April 1992
April 1992 was the month the jihad ended and Kabul's long night of factional war began. For Fariba, who had spent five years in mourning for her sons Ahmad and Noor, it was the day she had been waiting for—the day the Mujahideen, her heroes, finally took the capital. But the victory was fleeting; within weeks, the Mujahideen turned on each other, and the rockets began to rain down on the city, shattering the brief peace and plunging Laila's world into a new, more intimate kind of war.
The Fall of Najibullah and the Mujahideen's Victory
In April 1992, the year Laila turned fourteen, Najibullah surrendered at last and was given sanctuary in the UN compound near Darulaman Palace. The various communist regimes that had held power since the night Laila was born were all defeated. Mammy's heroes, Ahmad's and Noor's brothers-in-war, had won. After more than a decade of sacrificing everything, of leaving behind their families to live in mountains and fight for Afghanistan's sovereignty, the Mujahideen were coming to Kabul, in flesh, blood, and battle-weary bone. Fariba knew all of their names: Dostum, the flamboyant Uzbek commander; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the intense, surly Pashtun leader of Hezb-e-Islami; Rabbani, the Tajik leader of Jamiat-e-Islami; Sayyaf, a stout Pashtun Muslim with Arab connections; Abdul Ali Mazari, the Hazara leader of Hizb-e-Wahdat; and, above all, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, whose handsome, thoughtful face would soon become ubiquitous in Kabul on billboards, walls, and storefront windows. For Mammy, this was the day she had longed for, the fruition of all those years of waiting. At last, she could end her vigils, and her sons could rest in peace.
Fariba's Transformation and the Celebration
The day after Najibullah surrendered, Mammy rose from bed a new woman. For the first time in the five years since Ahmad and Noor had become shaheed, she did not wear black. She put on a cobalt blue linen dress with white polka dots, washed the windows, swept the floor, aired the house, and took a long bath. Her voice was shrill with merriment. She declared a party was in order and sent Laila to invite neighbors, telling them they were having a big lunch the next day. In the kitchen, she stood looking around, hands on her hips, and said with friendly reproach, "What have you done to my kitchen, Laila? W'boy. Everything is in a different place." She began moving pots and pans around, theatrically, as though she were laying claim to them anew, restaking her territory. With unsettling energy, she set about cooking: aush soup with kidney beans and dried dill, kofta, steaming hot mantu drenched with fresh yogurt and topped with mint. The party was a dazzling, cloudless day, perfect for a celebration. The men sat on rickety folding chairs in the yard, drinking tea and smoking and talking in loud bantering voices about the Mujahideen's plan. The women gathered in the living room, the hallway, and the kitchen, chatting as they hoisted their babies. An Ustad Sarahang ghazal blared from a cassette player. Laila was in the kitchen, making carafes of dogh with Giti, who was no longer as shy or as serious as before, having caught the attention of an eighteen-year-old goalkeeper named Sabir. Mammy was nearby, peeling boiled eggs with Wajma, the midwife, and Tariq's mother, telling them she planned to present Commander Massoud with a picture of Ahmad and Noor as a token of thanks for his decency in overseeing their burial.
The Unraveling: Factional Violence and the First Rocket Attacks
The celebration was short-lived. The leadership council was formed prematurely and elected Rabbani president, prompting cries of nepotism. Hekmatyar, who had been excluded, was incensed. The Hazaras, with their long history of being oppressed and neglected, seethed. Insults were hurled, fingers pointed, accusations flew, and meetings were angrily called off. The city held its breath. In the mountains, loaded magazines snapped into Kalashnikovs. The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other. Kabul's day of reckoning had come at last. When the rockets began to rain down on Kabul, people ran for cover. Mammy did too, literally. She changed into black again, went to her room, shut the curtains, and pulled the blanket over her head. The whistling of the rockets became the sound Laila hated more than anything—the seconds between the start of it and impact, the brief and interminable time of feeling suspended, the not knowing, the waiting. Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. The whistling, then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild. The flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. After every rocket blast, Laila raced to the street, certain that this time it was Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke.
The Escalation of War and Its Casualties
In June of that year, heavy fighting broke out in West Kabul between the Pashtun forces of the warlord Sayyaf and the Hazaras of the Wahdat faction. The shelling knocked down power lines and pulverized entire blocks of shops and homes. Laila heard that Pashtun militiamen were attacking Hazara households, breaking in and shooting entire families execution-style, and that Hazaras were retaliating by abducting Pashtun civilians, raping Pashtun girls, and killing indiscriminately. Every day, bodies were found tied to trees, sometimes burned beyond recognition, often with their eyes gouged out and tongues cut out. Babi tried again to convince Mammy to leave Kabul, but she refused, insisting the fighting was temporary. The streets became so unsafe that Babi did an unthinkable thing: he had Laila drop out of school. He took over the teaching duties himself, discussing the ghazals of Hafez and the works of Ustad Khalilullah Khalili, teaching her to derive the quadratic equation and factor polynomials, as Hekmatyar launched his rockets at Massoud from the southern outskirts of the city. But it wasn't easy to pay attention; Laila kept getting distracted by thoughts of Tariq's lips, the heat of his breath on her mouth, her own reflection in his hazel eyes. Then, in that same month of June, Giti was walking home from school with two classmates when a stray rocket struck the girls. Only three blocks from Giti's house, she was killed. Laila learned that Nila, Giti's mother, had run up and down the street collecting pieces of her daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later. At Giti's fatiha, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila had known, been close to, loved, had died. She couldn't get around the unfathomable reality that Giti wasn't alive anymore. At last, Laila began to weep for her friend, and all the tears that she hadn't been able to shed at her brothers' funeral came pouring down.
