They are welcomed with open arms. The host puts out dried fruit and nuts, sweets and tea. They start off with formalities and the latest news. The children listen to the parents’ prattle. Shabnam cracks pistachios and is bored.
One of the children is missing, thirteen-year-old Belqisa. She knows to stay away; the visit is about her.
Sharifa has been here before, on the same mission. This time Sultan has reluctantly agreed to accompany her, to add gravity to the situation. They are there on behalf of Yunus - Sultan’s younger brother. He fell for Belqisa when he lived as a refugee in Pakistan a few years ago, when she was only a child. He has asked Sharifa to propose for him. He has never himself spoken to the girl.
The answer has always been the same: she is too young. On the other hand, if they wanted the older daughter, Shirin, who was twenty, that would be another matter. But Yunus did not want her, she was not nearly as beautiful as Belqisa, and anyhow, she was a bit too eager, he thought. When he visited she was always around him. In addition she had let him hold her hand when the others were not looking, and that, Yunus thought, was a bad sign. She was obviously not a virtuous girl.
But the parents held out for the older daughter, because Yunus was a good proposition. When Shirin had other proposals they approached Sultan and offered her to Yunus for the last time. But Yunus did not want Shirin. His eyes were on Belqisa and there they stayed.
In spite of being rejected, Sharifa has returned continually to ask for Belqisa. It was not seen as rudeness; on the contrary, it indicated the seriousness of the proposal.
Tradition says the mother of a suitor must wear out the soles of her shoes until they are as thin as garlic skin. As Yunus’s mother, Bibi Gul, was in Kabul, Sharifa, his sister-in-law, had taken on the role of go-between. She enlarged on Yunus’s excellence, how he spoke fluent English, how he worked in the bookshop with Sultan and how their daughter would lack for nothing. But Yunus was nearly thirty. Too old for Belqisa, the parents thought.
Belqisa’s mother had her eye on one of the other young boys in the Khan family: Mansur, Sultan’s sixteen-year-old son. ‘If you offer us Mansur we’ll accept on the spot,’ she said.
But now it was Sultan’s turn to dig his heels in. Mansur was only a few years older than Belqisa, and he had never even cast a glance in her direction. Sharifa thought it was too early to think of marriage. He was going to study, see the world.
‘Anyhow, she’s not thirteen,’ Sharifa said to her girl-friends a bit later. ‘I’m sure she’s at least fifteen.’
Belqisa walks into the room for a few moments so Sultan can give her the once-over. She is tall and thin and looks older than thirteen. She is wearing a dark-blue velvet costume, and sits down beside her mother - awkward and shy. Belqisa knows exactly what this is all about and feels uncomfortable.
‘She’s crying, she doesn’t want to,’ her two older sisters tell Sultan and Sharifa in front of Belqisa. Belqisa looks down.
But Sharifa laughs. It’s a good sign when the bride is unwilling. That indicates a pure heart.
Belqisa gets up after a few minutes and disappears. Her mother excuses her and says she has a maths test the next day. But the chosen one is not supposed to be present during the bargaining. First the opposing sides test the water before they get down to actual sums. How much the parents will get, how much will be spent on the wedding, the dress and the flowers. The groom’s family pays all expenses. The fact that Sultan is present gives the discussion gravitas; he has the money.
When the visit is over and nothing has been decided, they walk out into the cool March evening. The streets are quiet. ‘I don’t like the family,’ Sultan says. ‘They are greedy.’
It is especially Belqisa’s mother he is not keen on. She is her husband’s second wife. When his first wife never conceived he married again, and the new wife tormented the first one to such a degree that she could stand it no longer and moved in with her brother. Nasty stories circulate about Belqisa’s mother. She is grasping, jealous and avaricious. Her oldest daughter married one of Sultan’s relatives who said that she was a nightmare during the wedding ceremony, complaining constantly that there was too little food, too few decorations. ‘As mother so daughter. Belqisa’s a chip off the old block,’ states Sultan.
But he adds grudgingly that if she’s the one Yunus wants, he’ll do his best. ‘Unfortunately they’ll end up saying yes. Our family is too good to turn down.’
