But in Hayatabad it is not necessary to see in order to know. In your own living room, with closed eyes, you know that the neighbour is playing loud, piercing Pakistani pop music, that children are yelling or playing, that a mother is bawling, that a woman is banging her carpets and another washing up in the sun, that a neighbour is burning food and yet another cutting up garlic.
What the sounds and smells do not divulge, gossip supplies. It spreads like wildfire in the neighbourhood, where everyone is watching one another’s morals.
Sharifa shares the old, tumbledown brick house and the minute concrete backyard with three families. When it looks as if Sultan will not turn up, she pops down to the neighbours. The women of the house and a few assorted women from the surrounding backyards are gathered. Every Thursday afternoon they congregate for nazar, a religious feast - to gossip and pray.
They tie their shawls tightly round their heads, place individual prayer mats facing the direction of Mecca and bow, pray, rise up, pray, bow again, four times in all. The invocation is done in silence, only the lips move. As the prayer mats become free others take over.
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
The Beneficent, the Merciful,
Owner of the Day of Judgement
Thee alone we worship; Thee alone we ask for help.
Show us the straight path,
The path of those whom Thou hast favoured;
Not the path of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.
Barely has it finished than the whispered prayer is succeeded by loud, chattering voices. The women seat themselves on cushions along the wall. The oilcloth on the floor is laid with cups and saucers. Freshly brewed cardamom tea and a dry sweetmeat made of biscuit-crumbs and sugar is put out. Everyone puts their hands to their face and prays again, joining in the whispering chorus round the food: ‘La Elaha Ellallahu Muhammad-u-Rasoollullah’ - There is no other god but God and Muhammad is His prophet.
When the prayer is over they pass their hands over their face, from nose up to forehead, out and down the cheeks to the chin until the hands stop at the lips, as though they were eating the prayer. From mother to daughter, they have all been taught that if they pray in this manner at nazar, their prayers will be heard, if they deserve it. These prayers go straight to Allah, who will decide whether to answer them or not.
Sharifa prays that Sultan will fetch her and Shabnam back to Kabul. Then she will be surrounded by all her children.
When everyone has asked Allah to answer their prayer, the actual Thursday ritual can begin: eat sweetmeats, drink cardamom tea and exchange the latest news. Sharifa mumbles a few words about expecting Sultan any moment, but no one takes any notice. Her ménage à trois is no longer the hot topic in street 103 in Hayatabad. Sixteen-year-old Saliqa is the current star of gossip. The object herself is shut up in the back room following an unpardonable crime a few days earlier. She lies on her mattress, bruised and battered, with a bleeding face and a back full of red swollen streaks.
Those who do not know the story’s details listen rapturously.
Saliqa’s crime began six months earlier. One afternoon, Sharifa’s daughter Shabnam passed Saliqa a slip of paper.
‘I promised not to say who it is from, but it’s from a boy,’ she said, tiptoeing with excitement and delight at the thought of the important mission. ‘He doesn’t dare show himself. But I know who it is.’
Shabnam kept appearing with notes from the boy, scraps of paper full of hearts pierced with arrows and the words ‘I love you’ written in clumsy letters, notes telling her how beautiful she is. Saliqa saw the unknown letter-writer in every boy she encountered. She took care how she dressed, that her hair was glossy and shining, and cursed her uncle for making her wear the long veil.
One day he wrote that he would be standing by the lamppost a few houses past hers and that he would be wearing a red sweater. Saliqa quivered with excitement when she left home. She had dressed up in a pale blue velvet costume and was using the jewels she loved, gold-coloured bracelets and heavy chains. She was with a friend and barely dared walk past the tall, slender boy in the red sweater. His face was turned away and he never moved.
Now she took the letter-writing initiative. ‘Tomorrow you must turn round,’ she wrote and pushed the note to Shabnam, the ever-obliging and eager go-between. But again he did not move. Then, on the third day, he turned towards her. Saliqa felt her heart hit her stomach, but she kept on walking. The suspense had been replaced by obsessive love. He wasn’t especially good-looking, but it was him, the letter-writer. For many months they exchanged notes and stolen glances.
New crimes were added to this first one - that she had even accepted notes from a boy and, God forbid, had answered. Now she had fallen in love with someone not chosen by her parents. She knew they would dislike him. He was uneducated, had no money and was from an inferior family. In Hayatabad it is the parents’ wishes that count. Saliqa’s sister married after a five-year fight with her father. She had fallen in love with someone other than the one her parents had chosen and she refused to give him up. The battle ended when the two lovers each emptied a bottle full of pills and were sent in great haste to hospital to be pumped. Only then did the parents consent.
One day circumstances brought Saliqa and Nadim together. Her mother was spending the weekend with relatives in Islamabad and the uncle was away all day. Only his wife was at home. Saliqa told her she was visiting friends.
‘Have you got permission?’ her uncle’s wife asked. Her uncle was head of the family as long as Saliqa’s father was living in a refugee reception centre in Belgium. He was waiting for a resident’s permit to enable him to get employment and send money home - or better still, send for his whole family.
‘Mummy said I could go as soon as I had finished my chores,’ Saliqa lied.
