When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the
driveway of my father’s house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight
into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on
a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled
with dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate
mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing; I can still see
Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost
perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his
flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked,
depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire I can still see his tiny lowset
ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it
was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where
the Chinese doll maker’s instrument may have slipped; or perhaps he had simply
grown tired and careless.
Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his
slingshot at the neighbor’s one-eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to,
but if I asked, _really_ asked, he wouldn’t deny me. Hassan never denied me
anything. And he was deadly with his slingshot. Hassan’s father, Ali, used to
catch us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He
would wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror
and tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too,
shone them to distract Muslims during prayer. “And he laughs while he does it,”
he always added, scowling at his son. “Yes, Father,” Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feet. But he never told
on me. Never told that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the neighbor’s dog,
was always my idea.
The poplar trees lined the redbrick driveway, which led to a pair of wroughtiron
gates. They in turn opened into an extension of the driveway into my
father’s estate. The house sat on the left side of the brick path, the backyard
at the end of it.
Everyone agreed that my father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful house in
the Wazir Akbar Khan district, a new and affluent neighborhood in the northern
part of Kabul. Some thought it was the prettiest house in all of Kabul. A broad
entryway flanked by rosebushes led to the sprawling house of marble floors and
wide windows. Intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked by Baba in Isfahan, covered the
floors of the four bathrooms. Gold-stitched tapestries, which Baba had bought in
Calcutta, lined the walls; a crystal chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling.
Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba’s room, and his study, also known as “the smoking
room,” which perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. Baba and his friends
reclined on black leather chairs there after Ali had served dinner. They stuffed
their pipes--except Baba always called it “fattening the pipe”--and discussed
their favorite three topics: politics, business, soccer. Sometimes I asked Baba
if I could sit with them, but Baba would stand in the doorway. “Go on, now,”
he’d say. “This is grown-ups’ time. Why don’t you go read one of those books of
yours?” He’d close the door, leave me to wonder why it was always grown-ups’
time with him. I’d sit by the door, knees drawn to my chest. Sometimes I sat
there for an hour, sometimes two, listening to their laughter, their chatter.
The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custombuilt cabinets. Inside
sat framed family pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and King
Nadir Shah taken in 1931, two years before the king’s assassination; they are
standing over a dead deer, dressed in knee-high boots, rifles slung over their
shoulders. There was a picture of my parents’ wedding night, Baba dashing in his
black suit and my mother a smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and
his best friend and business partner, Rahim Khan, standing outside our house,
neither one smiling--I am a baby in that photograph and Baba is holding me,
looking tired and grim. I’m in his arms, but it’s Rahim Khan’s pinky my fingers
are curled around.
The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a mahogany
table that could easily sit thirty guests-- and, given my father’s taste for
extravagant parties, it did just that almost every week. On the other end of the
dining room was a tall marble fireplace, always lit by the orange glow of a fire
in the wintertime.
A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that overlooked
two acres of backyard and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had planted a small
vegetable garden along the eastern wall: tomatoes, mint, peppers, and a row of
corn that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it “the Wall of Ailing
Corn.”
On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the
servants’ home, a modest little mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.
It was there, in that little shack, that Hassan was born in the winter of 1964,
just one year after my mother died giving birth to me. In the eighteen years that I lived in that house, I stepped into Hassan and
Ali’s quarters only a handful of times. When the sun dropped low behind the
hills and we were done playing for the day, Hassan and I parted ways. I went
past the rosebushes to Baba’s mansion, Hassan to the mud shack where he had been
born, where he’d lived his entire life. I remember it was spare, clean, dimly
lit by a pair of kerosene lamps. There were two mattresses on opposite sides of
the room, a worn Herati rug with frayed edges in between, a three-legged stool,
and a wooden table in the corner where Hassan did his drawings. The walls stood
bare, save for a single tapestry with sewn-in beads forming the words _Allah-uakbar_.
Baba had bought it for Ali on one of his trips to Mashad.
It was in that small shack that Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar, gave birth to him one
cold winter day in 1964. While my mother hemorrhaged to death during childbirth,
Hassan lost his less than a week after he was born. Lost her to a fate most
Afghans considered far worse than death: She ran off with a clan of traveling
singers and dancers.
Hassan never talked about his mother, as if she’d never existed. I always
wondered if he dreamed about her, about what she looked like, where she was. I
wondered if he longed to meet her. Did he ache for her, the way I ached for the
mother I had never met? One day, we were walking from my father’s house to
Cinema Zainab for a new Iranian movie, taking the shortcut through the military
barracks near Istiqlal Middle School--Baba had forbidden us to take that
shortcut, but he was in Pakistan with Rahim Khan at the time. We hopped the
fence that surrounded the barracks, skipped over a little creek, and broke into
the open dirt field where old, abandoned tanks collected dust. A group of
soldiers huddled in the shade of one of those tanks, smoking cigarettes and
playing cards. One of them saw us, elbowed the guy next to him, and called
Hassan.
“Hey, you!” he said. “I know you.”
We had never seen him before. He was a squatly man with a shaved head and black
stubble on his face. The way he grinned at us, leered, scared me. “Just keep
walking,” I muttered to Hassan.
“You! The Hazara! Look at me when I’m talking to you!” the soldier barked. He
handed his cigarette to the guy next to him, made a circle with the thumb and
index finger of one hand. Poked the middle finger of his other hand through the
circle. Poked it in and out. In and out. “I knew your mother, did you know that?
I knew her real good. I took her from behind by that creek over there.”
The soldiers laughed. One of them made a squealing sound. I told Hassan to keep
walking, keep walking.