Having done his duty by the family, Sultan can at last start doing what he came to Pakistan for: print books. Early one morning he starts the next stage of the journey, to Lahore, the town of printing, bookbinding and publishing.
He packs a small suitcase with six books, a calendar and a change of clothes. As always when he travels, his money is sewn into his shirtsleeves. The day looks like being warm. The bus depot in Peshawar is seething with people and the bus companies struggle to make themselves heard over the din. ‘Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore!’ By each bus a man stands and screams. There is no timetable; the buses depart when they are full. Before departure men selling nuts, small cornets full of sunflower seeds, biscuits and crisps, newspapers and magazines board the bus. Beggars content themselves with reaching hands through open windows.
Sultan ignores them. He follows the Prophet Muhammad’s advice with regard to alms which he interprets thus: First take care of yourself, then your closest family, then other relatives, then neighbours, and last the unknown poor. He might slip a few Afghani to a beggar in Kabul, but Pakistani beggars are at the bottom of the list. Pakistan will have to see to its own poor.
He sits in the back row of the bus, squashed between other travellers, his suitcase under his feet. In it is his life’s undertaking, written on a scrap of paper. He wants to print Afghanistan’s new schoolbooks. When the schools open this spring there will hardly be any textbooks. Books printed by the Mujahedeen government and the Taliban are useless. This is how first-year schoolchildren learn the alphabet: ‘J is for Jihad, our aim in life, I is for Israel, our enemy, K is for Kalashnikov, we will overcome, M is for Mujahedeen, our heroes, T is for Taliban . . .’
War was the central theme in maths books too. Schoolboys - because the Taliban printed books solely for boys - did not calculate in apples and cakes, but in bullets and Kalashnikovs. Something like this: ‘Little Omar has a Kalashnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels. How many infidels does he kill with each bullet?’
Books from the Communist period cannot be used either.
Their arithmetic problems deal with land distribution and egalitarian ideals. Red banners and happy collective farmers would guide children towards Communism.
Sultan wanted to return to the books from the time of Zahir Shah, the king who ruled for forty comparatively peaceful years before he was deposed in 1973. He has found old books he can reprint: stories and myths for Persian lessons, maths books where one plus one equals two, and history books cleansed of ideological content other than a bit of innocent nationalism.
UNESCO has promised to finance the country’s new schoolbooks. As one of the largest publishers in Kabul, Sultan has had meetings with them and will give them an offer once he has been to Lahore. On the scrap of paper in his waistcoat he has scribbled down page numbers and formats of 113 schoolbooks. The budget is calculated at two million dollars. In Lahore he will investigate which printers come up with the best deals. Thereafter he will return to Kabul and compete for the gilt-edged contract. Sultan contemplates contentedly how large a cut he can demand of the two million. He decides not to be too greedy. If he wins the contract he is assured work for many years to come - from reprints and new books. He reflects as fields and plains whizz past along the road, which is the main thoroughfare between Kabul and Calcutta. The closer they get to Lahore the warmer it gets. Sultan sweats in his homespun clothes from the Afghan highlands. He strokes his hair, where only a few strands remain, and wipes his face with a handkerchief.
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In addition to the scrap of paper where the 113 schoolbooks are scribbled down, Sultan also has books he wants to print on his own account. Following the stream of journalists, aid workers and foreign diplomats into Afghanistan, came the demand for English-language books about the country. Sultan does not import books from foreign publishers, he prints them himself.
Pakistan is the piracy printers’ paradise. No control exists and few respect royalties and copyrights. Sultan pays one dollar to print a book he can resell for twenty or thirty. The bestseller Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid, Sultan has reprinted in several editions. The favourite amongst the foreign soldiers is My Hidden War, a book written by a Russian reporter about the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. It was a reality diametrically opposite to the one experienced by today’s international peace-keepers patrolling Kabul, who from time to time drop in and buy postcards and old war books in Sultan’s bookshop.
