by N G Osborne
“Dinner’s ready,” she says.
“Oh, how wonderful. I’ll be right there.”
Noor retrieves the meatballs and rice from the kitchen and places them on the sideboard in the dining room. Her father and sister join her at the table. Ten minutes pass with no sign of Charlie, and with each passing minute Noor’s irritation grows.
He may be not as bad as I once thought, but he’s not a lot better.
“Let’s start,” Bushra says.
“No, we’ll wait,” Noor says.
“I’m hungry.”
“I can’t see why, you spent the whole day in bed.”
Bushra’s eyes drop to the table.
“Noor, apologize to your sister,” Aamir Khan says, “that was uncalled for.”
“I’m sorry, Bushra, I’m a little on edge that’s all.”
“Why?” Bushra says.
“I just feel cooped up in this house.”
“It’s huge.”
“I guess it’s a state of mind, that’s all.”
They wait five more minutes. Noor fixes her father with a stare.
“You should go get him.”
“That would be rude.”
“And his tardiness isn’t?”
“Did you make clear when dinner was?”
“The meatballs were cooking in the oven.”
“That means nothing to a man, he could have thought they would take an hour.”
Charlie saunters into the room in a fresh t-shirt and jeans, his hair still wet from his shower.
“Hope you guys weren’t waiting for me.”
Aamir Khan stands up and pulls Charlie’s chair back.
“Please sit, you have had a most stressful day,” Aamir Khan says.
My God, we’re back in the days of the Raj, and Baba’s his butler.
“I’ll survive,” Charlie says. “Everything okay this end?”
“Oh, most delightful, thank you,” Aamir Khan says.
Noor shoves her own chair back and heads to the sideboard. She begins doling out the meatballs and rice onto plates.
“So I got a proposal,” Charlie says.
Noor looks his way.
“Wali’s doctor says he’ll be out in a month, and I’ve decided to look after him.”
“That is wonderfully considerate of you,” Aamir Khan says.
Noor knows where Charlie is heading but feels powerless to stop what he’s about to say.
“ So I was wondering if you’d help me, Aamir? Course I’d pay you, and you guys could go on living here, in fact you’d kind of have to if it’s going to work.”
Noor catches her father’s eye and shakes her head. Aamir Khan looks away pretending not to have seen her.
“That is a most generous offer,” Aamir Khan says.
“Trust me,” Charlie says, “you’d be doing me the favor.”
“Baba—” Noor says.
“Wait your turn, Noor, I think it only appropriate to ask your elder sister’s opinion first.”
Noor is flabbergasted. Not once since they’ve been in Pakistan has her father not consulted her first.
“So Bushra,” Aamir Khan says, “what do you think of Charlie’s offer?”
Noor tries to catch Bushra’s gaze, but Bushra is staring down at the table cloth.
There’s no way she’ll agree to live in a house with a strange man.
Bushra mumbles something, but her voice is so quiet that no one can decipher what she said.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Aamir Khan says.
“I like living here,” Bushra says.
“Then since I do too, that is settled. Thank you, Charlie, we accept your offer most gratefully.”
Noor stands there with her mouth agape. Charlie smiles at her. She twists away and dollops the rest of the food out.
Why didn’t he ask my opinion in the kitchen? Obviously because he wanted to set me up.
She plunks everyone’s plates in front of them and returns to the sideboard to retrieve her own. She sits down and sees Charlie shoveling up a forkful of rice.
“If you don’t mind,” Noor says, “we always say a prayer before we start eating.”
“My bad,” Charlie says.
How I hate that expression.
“Bismillah ar-Rahman, ar-Raheem,” the three Afghans say.
Charlie picks up a skewer and brings it up to his mouth.
“I assume you’re going to say one too,” Noor says.
Charlie looks bewildered by her sudden onslaught.
“Sorry, course.”
Charlie closes his eyes.
“Dear God, thank you for this meal, for saving Wali’s life, and for keeping everyone in this room safe. Amen.”
He opens his eyes.
“Oh, that was most heartfelt,” Aamir Khan says.
And you couldn’t be more of a sycophant.
Out the corner of her eye, she watches Charlie take a meatball off his skewer and pop it in his mouth. He chews it over and over as if he’s having difficulty swallowing it. He reaches for his glass of water and takes a large gulp. The meatball slithers down his throat.
“If you don’t like it just say,” Noor says.
“What do you mean? It’s good.”
“Sounds like faint praise to me.”
“What? Should I’ve said that it was awesome?”
“Not if you don’t believe that to be true.”
Charlie shakes his head and eats some rice.
“Well your rice is awesome, Noor. Thanks for making it.”
Noor tries some. It has the texture of daal that’s been left in water overnight.
“Have you ever read On The Road, Charlie?” Aamir Khan says.
“It’s got to be my favorite book,” Charlie says.
“I am ashamed to say I had never read it before, but this morning I noticed it in your library—”
“You’re lying,” Noor says.
