A Fort of Nine Towers (31 page)

I could hear the songs of a donkey driver from the bazaar and the flute of a herd boy from the hillsides. The whole land seemed ready to burst into song. I saw the girls from the town going down to a stream to fill their pitchers with water. They wore their best clothes. Young men stole glances at the girls as they walked past with their pitchers on their heads.

When the villagers passed us, they saw that we were strangers. They made
salaams
to me, and some of them shook our hands. They all invited us to their houses. They all seemed very hospitable and sincere. No one seemed to be in a hurry, and their deep peace created an air of timelessness. They had a world of their own, calm, serene, and indifferent to what was going on anywhere else.

The next day I went again to the same spot. I found the herd boy there with his sheep and goats pasturing around him. He looked about my age. He was sitting on the big, round rock where we had been sitting the day before, blowing his flute. I said “
Salaam
,” and sat next to him. He said “
Salaam alaikum
,” somewhat formally, and hurriedly hid his flute under his shirt.

“I heard the sound of your flute yesterday. I tried to find you. You play very beautifully, like the masters on the radio,” I said.

“You liked it?” he shyly asked. He lowered his eyes.

“Oh, yes. I love the sound of a flute, especially when I am hearing someone who plays as well as you,” I said.

He spoke to me in Pashto, and I replied in Dari, but we could understand each other.

He took his flute out from under his shirt and started playing again. His hands were shaking a little. He played a few traditional Afghan songs.

“I only know these four or five songs. If you know better songs, play them for me. I want to hear them from you,” he said.

“No thanks, I can’t play,” I said. “My father plays well, but I never learned.”

“It is very easy to play,” he said. “Sing me any song, then I can play it for you,” he said.

I sang an Indian song. We laughed, and then he played it. We did that several times until we got tired of it.

As we sat there, he started making letters in the sand with his shepherd stick. After a few moments, I could read “Omar Khan.”

“Who is Omar Khan?” I asked.

“It is my name,” he said. “Can you read and write?”

“Of course I can,” I said, surprised by his question.

“I know how to write my name only,” Omar Khan said. “Can you teach me how to read and write?”

“Yeah, it is not a big deal. I’ll teach you how to read and write, and you teach me how to play the flute,” I said.

“Done!” he said as we shook hands.

I wrote five Dari letters in the sand. I pronounced them and he repeated them after me. Then he wrote them again, several times. By then it was midday, and I had to go to the restaurant to eat lunch with my family. As I said goodbye, he asked me to come back after my lunch. I did, and he was there waiting for me, with his sheep and goats quietly grazing around him. I taught him five more Dari letters. By the end of the day he had learned them all.

The next day we met again, and I asked him about his life. He told
me that he was a Kuchi boy. I told him that my grandmother was a Kuchi long ago, and that my grandfather had been a shepherd when he was young, had lived with my grandmother’s Kuchi family for a year after he married her, and had traveled with them all over Afghanistan.

A broad smile appeared on his face. He looked at me for a few seconds without saying anything, and then he said, “We are cousins!”

He jumped up from his stone, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me after him. “Let me introduce you to your other cousins over there,” he said, pointing toward several long black tents hung with colorful bands down by the river. The tents were surrounded by children, goats, sheep, and camels, along with some donkeys and horses. The children and the baby goats were running in and out between the legs of the camels as if they were pillars carved from stone.

As soon as I walked into the Kuchi camp, I was overwhelmed by the strong smell of animals, which were all over the place. Girls my age and older, dressed in bright red, blue, and green, rushed inside their black and gray tents as soon as they saw me. I knew I was not supposed to look at them, but I could not help looking at the long woven bands strung across the tents.

Then I saw the men, all staring at me. They were tall and muscular, with dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and long hair. They were dressed in khaki-colored
shalwar kamiz
. All wore turbans or hats. Some had long daggers hanging from their waists that looked like swords. There were several men near a tent cutting large chunks from a cow they had just slaughtered. Their clothes were bloody. They stopped when they saw me. Boys my age came out of their tents as Omar Khan and I walked farther into the camp.

