The Lightless Sky

by Gulwali Passarlay

  As I didn’t want any harm to befall my sisters, I genuinely thought that their staying away from school and safe from all of these risks was the best option. I was still as pious as I ever was; in some ways, even more so, since the arrival of the ‘foreigners’.

  Everything was still new, unsettled – we were still technically at war. The whole country was in a state of uncertainty. There were fights between different rival groups, some of whom supported the old Taliban regime, others who were now siding with the Americans.

  The idea that the Taliban left and suddenly everything in my country improved overnight is nonsense. To many people, like my grandfather, it felt as if the world had collapsed into immorality.

  And as bad as the Taliban might have been, the NATO forces were far from perfect too. I witnessed one incident, which, like the stoning, still gives me nightmares today.

  We were driving to Jalalabad, the nearest city to us. US armoured vehicles were up ahead and the road was blocked on both sides, meaning no one could pass. Suddenly, a car – full of people, including children – swerved out and drove towards them from the oncoming side. I don’t know why they did this – maybe someone was sick, perhaps they had another kind of emergency – but for whatever reason, they drove on.

  There was a hail of gunfire from the American soldiers.

  The car burst into flames, killing everyone inside the vehicle. I remember a silent scream filling my head as my father held me to him and tried to shield my eyes.

  ‘Why? Why, why, why?’

  There were so many incidents like this one that I lost track of them. We used to hear the stories – accidental bombings of weddings, killings of innocent farmers, US soldiers shooting anyone they thought might be Taliban. People disappeared into the hands of the Special Forces and were not seen again for years. Women waited for husbands who never returned. Their crime – who knew?

  There were also the petty humiliations of life under occupation. There were near-constant roadblocks. One poor woman gave birth by the side of the road because the soldiers refused to let her and her husband past.

  I hated these people who had come to conquer us. I saw these latest invaders as worse than the Russians.

  Politically, though, things became stable enough for Uncle Lala to return; it turned out he had been sheltering in Pakistan. He offered his services to the newly democratic Afghan government. The new district governor knew him well and knew what an intelligent man he was, and he gave him a very senior role running the prison service. But some local people feared and mistrusted him because he had been such a key figure in the Taliban. Others were jealous of my family’s success, and saw denouncing my uncle as a way to get back at us. The Taliban were still thriving, only underground, in secret meetings and bunkers. The US military was hungry for information and people used old rivalries as an excuse to inform on others, whether or not the accusations were true. Because of my uncle’s history, it became impossible for him to stay working for the government, so a few months later he left again, for Pakistan.

  The US forces had a large base near our house, and they knew of my uncle’s former role as head of Taliban intelligence for the east. They believed he had gone back to join the organization in a mountain hideout somewhere, and came regularly to our home to interview my father and uncles, even though my father didn’t know where my uncle had gone – he hadn’t heard from him since he’d left.

  The men of the house, including me and my brothers, despised these visits. The soldiers had no understanding of our culture and stared directly at the women instead of turning their faces away, while my younger siblings were so scared they used to cry when they saw them.

  ‘Gulwali, be polite and answer them. Better not to make trouble for ourselves,’ my father used to insist.

  But inside, I seethed.

  ‘You are a year older now. Behave like it.’ My mother’s voice betrayed no maternal kindness, but after she spoke she broke into a rare smile.

  It was my eleventh birthday – October 2005. In the Afghan calendar it was 1385. The Afghan calendar is based on the date that Islam became predominant in Afghanistan, around fifty years behind the main Islamic calendar.

  We didn’t celebrate birthdays. People say it’s unIslamic to do so, but really it’s more of a cultural thing: many Afghan kids from poor or uneducated families don’t know what day they are born; if your family is educated, they will usually write it down somewhere so you know. So for my mother to make reference to it was something pretty special.

  My chest swelled and I spent the rest of the day strutting around the compound. Our family had continued to grow, with the arrival of another younger brother, Nazir. My parents were delighted with the arrival of another boy, and his arrival softened their pain over losing their twin boys. But he was a sickly child who didn’t eat much; I recall my father often injecting him with some kind of serum to help his appetite.

  When I was ten, three years after the US occupation began, my mother’s parents had returned from Pakistan, settling in a district about six hours’ drive from us. My mother’s father had two wives and a total of sixteen children, including my mother. Being a deeply devout man, he was fiercely opposed to violence of any nature.

  My mother wanted us to get to know them better, so she sent us kids away to stay with her parents. I suspect the district where they lived was also safer than ours at that time, so sending us there was also a way to protect us. We were out of school, and it was fun spending time with this new set of grandparents and my other cousins, so I didn’t mind.

  We had just eaten a delicious dinner of home-reared lamb and rice when the news reached my grandfather. He took Hazrat and me outside. His voice was shaking, yet his words, as is the Afghan way, were brutally matter of fact: ‘Boys, your father has been killed. You have to be strong. You are the men of the house now. Your father is gone.’

