99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

I threw my book at his head but missed him by a foot. “Come on,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to go and talk to Budabash.”

  First, we threw dirt clods because they were so easy to find. Me and Gwora stripped them from the edges of the gardens and the patches of mint and collected them in little piles at the base of an apple tree. Before throwing them, though, we climbed up into the highest branch of the tallest tree, where we could almost see the whole orchard and the courtyard too, and made sure no one could sneak up on us. From time to time, one of my khalas would enter the orchard to chop some wood or get a few eggs from the chicken coop, or else Rahmutallah Maamaa came by to flip some clay or to take the cows out to graze.

  We had adjusted quickly to the rhythms of their labor, predicting when they might start, waiting for them to finish, and tossing our clods only when they were gone. But after we actually started pitching the rocks, we realized that neither of us had very good aim. Targeting the long white mark that ran along his back, we hit Budabash only once or twice.

  After about an hour or two of climbing up and down the tree, we got hungry, and seeing all the green apples just within reach, we picked a few and started munching. They tasted sour and chalky. We ate maybe five apiece.

  “You think these are raw?” Gwora said.

  “Who cares,” I said, and took another bite. “They taste fine.”

  Thirty minutes later, with me and Gwora hunched over in the two connected kamoots, shitting our guts out, Gwora yelled through the wall: “I think they were raw.”

  “They were good, though,” I yelled back.

  “Hey,” he shouted, “you think Budabash likes apples?”

  “You know what,” I said, “I bet he does.”

  Then we chucked apples.

  For at least three hours every day, three days straight, me and Gwora tossed apples and rotten eggs and bread lathered in mud or shit or filled with shards of glass, and we waited and watched. Budabash ate almost everything that came in his path. He’d sniff it and look up at us and gobble it down. Mocking us. After a while, the assault just got boring. Motherfucker had a belly made of iron. Never saw him barf or shit blood or anything. Not once. Three days straight we watched him from up in the trees for hours and got nothing.

  “Explain to me,” I said, sitting up in a tree branch, watching Budabash lap up a bowl of gasoline, “how that is a normal dog.”

  “He can eat,” Gwora said.

  Budabash scratched his ear and yawned.

  “Nothing like he used to be,” I said.

  “How did he used to be?”

  “You don’t remember in ’99?”

  “I was four in ’99.”

  “Well, he was a good dog then. Quiet and peaceful. I mean no matter how much I used to beat on him, he’d never even bare his teeth or bark or anything. Sometimes, I’d hurt him so bad, he’d be shivering in pain. Wallah. I can see it even now.”

  Gwora took a bite out his apple. We watched Budabash sleep. “So you still feel guilty?”

  “No, Doctor Sahib, I feel swell.”

  “What I’m trying to say is you regret it, right? And you learned your lesson?”

  I thought about that for a while.

  Gwora took another bite out his apple, chewed it, spit it out, and tossed the rest at Budabash—hitting him square in the face.

  I almost fell out the tree laughing.

  Later on that same night, Moor called me and Gwora in for dinner. She shouted in Farsi instead of Pakhto, and so we knew we were probably late.

  In the dark of pre-Isha, we hurried into the courtyard through a pathway that cut through the middle of the living quarters. One ran from the beranda to the bedrooms, while the other path ran from Nabeela’s workshop to the door of the orchard from which we were coming. Smack-dab in the middle of the paths was the family well. The two pathways of the courtyard cut through Baba’s flower garden, slicing it into four equal parts. Each of these smaller gardens had beans or mint or a whole mess of flowers. In fact, there were so many flowers blooming that summer in Logar that after a particularly windy night, the beranda and the tandoor khana would be so choked with flower petals that at least four of Zia’s six sisters would have to spend all morning sweeping them up into the cesspits of the kamoots—along with a few cans of ash—neatly covering up the almost impossible stench of shit.

  The sun had set a while ago, but Rahmutallah Maamaa didn’t like to start up the generator until after dinner. So we approached the beranda in the dim light of a few lanterns. Almost every single night since I got to Logar, Ruhollah Maamaa kept assuring me that his brother—my missing maamaa, Abdul-Abdul—was going to help us become the first home in Naw’e Kaleh to get power lines. But until then, we had only the generator, which needed gas, which came from Kabul, which cost heaps, which was why we had electricity for only three hours every night.

  Inside the beranda, Moor’s whole family was already eating and chatting among themselves. We slipped into our spot on the men’s side without anyone really noticing us. Then we poured our own food into a shared platter and ate quietly.

  “How about I make you eat his hand?” Abo said to Dawood and Ruhollah, who were sharing the same platter of rice, well into their second serving and already eyeing a third.

  Ruhollah made an appeal to his father (my baba), claiming he worked so hard in the base that he deserved six servings. Dawood quietly agreed. Baba looked to Abo and offered her his hand, and so Abo poured Ruhollah another platter of rice.

  Meanwhile Agha and Rahmutallah Maamaa discussed the whereabouts of a local bandit named Jawed. Word was that Jawed had been pretending to be a T in order to spy for the Americans. But, supposedly, the whole time Jawed was feeding them bullshit intel, convincing the Americans that his personal enemies were prominent insurgents, tricking the American forces into assassinating men who had nothing to do with the Ts. Eventually his little scheme (not as original, Agha claimed, as you’d think) got caught up in the meshes. Now the Ts and the soldiers and a few local drug runners were all out searching for Jawed.

  “Same thing used to happen in the eighties,” Agha said.

  “It’s getting bad, brother,” Rahmutallah said. “These days any young khar with a rifle can claim they’re with the Taliban or the Americans or whoever else. They stop you on the road and then they’re cutting you up, robbing you of your insides, leaving you to die in a canal.” He ate a big handful of rice and sucked his fingers. Out of respect for Agha, he spoke Pakhto.

  Though Agha had his own compound two or three miles down the main road in Naw’e Kaleh, most of his family had fled or died during the war, so his house was filled with distant cousins he didn’t completely trust. That’s why he let us stay at Moor’s so often. They were almost untouched by the war. I think he thought they were blessed.

  On the other side of the beranda, the ladies talked business.

  Apparently, a bunch of Kabuli buyers had come that morning to see Nabeela Khala’s dresses and were impressed with her designs. My khalas and Moor argued about the price they should set. Nabeela wanted to bleed them dry. Moor advised caution. “You try to take too big a bite out of a Kabulay and you’ll find yourself eating your own arm.” She laughed.

  Moor had left her little sisters at seventeen—when Agha came to marry her—and during the first few days of our visit, my khalas treated Moor so respectfully it was almost cruel. But now all four sisters were getting along so well it was like Moor had never gone.

  Moor’s youngest sisters, Sadaf and Shireen, sat on either side of her, parting her curls and whispering secrets into her ears. Sadaf, the older of the two, most resembled Moor. She was chubby cheeked, with a head of curls and a chipped-tooth smile she flashed all the time for any reason. Shireen, on the other hand, was real pale, real skinny, with hair so brown it was almost blond. She was known al
l across the village for the crispness of her parathas and for her secret singing voice.

  Across from Moor and her sisters sat Zia’s mom, Hawa Khala, who, noticing me and Gwora, proceeded to offer us every single dish at the distarkhan at least six times in a row before accepting our denial, which she took as a personal insult because she handled most of the work in the kitchen. Moor told me that when Hawa Khala first married Rahmutallah, she was actually thick for a village girl, almost hefty, but Abo and Nabeela worked her thin. Hawa Khala never seemed to complain. She was a dark woman. Quiet and reflective and incredibly shy.

  Abo eyed me from her place at the distarkhan. She always sat next to Baba during dinner. They had been eating together like that, side by side, from the same platter, since they were newlyweds some forty years ago.

  “Marwand,” Abo said, “what were you and Gwora doing all day in the orchard?”

  “And without Mirwais?” Agha added.

  I had trouble scooping rice into my mouth with my left hand, and the double death gaze didn’t help. Usually, we ate only soups and stews for dinner, but Zia’s mom had slaughtered a chicken that day, so we were eating big platters of rice with korma on the side.

  “Just playing,” I said.

  “Tell your son,” Moor called out, “to stay away from that dog.”

  But Ruhollah told her not to worry about any dogs and started retelling the story of me and the strays in Kabul for the sixteenth time.

  “So why have you been playing without Mirwais?” Agha asked again, interrupting Ruhollah.

  Mirwais sat on the other side of the distarkhan with Moor, eating his rice with both hands. He stared straight at me when Agha asked about him—completely unashamed.

  “Mirwais was in trouble with us,” I said.

  “For what?” Agha asked.

  “For snitching,” I said.

  Agha bit down on his lower lip like he always did right before he smacked me, but I kept on eating, quickly shoveling small bites into my mouth with my left hand. He wouldn’t hit me with food in my mouth. Especially in front of Baba and Abo. Things got quiet and awkward like they always did before a sudden ass whupping, and to ease the tension, or to teach me a lesson, Abo decided to break the silence with a story.

  The Tale of the Three Kings

  I heard, child of my child, that there once lived an auspicious prince named Shah Zaman, who was the son of Timur Shah and a grandson of the great Ahmad Shah Baba. This Prince Zaman, after the untimely death of his beloved father, and upon overcoming all of his rivals, including twenty-two of his brothers, came to take up the throne. During his reign, Shah Zaman attempted to replicate the glorious victories of his grandfather Ahmad Shah but was thwarted time and again by the conspiracies of the English and the Iranians. Eventually, these serpents from the West nestled themselves into the hearts and minds of Shah Zaman’s own brothers Mahmoud and Shuja, convincing them to betray their king and brother for their own good. Mahmoud, with the backing of the Iranians and the English and his brother Shuja, took the throne, blinded Zaman, and exiled him to India. In this way, Mahmoud was able to ensure that Zaman could never retake the throne. Thus, the rightful king of Afghanistan lived out the rest of his life in exile, a musafir forever clouded in darkness.

  But listen, children of my children, Allah (subhanahu wa ta’ala) is all-seeing, all-knowing, and forever just. For the victories of Mahmoud and Shuja were short-lived and beset, time and again, by calamity. Mahmoud, king for only a short time, was overtaken by his co-conspirator, Shuja, who thenceforth suffered defeat after shameful defeat: losing the throne not once but twice, and then, in the process of attempting to regain power, lost Peshawar to the Sikhs and Kabul to the English, so that Shuja himself was to be exiled, disgraced, and forever shamed for his sins. Therefore, children of my children, be just with your brothers, treat them fairly, for time and again our kings have led our lands into calamity only because they were unable to do right by their blood and by our Lord.

  * * *

  —

  Whispers of “Ameen!” and “Mashallah!” poured out from every mouth in the courtyard. Even mine. After the story and after dinner and after cleaning and after gathering and after the movie (Rambo III for the tenth time)—after the shoot-out and the boss fight and after the resolution and after the credits (dedicated to the brave warriors of Afghanistan)—and after the lights and the lamps all blew out, and after Rahmutallah Maamaa unchained Budabash from his tree so he could roam about the orchard all night, searching for the shape-shifting thieves whose unlucky destiny it was to climb over the walls and be torn to shreds, I went looking for my brothers, Gwora and Mirwais, before they fell asleep.

  “From now on,” I said, whispering in the guest room where my parents and brothers slept, “Mirwais comes too.”

  Even in the dark I could feel him beaming. It was a rare moment of discretion for Mirwais. He knew not to ask us what we were up to, whatever it had been, since he was lucky just to be invited.

  Gwora shrugged.

  “So,” I said to him, “how do we bring the hurt here?”

  “We need a new strategy,” he said.

  “Apples didn’t work.”

  “Neither did rocks.”

  “Yeah, the rocks were pretty stupid.”

  “Almost pointless.”

  “Waste of time.”

  “But what’s next?”

  On the Thirty-Second Day

  A few hours into the search and we still had no real lead. The noonday sun wouldn’t let up as Zia prayed his Dhuhr Salah on a short wall cutting between two fields. Though he looked real holy praying in all that sunlight, he got no sign from God. Gul interrogated almost everyone he saw: farmers and shepherds and kids running little snack stalls out of their homes. But he heard nothing from a soul. And I was starting to doubt whether Dawood’s nose was as strong as the others claimed.

  “He can smell ashak boiling from Kabul,” Gul said.

  “He can smell a fart before it’s farted,” Zia added.

  “In all the time I’ve known this khar, he’s never failed at sniffing out a scent. He’s part bloodhound or something,” Gul swore.

  Dawood walked ahead with his nose held high, black bag over his shoulder, taking in his brother’s praise. Suddenly, his nose latched on to the unmistakable scent of cheap hair gel, butchered meat, and unrequited love.

  At Dawood’s signal—and Gul’s confirmation—we leapt behind a row of chinar, into the sloping path of a river bend. A guy with his mouth masked in a dusmal and his hair slicked back into a weapons-grade pompadour came strolling down the trail.

  “Who’s that?” I said.

  “The butcher’s son,” Gul whispered, and then gently placed a stone in my hand.

  The butcher’s son was walking the trail slowly, carefully, and, luckily for us, unarmed. Dawood gathered stones from the stream and set them at our feet, and just before we chucked them, we lifted our own scarves over our mouths, at the same time, like bandits out of an old John Wayne flick. We rubbed the stones in our dirty little fingers, huffing quick breaths that shook the tatters of our masks, and then there came this moment between the holding of the stones and the ambush itself, when I was watching the butcher’s son walk the road, watching and knowing what was coming for him, knowing what he didn’t know, would know only when it was too late, and I felt so bad for him and for me too, Wallah, because although I knew that the stones were coming, I didn’t know why, and in that way, me and the butcher’s son were the same.

  Later on, I asked the fellahs why we did what we did, and they looked really surprised that I didn’t know, that I was that much out of the loop over in America. But having taken part in the ambush, I thought it was my right, you know, to be informed.

  Luckily, they seemed to agree.

  The Tale of the Butcher’s Son

  Really, the story of the butcher’
s son was the story of Nabeela Khala. She was Moor’s younger sister and, as the oldest of the unwed girls, she was also the next in line to be married. Problem was Nabeela wasn’t the prettiest girl in the family, the slimmest, or the most polite. Word was she could slaughter a steer, chop down trees, whup on her nephews, dig ditches, toss bricks, and handle an AK as well as any soldier. When she wore her burqa in the city and the perverts tried to fuck with her, she’d beat on them before her brothers could. Agha even recalled a time in ’99 when she threw a dude out of a moving bus because he was pinching her sides. Then this one time, at a wedding, Ruhollah Maamaa was having trouble with an AK during a machine-gun celebration, and Nabeela got so annoyed, she snatched the weapon and fired it up into the air herself. After unloading the whole clip, she handed the weapon to her little brother and went back to the ladies’ side of the wedding to dance her ass off.

  These sorts of incidents were becoming so common for Nabeela that no suitor wanted to come within a mile of her. That was until very recently, when her dress shop started getting more attention than her temper. She had her own little space in the lower half of the compound to sew clothes for the village girls. There, Nabeela came up with a new design fusing Punjabi kali with the older fashion of the Kochian. It was a hit among the locals, but when the new design started getting popular with girls up in Kabul, it became clear that the dresses were turning into a hot commodity. Nabeela’s little dress shop started netting a tidy profit. Baba and Abo were thrilled. They bought the family’s first television with the extra cash.

  Her little sisters, though?

  Not so much.

  While Nabeela was in the cool of the dress shop, sewing clothes and listening to Turkish dramas on the radio, Sadaf and Shireen had to take on the housework she left behind. She was also, at the ripe age of twenty-eight, holding up the marriage line, since her sisters couldn’t marry the boys that were coming for them until Nabeela herself was finally wed.

  But just as Nabeela was getting dangerously close to unmarriageable, the butcher’s son came calling. He and his khala had been coming to the house intermittently for the past year, asking for Nabeela’s dusmal. He was handsome, light skinned, with a head of hair like Ahmad Zahir. But also poor. Very poor. A butcher’s kid, you see, and a failed butcher at that, so Baba, taking Abo’s advice, proceeded to reject the kid’s offer.