About a hundred pairs of eyes were staring at me. I began to feel a little nervous and somewhat shy. Old women slowly emerged from their tents and added their curious eyes to my discomfort. Apart from them, I did not see any other women anywhere, as they all remained inside their tents. I was only eleven, but because we had not had very much to eat for many months, I was very thin, which made me look taller. The women could see that I was a stranger, and they must have thought I was a man.

All around me, I was surrounded by Kuchis. Nobody spoke. The only sounds were kids crying inside some of the tents, and some sheep that were baaing and cows that were mooing. The baby goats kept jumping and running after one another, paying no attention to the people as they played with the chickens and the cats.

I looked at Omar Khan. Unlike the others, he had a big smile on his face and was completely at ease. He introduced me to his father, Amir Khan. His father looked at me sternly for a long moment, then gave me a big, welcoming hug. As he wrapped his arms around me, I could see over his shoulder that all the faces in the camp were growing big smiles. Now I did not feel like a stranger anymore. I felt like I was at home. Their smiles had the warmth of my grandfather’s smile. The men all looked like they were my uncles.

After hugging Amir Khan, I had to do the same with all the other men and boys my age and older. Then I kissed the old women’s hands as a sign of respect. They kissed me on the head in return, and rubbed their right hands on my head in blessing.

I was filled with excitement and wished I had known these people all my life. I had very unexpectedly entered the world of my grandmother, whom I had never known but had always wondered about. I wanted to tell Grandfather everything that was happening.

Omar Khan’s father asked me to introduce him to my father, and I took him to the restaurant. My father talked to him in Pashto in the Kuchi manner, which is very loud, like you are shouting at each other instead of speaking. The boy’s father was very happy to hear my father talk as he did. He asked my father about his ancestors and figured out that my father’s great-grandfathers and the man’s great-grandfathers truly were distant cousins. So that meant we were all part of the same family.

My father and the man hugged each other warmly. Then the man kissed me and my sisters and told us to call him uncle, and he called my mother “sister.” Straightaway, he invited us to his tent. He would not let us stay in that restaurant for one more minute. He helped us collect our stuff. An hour later we were in a Kuchi tent, drinking green tea, with more than a hundred men, women, and kids watching us.

Their tents were dark inside. They were made from black goat
hair that had been pounded into long, wide strips of felt and stretched across a wooden framework that could be taken down easily, folded, and carried on the backs of camels. A single tent could shelter a very big family. During the day it furnished shade; at night its sides could be lowered to give protection from the cold and wind. From a distance, an encampment of Kuchi tents stretched long, black, and low across the dry land.

Their life was measured in their herds of camels, sheep, and goats, and in the passage of the seasons and the years as they moved their herds from one grazing place to the next, from one end of Afghanistan to the other.

Omar Khan introduced my older sister and me to more than forty kids. They wore ragged, dirty clothes. They looked like they had not washed for months. He told the other kids that we were their cousins. I wondered how many more cousins I had whom I did not know. Finding so many cousins from my mother’s family in Kunduz had been a big surprise. Now here were all these Kuchi cousins from my father’s family who looked at us with wide eyes, but said nothing.

Omar Khan’s father, Amir Khan, set up a new tent and put all our belongings inside. Like on many of the other tents, colorful, long woven bands were hung on the outside of ours. Then he invited my father and me to another big tent, where we found all the Kuchi men. My father said “
Salaam
” and embraced them all. I imitated him. They tied a turban on my father’s head and gave him handmade slippers. Amir Khan put an embroidered hat on my head and called me Qais Khan. And a few hours later we ate with the Kuchi men while my mother and sisters ate with the Kuchi women in another tent.