Everyone looks in her direction. She stares Charlie down.
“Come on,” Charlie says, “every kid in America with half a brain’s read Kerouac.”
“The rice, you don’t think it’s awesome. There were no high-fives, no thumbs up. Besides it’s cold and sticky.”
“Maybe I like it that way.”
“No, you don’t.”
Charlie holds his hands up.
“We really need to fight over this?”
“Just so you’re aware,” Noor says, “the reason it’s the way it is, is because you took so long to join us.”
“That’s the reason?”
“When someone goes to the trouble of cooking you dinner the least you can do is come down on time.”
Charlie picks up his napkin and wipes his hands with it. He fixes Noor with the first cold stare she’s ever received from him. It disconcerts her.
“You ever thought that sometimes people say things to be nice?” Charlie says.
“That’s what every liar tells himself,” Noor says.
Aamir Khan’s fork clatters onto his plate.
“Noor.”
“No, it’s cool, Aamir,” Charlie says. “I’m happy to give Noor an honest review if she wants one.”
Charlie pops a meatball into his mouth, and takes what seems like an eon to swallow it.
“So?” Noor says.
“If you’d ripped the sole off my shoe and cut it into tiny, little pieces it’d have tasted better.”
Bushra gasps.
“Night Aamir,” Charlie says. “Night Bushra.”
Charlie shoves his chair back and strides from the room.
“I do not know what has gotten into you lately,” Aamir Khan says.
He stands up and leaves the room. Bushra follows him.
“I’m not hungry,” she says.
Noor sits there at the table, staring at the crumbled meatballs. She wants to cry but refuses to.
TWENTY-SEVEN
NOOR SITS ON the bus, her application essay in her hands. She keeps her head bowed and her eyes o
n the floor in an attempt to show her face to as few people as possible. She imagines every man that glances in her direction to be one of Tariq’s brothers-in-arms.
When Elma had called and suggested meeting at a tea shop in Qissa Khawani bazaar, Noor hadn’t protested. How could she? If anything she felt fortunate that Elma hadn’t forgotten all about her.
But why here of all places?
At the entrance to the bazaar, she gets off and enters its shadowy warren of alleys. Their very tightness only increases her paranoia. At any moment she fears someone is going to reach out from a doorway and snatch her. She finds the tea shop, squished between a tailor’s and a book store. Up front its owner sits on a raised platform in front of two massive brass urns. Blue and beige teapots dangle above him, and each time one of his boy servers races up, he grabs one and fills it with either sweet, milky chai or dark green kahwah. The tea shop is throbbing with customers. Noor looks for Elma but doesn’t see her. She does, however, see an empty table towards the back. She threads her way over to it and sits down. A boy comes over, and she orders a cup of kahwah. She glances around the tea shop. Every man in the place, and there are only men here, is staring at her. She turns her head away. ‘Never draw attention to yourself,’ her father has often counseled her, yet in this establishment it seems impossible not to.
Her thoughts stray to the previous evening. Even now she’s baffled as to what came over her.
To get worked up by him of all people.
All night she’d tossed and turned, and that morning her father had insisted she apologize to Charlie. As a child her father had scolded her so rarely that when he had she’d retreat to her room in tears for the rest of the day. She hadn’t done that in this instance, but it had shook her up nonetheless. The apology won’t be pleasant; in fact just thinking about it makes her queasy.
But better that than having to face Baba’s continued displeasure.
A hand rests on her shoulder, and she twists around. She finds Elma standing there in jeans and a jacket, a head scarf draped lazily over her head.
“Sorry, I’m late. I took Rod to get a shalwar kameez next door, and you know how these tailors are; it’s like they have to show you every ream of cloth in the store.”
Noor nods as if she does.
“So is that the essay?” Elma says noticing the pages in Noor’s hands.
“It still needs a lot of work.”
“Well let me be the judge of that.”
Noor hands the essay over and pulls her head scarf tighter. Elma notices and takes a sweep of the tea shop. She curses the assembled throng in Pashtu, and the men look away, ashamed.
“That’s better,” she says.
Elma focuses on the essay. Noor knows it by heart, and she can’t help but recite it in her head as Elma reads it.
On my twelfth birthday my father gave me Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. This may strike you as a peculiar gift from a father to a daughter, especially to a daughter so young, but you must understand my father is a peculiar man, peculiar in all the best possible ways.
To say the book had an impact on me would be a gross understatement. I suspect this was because the subjects that preoccupied it were so prominent in my part of the world. There’s no better example than Afghanistan of Three Guineas’ central message regarding the interconnectedness between male patriarchy, education and war.
I’m an Afghan refugee from a war that’s claimed over a million lives, a war that’s been raging for a decade now and, despite the imminent fall of the Communist regime, looks likely to continue on in some new and reconstituted form.