  I recall my legs buckling underneath me, but after that I can’t remember anything. I think I have blocked it out – my mind can’t go back there.

  The details of my father’s death are sketchy, based on the little I was told. My mother didn’t want us to know the full horror of what had happened and I didn’t ask. I still don’t want to know, because it won’t bring my family back.

  The night of my father’s death, US troops came to our home. There had been an attack on their base that had resulted in several soldiers being killed, and they suspected the weapons used in the attack had been stored in our house. They were angry, and this time they didn’t ask questions: they came with snarling dogs, kicking in the doors. They searched everything – even the women – throwing furniture, personal items, and the Quran on to the floor.

  They came ready for a fight. And they got one.

  Neighbours, relatives and extended family came to help drive the invaders out, all of them armed. By the time the shooting stopped, five of my relatives had been killed, including my father and my beloved grandfather. My two tailor uncles had survived, but were arrested and thrown into prison.

  I honestly don’t know if the weapons came from our house or not. I was just a child, and these things were never talked about in front of me.

  Yes, my family were Taliban sympathizers, but I know my father would not have been happy putting his children at risk – he was never really happy when former Taliban members came to our house. But to refuse these visitors would have brought even more trouble on the family. The reality is that in war, ordinary families like ours are often left to make hard choices: appease one side and you make an enemy of the other side; try and placate the other side and the first side wants to know why. You can’t win. The best you can do is try and negotiate a middle path and keep everybody happy, thus best ensuring those closest to you are kept safe. If indeed this was my father’s strategy, and I will never know for sure, then tragically it failed.

  I only knew one thing clearly. I had lost my fa
ther and grandfather, and so as was the tradition in my culture, I wanted revenge.

  Chapter Four

  Losing my father was the event that changed everything. Our family was plunged into turmoil. For a few months, my mother and my little siblings came to join us at her parents’ house. My aunts also went to their respective parents’ houses.

  It wasn’t just the shock of losing my father – money was in very short supply, too. In countries like Afghanistan, the reality is that if the breadwinner is killed, the family he leaves behind will be very hard put to live.

  One solution was available to us: my father’s big ledgers from his doctor’s surgery – the ones detailing the debts owed to him for medical treatment. It fell to my brothers and me to call at the homes of the people listed in them, and ask, demand, then beg for the money my family was owed. I detested it. Often these families were in worse straits than our own, yet the ledger had it all there in black and white: it was where our next meals would come from.

  After a while we went back to live in Hisarak, where we’d lived before the invasion. We had a huge extended family and people gave us a lot of support, with different relatives – including the husbands of my dad’s sisters – coming to stay and support us. But with the men of our immediate family dead, imprisoned or, in the case of Uncle Lala, whereabouts unknown, it was left to my brothers and me to become the men of the house.

  Other problems began to crop up, too. Taliban representatives began to visit more and more often. They wanted my brother and me to become fighters or even suicide bombers – martyrs – to avenge our father’s death.

  I was so angry that I wanted to do it. Hazrat and Noor were the same. The three of us didn’t really talk about it but I think we had an innate brotherly understanding of each other’s pain. But my mother knew that an angry and hurt child couldn’t understand the consequences of such a drastic action and could be easily manipulated in his grief. She had been there for the horrific event and she too was filled with fury and pain – certainly a lot of Pashtun women would have wanted their sons to take revenge, even if it meant them losing their lives. Revenge is a central yet often lethal part of Pashtunwali – if you don’t avenge yourself against your enemies, you have failed as a man.

  But my mother was influenced by a different set of thinking – her deep and abiding faith. Thanks to my maternal grandfather, she had a genuine and strong understanding of true Islamic law, and it is a religion that prohibits the taking of life. She had been taught that killing anyone was wrong, even if the reasons might seem justified. She had been taught to try and forgive, to show compassion and to accept tragic events as God’s will. It wasn’t easy for her, but her faith helped her get through losing my father.

  My mother was also doubly scared for me and Hazrat, because the US forces had also turned their attention to us two elder boys, urging us to become informants. They wanted information about my uncle’s contacts and where Taliban weapons might be stored. She feared that if we followed that route and got involved with the NATO forces, or even the Afghan authorities who were cooperating with them, then we would be seen as traitors and killed.

  It was a genuine fear. We knew other families where this had happened.

  The approach from the US forces was all very carefully done: there wasn’t really any direct contact. It was more indirect – through letters or messengers. We had a family friend who revealed himself to be a US informant. He had survived so far because he was a very powerful man; so powerful, we’d been told he had the ability to call in US airstrikes if he needed to.

  Hazrat and I visited him at his house to try and find out information about my uncles: we still didn’t know to which prison they had been taken or what their charges were.

  We sat on an ornate gilded French-style rococo couch and drank tea.

  ‘Do you know the saying, boys? “The enemy of your enemy is your friend?”’ Of course we did. It was a very common Pashtu saying. ‘You would be wise to remember it now. I will do whatever I can within my power to support you and help you, but you would also be wise to think of who your new friends might be.’