We ate Kuchi bread-cake, spiced rice, kebab, and thick Kuchistyle yogurt. I could see that my new uncles and cousins were very fond of meat. Amir Khan said a Pashto proverb as his mouth was full of kebab: “Even burnt meat is better than vegetables.” And the rest laughed. After dinner we drank green tea and ate dried melon until midnight. In every sentence they used a proverb. Some of them started their sentences with a verse or two from a famous poet.

At midnight we went to our tent, which we found full of Kuchi
women surrounding my mother and sisters. My mother was telling them about our travels since we had fled Kabul.

A few minutes later, they all left us to sleep. My mother blew out the lantern that they had given to us, which is called a “hurricane,” though we have never had a hurricane storm in Afghanistan. Some foreigners had brought us that word along with the lanterns. My mother and father slept in one corner with my little brother. My sisters slept in another corner, and I slept in a corner of my own. Before long, though, my whole body began itching, like I was having some kind of reaction to a drug. My father whispered to my mother that something was biting him. My sisters and I shouted that something was biting us, too.

I lit the hurricane lamp and looked at my legs. An army of tiny grayish insects were all over me, jumping and hopping like they were playing
gursai
. I hurriedly shook them off. My mother told me to take off my clothes outside of the tent and shake them there. I went outside, tearing off my clothes. A minute later I was naked and shaking my clothes as hard as I could.

I heard someone giggling. I looked all around me, but I did not see anyone. All the tents were dark and quiet, and the sky was very starry with no moon. I heard the giggling again as I continued shaking my clothes. This time it was more than one person’s voice. I looked to my right, and I saw nobody. Then I looked to my left, and saw a group of kids hiding behind a tent and laughing. I narrowed my eyes to see whether they were really there and took a step toward them; I saw more than twenty kids, including Omar Khan, staring at my naked body. I ran quickly inside our tent without stopping to put on my clothes before I entered.

“What the hell are you doing?” my father shouted.

I saw that my mother and my sisters were staring at me. I was deeply embarrassed and quickly ran outside as I heard my sisters laughing. Then the Kuchi kids started giggling and looking at me again.

I walked toward them, still naked, and stood before them with my clothes slung over my shoulder. I was angry now, and I did not care who looked at me, although it is very shameful to be naked in front of another person.

“What the hell are you laughing at?” I demanded.

They became quiet for a second, then ran off laughing very loudly. I put on my clothes. The itching had stopped for the moment, and I went back to our tent, wondering how to face my father, mother, and sisters. I thought about the day that Wakeel and I had seen Haji Noor Sher after his bath and made fun of him. Maybe I was being punished for laughing then.

“What is wrong with you?” my father said.

“When I was shaking out my clothes, a lot of kids were looking at me. I panicked, and without thinking I ran inside,” I said.

“All right, go to your bed and sleep. Be careful next time,” my father said.

My sisters were still giggling. I looked back at them fiercely, daring them to tease me in the morning, and they started to laugh openly. My father shouted at them to shut up, and this made them laugh even louder.

I lay on my bed, angry and bitten, but before long I was asleep. I was glad that Grandfather was not there to see me. He would have made jokes about that night for the rest of my life.

I woke up later than usual. There was no one else in our tent. I found Omar Khan outside giving orders to the other kids. When the kids saw me, they grinned. I greeted them and asked Omar Khan about my family. First, he laughed a little about the night before. Then he told me that my family was in the stream, bathing.

I asked him about the insects that had been biting me.

“Those are fleas from the sheep and goats and camels,” he said. “You will soon get used to them.”

Get used to them? I thought. How does someone get used to fleas?

I went to the stream nearby. My father was in the water in his underwear. He was splashing around as if he were in a warm bathtub. He told me to jump in. I took off all my clothes except my underpants and jumped in. It was freezing, and I yelped. My father laughed as I ran out of the water, where the wind made me even colder. I started shivering. My feet were muddy and there was no towel to dry myself.

I looked for my father to ask him for his towel, but he was no
longer in the stream. Suddenly, he was behind me, pushing me into the water. It felt even colder than before. My father was standing above me and laughing as I shivered.