Thunder Over Kandahar

by Sharon McKay

  “The housekeeper is back.” Yasmine gabbed Tamanna’s hand and both ran through the house and back into the courtyard. The housekeeper came around the privacy wall, a freestanding divider that thwarted prying eyes, and glared at the girls. She was frowning but not because she was angry, that was just how her mouth went. The old woman brushed past them and walked up to Yasmine’s father as he sat at his desk. Both girls huddled in the doorway.

  “The uncle has no objection to the girl working. She can start with me in the kitchen at sunrise,” said the old woman. No one was surprised that Tamanna’s uncle had agreed to the conditions. Money was money, after all.

  “I have other plans for her,” said Yasmine’s father. The housekeeper arched her eyebrows, but Baba just kept talking. “She is to be my daughter’s companion, at least until the school is opened.” Companion? Who had ever heard of such a thing! The woman made a tut-tutting sound.

  Yasmine bit her lip. No one had actually asked Tamanna if she wanted to be her friend. But she could tell just by looking at her that they would like each other. Tamanna had a soft, round face. Her eyes were as dark as chocolate, and she was sure that if she smiled it would be a beautiful, wide smile. She turned to Tamanna.

  “Would you be my friend?” she asked.

  Tamanna nodded. More than anything in this world she wanted to be Yasmine’s friend.

  Yasmine laughed. “I knew that you would have a beautiful smile.”

  Next morning, Tamanna woke before the muezzin called the faithful to early morning prayers. She collected firewood in the dark, fed the chickens, built the fire under the oven for Mor, and left before the sun peeked over the distant mountains.

  The trail from her house to the main road wound through long grass like a kite’s tail. The sun-baked ground was hard and her feet fell in and out of ancient donkey tracks. Soon the heat of the day would press down like a flat palm, but for this moment, in the early morning, the weather was glorious. She had never felt so happy.

  From then on, every morning Tamanna brought the naan to give Rahim Khan and took a smaller stack of bread to Yasmine’s house. Every day the girls drank tea together, ate pomegranates or sweet melons, and bit into Mor’s warm naan. They took fruit, tea, and bread into Yasmine’s mother’s room and listened to stories. Many were from a book, but some were her own stories of places far away, magical places with names like London, Paris, New York, and Montreal. Tamanna repeated everything in her head. When this dream ended and her real life returned, she wanted to relive these moments.

  A large patoo, a shawl, covered the bed. It was decorated in elaborate and detailed embroidery. It was so beautiful, Tamanna could hardly pull her eyes away. If she could just turn the patoo over and see the delicate stitching. Mor said that her stitching was excellent but she had not had the opportunity to work with fine, thin thread.

  Yasmine’s mother noticed Tamanna’s interest and said, “Is it not lovely? It is cherma dozi, a traditional form of Afghan needlework.”

  Tamanna nodded. “I . . .” but she stopped. It would be wrong to tell of her talents.

  “Do you know how to embroider?” asked Yasmine’s mother.

  Tamanna nodded. “But the thread is too expensive and Uncle will not allow it.” She felt her face flush red.

  “Could you teach me?” Yasmine squealed.

  Again, Tamanna nodded.

  Later in the day they would study arithmetic under a tree with Yasmine’s father. Bent over paper, Yasmine did complicated equations, while Tamanna learned to count by lining up small pebbles in a row. Sometimes they sat under Baba’s cozy blanket, the campal, and listened to tales of Alexander the Great and Buddhist Afghanistan. But the stories they liked best were of the Silk Road—except it wasn’t one road, it was many roads, all filled with adventure.

  “And did you know,” said Baba one day, “that Genghis Khan, who thundered through Asia in a hail of slings and arrows, gave women equal rights under the law?”

  Yasmine always asked Baba lots of questions. Never, not once, had Tamanna managed to ask a question, but then there it was, on the tip of her tongue.

  “Did Genghis Khan allow women to work?”

  Baba laughed. “A woman could even be a soldier in his army.”

  Tamanna whispered, “There are woman soldiers in the kharijis’ army, too. Some walk through the village wearing great equipment and carrying guns.”

