The Taliban Cricket Club (20 page)

I couldn't read anymore. I had told him about my father's death, Mother's illness, and Shaheen's leaving and he had wanted to swoop down and take me away. I couldn't answer that one, now three months old. I folded his letters carefully and would save them for another day when I needed to remember our love and lift my spirits.

When I went upstairs, Jahan was waiting, a grave look on his face.

“What is it?”

“I've been looking for you. Parwaaze and Hoshang want to see you. They have bad news.”

The Stadium

T
HEY WERE IN THE FRONT HALL AND
I
IMMEDIATELY
noticed the despairing hunch of their shoulders as they paced in the narrow space.

“Hoshang knows the guard at the stadium,” Parwaaze burst out. “He told Hoshang there is an official state team in the tournament. We won't have a chance to win against it.”

“I went to the stadium just to check,” Hoshang said. “They're practicing there. The team has a Pakistani cricketer named Imran teaching them.”

“It's not Imran Khan, is it?” I asked in apprehension. He was one of Pakistan's best cricketers. “A tall man, well built . . .”

“No. This Imran's small and quite round.”

“What difference does that make?” Jahan cut in. “They'll win.”

“Why should they just because they have a professional coach?” I wasn't in the mood for their pessimism. “He still has to teach them how to play, just as I'm teaching you. You have to beat them, that's your only chance. We'll watch them tomorrow before we panic.”

I reached over and straightened each one's shoulders, forcing them to stand straight.

“That's not our main worry,” Parwaaze said with anxiety. “They will fix it so their team wins.”

“How can they, with an ICC observer? They have to stick by the rules, and you have to believe in yourselves and win the match.”

He looked at me with pity. “It's the Talib, Rukhsana,” he said as they went out.

Ghazi Stadium was the venue for our cricket matches and the eleven of us squeezed into an old Toyota taxi to get there. I sat on Jahan's lap, holding the passenger door closed, my
lungee
crammed down on my head and my
hijab
up to my eyes, as an added precaution, to protect me from the driver. It was cheaper than the bus.

I shivered with fear when I saw the stadium again. The Talib regularly executed people during the intervals of the football matches.

The main entrance rose like a cooling cliff of ice, and was striped with red pillars. Only Talib officials entered through the wide entrance. The huge Olympic sign of five rings was framed high on the cliff, mocking us with the pretense that we were a sporting nation.

This time the road into the stadium was deserted except for a lone guard, a young man with a cane, who stood at the gate. Hoshang and he greeted each other warmly—they played on the same football team.

“It's good to see you all,” the guard said cheerfully. “It gets lonely here. But you must leave before night comes.”

“Why?” Royan asked, though we had no intention of remaining that long.

The guard lowered his voice. “The spirits of the dead executed here sit in the stands and call out to each other when the sun sets.”

“You've seen these s-spirits?” Qubad asked nervously.

“I have heard them. I hide out here and pray they never see me.”

“What do they say?” Atash asked, also uneasy.

“They don't speak in Dari or Pashtu. They talk in the language of the dead.”

“I don't believe that,” Parwaaze said as we climbed the narrow steps into the stadium.

“Why not?” I said and shivered, along with the others. “Where else can they go?”

Apart from the covered stand by the main entrance, the stadium was open to the sky. It was oval shaped, a shallow saucer, and above the rim rose Paghman to the west and Maranjan to the east. A baleful sun, hazy with dust, watched over us. A neglected dirt track, with faded lane markings, surrounded the football pitch.

F
IVE MONTHS AGO
, P
ARWAAZE
had come as my
mahram
for an execution in this stadium. Mother refused to allow Jahan to accompany us. Normally, women were not permitted at public gatherings, but the government made an exception for the execution of the murderer Zarmina.

The buses were packed—even the women's section behind the drab, dusty curtain—and all along the road, crowds moved steadily toward the stadium. We had to get out of the bus and walk the last stretch to the stadium entrance. On both sides of the road were carts selling fresh fruit, smoky kebabs, naan, and children's cheap toys. I tried to judge the mood of the crowd. Some were excited, with expectation, talking and laughing; many more were silent and solemn, even fearful.