The bus trundles into Lahore bus depot. The heat hits him. The place is heaving with people. Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and artistic stronghold, a busy, polluted and confusing city. Lying in a plain, lacking all natural defences, the town has been conquered, destroyed, rebuilt, conquered, destroyed and rebuilt. But in between conquests and destruction many of the rulers entertained leading poets and writers and Lahore thus became the town of artists and books, in spite of the fact that the palaces the artists visited were constantly being levelled to the ground.
Sultan loves the Lahore book markets; he has pulled off several coups here. Few things warm the cockles of Sultan’s heart more than finding a valuable book in a dusty market place and buying it for next to nothing. Sultan is of the opinion that he owns the world’s largest book collection on Afghanistan, a collection of about eight or nine thousand volumes. Everything interests him: old myths and stories, old poetry, novels, biographies, recent political literature as well as dictionaries and encyclopaedias. His face lights up when he happens upon a book he hasn’t got or doesn’t know.
But now he has no time to trawl the book markets. He gets up at dawn, puts on his clean change of clothes, arranges his beard and places the fez on his head. He stands before a holy responsibility - to print new textbooks for Afghanistan’s children. He goes straight to the printers he uses most. There he meets Talha. The young man is a third-generation printer and only mildly interested in Sultan’s project. It is, quite simply, too big.
Talha invites Sultan to a cup of tea with thick milk, strokes his mouth and looks worried.
‘I don’t mind taking a few, but a hundred and thirteen titles! That will take us a year.’
Sultan has a two-month deadline. While the sound of the printing presses reverberates through the thin walls in the little office, he tries to convince Talha to put all other jobs aside.
‘Impossible,’ says Talha. Sultan might well be an important client and printing schoolbooks for Afghan children might well be a holy undertaking, but he has other commissions to take care of. Nevertheless, he makes a quick calculation and reckons the books can be printed for as little as 3 pence per copy. The price will depend on paper quality, colour quality and binding. Talha calculates all combinations of quality and size and makes a long list. Sultan’s eyes narrow. He does mental calculations in rupees, dollars, days and weeks. He lied about the deadline to get Talha to speed up and put aside other assignments.
‘Don’t forget, two months,’ he says. ‘If you cannot make the time limit, you’ll ruin my business, do you understand?’
When they finish talking about the schoolbooks they negotiate the new books for Sultan’s bookshop. Once again they discuss prices, numbers and dates. The books Sultan has brought with him are reproduced straight from the original. The pages are taken apart and copied. The printers stamp them on large metal plates. When they print coloured front-covers a zinc solution is poured over the plates. They are then laid out in the sun, which brings out the right colour. If a page has several colours the plates must be exposed one at a time. Thereafter the plate is put on the press and run. Everything is done on old, semiautomatic machinery. One worker feeds the press with paper; another squats at the opposite end and sorts what emerges. The wireless drones in the background; a cricket match between Sri Lanka and Pakistan. On the wall hangs the mandatory picture of Mecca and a lamp swings from the ceiling, full of dead flies. Streams of yellow acid run on to the floor and down the drains.
After the inspection-round Talha and Sultan sit down on the floor and consider book covers. Sultan has chosen motifs from his postcards. He has some strips of border which he likes and he makes up the pages. After five minutes they have designed six book covers.
In a corner some men sit and drink tea. They are Pakistani publishers and printers who all operate in the same shadowy piracy market as Sultan. They greet each other and get talking about the latest news from Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai walks a tightrope between the various warlords, while groups of al-Qaida soldiers have launched an attack in the east of the country. American Special Forces have come to the rescue and are bombing caves by the Pakistani border. One of the men sitting on the rug says what a pity the Taliban were driven out of Afghanistan.
‘We need a few Taliban here in Pakistan too, to clean up a bit,’ he says.
