She misses Sultan terribly when he is away. The other members of the family do not treat her so well when he is not there. Then she is no longer mistress of the house, just someone who has dropped in by chance. Suddenly others are in charge and they do what they like when Sultan is absent. ‘Peasant-girl’, they call her. ‘Stupid as an ass!’ But they dare not tease her too much because she will complain to Sultan and no one wants him for an enemy.
Sultan misses Sonya too, in a way he never missed Sharifa. Sometimes he feels she is too young for him, that she is like a child, that he must look after her, trick her into drinking milk, surprise her with little presents.
He ponders on the difference between the two wives. When he is with Sharifa she looks after everything, remembers appointments, organises, arranges. Sharifa puts Sultan first, his needs and wants. Sonya does what she is told, but never takes the initiative.
There is only one thing he cannot reconcile himself to, the different hours they keep. Sultan always gets up at five to pray fajr, the only hour of prayer he observes. Whereas Sharifa always got up with him, boiled water, made tea, put out his clean clothes, Sonya is like a child, impossible to wake.
Sometimes Sultan thinks he is too old for her; he is not the right one. But then he reminds himself that she could never find anyone better than him. Had she married someone her own age she would never have had the standard of living she now enjoys. It would have been a poverty-stricken boy, for all the boys in her village are poor. We’ve got ten to twenty happy years ahead, Sultan thinks and his face assumes a contented expression. He feels lucky and happy.
Sultan laughs. He twitches a bit. He is nearing Mikrorayon and the delicious child-woman.
Do You Want My Unhappiness?
The feast is over. Mutton bones and chicken legs lie scattered about on the floor. Lumps of rice have been rubbed into the tablecloth, stained dark red from chilli sauce mixed with puddles of thin, white yoghurt. Bits of bread and orange peel litter the room, as if they had been thrown around during the final moments of the meal.
On the cushions against the walls sit three men and a woman. In the corner by the door two women squat together. They have had no part in the meal, but stare straight ahead beneath the shawls, and make eye contact with no one.
The four round the wall enjoy the tea and drink slowly and thoughtfully - wearily. The important points have been decided and settled. Wakil will get Shakila and Rasul will get Bulbula. Only the price and the wedding date remain to be fixed.
Over tea and glazed almonds the price for Shakila is set at one hundred dollars; Bulbula is free of charge. Wakil has the money ready; he pulls a banknote out of his pocket and hands it to Sultan. Sultan accepts the money for his sister with an arrogant, slightly uninterested expression; not much of a price he got for her. On the other hand, Rasul draws a sigh of relief. It would have taken him at least a year longer to scrape together enough money to buy a bride and pay for the wedding.
Sultan is disgruntled on behalf of his sisters and thinks that their grumpiness cost them many dashing suitors. Fifteen years ago they could have had young, rich men.
‘They were too fussy.’
However, it was not Sultan who sealed their fate, but his mother, Bibi Gul, enthroned on the seat of honour. She sits cross-legged, satisfied, rocking from side to side. The kerosene lamp throws a peaceful glow over her wrinkled face. Her hands lie heavily in her lap and she smiles blissfully. She no longer appears to be listening to the conversation. She herself was married off at eleven to a man twenty years older. She was given away as part of a marriage contract between two families. Her parents had asked for one of the neighbouring family’s daughters for their son, and they accepted on condition that Bibi Gul was thrown in for good measure for their oldest unmarried son. He had spotted her in the backyard.
After a long marriage, three wars, five coups d’état and thirteen children, the widow has finally given away her third and second last daughters; one remains. She has held on to them for a long time; they are both over thirty and consequently not very attractive with regard to the marriage market. But then their husbands are well worn too. The one who this evening walks out of the door as Shakila’s fiancé is a fifty-something widower with ten children. Bulbula’s intended husband is also a widower, but he is childless.
