The Bookseller of Kabul

Crime and Punishment

Sharifa, the pensioned-off wife, is waiting in Peshawar. She has no peace. She knows that Sultan will turn up one of these days, but he can never be bothered to tell her exactly when he is leaving Kabul, so Sharifa expects him home every hour for days on end.

Every meal is prepared in case her husband shows up: a plump chicken, the spinach he loves, the green homemade chilli sauce. On the bed are clean, freshly ironed clothes; letters lie orderly in a box.

The hours pass. The chicken is wrapped up, the spinach can be reheated and the chilli sauce is put back in the cupboard. Sharifa sweeps the floors, washes curtains, busies herself with the perpetual dusting, sits down, sighs, sheds a few tears. It’s not that she misses him. But she misses the life she once had as the wife of an enterprising bookseller, respected and esteemed, the mother of his sons and daughters; the anointed.

Sometimes she hates him for having ruined her life, taken away her children, shamed her in the eyes of the world.

Eighteen years have passed since Sultan and Sharifa got married and two years since he got himself wife number two. Sharifa lives like a divorced woman, but without the freedom granted divorced women. Sultan is still her master. He has decided that she must live in Pakistan in order to look after the house where he keeps his most precious books. Here is the computer, a telephone. From this address he can send off book parcels to clients, receive emails – everything which is impossible in Kabul where post, telephone and computers won’t function. She lives in Pakistan because it suits Sultan.

Divorce is not an alternative. If a woman demands divorce she loses virtually all her rights and privileges. The husband is awarded the children and can even refuse the wife access to them. She is a disgrace to her family, often ostracised, and all property falls to the husband. Sharifa would have to move to the home of one of her brothers.

During the civil war early in the nineties, and for some years under the Taliban, the whole family lived in Peshawar, in the district called Hayatabad, where nine out of ten inhabitants are Afghans. But one by one they moved back to Kabul, the brothers, sisters, Sultan, Sonya, the sons; first sixteen-year-old Mansur, then twelve-year-old Aimal and lastly Eqbal who was fourteen. Only Sharifa and her youngest daughter Shabnam stay behind. They keep hoping that Sultan will take them back to Kabul, to family and friends, and he keeps promising, but something always gets in the way. The tumbledown house in Peshawar, which was meant as a temporary shelter against the bullets and grenades of Kabul, has now become her prison. She cannot move without permission from her husband.

The first year following Sultan’s second marriage, Sharifa lived together with him and the new wife. In Sharifa’s eyes, Sonya was not only stupid but lazy too. Maybe she wasn’t lazy, but Sultan never let her lift a finger. Sharifa cooked, served, washed and made the beds. At first Sultan would lock himself and Sonya into the bedroom for days on end, only occasionally demanding tea or water. Sharifa heard whispering and laughter commingling with sounds that cut her to the heart.

She swallowed her pride and appeared the model wife. Her relatives and girl friends recommended her for first prize in the wife contest. No one ever heard her complain, quarrel with Sonya or show her up.

When the honeymoon was over, and Sultan left the bedroom to attend to his business, the two women were thrown into each other’s company. Sonya powdered her face and tried on new dresses. Sharifa tried to chirp like a fussing mother hen. She took on the heaviest chores and little by little taught Sonya how to make Sultan’s favourite dish, showed her how he liked his clothes organised, the temperature of the water he washed in and other details that a wife should know about her husband.

But oh, the shame! Although it is not unusual for a man to take a second wife, and sometimes even a third, nevertheless, it is humiliating. The slighted wife will always be labelled inadequate. Anyway, that is how Sharifa felt, because Sultan so obviously preferred his younger wife.

It was necessary for Sharifa to justify this new wife of Sultan’s. She had to make up an excuse to show it was not her, Sharifa, who was at fault, but external circumstances that had ousted her.

To anyone who was willing to listen she divulged that a polyp had developed in her womb. It had been removed and the doctor had warned her that if she wanted to survive she could no longer lie with her husband. It was she, Sharifa, who had asked her husband to find a new wife and it was she who had chosen Sonya. After all, he was a man, she said.

In Sharifa’s eyes this imaginary ailment was less shaming than the fact that she, the mother of his children, was no longer up to the mark. After all, he had only followed the doctor’s advice.

When Sharifa really wanted to lay it on thick, she would recount, with sparkling eyes, how she loved Sonya like a sister, and Latifa, her child, like her own daughter.

In contrast to Sultan, men with more than one wife usually keep a balance in the relationships, spending one night with one wife, the next night with the other, for decades. The wives give birth to children who grow up as siblings. The mothers keep an eagle eye on the children’s treatment; no one is favoured in front of the other. They also make sure that they themselves receive the same amount of clothes and gifts as the other wife. Many of these co-wives hate each other intensely and never speak. Others accept that it is the husband’s right to have several wives, and become good friends. After all, the rival will most likely have been married in a put-up job, arranged by the parents and often against her own will. Few young girls’ pipe dream is to be the second wife of an old man. Whereas the first wife gets his youth, she gets old age. In some cases none of the wives really want him in their bed every night and are delighted to be let off the hook.

Sharifa’s beautiful brown eyes, the ones Sultan once said were the most lovely in Kabul, stare into space. They have lost their radiance and are encircled by heavy lids and soft lines. She discreetly covers her light, blotchy skin with make-up. Her white skin has always compensated for her short legs. Height and fair skin are the most important Afghan status symbols. It has always been a fight to keep up her youthful appearance – she conceals the fact that she is a few years older than her husband. Grey hair is kept at bay by home colouring, but the sad facial features she can do nothing about.

She crosses the floor heavily. There is little to do since her husband took her three sons back to Kabul. The carpets have been swept, the food is ready. She turns on TV and watches an American thriller, a fantasy film. Good-looking heroes fight dragons, monsters and skeletons and conquer evil creatures. Sharifa watches intently, in spite of not understanding the language, English. When the film is over she phones her sister-in-law. Then she gets up and walks over to the window. From the second floor she can see everything that goes on in the backyards below. Head-high brick walls surround the yards. Like Sharifa’s they are all full of clothes hanging out to dry.

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.