‘That’s what you say. You have no experience of the Taliban. Pakistan would collapse if the Taliban came to power, don’t believe anything else,’ Sultan thunders. ‘Just imagine: all the advertising posters will come down, and there are at least one thousand in this street alone. All books containing pictures will be burnt, and the same will happen to the whole of Pakistan’s film archive, music archive, all instruments will be destroyed. You’ll never again hear music, never dance again. All the Internet cafés will be closed, TV is prohibited and confiscated, and all you’ll get on the wireless will be religious programmes. Girls are taken out of school, all women are sent home from work. What will happen to Pakistan? The country will lose hundreds of thousands of workplaces and sink into deep depression. And what will happen to all the superfluous people who lose their jobs when Pakistan is no longer a modern country? Maybe they’ll become warriors? ’ Sultan was working himself into a frenzy.
The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, maybe not all the Taliban, just a few of them.’
Talha supported the Taliban by duplicating their pamphlets. For a few years he even printed some of their Islamic textbooks. Eventually he helped them set up their own printing works in Kabul. He got hold of a secondhand press from Italy, which he let them have cheaply. In addition he provided paper and other technical equipment. Like most Pakistanis he found it reassuring to have a Pashtoon regime next door.
‘You are unscrupulous,’ Sultan teases him good-naturedly, now that he has vented his spleen on his loathing of the Taliban.
Talha squirms, but sticks to his guns. ‘Taliban is not in conflict with our culture. They respect the Koran, the Prophet and our traditions. I would never have printed anything that went against Islam.’
‘Like what?’ Sultan laughs.
After having thought about it Talha says, ‘Like The Satanic Verses, for instance, or anything else by Salman Rushdie. May Allah lead us to his hideout.
‘He should have been killed. But he always gets away. Anyone who prints his books or helps him should also be put down,’ says Talha. ‘I wouldn’t print his stuff if I was offered all the tea in China. He has trampled on Islam.’
‘He has hurt and humiliated us, stabbed us. They’ll get him one day,’ one of the men continues, although neither man has read the book.
Sultan agrees. ‘He is trying to destroy our soul and he must be stopped before he corrupts others too. Not even the Communists went as far as that; they behaved with a certain amount of respect and did not try to rubbish our religion. Then you have this smut from someone calling themselves a Muslim.’
They sit silently, as though unable to shrug off the darkness the traitor Rushdie has cast over them. ‘They’ll get him, y
ou’ll see, Inshallah, God willing,’ says Talha.
In the following days Sultan stamps around Lahore to all sorts of printers, in backyards, cellars and alleyways. To manage the sheer numbers he must spread his order over a dozen or so print shops. He explains his errand, gets quotations, jots down notes and estimates. His eyes blink when a quote is especially good, and his lips quiver slightly. He runs his tongue over his lips, does a quick mental calculation and assesses the profit margin. After two weeks he has placed orders for all the textbooks and promises to report back to the print shops.
At last he can return to Kabul. This time he doesn’t have to struggle across the border on horseback. Afghans are not allowed into Pakistan, but there is no passport control on the return journey and the bookseller can leave the country openly.
Sultan jolts along in an old bus round the tortuous bends from Jalalabad to Kabul. On one side of the road massive boulders threaten to roll off the mountain. Once he sees two overturned buses and a trailer, which have driven off the road. Several dead people are being carried away, amongst them two young boys. He prays for their souls and for himself.
Not only avalanches threaten this road. It is known as the most lawless in Afghanistan. Here foreign journalists, aid workers and local Afghans paid with their lives when, by accident, they stumbled upon outlaws. Soon after the Taliban fell four journalists were murdered. Their driver survived because he recited the Islamic creed. Just after that a busload of Afghans was stopped. All those with shaven beards had their ears and noses cut off - a demonstration by the bandits of how they wished their country to be ruled.
Sultan prays by the spot where the journalists were killed. To be on the safe side he has kept his beard and wears traditional clothes. Only the turban has been exchanged for a small fez.
He is nearing Kabul. Sonya is no doubt angry, he thinks to himself and smiles. He had promised to return within a week. He had tried to explain that he could not possibly do Peshawar and Lahore in one week. But she did not want to understand. ‘Then I won’t drink my milk,’ she’d said. Sultan laughs. He is looking forward to seeing her. Sonya does not like milk, but because she is still breastfeeding Latifa, Sultan has forced her to drink a glass every morning. This glass of milk has become her bargaining chip.