Bibi Gul has had her own reasons for holding on to her daughters for so long, although many think she has done them an injustice. She describes Bulbula as not very clever and pretty useless. Bibi Gul voices this loudly, without shame, even when her daughter is present. One of Bulbula’s hands is lame and not very strong, and she walks with a limp. ‘She would never manage a big family,’ her mother says.
Bulbula suddenly fell ill when she was six, and when she recovered she had difficulty moving around. Her brother says it was polio, the doctors do not know, and Bibi Gul thinks she suffers from sorrow. All she knows is that Bulbula became ill, pining for her father in prison. He was arrested and accused of stealing money from the warehouse where he worked. Bibi Gul proclaims his innocence. He was released after a few months but Bulbula never recovered. ‘She took on her father’s punishment,’ says her mother.
Bulbula never went to school. The illness went to her head so she was unable to think clearly, her parents maintained. Bulbula hovered around her mother throughout her childhood. She never did much owing to the mysterious illness. But consequently life dropped her. No one had anything to do with Bulbula; no one played with her or asked her to help.
Few people have anything to say to Bulbula. The thirty-year-old woman has a kind of lassitude hanging over her, as though she drags herself through life, or out of it. She has large empty eyes, and on the whole sits with her mouth half open, the lower lip hanging down, as if about to fall asleep. At best Bulbula pays attention to the conversations of others, other lives, but without much enthusiasm. Bibi Gul was content to have Bulbula slopping around the apartment and sleeping on the mat beside her for the rest of her life. But then something happened that made her change her mind.
One day Bibi Gul wanted to visit her sister in the village. She pulled on her burka, dragged Bulbula with her and hailed a taxi. Normally she would go on foot, but she had grown large the last couple of years, her knees were starting to give out and she did not have the energy to walk. Having experienced starvation in her youth and poverty and toil as a young wife, Bibi Gul developed an obsession with food - she was unable to stop eating until all the dishes were empty.
The taxi-driver who halted by the fat burka and her daughter was their distant relative Rasul. He had lost his wife a few years earlier; she died during confinement.
‘Have you found a new wife?’ Bibi Gul asked him in the taxi.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Sad. Inshallah - God willing - you will soon find a new one,’ said Bibi Gul, before relating the latest news from her own family, the sons, daughters and grandchildren.
Rasul took the hint. A few weeks later his sister came to ask for Bulbula’s hand. ‘Surely she can manage him as a husband, ’ thought Bibi Gul.
She agreed without hesitation, which is most unusual. To give away a daughter immediately means she is worthless, that one is pleased to get rid of her. Holding back and hesitating increases the girl’s value; the boy’s family must come several times, plead, persuade and bring gifts. Not many steps were taken for Bulbula, nor any gifts proffered.
While Bulbula stares into space, as though the conversation does not concern her, her sister Shakila listens attentively. The two are like chalk and cheese. Shakila is quick and loud and the family’s centre of attention. Her appetite for life is well developed and she is nice and plump, as behoves an Afghan woman.
Shakila has had several suitors over the last fifteen years; from the time she was a slender teenager, to the present voluptuous woman, sitting in the corner behind the stove, listening speechless to her mother and brother haggling.
Shakila has been choosy. When the suitors’ mothers appro
ached Bibi Gul to bid for her, she never asked, as is usual, whether he was rich or not.
‘Would you allow her to continue her studies?’ was the first question.
The answer was always ‘No’, and so marriage never came up for discussion. Many of the suitors were themselves illiterate. Shakila completed her studies and became a maths and biology teacher. When yet more mothers came to bid for the dashing Shakila on behalf of their sons, Bibi Gul asked: ‘Would you allow her to continue to work?’
No, they would not and so Shakila remained a spinster.
Shakila got her first teaching job while the war against the Soviet Union raged. Every morning she tottered on high heels in knee-length skirts, as dictated by eighties fashion, to the village of Deh Khudaidad, outside Kabul. Neither bullets nor grenades came near. The only thing that exploded was Shakila: she fell in love.
