Open Skies

by Niloofar Rahmani

  There was a loud crash, and I looked up just enough to see two Taliban militants standing in front of our car smashing their rifle butts against the bumper. I felt my chest tighten and my throat constrict. I nearly stopped breathing. I wanted to cry, but I was frozen with fear.

  The men were yelling, and both our driver and my father opened their car doors and got out. My brother followed; out of the corner of my eye I could see him shaking.

  The Taliban questioned them. What’s your name? Where are you from? Where are you going? Why? Why’s your beard so short? Their voices were hard, like grinding stones, and their eyes were angry. They looked at everyone and everything with disgust and hatred.

  The questioning lasted about ten minutes before they sent us on our way, apparently satisfied with the answers our driver, my father, and my brother had given them. I thanked God they didn’t speak to me or my mother and sister. They didn’t even look at us, actually.

  We encountered three more checkpoints just like this before we finally reached Kabul, and I admit, each time I was terrified. All I could think was that these men were evil and that they would kill us for no reason and over nothing.

  We arrived in Kabul around noon and, as before at the Torkham Gate, a sense of desolation crept over me. This was not the city of warmth and vibrancy my father had told us about. There was no music, there were no colorful kites in the air, there were no bustling bazaars, and there were no travelers who’d come from faraway places.

  Instead, Kabul was full of fear and decay, almost entirely deserted by its former inhabitants. The crumbling buildings, marked by the scars of war and neglect, appeared abandoned. Everything was gray and brown and coarse looking. The few men who were out had hollow looks in their eyes. There was not a woman to be seen.

  I asked my father if this was the city he remembered, the Paris of Central Asia. After taking a deep breath, he said, “No, not even close.” I looked at my mother, and through the mesh window of the horrid burka that covered her face, I saw her weeping.

  We eventually arrived at my grandparents’ house, but it was locked and no one was inside. A neighbor came out from next door and at first thought we were thieves, but then he recognized my father. There was a warm exchange, and he invited us inside his home. We learned that my grandparents had fled to Iran a year ago and were now safe. The neighbor had no news other than that, and regretted that he didn’t know the fate of my mother’s parents.

  The neighbor let us into my grandparents’ house. Bombs had hit it during the civil war, and much of the house had been damaged or completely destroyed. The room that my parents had built had been reduced to rubble. The courtyard was hard and dusty; there was no garden, no birds, and no life. There was only a well and a bucket, which we used to clean a section of my grandparents’ basement floor to sleep on. The sun had already set, and it was getting cold.

  That night, as soon as I closed my eyes, images of the city and our drive through its deserted streets plagued me. No people. Abandoned and bombed-out buildings. Hollow faces. The Taliban and their guns. I could hear their shouts and see the hate in their eyes.

  I remembered the warnings from the old man who drove us to Kabul and the ones from our neighbor. During prayer time no one could be outside. The Taliban would whip anyone who did not comply. If they saw someone stealing, they would cut off the person’s hand. If a woman was seen alone outside her home or if any bit of her skin was exposed, they would whip her until she bled.

  Violence. Anger. Hate. That was Kabul. That’s what the Paris of Central Asia had become, and there was no place for women here except as modern-day slaves who were treated worse than animals.

  For the first time in my life, I wished I were a boy.

  9

  Life Under the Taliban

  We’d been in Kabul no more than a week before my father’s handsome face began to disappear behind a growing beard and mustache. He looked different to me, somewhat foreign; the change in his appearance seemed to represent the upheaval happening in our lives.

  In Karachi we’d been happy and we’d been free. We’d laughed, smiled, played, dreamed, loved, and so much more. But now we were in Afghanistan, where there was no joy, no hope, and no life. My father couldn’t find work as an engineer, because educated people were not needed in Afghanistan. There was no need for infrastructure and modern buildings; the only thing that mattered was the Taliban’s corrupt view of Islam. My father eventually found a job as a laborer on a farm.

  My brother started going to school, which was good, but no girls or women were allowed anywhere near the schools. The schools were only for boys, and religious education was paramount. The schools taught some academic subjects—writing, reading, and arithmetic—but the Koran and the history of Islam dominated everything. The religious leaders declared that memorizing the Koran and strictly adhering to Sharia law were more important than all other subjects.

  Each day when my brother came home from school, he’d share with us what he could, which we were grateful for, but the fact that he had to sneak us the information made it all seem poisoned. Everything here was wrong.

  During these first few months, I remember looking at myself in the mirror. I was just eight years old, a little girl with curly, dark hair and big, brown eyes, and I felt ashamed. Women were nothing and were not important.

  * * *

  A few months after we arrived in Kabul in the fall of 1999, something happened I will never forget. The day had started like any other. My father had gone to work at the farm, and I had stayed home with my siblings. My mother was teaching us math.

  That afternoon, we heard an eruption of gunfire coming from our neighbor’s house next door. We knew these neighbors; the father was a carpenter, the mother was an older woman, and there were two daughters, Samira, who was eighteen, and Nargis, who was thirteen. They were our friends.