  Baba nodded. “In the West, women may do any job, or join any profession.” How could that be? Tamanna wondered. Yasmine’s father then went on about the Mongolian warrior who had created the world’s biggest empire. There was so much to learn!

  And then, each day as the sun began to set, Yasmine’s father gave her a few bills, payment for work she had not done. The money was delivered directly to Uncle.

  The old housekeeper’s mouth curled in disdain. Tamanna grew fearful. If the housekeeper spread gossip, Uncle would not allow her to come back, she was sure of it. As the weeks went on her fear increased. She tried to help with the housework, but Yasmine would not let her. “Leave the vegetables. Mother wants to tell us a story,” she’d say, or, “Never mind the laundry, Baba has a map of all of Afghanistan to show us.”

  The housekeeper went to Mother and complained. “The girl should work. What use is it to educate her?”

  Baba overheard, and so did Yasmine and Tamanna. Baba quoted Hajji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev: “An educated woman is an educated mother and, as such, she is able to provide her children with a broad outlook.” He spoke gently to the old woman, as if by doing so she would better understand. The housekeeper pursed her lips so tightly they turned white. She had never heard of Hajji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev. Did this man mean to make her feel stupid? Did he think their ways in the village were not good enough for such a learned person as himself?

  Tamanna grabbed Yasmine’s hand and pulled her into a corner. “Your father must not say such things. There is gossip in the village,” she whispered.

  “Please, what do they say?” asked Yasmine.

  “They say that he is not one of them. That he has been tainted by the outside world.”

  Yasmine nodded. She remembered the professor who had come to their house after the attack on Mother. It didn’t matter that Baba looked like one of them or that he was a hajji, they were suspicious of him, as they were of all outsiders.

  “What should we do?” Yasmine whispered.

  “I do not know.” If Yasmine’s father let the old woman go, the gossip would only get worse. There didn’t seem to be anything that they could do.

  One morning, the housekeeper’s grandson knocked on the door. He said that his grandmother had taken a pain in her side during the night and died! It was a tragedy. Baba gave the boy paper bills for the old housekeeper’s burial. For the moment, anyway, Baba’s reputation was safe.

  Yasmine’s father hired a woman to clean the house after evening prayers, long after Tamanna had left for the day. Now no knew about their secret lessons, not even Tamanna’s mother.

  The girls took on a few household jobs, but since they were doing them together it was fun. The hardest job was the laundry. Tamanna filled the copper washing lagaan with warm water while Yasmine swished the clothes around, squeezing, swish-swishing, then squeezing again. It was then that Tamanna mustered up her courage to ask, “Why do you speak . . . ?” What was the word she wanted? “You speak Dari but it is different somehow.”

  Yasmine did not seem to be offended by the nosy question. “My parents spoke Dari to me when I was little but really my first language is English.”

  Tamanna pulled back so fast it was if she had been hit! “You speak English?”

  Yasmine nodded. “And a little French. I wish I had studied more. I thought I had time to learn it. I didn’t know that I would be coming here.”

  Tamanna thought that she sounded sad. “Do you not like it here?” she asked.

  Yasmine dried her hands on a piece of cloth. “If I hadn’t come here, I would not have met you,
so I guess I do like it,” she said, smiling.

  Tamanna bit her lip. This feeling inside—it was like she was filled with bubbles.

  “Why do you speak both Dari and Pashto?” Yasmine asked.

  “Everyone in the village speaks Pashto, but my mother is from Parwan Province and there they speak Dari. My uncle does not know how to speak Dari so he cannot understand us when we talk about him.” Tamanna laughed.

  “What is your uncle like?” asked Yasmine.

  Tamanna shook her head. There was nothing to say.

  “Would you like to learn English?”

  Tamanna nodded, more than nodded. Her head bobbed up and down so fast her headscarf almost came off.

  “In the morning you can correct my Dari accent and teach me Pashto, and in the afternoon I will teach you English. I bet that you are the faster learner. You are so smart!” Yasmine laughed.