Unfortunately Mahmoud was already married. It was an arranged and loveless marriage. He was a few years older than her and the father of three little children. It was love at first sight when the two colleagues met. No one knew of their feelings for each other, they hid away out of view or phoned and whispered sweet nothings down the receiver. They never met except at school. During one of their clandestine meetings they laid plans for a future together; Mahmoud would take Shakila as his second wife.
But Mahmoud could not simply go to Shakila’s parents and ask for her hand. He was dependent on his mother or sisters.
‘They’ll never do it,’ he said. ‘And my parents will never say yes,’ sighed Shakila.
Mahmoud was of the opinion that only she, Shakila, could get his mother to ask her parents for her. He suggested that she act crazily, desperate; threaten suicide if she could not have Mahmoud; throw herself down in front of her parents; say she was being consumed by love. The parents might give in. To save their lives.
But Shakila had not the courage to scream and shout, and Mahmoud had not the courage to ask the women in his family to go to Shakila’s house. He could never mention Shakila to his wife. In vain did Shakila try to approach her mother. But Bibi Gul thought it was a joke; she anyhow chose to interpret it as a joke every time Shakila said she wanted to marry a colleague with three children.
Mahmoud and Shakila walked around each other in the village school for four years. Then Mahmoud was promoted and changed school. He could not refuse the promotion and now the only contact between them was by phone. Shakila was deeply unhappy and longed for her beloved, but no one was supposed to notice. It is a disgrace to be in love with a man one cannot have.
Then civil war broke out, the school was closed and Shakila fled to Pakistan. After four years the Taliban arrived and although the rockets stopped and peace returned to Kabul, her old school never reopened. Girls’ schools stayed closed, and, like all women in Kabul, Shakila lost the chance overnight of finding another job. Two thirds of Kabul’s teachers disappeared with her. Several boys’ schools were obliged to close too, as many of the teachers had been women. Not enough qualified male teachers could be found.
The years passed by. Her secret liaison with Mahmoud had already been severed when the telephone lines were cut during the civil war. Shakila sat at home with the women of the house. She could not work, she could not go out alone, she had to cover herself up. Life had lost all colour. When she reached thirty the suitors stopped coming.
One day, having been grounded by the Taliban for nearly five years, the sister of her distant relative Wakil came to Bibi Gul to ask for her hand.
‘The wife died suddenly. The children need a mother. He is kind. He has some money. He has never been a soldier, he has never acted unlawfully, he is honest and healthy,’ said the sister. ‘She suddenly went mad and died,’ she whispered. ‘She was delirious, didn’t know any of us. Awful for the children.’
This father of ten needs a wife urgently. At the moment the oldest looks after the youngest, while the house falls apart. Bibi Gul said she would think about it and inquired about the man from friends and relatives. She concluded that he was hardworking and honest.
At any rate, it is an urgent matter if Shakila is going to have children of her own.
‘It is written on her forehead that it is time for her to leave this house,’ said Bibi Gul to anyone who wanted to listen. As the Taliban did not allow women to work at all she hadn’t even bothered to ask whether Wakil would allow it.
She asked Wakil to come in person. Usually a marriage is arranged through the parents, but as this husband was nearing fifty, she wanted to see him with her own eyes. Wakil drove an articulated lorry and was away for days at a time. He dispatched his sister once again, then the brother, once again the sister, and the engagement dragged out.
Then came September 11 and Sultan moved sisters and children once more to Pakistan, to shelter from the bombs he knew would drop. That was when Wakil arrived.
‘We’ll have to talk about it when things return to normal,’ said Sultan.
When the Taliban were driven out of Kabul two months later, Wakil returned. The schools had not yet opened so Bibi Gul never thought of asking whether he would allow Shakila to work.
From the corner behind the stove Shakila follows closely the progress of her destiny and the date of her wedding. The four on the cushions decide everything before the two newly engaged have even had time to give each other the once-over.
