Khost (خوست), Afghanistan, September 10, 2001

The call to prayer pierced the stillness, announcing Fajr to all of the faithful in Khost valley, the first of the day’s five prayers. Aminullah was up quickly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He went out into the small courtyard to perform his ablutions at the cistern, cleansing himself so that he would be acceptable to Allah. He could feel and hear his younger cousins emerge from their house before he could see them in the predawn darkness. There were soft murmurs of acknowledgment.

“Allaaahhh, Alaaahhu-Akhbar,” the muezzin twanged on, the call ringing from further west, closer to the main bazaar. Aminullah hated the man’s voice, though he knew in his heart this had nothing to do with the muezzin’s intonation, as it did with the fact that he was a talib. “Student, my ass,” Aminullah thought derisively to himself, snorting out loud. Aminullah intentionally thought in English colloquialisms as often as he could, his secret act of defiance against the Taliban.

His cousins looked at him and Aminullah covered his snort by splashing water over his face. He could hear his father’s voice, however, a gentle chiding: The muezzin will call us to Allah while the taliban are here, Amin, just as he called us before they came, and will call us after they are gone. Pay them no great part of your mind.

Aminullah finished washing his feet, slipped his sandals back on, then walked across the hard-packed clay back to his family’s house… his house now. He liked to pray alone during morning prayer. Now as one of the older males, he was afforded more say in such matters; his father’s death had simultaneously ruined his life and elevated him in status.

Aminullah bowed his head to the floor, saying the words as his father had taught him. The prayer steadied him, its incantations warm and familiar, its commands absolute. Tears welled-up in his eyes unbidden. He thought of his father Hamidullah’s silent defiance as he had been led from the old classroom out to the soccer field, the whole of Khost forced to watch another public flogging and execution. Aminullah’s father had been charged with “moral offenses” - their family never learned what crime exactly had been committed and no one knew, but it wasn’t important. Aminullah learned quickly that the subjugation of Khost by the talib, the students, was not about moral purification, and was not about the true inner jihad. This is the war that must be won, Amin, his father would tell him while he stroked his hair. This is the battle for a man’s soul that he must win by choosing Allah. No, the sharia of the talib was about consolidating power by eliminating opposition, killing strong men who might oppose them, and perverting the sharia to justify it.

Aminullah finished his prayers, feeling the heat of the day beginning its ascent with the sun’s light, pouring over the Hindu Kush ten or fifteen kilometers to the east. The mountains rose steep and fierce between the Afghan Pashtuns and their Paksitani cousins in the Miran Shah valley in Waziristan, the heart of what some of the old ones called Pashtunistan.

Aminullah returned to the cistern with the teapot for water for chai, then slipped back inside, as he heard his mother and brothers and sisters in various stages of waking and praying. He hung the steel kettle over the fire and listened to the hiss as the moisture evaporated from the sides. He did not look up from the fire when his mother’s footsteps approached. He felt her embrace from behind, and he wrapped his left arm around her. She murmured to him, as she always had, zuma khkali mashar zawi, my beautiful, eldest son. He got up, kissed her forehead, and gave his reply: manana, zuma khkaly mory. Thank you, my beautiful mother.

He slipped her embrace and padded out of the living area, grabbing the hand-crank, dynamo radio from his blankets. He popped the crank free from the back of the small AM radio, worked it around and around for three straight minutes, knowing that would give him enough battery power to hear the first thirty minutes of the BBC World News radio broadcast. Mother would make his tea while he listened. Now a man at nineteen, he could do this without permission. Now that father is gone.

Aminullah’s father had approved of, and even encouraged, Amin’s study of English, and other languages. Allah had blessed their family with very few defective children, so Aminullah spoke his father’s tongue, pashto, as well as the farsi of the city dwellers over the western mountains, in Kabul, and Herat, along the border with Iran. Dari was a related language spoken by many tribes in the area. Aminullah learned Arabic from studying and memorizing the Holy Qu’ran, Russian from a cousin who was among many Afghans who had initially worked for and alongside the occupiers, and eventually he had caught onto English… from books, Bollywood movies, and the BBC Newshour, as well as their Pakistani cousins. Common to all of the languages Amin learned were the miraculous things they so casually described about the United States. It was a land of milk and honey where everyone had cars and homes and ate until they were obese! They commanded an Empire more vast than the Mongols had, or the British, or the Russians… they had planes that could rain atomic fire on their enemies at will. Aminullah knew that much of this was not, could be true, was surely lies, exaggerations, and propaganda, but still… the Russians, their enemies, acknowledged wonders even when criticising the United States. Hamidullah had laughed gently at Amin’s awe as a child: it is a country filled with men, Amin, kafir at that. Just a country filled with men.

Amin flipped on the radio just as BBC One was beginning. The three-and-a-half hour difference between London and Kabul meant that the tribal areas always heard the overnight re-broadcast of yesterday’s news. Amin admired the way the British delivered the news: precise, clipped, bland… they took their news like their tea. No matter the horror of the day’s events: Earthquake in Peshawar kills hundreds, sip sip sip. Volcanic eruption wipes out Indonesian island, sip sip sip. Mudslide buries village in Colombia, sip sip sip. Amin had travelled twice through Pakistan with his father; while the Brits were no longer there in large numbers, their presence lingered. Cricket remained the dominant pastime and English was still the official language.

Amin’s mother brought him hot chai. She ran her hand through his hair after he took the cup.

“Are you going to the bazaar for rice and wood today, Amin?” He nodded as he sipped his tea, the glass cupped in both hands for its warmth.

“Be careful,” she said, then kissed his head and went back out. He knew what she meant, but only nodded his head a few times by way of reply. What else was there to say of it? He would take his father’s pistol with him when he went to the bazaar… just in case. Amin finished dressing while the British delivered the tragedies in perfectly accented English.