She didn’t go to her girl friend; she went to meet Nadim, face to face.
‘We can’t talk here,’ she says quickly when they seemingly meet by chance on the street corner. He hails a taxi and pushes her in. Saliqa has never sat in a taxi with a strange boy and her heart is in her throat. They stop by a park, a park in Peshawar where men and women can walk together.
They sit on a bench in the park and talk for a short half-hour. Nadim is making grand plans for the future, he wants to buy a shop or sell carpets. Saliqa is first and foremost terrified someone is going to spot them. Less than half an hour after leaving home she is back. But all hell has already broken loose. Shabnam saw her and Nadim in the taxi and went and told Sharifa who informed the uncle’s wife.
The aunt hits Saliqa hard on the mouth when she returns, locks her into a room and phones the mother in Islamabad. When the uncle comes home the whole family enters the room and demands to know what she has done. The uncle shakes with anger when he hears about the taxi, the park, and the bench. He grabs a piece of broken wire and beats her repeatedly over the back while her aunt holds on to her. He hits her face until she bleeds from mouth and nose.
‘What have you done, what have you done? You’re a whore,’ the uncle screams. ‘You are a disgrace to the family. A stain on our honour. A rotten branch.’
His voice reverberates throughout the house, in through the neighbours’ open windows. Before long everyone knew of Saliqa’s crime. The crime that caused her to lie locked in her room, praying to Allah that Nadim will propose to her, that her parents will allow her to marry, that Nadim will get work in a carpet shop and that they can move away.
‘If she can sit alone in a taxi with a boy, I’m sure she is capable of other things,’ says Nasrin, a friend of the aunt, and looks haughtily over at Saliqa’s mother. Nasrin shovels sweetmeats into her mouth with a big spoon, and waits for answers to her pronouncement.
‘She was only in the park, there is no need to beat her within an inch of her life,’ says Shirin, who is a doctor.
‘If we hadn’t stopped him we would
have had to take her to the hospital,’ says Sharifa. ‘She was out in the courtyard all night praying,’ she continues. In her sleepless state she had caught sight of the wretched girl. ‘She was there until the call for prayer early this morning,’ she added.
The women sigh, one mutters a prayer. They all agree that Saliqa made a big mistake by meeting Nadim in the park, but they cannot agree whether she was merely disobedient or had committed a serious crime.
‘What a disgrace, what a disgrace,’ Saliqa’s mother wails. ‘How could a daughter of mine do something like that?’
The women discuss the way forward. If he proposes to her the disgrace can be forgotten. But Saliqa’s mother is not keen on the idea of Nadim as son-in-law. His family is poor, he is uneducated, and for the most part he just roams the streets. The only job he ever had, but subsequently lost, was in a carpet factory. If Saliqa married him she would have to move in with his family. They could never afford their own house.
‘His mother is not a good housewife,’ one of the women claims. ‘Their house is shabby and dirty. She’s lazy and doesn’t stay at home.’
One of the older women recalls Nadim’s grandmother. ‘When they lived in Kabul they entertained anybody,’ she says and adds slyly: ‘Men even came to her apartment when she was alone, and they weren’t relatives.’
‘With all due respect,’ one of the women says, turning towards Saliqa’s mother, ‘I must admit I always thought Saliqa was a bit of a show-off, always made up, dressed up to the nines. You should have realised that she had dirty thoughts.’
For a while no one says anything, as though they all agree, without actually saying so, in sympathy for Saliqa’s mother. One woman wipes her mouth; it is time to think of supper. The others get up, one by one. Sharifa mounts the stairs to her three rooms. She passes the back room where Saliqa is shut up. She will stay there until the family have decided what to do with her.
Sharifa sighs. She thinks of the punishment that befell her neighbour Jamila.
Jamila came from a superior family, she was rich, immaculate, and beautiful as a flower. A relative had put aside money earned abroad and thus could afford the eighteen-year-old beauty. The wedding was exceptional, five hundred guests, the food sumptuous, the bride radiantly beautiful. Jamila did not meet the man she was to marry prior to the wedding; the parents had arranged everything. The groom, a tall, thin man of forty-something, travelled from overseas to get married the Afghan way. He and Jamila spent two weeks together as newlyweds before he returned to arrange for a visa in order that she could join him. In the meantime Jamila lived with his two brothers and their wives.
They got her after three months. The police had ratted on her. They had spied a man crawling in through her window.
They never got the man, but the husband’s two brothers found some of his belongings in Jamila’s room, proof of the relationship. The family immediately dissolved the marriage and sent her packing home. She was locked up for two days while a family council was held.
Three days later Jamila’s brother told their neighbours that his sister had died as the result of an accident with a fan which short-circuited.
The funeral was held the next day; lots of flowers, lots of serious faces. The mother and sisters were inconsolable. All mourned the short life allotted Jamila.
‘Like the wedding,’ they said, ‘a wonderful funeral.’
The family’s honour had been salvaged.