  After a few more shots, we heard screams. I heard the mother wailing and Samira and Nargis crying.

  The gunshots and the screams shocked me, and I started shaking. I had no idea what was happening. The noise echoed throughout our house. The sound of a truck driving away was followed by more screams. I was terrified.

  I saw my brother jump up and run out the front door toward their house. My mother threw on her burka and followed him. After a moment’s hesitation, Afsoon and I followed. To this day, I cannot forget what I saw and heard.

  As I trailed my sister into our neighbor’s courtyard, I heard the mother screaming, “Please, God, help. They took my husband. They took my daughter from me. Take me! Take me! Take me!” She kept shrieking over and over again, and her cries of anguish pierced my ears.

  She was crumpled on her knees by the front door, flailing her arms against the wall and beating the ground. I saw Nargis standing there, frozen like a statue, with tears streaming down her blazing cheeks. She was screaming with each breath, her eyes wide and staring at nothing.

  Then I saw the body on the step by the front door. I could tell it was the father. One of his sandals had come off, and his tan shalwar kameez was rumpled, exposing his stomach and calves. A pool of blood had formed around his head and shoulders, and dark-red droplets had splattered his clothing. There were splashes of blood on the wall beside him.

  The Taliban had shot him in the head. A group of Taliban had come to take Samira, but her father had tried to stop them. They shot him while his wife and children looked on. They took Samira, my friend, and they drove off. No one knew where they took her or what they did to her. She was gone.

  I kept asking my mother what happened and where Samira was. I just kept asking and asking, staring at the mother, staring at my friend Nargis, but my eyes always returned to the blood on the ground and the broken skull that had been shattered by a Taliban bullet.

  My mother yelled at Afsoon and me to go home. She told us to go inside and lock the door and not to open it for anyone. My sister took my hand and led me away. I started shaking, and as soon as we got inside our house, I r
an into our bedroom and hid inside the closet. I shut the door and curled up in the corner, hugging my knees to my chest, crying. I was crying so hard I couldn’t control myself, my body quivering. I lost all sense of time, and at some point I fell asleep, my entire body exhausted from fear and trauma.

  Sometime later, I awoke to my father’s voice. He was standing over me in the door of the closet, his warm hand on my shoulder. He encouraged me come out, but I wouldn’t move. I asked him what had happened to Samira. I told him to tell me the truth. “What happened to my friend?”

  My Baba Jan stayed silent. All he could do was hug me.

  For the next two days, I couldn’t eat. I was sick, I barely talked, and I didn’t want to do anything. I wouldn’t play with my sisters and I wouldn’t study. I wouldn’t go outside. I wanted to be alone.

  At night, when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I could hear the screams of my friend and her mother, and I could see her father dead in the doorway. In truth, I can still hear the screams and picture the body lying in a pool of blood. It’s seared into me.

  * * *

  A year later, one day in the fall of 2000, my siblings and I were at our house in Kabul with our mother, as usual. Our father was working at his job on the farm on the outskirts of the city.

  That morning, Afsoon had come down with a severe fever. Her temperature was so high my mother feared for her life, so she sent my brother, Omar, to the fields to find my father. My father had to be the one to take my sister to the clinic because, as a woman, my mother was not permitted outside the house without a male escort. If the Taliban caught her, they would punish and shame her.

  But when Omar returned, he said he couldn’t find our father. Omar then told my mother that he could escort her and Afsoon to the clinic. Though just ten years old, he was a man, and as long as he was the escort the Taliban couldn’t challenge them. He stated this as confidently as he could, and my mother agreed.

  She told my brother to find a taxi or a cart to transport his sick sister while she got ready to go. She hurriedly put on her burka and told me that I needed to watch my younger sister, Maryam. If Baba Jan came home, I was to tell him where they’d gone.

  They left and the house fell silent. Three hours passed. I was playing with Maryam in the backyard when someone started pounding on the front door. The bangs against the metal door were so loud I jumped, fearing it might be the Taliban. Thoughts of my friend and her murdered father flooded my mind.

  My heart raced, and I told my little sister to be quiet and to stay in the backyard, out of sight. I took off my flip-flops and tiptoed barefoot through the house to within a few feet of the front door. I planned to get on my stomach and look through the crack underneath to see who it was.

  Then I heard my brother’s voice. He was yelling, calling my name, telling me to open up. He kept pounding on the door, the booms echoing through the house. Without thinking, I jumped up, undid the bolt, and yanked the door open. I didn’t know what to expect, but I found myself short of breath and scared.

  Looking out into the front courtyard, I saw my sister crying and my brother by her side, his face flushed. They were on their knees in the dirt. My mother stood beside them, having just come through the gate, but she moved haltingly.

  I immediately knew something was wrong. Standing in the doorway, I pleaded with them to tell me what had happened. My mother didn’t look at me; she yanked off her heavy burka and threw it into the dirt. My heart stopped when I saw her bleeding feet.

  She fell down. I started crying and kept pleading for someone to please tell me what had happened. Then, sensing something behind me, I turned and saw my little sister’s face at the back door. She was also crying.