  Tamanna held her breath. Blood rushed to her face. Surely Yasmine did not mean to say such a thing! Embarrassed, Tamanna added, “And will you tell me about England, about how people live?” She would likely never leave this place unless she married a man from the next village, but still, just to hear about the magical world beyond her reach would be enough.

  “I will tell you all I remember. I am forgetting things about England, but I haven’t forgotten pigs-in-a-blanket!”

  Tamanna’s mouth dropped open. “You eat pig?” To eat pig was forbidden.

  Yasmine laughed. “Mother used to make meat sausages wrapped in pastry, which is like bread, then I’d dip them in ketchup.”

  “Ket-up.” Tamanna tested the word. “Ket-up sounds delicious!” Ketchup was Tamanna’s first English word. “Are there buses and rickshaws in England?”

  Yasmine told her, “In England, a woman can own and drive her own automobile. And she can wear whatever she wants, no one cares. And young men and women can go out together and even hold hands in the street. I have seen people kiss. And many women live alone in flats.” Yasmine giggled.

  “Alone? Without family?” Tamanna thumped down in a fog of wonder. Kiss? What was that? Such strange things she was learning!

  Twice a week there was a market in the village. Baba always returned with embroidery thread, often silver and gold, but one day he came home with a soccer ball. Even with her bad hip Tamanna could kick the ball through two posts Baba had slammed into the ground. Mother and Baba sat under the tree and cheered every goal.

  “Your hip, does it hurt to run?” asked Yasmine as they sank to the ground.

  Tamanna shrugged. There was nothing that could be done about it, so why complain?

  “You are lucky that you deliver naan,” said Yasmine.

  Lucky? “I do not understand,” said Tamanna.

  “In England I walked to school by myself. I was always outside. But here Baba is worried all the time. In Herat, my mother . . .” But her words drifted. They never talked about the attack on Mother. “Never mind. Draw me a map of the village and show me where you live?” Yasmine sat with her knees in the dust and passed Tamanna a pointy stick.

  Tamanna scratched a map into the hard ground. “Here is the mosque, and beside it a madrassa, and down here is the bathhouse and the public oven, the well, the stream, and my house is here!” It was fun, being the one to teach Yasmine! She stabbed the ground. “Beside my house there are great stalks of wheat and noisy bulbul birds. And there is a burned-out Russian tank right in the middle of the field. It pokes out of the ground like an old tombstone. Kabeer and I used to play on it.” She stopped. The image of her brother rose up in her eyes like a flash of light. She closed her eyes tight.

  “Tamanna, what’s wrong? Who is Kabeer?”

  Tamanna shook her head as if the effort would get rid of the memory. “Kabeer is my brother. He is gone now.”

  “Where did he go?” asked Yasmine, confused.

  Tamanna gave her head another shake. There it was again, the picture of her twin brother with a tear-streaked face, arms reaching out for her, pleading, “Mor, Mor, I do not want to go. Tamanna, I do not want to go.”

  Tamanna squared her shoulders. Again she stabbed the ground with the stick. “A tent school used to be on that spot but it got washed away. The new school will have two rooms, one for boys and one for girls. Each room will have heat! Everyone talks about it.”

  Yasmine looked down at the scratches in the ground. “Did you go to the tent school?”

  Tamanna shook her head. “Uncle would not allow me to go.”

  It was Yasmine’s turn to be surprised. “But you are so smart! Baba and Mother said so. And you can already read and do additions and subtractions. What is wrong?” asked Yasmine.

  This time Tamanna let herself hear the compliment. She turned away before Yasmine could see the tears in her eyes.

  Mother walked with only one crutch now. Many times Baba had said, “We will go to India or Pakistan and have your leg looked at.” Mother brushed him away. “I am healing in my own time, Yasmine is happy, and you are making great progress on your book. Let us enjoy this peace a little while longer.” It was true, Baba had filled three large books with his writing. Mother read his work every day, often commenting and sometimes rewriting. Baba said, “Your mother makes me sound smarter than I am.”

  According to Tamanna, Yasmine no longer had a funny accent and her embroidery had improved, although, truth be told, Yasmine was too impatient to do an excellent job. Tamanna could read, write, multiply, and speak many words in English. And then, everything changed.