“What a tight little sugary cunt she had!” the soldier was saying, shaking hands
with the others, grinning. Later, in the dark, after the movie had started, I
heard Hassan next to me, croaking. Tears were sliding down his cheeks. I reached
across my seat, slung my arm around him, pulled him close. He rested his head on
my shoulder. “He took you for someone else,” I whispered. “He took you for
someone else.”
I’m told no one was really surprised when Sanaubar eloped. People _had_ raised
their eyebrows when Ali, a man who had memorized the Koran, married Sanaubar, a
woman nineteen years younger, a beautiful but notoriously unscrupulous woman who
lived up to her dishonorable reputation. Like Ali, she was a Shi’a Muslim and an
ethnic Hazara. She was also his first cousin and therefore a natural choice for a spouse. But beyond those similarities, Ali and Sanaubar had little in common,
least of all their respective appearances. While Sanaubar’s brilliant green eyes
and impish face had, rumor has it, tempted countless men into sin, Ali had a
congenital paralysis of his lower facial muscles, a condition that rendered him
unable to smile and left him perpetually grimfaced. It was an odd thing to see
the stone-faced Ali happy, or sad, because only his slanted brown eyes glinted
with a smile or welled with sorrow. People say that eyes are windows to the
soul. Never was that more true than with Ali, who could only reveal himself
through his eyes.
I have heard that Sanaubar’s suggestive stride and oscillating hips sent men to
reveries of infidelity. But polio had left Ali with a twisted, atrophied right
leg that was sallow skin over bone with little in between except a paper-thin
layer of muscle. I remember one day, when I was eight, Ali was taking me to the
bazaar to buy some _naan_. I was walking behind him, humming, trying to imitate
his walk. I watched him swing his scraggy leg in a sweeping arc, watched his
whole body tilt impossibly to the right every time he planted that foot. It
seemed a minor miracle he didn’t tip over with each step. When I tried it, I
almost fell into the gutter. That got me giggling. Ali turned around, caught me
aping him. He didn’t say anything. Not then, not ever. He just kept walking.
Ali’s face and his walk frightened some of the younger children in the
neighborhood. But the real trouble was with the older kids. They chased him on
the street, and mocked him when he hobbled by. Some had taken to calling him
_Babalu_, or Boogeyman.
“Hey, Babalu, who did you eat today?” they barked to a chorus of laughter. “Who
did you eat, you flat-nosed Babalu?”
They called him “flat-nosed” because of Ali and Hassan’s characteristic Hazara
Mongoloid features. For years, that was all I knew about the Hazaras, that they
were Mogul descendants, and that they looked a little like Chinese people.
School text books barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in
passing. Then one day, I was in Baba’s study, looking through his stuff, when I
found one of my mother’s old history books. It was written by an Iranian named
Khorami. I blew the dust off it, sneaked it into bed with me that night, and was
stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated
to Hassan’s people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted
and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the
Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had “quelled them with
unspeakable violence.” The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras,
driven them from their lands, burned their homes, and sold their women. The book
said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns
were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi’a. The book said a lot of things I
didn’t know, things my teachers hadn’t mentioned. Things Baba hadn’t mentioned
either. It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras
_mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys_. I had heard some of the kids
in the neighborhood yell those names to Hassan.
The following week, after class, I showed the book to my teacher and pointed to
the chapter on the Hazaras. He skimmed through a couple of pages, snickered,
handed the book back. “That’s the one thing Shi’a people do well,” he said,
picking up his papers, “passing themselves as martyrs.” He wrinkled his nose
when he said the word Shi’a, like it was some kind of disease. But despite sharing ethnic heritage and family blood, Sanaubar joined the
neighborhood kids in taunting Ali. I have heard that she made no secret of her
disdain for his appearance.
“This is a husband?” she would sneer. “I have seen old donkeys better suited to
be a husband.”
In the end, most people suspected the marriage had been an arrangement of sorts
between Ali and his uncle, Sanaubar’s father. They said Ali had married his
cousin to help restore some honor to his uncle’s blemished name, even though
Ali, who had been orphaned at the age of five, had no worldly possessions or
inheritance to speak of.
Ali never retaliated against any of his tormentors, I suppose partly because he
could never catch them with that twisted leg dragging behind him. But mostly
because Ali was immune to the insults of his assailants; he had found his joy,
his antidote, the moment Sanaubar had given birth to Hassan. It had been a
simple enough affair. No obstetricians, no anesthesiologists, no fancy
monitoring devices. Just Sanaubar lying on a stained, naked mattress with Ali
and a midwife helping her. She hadn’t needed much help at all, because, even in
birth, Hassan was true to his nature:
He was incapable of hurting anyone. A few grunts, a couple of pushes, and out
came Hassan. Out he came smiling.
As confided to a neighbor’s servant by the garrulous midwife, who had then in
turn told anyone who would listen, Sanaubar had taken one glance at the baby in
Ali’s arms, seen the cleft lip, and barked a bitter laughter.
“There,” she had said. “Now you have your own idiot child to do all your smiling
for you!” She had refused to even hold Hassan, and just five days later, she was
gone.
Baba hired the same nursing woman who had fed me to nurse Hassan. Ali told us
she was a blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha
statues. “What a sweet singing voice she had,” he used to say to us.
What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew--Ali had
told us countless times. We just wanted to hear Ali sing.
He’d clear his throat and begin:
_On a high mountain I stood,
And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.
O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,
Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts._
Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed
from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break.
Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn
in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
Mine was _Baba_.
His was _Amir_. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter
of 1975--and all that followed--was already laid in those first words.