  My mother asked for a cup of water, so I rushed into the kitchen to fetch her one. When I returned, she was holding her bloody feet. Afsoon was sitting on the ground and crying. She kept saying, “It was all because of me! It was all because of me!”

  Then the story came out. My brother, mother, and sister made it to the clinic and were seen by a nurse. After they left the clinic, a Taliban truck drove past. A Taliban fighter with a long red beard and a bald head, wearing a long, black shalwar kameez, jumped out of the truck and advanced toward them. He was yelling at my mother for exposing her feet.

  In her rush to get out of the house, my mother had forgotten to trade her flip-flops for shoes that covered the skin of her ankles and feet. Women were not allowed to show even an inch of skin in public. She had broken the law.

  The Taliban fighter with the red beard started whipping my mother. My brother and sister rushed to her side, but she told them to stay back. The fighter yelled wildly at everyone. My mother dropped to the ground, pleading for him to stop hitting her and not to hurt the children. She’d only taken her daughter to the clinic, she’d forgotten to change shoes, she was sorry, it was a mistake—please have mercy. But he kept beating her until her feet were bloody and bruised, and then he left.

  When I heard this story, I couldn’t stop my tears, and I hugged my Mother Jan as tightly as I could. I asked her to please let me help her inside. We could clean her feet inside the house, where she could rest and get better.

  As I tried to help my mother up, I heard the courtyard gate open again. Fear coursed through me, but when I turned to see who it was, I saw my father. He was carrying groceries, but upon taking in the scene before him, he dropped the bag and rushed to my mother’s side.

  While my brother tried to explain what had happened, my father picked my mother up out of the dirt and carried her inside the house. My mother clutched his neck, and her cries turned into sobs. My father told me to bring him some clean towels and bandages, and he eased my mother down onto the couch. I brought what he asked for, then watched as he tended to my mother’s injuries, wiping the dirt and smudges from her face as he did so.

  That night I fell asleep silently crying to myself. I had nightmares about something terrible pressing down on my chest, making it hard to breathe, but I couldn’t remember specifically what it was. It just kept getting heavier and heavier, and I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t move.

  The next morning, I woke up and found my mother making breakfast: eggs, tomatoes, and peppers. She was sitting on the floor cross-legged with white bandages on her feet, stained red from where the blood had soaked through and smudged black from the traces of dirt on the floor.

  I asked her if her feet still hurt, and she said yes, but that it was OK. She could sit on the floor and do what she needed to there. I sat down beside her and offered to help. I took one of the peppers and worked silently for a time. Eventually I asked my mother if we made her and Baba Jan’s life more difficult.

  This question had been festering in the back of my mind for quite a while, and I needed to know. They gave us so much and took care of our every need before their own. They’d given up their lives and their dreams so they could raise us. And if it weren’t for us, she would have not been beaten by the Taliban. Or so I thought.

  My mother looked at me with both pain and love and told me that I should never think such a thing, that she and Baba Jan couldn’t imagine life without us, and that we’d brought so much light and joy into their lives. She said they were gardeners and that we were their fruit to be tended to and nurtured. Each one of us was like a tree that they’d raised from the tiniest beginnings, and what they wanted most in life was for us to have happiness and health.

  I believed her and her words warmed my heart, but I asked her why we’d left Pakistan. “We were happy there, right? We used to play outside, have picnics, be free . . . Why did we come here? And why is it bad to be a woman? Why must we be treated this way? What is wrong with us?”

  She told me that nothing was wrong with us, and yes, we’d been happy in Karachi. But we had to return to Kabul for our future. Things were bad now, but that was life. Sometimes there is happiness; other times there is sadness. That is how life works.

  * * *

  The Taliban’s rule was barbaric an
d cruel. There was violence all the time, oppressive, sadistic violence. They were worse than mad dogs—they still are. I pray the Taliban, or any regime even remotely like them, never comes to power in any part of the world ever again.

  During these first few years back in Afghanistan, the Taliban took everything from me: my innocence, my peace, my right to an education, and my freedom to walk down the street without fear. They took away my childhood.

  I will never get those years back, nor will the thousands of other girls who grew up under the Taliban’s heel. The Taliban ruined an entire generation of children. And as I write this, the remnants of ISIS’s caliphate in Syria are withering, but my heart cries out for the innocents who had to endure that hell: the children, women, and men forced to serve such evil. Make no mistake—the kind of rule meted out by the Taliban and ISIS is truly evil.

  Thankfully, my father was right. No oppressor, foreign or domestic, lasts forever in Afghanistan. Their day would come. I knew it would. And when I was old enough, I told myself, I would fight back. I would not live in fear.

  10

  September 11, 2001

  At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. At 9:03 AM, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. At 9:37 AM, American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon in northern Virginia. And at 10:03 AM, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, its intended target likely the US Capitol or the White House.

  By the end of the day, 2,977 innocent people were dead, the towers had fallen, the Pentagon was burning, and plane wreckage was strewn across a Pennsylvania field. Nothing would ever be the same.