Sharifa had a video from the wedding, but Jamila’s brother came to borrow it. She never got it back. Nothing would remain to suggest that a wedding had ever taken place. But Sharifa keeps a few photos. The bridal couple look formal and serious as they cut the cake. Jamila’s face betrays nothing and she looks lovely in the innocent white dress and veil, black hair and red mouth.
Sharifa sighs. Jamila committed a serious crime, but more from ignorance than a wicked heart.
‘She did not deserve to die. But Allah rules,’ she mumbles and breathes a prayer.
However, one thing bothers her: the two days of family council when Jamila’s mother, her own mother, agreed to kill her. She, the mother, it was, who in the end dispatched her three sons to kill her daughter. The brothers entered the room together. Together they put a pillow over her face; together they pushed it down, harder, harder, until life was extinguished.
Then they returned to the mother.
Suicide and Song
In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes’ notion of honour and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death. The undisciplined are cruelly killed. Should only one guilty party be executed it is invariably the woman.
Young women are above all objects to be bartered or sold. Marriage is a contract between families or within families. Decisions are made according to the advantages the marriage brings to the tribe - feelings are rarely taken into consideration. Throughout the centuries Afghan women have had to put up with injustices committed in their name. But in song and poem women have testified about their lives. The songs are not meant for publication, but the echo lingers on in the mountains and the desert.
‘They protest with suicide and song’, writes the Afghan poet Sayd Bahodine Majrouh in a book of poems by Pashtoon women.* He collected the poems with the aid of his sister-in-law. Majrouh was himself murdered by fundamentalists in Peshawar in 1988.
The poems or rhymes live on in popular sayings and are swapped by the well, on the way to the fields, by the baking oven. They talk of forbidden love, and without exception the beloved is someone other than the one the woman is married to; they talk of loathing the (often much older) husband. But they also express pride and courage. The poems are called landay, which means ‘short’. They are of few lines, short and rhythmical, ‘like a scream or a knife stab’, writes Majrouh.
Cruel people, you can see the old man
On his way to my bed
And you ask me why I cry and tear my hair.
Oh, my God, yet again you have bestowed on me a dark night
And yet again I tremble from head to foot
I have to step into the bed I hate.
But the women in the poems are also rebellious; they risk their lives for love - in a society where passion is prohibited and punishment merciless.
Le suicide et le chant. Poésie populaire des femmes pashtounes, by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, Gallimard 1994.
Give me your hand, my loved one, and we will hide in the
meadow
To love or fall down beneath the knife stabs.
I jump in the river, but the current does not carry me away.
My husband is fortunate; I am always thrown back on to the
bank.
Tomorrow morning I will be killed because of you.
Do not say that you did not love me.
Nearly all the ‘screams’ deal with disappointments and life unlived. One woman asks God to make her a stone in the next life, rather than a woman. None of the poems are about hope - on the contrary, hopelessness reigns. The women have not lived enough, never tasted the fruits of their beauty, their youth, or the pleasures of love.
I was beautiful like a rose.
Beneath you I have turned yellow like an orange.
I never knew suffering.
Therefore I grew straight, like a fir-tree.
The poems are also full of sweetness. The woman glorifies her body with brutal sincerity, sensuous love and forbidden fruit - as though she wants to shock, provoke men’s virility.
Lay thy mouth over mine,
But let my tongue be free so it can talk of love.
Take me first in your arms!
Afterwards you can bind yourself to my velvet thighs.
My mouth is yours, eat it up, do not be frightened!
It is not made of sugar, dissolvable.
My mouth, you can
have it.
But why stir me up - I am already wet.
I will turn you into ash
If I only for one moment turn my gaze towards you.
The Business Trip
It is still cool. The sun’s first rays have touched the steep, stony mountain cliffs. The landscape is dust-coloured, brown turning to grey. The mountainsides are all stone; boulders threaten to trigger crushing avalanches, and gravel and bits of clay crunch below the horses’ hooves. Thistles growing between the stones scratch the legs of smugglers, refugees and fleeing warriors. A confusion of paths cross and disappear behind rocks and mounds.
This is the route used by smugglers of weapons and opium, cigarettes and Coca-Cola cans between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The paths have been trodden throughout the centuries. These are the paths the Taliban and the Arab al-Qaida warriors crept along when they realised the battle for Afghanistan was lost and they fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan. These are the paths they will use when they return to defeat American soldiers - the infidel who has occupied holy, Muslim soil. Neither Afghan nor Pakistani authorities control the area around the border. Pashtoon tribes command their particular districts on each side of the state boundaries. The lawlessness, preposterously, has found its way into Pakistani law. On the Pakistani side the authorities have the right to operate on tarmacked roads, and up to 20 metres beyond on both sides. Outside the 20 metres tribal law reigns.
On this morning the bookseller Sultan Khan makes his way past the Pakistani border guards. Less than 100 metres away are the Pakistani police. As long as humans, horses and laden donkeys keep their distance, there is nothing they can do.
But if the authorities cannot control the stream, nevertheless, many of the travellers are stopped and ‘taxed’ by armed men, sometimes just ordinary villagers. Sultan has made his provisions; Sonya has sewn the money into the sleeves of his shirt and he carries his possessions in a dirty sugar bag. He is wearing his oldest shalwar kameez.