  “The school building is finished.” Tamanna, standing in the courtyard, clutched her side, panting. Yasmine raced across the courtyard and threw her arms around her friend. “Two teachers will arrive tomorrow. And . . .” Tamanna had saved the best for last, “Uncle says that he does not care if I go to school or not, as long as I make my deliveries!”

  There was no end to the miracles.

  Chapter 6

  Education Is Light

  The new school was a white building with blue trim. It was beautiful, despite being surrounded by rubble, smashed bricks, bits of wood, shingles, and rocks. Boys gathered on one side of the building, girls on the other. Really, there were hardly any girls, maybe ten or so, but all the boys of the village were there.

  Tamanna stood near the building and watched for Yasmine. Uncle had said that he hoped she would enjoy her day at school. She had said thank you, and then her skin had felt prickly. Why was he being nice to her?

  Mor had only said, “Wear your burka.” No, she would not! Anyway, it was not her burka, it was their burka. They had not the money for two. They’d argued until it was agreed that she would carry it with her.

  Praise be to Allah, her life was perfect. Almost perfect. There it was again, that rumble in her stomach. She had felt ill since the day before, and she’d run to the outhouse three times before school. But nothing would be allowed to spoil this day, nothing.

  “Tamanna!” She heard her name and turned. Yasmine and her father were walking down the road towards the school. Yasmine raised her hand in a wave, said goodbye to her father, and ran towards her.

  “Look!” Tamanna pointed up to a banner above the door of the school. It read, “Education Is Light.” The two girls giggled.

  The sun was beginning to climb in the sky. Some of the younger children grew tired of waiting and sat in the shade of the building, their backs against the wall. Boys kicked around a ball, while the girls became pensive. Tamanna edged closer to Yasmine. “What if they do not come? What if . . . ?”

  “There he is!” Yasmine pointed.

  Heads down, eyes up, the girls watched as the teacher strode towards the school. It had to be him. He carried books. What age might he be? Twenty-five? Maybe older. A small beaded skullcap covered his head. He had an elegant nose, large, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and smooth skin—and he wore no beard! He walked with such confidence and assurance that the boys surrounded him like yapping puppies. The girls giggled and covered their faces with the ends o
f their headscarves.

  “Asalaam alaikum,” the teacher said to the boys. Then he turned and looked in the direction of the girls. “Asalaam alaikum,” he repeated, his hand suspended in the air.

  Tamanna and Yasmine stood transfixed, hearts pounding. He was the teacher for the boys, but where was their woman teacher? Tamanna strained to see past him. Nothing. No one.

  “You girls,” said the teacher. He looked at them! He spoke to them! “Your teacher is delayed.”

  The heads of the girls slumped. Tamanna swallowed hard. Delayed? Was she coming at all? Some girls turned and started for home.

  “No, no, today we will all be together. Come,” said the teacher.

  Boys and girls together? The girls whispered to one another. Was it allowed? Would they get into trouble?

  “Girls will sit at the back,” said the teacher.

  “Yasmine, perhaps we should go home,” Tamanna whispered.

  “It will be all right. In England, boys and girls always sit together!” Yasmine grinned and tugged at Tamanna’s hand. She was outside, she was with other girls, she could not go home, not yet.

  The boys barged into the school first. The smaller boys crumpled like balls of paper onto the rugs at the very front of the room while the bigger boys took the seats behind. Immediately they pounded the desks that were attached to the chairs. Girls were expected to behave well, but could and would do what they liked. Noor took the best seat. That was expected, too.

  “Alaikum asalaam,” mumbled the girls as they passed the teacher’s desk and made their way to the back of the class. Some stopped in the doorway and peered around, frightened and unsure. Eventually they all took a place on the tall benches that ran the length of the room. Tamanna’s legs dangled beneath her. It was hard to sit so far off the ground, and harder still to keep from slumping forward.

  Large, long windows were at their backs and in front the teacher stood beside a black chalkboard. He said, “As salaam wa alaikum. My name is Nasir Akhtar, but you will call me Moalim sahib or Teacher.” Tamanna reached out and squeezed Yasmine’s hand. Teacher wrote words on the blackboard: