No Space for Further Burials

by Feryal Ali Gauhar

  I made my way in the dark toward her, stumbling over limbs and Sabir Shah’s crutch, and listened to her story, which she spoke in words I had begun to understand, words which were part of the language of absence.

  * * *

  Waris Khan and I are cousins. My father left the village many years ago when I was still a child, and traveled to a land beyond the seas. He would send us money and sometimes return with gifts of soft velvet blankets with images of cats, or perhaps tigers—I was too young to know the difference—and radios that played the sweetest music, the songs of Qamar Gul, speaking of her beloved’s dark eyes and the gaping hole in her heart which was her beloved’s absence.

  I was one of several girls in the family. My sisters were beautiful and fetched a good bride price when they were married. But I seemed not to be worth much, and even though my father laughed and called me his little dark camel, I knew that I did not measure up among the other young women who had suitors paying large sums of money for their hands in marriage. It was my cousin Waris who finally asked for me, and much as my mother wanted to wait for a better proposal, my father insisted that the offer was a good one: there would be some cash, and the rest of my dower would be made up with the promise of a decent life as the daughter-in-law of the village muezzin, a respectable man with few means but great honor.

  Waris Khan himself had learned to be a carpenter. When the war began and the mosque was hit during Friday prayers, killing his father and injuring so many others, Waris became a builder and repaired it within a few days so that there would be a place for men to worship Allah. The men in the village knew he had a gift, that his hands were able to create beauty out of the most ordinary materials, and they began to ask him to repair their damaged homes, erecting walls and constructing doors out of fallen trees. Waris did not ask them to pay him with money, knowing that there was not much to go around, but he gladly took whatever they could give him, sometimes a chicken, other times a dozen eggs, and once a newborn lamb whose mother had stepped on a landmine while grazing in the field.

  We were happy, as much as anyone can be in times of hardship. When I became heavy with our first child, Waris embraced me so tightly I thought I would lose consciousness. He said that we would name our son after his father, and that we would send him to school so that he could learn to read and write and be a good man in the future. Our son was born in the winter but he did not live to see spring, and I grieved for that lost child until summer turned our fields to gold and the sky became the color of lapis. When I told Waris that there was another child who would be coming to us at the time of the harvest, he said we must prepare carefully for his arrival.

  Waris loved children, but his own never lived for more than a few months after they came into this world. I became distraught each time I lost a child, and began to think of myself as worthless, the little dark camel my father would laugh at. There was a teacher in our village who had been to the city to study, like Sabir Shah, and he told Waris that our children would not live because they were born of the same blood, the two of us being cousins. Waris didn’t believe him, but took his advice and left for the city where I would be seen by a doctor who would help us keep our next child.

  We collected our few belongings and said goodbye to our families. My mother wept to see me go—she said she knew she would never see me again. I tried to reassure her but she just shook her head and told me that daughters do not belong to their mothers; when they marry they become the responsibility of their husbands until they die. Once a daughter leaves her home she becomes a stranger to her mother, and I was becoming that stranger now.

  The journey to the city was difficult. I was carrying the child in my womb, and I stumbled often on the rough mountain paths leading out of the village. Waris was using our mule to carry our belongings. Along the way he took off the bundle of clothing and grain that the mule was carrying and asked me to sit on top. He carried our belongings and I rode the mule, and that is how we arrived in the city, expecting to find a doctor who would help me bear the child we wanted to nurture and love.

  Waris knew a man at a hospital who guided him to a woman doctor who specialized in diseases of the womb. The next morning we made our way from the home of our friends near Puli Baghumoomee in the center of the city to the hospital in Karte Se. Waris made me sit on the back of the mule, seeing my exhausted state. We were traveling along the side of the street when the mule became frightened by the noise of trucks passing by. He bolted into the middle of the street, throwing me off first. I wasn’t hurt much, and asked Waris to go after the mule which had been hit by the side of a truck. Waris ran into the middle of the street and tried to get the mule out from under the truck. I watched him as he struggled to free the animal’s legs from under the wheels, and then I saw several men jump off from the truck and begin hitting Waris with the butts of their rifles. They kept accusing him of having caused the accident that damaged their truck. They said they would punish him like the others who had tried to obstruct their path, and they dragged him to the back of the truck. I rushed forward, shouting at them to leave Waris alone, to leave my husband alone. But it was already too late—they had thrown him into the back of the truck, and when they saw me they said that I had no business being out in the streets like a woman with no morals. The men got into the truck and began to drive away. I ran after the truck, pleading with them to let my husband go. I could hear the mule braying and the noise of the truck in the distance as it drove off, leaving me alone on that street. I had no idea what to do, and for a while I just sat in the middle of the road next to the injured mule, wanting to die, to end a life that had nothing in it now but misery.

  Several men passing by stopped and asked me what had happened. I told them about Waris being taken away by the men in the truck, and they assured me that he would be back, that it was just a game these people played with the lives of those who have no power. I didn’t want to leave that place where I had been separated from my husband, but the men said it wasn’t safe for me to be on my own. I let them have the name of the family we were staying with, and they took me back, dragging the mule along on his injured legs.

  Waris returned to me after many days. I had wanted to end my life, believing that I would never see him again. I had no one else I could turn to, and so I turned to Allah and asked Him to take my life and give it to one more deserving. But He is infinitely kind in His mercy, and He let me live. Although I had already lost the child in my womb, He let me live.

  Waris was pale and haggard when he came back. He told us of his ordeal, of having jumped off the back of that truck once they left the city and were headed for some outpost in the mountains, where the commander of these men waited with the loot they were carrying in barrels loaded onto the truck. At first Waris thought the barrels contained food and other items stolen from people in the city. But when the lid of one of the barrels fell off on a particularly bad road, he peered into it and was horrified to see the body of a man with his hands and feet tied with a rope. He had been dead only a little while—his body was still warm, and there was spit on his mouth where he must have licked it when his soul escaped his body.

  That is when Waris decided to jump. He said it was better to die trying to escape than to die like that man in the barrel. Waris injured his leg when he leaped from the truck, and took several days to get to the nearest town to ask for directions to the city. When he arrived at the house where I had waited for so many unending days, he just held me and then collapsed on the floor. I did not tell him that I had lost our third child. I did not want him to suffer more than he already had.

  After a few days we got news from the village. We were told that disaster had struck the day after we left. A caravan of trucks stopped at the village and told the people to give them food and clothing and anything else of value. The men of our village resisted and were shot. The women, old and young alike, were taken away. The children had hidden from these men, but couldn’t survive on their own for too long.

&
nbsp; Waris wanted to go back immediately. I pleaded with him to let things be, saying it was probably too late, that he needed to rest and heal. But he wouldn’t listen and said he would go on his own, that it was necessary for him to find out what had happened to his family.

  We made our way back to the village without the mule, whose legs were now twisted and useless. When we got there we found nothing except the wind and dust and heaps of mud which used to be our homes. There was no one around. We were ready to turn back when we heard a baby’s cry, weak but still carrying the sound of life. We rushed into a house whose walls were still intact. There were bodies of several children on the floor, huddled together as if they had been trying to keep each other warm. When we touched them, they were already stiff with cold. The baby, a tiny little thing with large eyes, was lying between the older children. He had survived, and even if he has lost his words he is the story I wanted to tell you, my son. He is Qasim, a gift from God, the child we did not have, the child for whom I live.

  nine

  We ate well today. Waris and Sabir were triumphant in their mission and carried back the dark, smelly flesh of that miserable camel who was worth little in life, but a lot more after he was ritually slaughtered, fulfilling the religious obligation of believers.

  Sabir tells me it is the Festival of the Sacrifice, when the Prophet Abraham saw in his dream that he had made an offering of his young son to convince Allah of his faith. In the dream Allah switched Abraham’s son with a goat. And in this dream of madness, we have replaced the goat with a dark-haired camel.

  Today we had a delicious stew seasoned with Noor Jehan’s special blend of spices—some rock salt and crushed black pepper. She even offered us dried pomegranate seeds after we ate, telling me they would help me digest the tough flesh of that ancient animal.

  Everyone is happy. Karim Kuchak is laughing again, and the rat-faced man squeals with delight. Anarguli smiles too, and Hayat has a wide grin on her face which makes the tattoo around her mouth look even more like a mustache. Qasim has filled his belly to the extent that it now looks bloated and he complains of a stomachache. Noor Jehan rubs his belly and insists that Noor Kaka should eat only the soup, not the flesh, because it is not tender enough for his toothless mouth.

  Noor Kaka laughs. There is a soft glow in the hearth this evening and a feeling that all will be well, despite the snow outside and the dread in our hearts.

  When can I go home, sir?

  She was in a diabetic coma when we found her, passed out in front of the television in her small unit in a gated community in the Fig Gardens. There was a cat sitting with her on the couch, staring at us with round, green eyes, meowing in a dolorous kind of way. The television was still on—I caught a glimpse of Jerry Springer and two large-breasted women lunging at each other for all it was worth.

  Our lady of the condo was heavy too. It took everything out of me to lift her up with my partner and place her on the gurney before getting her into the ambulance. I checked her vitals—blood sugar low, heartbeat almost imperceptible. Her pupils were constricted, and her hands clammy and cold. When she opened her eyes, blue and pale, sunk in the flaccid flesh of her face, she did not speak. And when she finally did speak, I got the feeling that whatever she said was what I would hear for the many trips I would take as an emergency medical technician, fresh out of school.

  I called ahead to the hospital to let them know what to expect, aware the whole time that there would be several others parked on gurneys along the hallway or laid out on beds, hooked up to monitors, peeing into bags and generally feeling alone despite the number of staff on duty in the emergency room. In all the time I spent taking people into the ER, most of them were old folks living alone or with a pet, or with others like them. Some were so old they couldn’t remember their names, or perhaps that was not age, just the drop in their sugar level or blood pressure playing tricks with their minds. Or it could be that they hadn’t heard their names in so long that they had forgotten them.

  Some of them probably didn’t have much to remember—the lady of the condo who had been watching Jerry Springer before she passed out on her couch asked for her daughter. It was a neighbor who called 911, and the same neighbor who gave the hospital her daughter’s phone number.

  The daughter came. It was Friday night, she must have been out on the town—she wore a fake fur coat with large gold buttons. Her fingernails were long and curved, painted red and gold. She was heavy, like her mother, and she had the same pale blue eyes set in her ample face. She didn’t want to stay long, and took off with her husband (his name was Elmo, he was bald and corpulent, like Elmer Fudd in the comic strip) as soon as the nurse told her they would keep the comatose woman for the night.

  Call me, honey. Let me know when she comes round. Gotta go now, sweetie.

  Bulbul has begun smiling again, although he doesn’t talk much. He spends most of his time beside the curtain separating him from Anarguli and Hayat. Noor Jehan saves the strongest tea for him before she waters it down to stretch it for the rest of us. It’s as if she has found another son in him, other than Qasim and the ones she lost.

  Bulbul has something to smile about. The large-eared man, having heard of the night Bulbul ate the mule’s flesh, has pronounced it quite alright to consume anything as long as one believes that Allah does not want us to suffer, that He always shows us a way, that it is up to us to find it.

  His name is Haji Meer Abdul Hassan. Before the war, he had traveled far to complete his religious learning and performed the pilgrimage at Mecca many times, taking his mother with him on his last journey. Haji carried the old woman on his back throughout the pilgrimage, circling the Kaaba where pagan priests had placed idols for the people to worship, before the true faith was revealed and the idols smashed by the Prophet who declared that there was only one God and that was Allah. The old woman had not survived the grueling heat and the crowds, and was buried in the desert of that holy kingdom. Haji says it is an honor for a believer to die while paying the greatest homage to Allah. His mother died a fulfilled woman, and he returned to his village a satisfied man, a dutiful son.

  It was only after his pilgrimage that things began to go wrong. On the evening of his return, his young daughter went missing. She was twelve, and Haji had hoped to marry her off in a year or two. He was asked to pay ransom for her but he refused, telling his family that his daughter would have no honor left once she came back. The little girl was found the next day, dead, on his doorstep.

  I thought she was asleep, my little Zarsanga. She looked so peaceful, like my mother after we prepared her for the burial in Medina. Only when we carried her inside did I see the marks on her neck—she had been strangled, and her blood had turned black with shame at what they did to her while she was still alive. I could see that black blood beneath her fair skin, pale now, like corn before it ripens. I knew she must have struggled—there were cuts on her wrists where they tied her, and on her ankles too. She had not been visited by any man after she became a young woman, except her brothers and uncles. And now I knew that she had been touched, and violated, by men we had never seen or known.

  Zarsanga had gone with the elder women in the family to collect water. After so many dry years, the journey to a mountain stream or a small spring took longer each time. She would leave early in the morning, carrying the water pot on her head—sometimes the women would not return till the afternoon, when food for the evening had to be prepared, the animals fed, the children washed, and the home cleaned. Zarsanga always looked forward to going with the women—she had been betrothed to my brother’s son and she knew that in a year she would leave our home for that of her husband. It was as if she wanted to spend as much time as possible with her mother before the final separation.

  I did not know then that this was how the parting would occur, with her death, with the shame and dishonor that her abduction brought us.

  Haji did not complete his story. The other men had finished their meal and were listening
to him, even Karim Kuchak who ordinarily never let anyone complete a sentence. I realized then that none of these people were insane—they had just found themselves in the middle of insanity and given up the fight to claim what was theirs.

  Sabir told me later that Haji had left the village, never to return to his family. Sabir said that more than the shame of having had a daughter abducted and probably raped, Haji couldn’t forgive himself for not trying to get her back. She was just a little girl, his girl, and in her eyes he had seen his own shame. Not the dishonor that was brought upon the family through no fault of hers, but of having been a coward when she needed him to stand by her, to love her the way a daughter should be loved.

  * * *

  I am having the dreams again, this despite the fact that my stomach is not aching with hunger and my head is not humming with fatigue. There was a time when I thought I would not survive this ordeal, but after the camel was slaughtered, after food was cooked once again and the fire was lit, I thought the dreams would leave me, that if I was to dream at all it would be of home and my mother and the life I left behind, to come to fight a war I no longer believe in.