Wakil peeps at Shakila. She looks straight ahead, at the wall, into nothing.
‘I am glad I found her,’ he says addressing himself to Sultan, but looking at his fiancée.
The curfew is about to start, and the two men hasten out into the dark. They leave behind two married-off women. They continue to stare into space. Not even when the men bid farewell did they look up. Bulbula heaves herself up and sighs; it’s not her turn yet. It will take years before Rasul scrapes together enough money to pay for the wedding. She appears not to care. She puts a few more sticks of firewood in the oven. No one pesters her with questions; she’s just a presence, as always, until she shuffles out of the room to see to her duties, the washing up and the swill bucket.
Shakila blushes when all the sisters throw themselves over her.
‘Three weeks! You’ll have to hurry.’
‘I’ll never make it,’ she moans. The bridal dress material has already been chosen and is awaiting delivery to the dressmaker. But what about the outfit, the linen, the crockery? Wakil is a widower, so most of it he’ll already have, but regardless, the bride must bring something to the marriage.
Shakila is slightly disgruntled. ‘He’s short, I like tall men,’ she tells her sisters. ‘He’s bald, and he might be a few years younger,’ she says and pouts. ‘What if he’s a bully, what if he’s unkind, what if he won’t let me go out?’ she wonders. Her sisters say nothing and think the same gloomy thoughts. ‘What if he won’t let me visit you, what if he beats me?’
Shakila and the sisters view the marriage in an increasingly dismal light, until Bibi Gul tells them to shut up. ‘He’s a good husband for you,’ she insists.
Two days after the agreement has been signed, Shakila’s sister Mariam arranges a party for the engaged couple. Mariam is twenty-nine and has been married twice. Her first husband was killed during the civil war. Her fifth child is due any moment.
Mariam has laid a long cloth on the floor in the sitting room. Shakila and Wakil sit at one end. Neither Bibi Gul nor Sultan is present. As long as the older members of the family can see them there must be no physical contact. But now, surrounded by younger siblings, they talk together in low voices, hardly aware of the others, who are desperately trying to snatch a few fragments of the conversation.
It is not an especially loving conversation. On the whole Shakila talks to the air. According to custom she must not make eye contact with her fiancé before the wedding; he on the other hand looks at her all the time.
‘I miss you. I can hardly wait two weeks, before you are mine,’ he says. Shakila blushes but keeps on staring into space.
&
nbsp; ‘I can’t sleep at night, I think of you,’ he continues. No reaction from Shakila. ‘What do you say to that?’ he asks.
Shakila goes on eating.
‘Imagine, when we’re married, and you’ve made my supper when I come home. You’ll always be there, waiting for me,’ Wakil dreams on. ‘I’ll never be alone again.’
Shakila holds her tongue, but then conjures up enough courage to ask if he will allow her to continue to work when they are married. Wakil says yes, but Shakila does not trust him. He might change his mind as soon as they are married. But he assures her that if working makes her happy, that’s OK by him. In addition, of course, to looking after the children and the house.
He takes off his hat, the brown pakol, which adherents of the murdered Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud wear.
‘That makes you look ugly,’ Shakila says cheekily. ‘You’re bald.’
Now it’s Wakil’s turn to feel embarrassed. He does not answer his fiancée’s insults, but leads the conversation on to safer ground. Shakila has spent the day in the Kabul markets buying things she needs for the wedding and presents for all the relations, hers and her husband’s. Wakil will dole out the presents, as a gesture to her family who have given her away. He pays and she buys: pots and pans, cutlery, linen, towels, and fabric for tunics for him and Rasul. She has promised Rasul, Bulbula’s fiancé, that he can choose his own colour. She talks about her shopping, and he asks the colour of the material.
‘One blue and one brown,’ answers Shakila.
‘Which one is for me?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know, Rasul can choose first.’