of doves, sparrows, and mynahs, testing their wings after years in hiding. But the chasm between the Afghan people and the government grew even wider. President Najibullah was unable to gain the support of mujahideen resistance groups and his government forces continued to fight the mujahideen, while KhAD and the Islamist factions stalked the cities, killing their enemies.

Despite Herat’s ruined vistas and fallen monuments, life had started moving through the city’s streets like blood pumping through a resuscitated child’s veins. The city took a deep breath. People began to climb out of their basements, where they had huddled for years. They could finally stand in the sun beneath the open sky and speak to each other without having to shout over the screams of low-flying rockets and jet fighters.

The mujahideen struggled home, the survivors, the wounded, the blind, the lame, the limbless, the foot soldiers. They came to look for their families. Some found orphans, some found homes, others found bone-filled craters where their homes had once stood.

Many people that KhAD arrested never returned, but Uncle Basheer came back. Everything seemed fine, except he was missing some of his fingernails. Whenever I asked him what had happened to them, he hid his hands in his sleeves and said nothing. Uncle Naseer also returned, with only one missing kidney. I never dared ask about that.

Our own house was still standing, but the neighborhood along the river was a wasteland of water-filled bomb craters. Cut down by bombs or for winter firewood, not a single tree remained standing in the Bagh-e Zananah, the Women’s Garden, which surrounded Queen Goharshad’s mosque and mausoleum.

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.

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