  I was suspicious of him. As we all knew he was working with the US military, advising them on local intelligence issues, I was worried that he could be double-crossing us. But I also knew he’d known our family for a long time and had known my father very well, so I hoped that stood for something.

  At the end of the meeting, he warned us both to be careful, telling us flatly that the NATO forces wanted us to work with them. He said if we didn’t do what they said, there would be a danger we’d be killed or end up in Bagram prison. They had impunity. He knew it and we knew it. He also made clear that if we made any moves towards the Taliban side, he would know about it.

  And, in that circumstance, he was more than clear that he couldn’t and wouldn’t help us.

  In the weeks following our father’s death, our house was full of visitors, all with lots of advice, and all of it conflicting.

  Senior elders told us to get involved with the Taliban, insisting it would be for our own safety. A messenger arrived, a stranger, who said he was there to offer condolences. He said that he was representing the Taliban shadow governor for the province, a man who had been appointed by Mullah Omar himself. He told us the Taliban authorities were happy to take revenge on our family’s behalf, but that before doing so he needed our cooperation in the form of my brothers and me joining the movement as fighters.

  ‘Work with us, not against us. Join us to fight the infidels and expel them from Afghanistan.’

  He went on to say that he understood we had family duties and could understand why we might want to stay out of things, but he still hoped we’d play our part.

  ‘This isn’t just about revenge for your father, boys. We want you to be part of a bigger and greater mission – expelling the invaders.’

  For me this message made sense. Of all the different people advising us, he was probably the most persuasive – to me, at least. Hazrat hadn’t liked him.

  Later, the messages took a more sinister and threatening turn in the form of so-called ‘night letters’: a handwritten letter would be thrown over our compound wall or through the doorway. The words on the page were stark: Be martyred, or die.

  Added to this, when we went to school, we were followed home by bearded men on motorbikes. Some of them were cajoling; others directly threatening; some of them even tried to grab us and make us go with them to a Taliban training camp there and then. It got to the point that as soon as we heard the sound of an engine we ran to hide.

  All this terrified me. It got so bad that we had to have bodyguards guarding the house.

  So many different people were offering protection and support, but the reality was that we didn’t know who we could trust.

  I doubt that the Taliban would have killed us for not joining them – this was about threatening persuasion. But I think if we had collaborated with the US military they certainly would have. While my brother and I were just two little boys, in the political and moral whirlwind of that time we were pawns in the two sides’ deadly game of chess: easily played and easily lost.

  In the end, highly unusually, a woman – my mother – decided our fate. One night, she sat Hazrat and me down. She was very composed. ‘Gulwali, Hazrat, you need to leave. You have to go somewhere far from here, where no one knows you. Noor is too little, so he will stay with me. We are working on a plan.’

  That was it. She didn’t say where, for how long, or when. She didn’t ask our opinion or how we felt about it. I wanted to ask a hundred questions but she was already busy making tea, her tight-lipped look making it clear the conversation was over.

  Never did I imagine that her plan would involve paying human smugglers thousands of dollars to take us to Europe.

  In my head I thought the journey – in as much as I knew about it – would only take a few weeks
.

  Hazrat and I were sent first to my maternal aunt’s house in Waziristan. I assumed we’d be coming home at some point, so there were no big goodbyes, no tears of sadness. Even when I hugged Grandma and my little siblings goodbye, I didn’t make a fuss because I thought I’d see them all again soon. We’d been moving around so much since the conflict began, none of it seemed unusual. And I didn’t question my mother, because in my culture, as a child, there are things you just do when you are told to – you don’t ask why or require an explanation. We never thought about ourselves individually, just about the family.

  My uncle (the husband of my mother’s sister), came to collect Hazrat and me. The journey to Waziristan took us across the area that is the lawless heartland of the Pashtu tribes, a place that has been described as the most dangerous and controversial border in the world. Although recognized internationally as the western border of Pakistan, the area is not recognized by the Afghan government. It’s known as the Durand Line, named after Sir Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat who, in 1893, after two Anglo-Afghan wars, negotiated the 2,640-kilometre-long boundary between what was then British India and Afghanistan. The idea was to create a neutral buffer-zone to both improve diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, but also to limit Russian expansion – a battle for the control of central Asia known as the Great Game.

  Pasthuns refer to the Durand Line as: ‘A line through our heart.’ For us it is a remnant of colonial oppression, and the sense of injustice had been instilled in me for as long as I could remember. Pashtuns see the real border as further into what is now Pakistan, where the river Indus separates both the Pashtun and Baloch lands – Balochistan – from Punjab and Sindh. The Baloch people, who the Pashtuns see as cousins, have been fighting for independence from Pakistan for nearly sixty years.

  As we journeyed over mountains, rivers and lakes, my heart stirred, both with the pride of being a Pashtun, and with the happy, nomadic memories of my early childhood. How I longed to be in the fields again, tending sheep with my grandfather. I was still grieving so very badly for both him and my father, the two men I had loved so much.