The Taliban herded us along to the gate, wanting us to hurry and not miss even a moment of their grand spectacle.

The crowd was funneled to other entrances, and Parwaaze protected me, pushing his way through the mass of people going up the narrow steps leading to the terraced seating area. There was barely a seat to spare, and we pushed our way down to the front and squeezed into a space next to a woman. I looked toward the covered stand, filled with important Talib officials, enjoying a convivial afternoon of entertainment, and then across the football field. Three Land Cruisers were parked at different positions and Talib fighters stood beside them facing the crowd, holding their guns. At either end of the football pitch were the goalposts, sagging in the center from the weight of the many men who'd been hanged there, kicking and struggling. Dark patches spotted the grass, blood being no substitute for water.

TALIBAN EXECUTE
MOTHER OF FIVE CHILDREN

Today, a crowd of around 25,000 people has gathered, many coerced by the police, to watch the Talib execute Zarmina, the mother of five children. She was accused of murdering her husband by beating him to death with a hammer. Her husband, Alauddin Khwazak, a policeman, had also owned a shop in north Kabul. Their marriage was arranged when she was sixteen and it had grown into love. She had one-year-old twins, Silsila, a female, and a male, Jawad; another son, Hawad, age eleven; and two other daughters, Shaista, fourteen, and Najeba, sixteen.

The government told everyone that the strain of the violent events in the country had affected Alauddin Khwazak, and by participating in the continued brutality, his mood had grown darker and threatening. He started to beat Zarmina frequently in front of the children. The elder girls, no longer able to bear to see their mother abused and mistreated, decided to kill their father. Najeba mixed a sleeping potion into his night meal, and when he slept, she killed him with a hammer. Zarmina claimed a robber had broken into the house and killed him.

The Taliban judge did not believe her story. To protect her beautiful daughters, Zarmina confessed to the crime when she was tortured in prison, beaten continuously with cable wire, the normal method of torturing women who could have broken a Taliban law. Although the government claimed the murder took place a few months ago, my sources informed me that Zarmina had been in prison for the last few years, tortured and starved. Her daughters had taken her food daily, until the day they vanished.

According to custom, the two elder girls and the boy were left in the custody of Khwazak's brother, a Talib supporter. Two months ago, he told Zarmina that he had sold her beautiful daughters Shaista and Najeba for around 300,000 Pakistani rupees each to a brothel in Khost, on the Pakistan border. Zarmina had cried in despair, knowing she would never see her beloved daughters again, and beat her head against the prison walls.

On this cold November day in 1999, an open jeep entered the stadium. Zarmina, in her blue burka, stood in the back, supported by two Talibs. The crowd remained silent as the jeep circled the stadium. Then we heard the thin cries of her twin children coming from somewhere in the crowd, calling out to her, “Maadar, Maadar . . .” Her head turned, searching for her children in the crowd. “Silsila . . . Jawad,” she said, trying to comfort them, but she was silenced by her captors. As if this was a sporting event, an announcer broke the silence. “Zarmina, daughter of Ghulam Hasnet, is to be executed for killing her husband with a hammer.” The jeep stopped. The guards carried Zarmina down from it and escorted her to the goalposts. They forced her to sit, but she struggled to crawl away. She could see little through her burka.

The crowd now awakened. “Spare her . . . spare her . . . ,” they called out, but the Talib ignored the chants. The crowd fell silent. Zarmina tried to crawl away again, a moving blue bundle. A tall Talib came to stand behind her with his rifle. His hand was unsteady. His first shot missed her, though he was only a few feet away. As she could not sit or kneel without falling over, Zarmina cried out, “Someone, please take my arms.” No one moved to help her.

The Talib took a step forward, aimed more carefully, and fired a 7.62-millimeter bullet into her head. It was a flat sound and we could barely hear it. The executioner was Zarmina's brother-in-law, the one who had sold her daughters into prostitution. (
SENT BY LBW
)

The crowd was silent, only the shuffle of feet was heard as we flowed out of the stadium, each cocooned in his own thoughts, and we avoided all eye contact with strangers. Even those who had come for the “entertainment” remained quiet.