I’m also a woman from a society that’s never placed any value in women’s work, where young girls can be bartered for the misdeeds of their male family members, and which every day finds new ways to restrict what women can do. Here men rule supreme with women unable to make decisions of even the slightest import. Most of us are forced into burqas when we venture outside, and inside we must labor for our menfolk without reward. The greatest insult of all is that our men tell us they do this out of concern for our honor, but there is no honor to be had in this world unless you have freedom and are treated as an equal.
Despite our history, martial qualities are still celebrated by my people as if they’re the essence of what it means to be a man. It’s ironic that Afghanistan is known for its opium fields, for if anyone is a ruinous addict it’s my country that bemoans this war yet continues to instill in our boys a reverence for fighting.
At present the United Nations ranks Afghanistan as the poorest nation on the planet. When you exclude half your population from productive life and only teach the other half how to fight and recite (rather than understand) the Holy Quran how could that not be the case? Given this situation it is understandable that I was seduced by the words of the outsider in Three Guineas who says “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” And yet as Virginia Woolf predicted I’m unable to abandon my country, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I quote her further with a little artistic license.
“And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of Afghanistan dropped into a child’s ear by the cawing of rooks in a mulberry tree, by the hum of a kite overhead, or by Pashtun voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to Afghanistan first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”
You see despite the indignities I’ve experienced and the tragedies I’ve endured I still love my country and hope to craft a better future for it one day. I fervently believe that if we can promote the education of women we might slowly but surely break our ruinous obsession with war. It should be an education that stresses compassion and non violence to our children because one day that will turn into advice given to imams and tribal leaders, governors and presidents, and aggression and wars over property (or may I be so bold to say human souls) will lessen, and a more peaceful coexistence of humans as equals will result.
This may seem like some fanciful dream but isn’t Germany a country that celebrates such values? If the society that gave birth to the holocaust and the blitzkrieg can achieve this, can’t we Afghans do so too?
To do my part I need further education, an education in educating so to speak, and that’s something I’ll never be able to obtain living here in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the most fundamentalist city in Pakistan.
In Virginia Woolf’s other great treatise In A Room Of One’s Own, she contended that an equally talented sister of Shakespeare’s would never have written a word, let alone a play, for all people need a living wage and a private place or else their potential will never be realized. What I humbly ask you to provide me with is just that – an opportunity to broaden my mind at your inspiring university with just enough money that I might live. I might not write Hamlet or Twelfth Night, in fact I can guarantee you I won’t, but I know if you are kind enough to afford me this opportunity that I will flourish and maybe, just maybe, I can be part of a wave that will turn my beloved country into a more equitable and peaceful place for all Afghans, and by extension for everyone in the world.
Yours truly, Noor Jehan Khan
Noor watches Elma for a sign. Elma’s eyes still haven’t left the pages.
She hates it.
“How many words is it?” Elma says.
“Eight hundred and fifty-one,” Noor says.
Elma nods.
“It’s too long, isn’t it?” Noor says. “Too saccharine, too convoluted.”
Elma looks up. Her eyes are wet with tears.
“Don’t change a thing, it’s beautiful.”
“You really mean that?”
“There’s no way they won’t give you a scholarship after reading this.”
Noor feels her heart beat fast.
Calm down, you’re not there yet.
“Now we just need to get your Dutch up to speed.”
&nbs
p; “I’m practicing every day.”
“Good but you and I need to meet. We start Monday at my house. No excuses anymore. Now how’s your father?”
“He’s getting better, thank you. And how about you? How are you doing?”
Elma seems surprised that anyone would care to ask.
“Can you keep a secret?” she grins.
“Of course.”
“I’m in love.”
“With whom?”
“Have you ever been to the Hunza Valley?”
“I’ve read about it.”
“It’s like the Gods created it as a garden for themselves. I took Rod there to see a couple of girls schools we started. These girls, they don’t even look South Asian. They have fair skin, blue eyes, some even have blonde hair -”
“Alexander’s lost battalion.”
“Exactly. For two days they took us around, through the harvested fields, up the terraced hillsides, past the baskets of apricots drying in the sun, the snow covered peaks jutting into the sky above us, and I felt a connection to him like I’ve felt for no man before. I’m not going to lie to you, Noor, I’ve been with a lot of men, more than I care to remember, but in that valley, amongst those people so cut off from the rest of the world, I felt chaste and pure. It was like I was reborn. We stayed in this hotel overlooking the valley, and each night we’d sit on its balcony, blankets wrapped around us, and stare at the mountains as the sun set.”
Elma takes a sip of her tea, and Noor waits, desperate to know what happened.
“The last night he reached out his hand and took mine in his. That was it, nothing more, yet it was the most magical thing I’ve ever felt in my life.”
Elma blushes.
“Look at me, babbling away like a silly teenage girl.”
“No, I think it’s beautiful,” Noor says. “I’m happy for you.”
“How about you? Have you ever been in love?”