We waited until we were some distance from the stadium.

“I feel sick,” I whispered as a huge wave of nausea surged up into my mouth. I bent over and, hurriedly lifting my burka, puked on the street. It had been waiting from the moment I heard the children cry out for their mother. I was vomiting out my uncontrollable rage at what I had witnessed. My throat and stomach hurt as nothing heaved out. I remained bent like an old crone and waited until the wave receded. I felt Parwaaze's sympathetic hand resting on my back and finally straightened and returned to my faceless anonymity under the burka.

Parwaaze looked around before he burst out, “There were thousands of us, only a few Talibs, and we could have rushed down and saved her. Rukhsana, you must not write anything.”

“I have to. I can't have her death on my hands or in my mind.”

We remained silent on the bus going home and parted at my gate without speaking anymore, burdened by melancholy. I told Mother and Jahan every detail.

“Does conscience exist anymore?” I asked Mother.

“Not as far as I can see. In Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnikov's punishment, at first, is not the state's punishment for his crime of killing the moneylender but is his own conscience. His conscience haunts him through his life until, no longer able to live with it, he surrenders to the police and confesses his crime . . .”

“But that's in a novel,” I protested. “The brother-in-law will not even think anymore of the woman's life he's taken. He will sleep peacefully, even as other murderers sleep like innocents.”

“Conscience controls our impulses to do harm,” she said, taking hold of my hand to comfort me. “Our religions are meant to instruct us in what is right and what is wrong, but they can be misinterpreted, words twisted in their meanings, by those who wish to justify their killings in the name of their religion and in the name of God. Conscience does and must exist among us, as otherwise the whole world would go up in flames. You must believe in it, as I know you possess it. Never lose it.”

That night, in the secrecy of my bedroom, I wrote the story, and spent half the night trying to fax it from Father's office to my contact in Delhi, the telephone sullenly unresponsive until nearly dawn, when it came to life. I disconnected, hid the modem and computer, and took to my bed. I was sick for two days after witnessing Zarmina's murder and cried for her lost daughters.

N
OW
, I
WATCHED THREE
men lethargically cut the grass for the wicket in the center of the football field.

It would be an uneven pitch with a variable bounce, it would take spin because of the surface and runs would be hard to get. Remembering Zarmina, I wondered whether the dead would awaken to watch the match. Would they recognize the particular black patch of grass on which a ball landed, and think that is where they had died?

From an entrance at the opposite side we saw five men drift in and take their places in the stands. I thought I recognized Azlam as one of them, and paid no further attention. There was another group of six men also watching the government's team practicing their game in the nets. Jahan, Parwaaze, Qubad, and I sat together, the others of our team scattered around as if we were just idlers, passing the time of the day, with little else to do but watch a new sport. But we weren't idle. I had coached them to study every batsman and bowler, watch for their strengths and weaknesses, and to remember everything they saw. I jotted down notes in my book.

Parwaaze pulled out a scrap of newspaper, torn out of the
Kabul Daily
. “See . . . the preliminary cricket matches will take place on Saturday and . . .”

I took the brief report. “. . . the final match will be played on Sunday the twenty-third and the winning team will be sent abroad for further training.”

“It doesn't say Pakistan.”

“Abroad can only be Pakistan,” Parwaaze insisted. “Where else is abroad?” He looked across the stadium.

He turned his attention to the team practicing. “What do you think? Are we as good?”

There were thirteen on the state team, young men around the same ages as my cousins, dressed in green tracksuits. Only one man was immaculate in white trousers and a cream shirt, with a cap pulled low over his face to protect him from the sun. The coach. He was portly, bearded too, and he strode busily among his team. From the size of his paunch, he must have been a spin bowler. Pakistan had great spinners, and fast bowlers too, but this one in particular didn't have the build for speed.

They also had professional equipment—a few real cricket bats, many cricket balls, pads, and gloves. They had laid and rolled half a pitch, and had nets erected on either side and behind the stumps. They had chairs on which to sit and straps on their pads. The scene reminded me of our practice pitch in Delhi where we met in the late afternoons, when the sun wasn't so brutal, to hone our batting and bowling skills.