Under an Afghan Sky (12 page)

I didn’t even want to think about my family. Surely they’d been notified by now. My sister, Vanessa, was my emergency contact and she would have been the first person they called. I hated the thought that she’d have to break the news to my parents over the telephone from Los Angeles. I wondered what was happening at home. I pictured my mother going to church to pray the same prayers as me. I knew she had a great deal of faith in God, and I hoped that would sustain her until I was released. My father was a different story. Kellog was your stereotypical, stoic Chinese father who didn’t say much but felt and kept everything deeply, and I was afraid of the stress on his health. I’d hardly seen my father show any emotion throughout my childhood, except when he was angry with us. I remember seeing him cry at his mother’s funeral six years before. We went up to my grandmother’s open casket together, and I felt him shaking with tears. It unsettled me because I wasn’t used to any show of emotion from my father. I imagined it might be the same when he heard about my disappearance. He might be angry with me for venturing so far from home and into a place he didn’t understand, wondering why I would put myself and our comfortable
existence at risk. I was, in fact, much more afraid of my parents’ reaction than of what my kidnappers might do to me.

Shafirgullah stirred again, but this time, instead of rolling over, he propped himself up on his elbows.

“Mellissa.”

“Shafirgullah,” I said. “You slept a lot.”

He looked at the alarm clock and took a match out of his pocket to light the kerosene lamp. The flame flickered and cast a warm glow into the dark hole, but a small stream of black smoke was starting to pollute the air in such a confined space. He waved his hand around the lamp and turned the knob down to lower the flame. But the smoke still came out. He sighed and set the lamp down between us, then sat back and took a pocket mirror and comb out of his left breast pocket.

I watched as he took the can of water and washed his face. He took a small stick with some rope tied to one end and used it to clean his teeth—like you would with a toothbrush. Then more water onto his hands and onto his jet black hair. He combed it carefully and checked himself out in the mirror, rotating it several times to make sure even the hair at the back of his head was neatly combed. He put on his skullcap, and placed the mirror and comb back in his pocket.

“You,” he pointed at me, “biscuit?”

“You, biscuit.” I nodded back at him.

He reached for the plastic bag. “Me, biscuit.” He took out a box of the chocolate cookies, unwrapped them, and proceeded to eat the entire contents, washed down with two boxes of mango juice. Satisfied, he sat back and stared at me. It was barely nine o’clock. I wondered how we would pass another day with nothing to say to each other, and a language barrier that was like a wall between two people, two genders, and two cultures.

Shafirgullah pointed at the door.

“Darwaaza,”
I said, remembering the Pashto word for door he had taught me the night before. He pointed at my notebook.
“Kitab,”
I said. He smiled and pointed at his hand.
“Laas.”

And we continued.
Nuk
was finger,
sar
was head,
stergae
was eye,
pssa
was foot. We counted to ten, first in Pashto for me, then in English for him.

Then he wanted to learn how to count in Chinese. I tried explaining to him that there are two kinds of Chinese—Cantonese and Mandarin. I told him that I spoke Cantonese, being from Hong Kong. But I knew how to count in both forms—so we went through the numbers. I wrote them down phonetically in English, and he in turn wrote them down phonetically in Pashto.

Cantonese first: “Yut, yee, saam, say, mmm, look, tsut, bhat, gow, sup.”

“Mmm?” Shafirgullah was confused by the sound of the word for five.

“Pindza,”
I said to him, the Pashto word for five.

“Mmm!”

Then Mandarin:
“Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi.”
A little harder to get the tones right, but Shafirgullah was a determined linguist. Getting me to say the words slowly, he repeated them over and over, rolling his tongue around his mouth until the syllables fell out right.

“Very good,” I said.

“Very good,” he repeated. He sat back and reached into his pocket. “Cigarette?”

I took it from his hand as he reached for another. Smoking was probably the worst thing we could do in such a small space, but it was a good way to kill the time. The young Afghan lit a match, held it to my smoke, and then his. We both inhaled deeply. He blew the smoke out the doorway and into the tunnel, as if to clear it from
our sleep space. I followed suit, and soon our cigarettes were nothing more than glowing embers. I put out the butt of mine in a small notch in the wall behind me. Ashes scattered over my knapsack and camera bag, and I brushed them away. Everything was covered in dust anyway, and I didn’t even want to imagine what my lungs would look like after a few more days in the hole. At least, I hoped it would be only a few more days.

“Me, bathroom,” Shafirgullah said. I turned around and waited for him to relieve himself into the plastic bottle by the door.

“Okay,” he said. I watched as he took the can of water and poured it over his hands, scrubbing them hard over the metal bucket. When he was done, he adjusted his skullcap on top of his head and took off his kaffiyeh, spreading it over his blanket. Then he knelt down on top of it to pray.

Shafirgullah prayed for a good half hour, murmuring what I assumed were passages from the Koran and pressing his forehead to the ground several times.

I took out my rosary and fingered the beads again, starting to pray my own way.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
I kept looking over at the Afghan in the skullcap, praying hard and looking as devout as some of the born-again Christians in the Deep South. This is where I had trouble. If we were both praying to the same god, like I’d always believed in—and Allah is God, God is Yahweh, Yahweh is Allah—then who was God listening to? Does the God I believe in have a split personality? Does Allah listen to Shafirgullah, and God listen to me? Is that why I was still here—because Allah had overruled my God? How could it be possible that we were praying to the same entity? I watched as Shafirgullah knelt and prayed, his eyes closed, his lips mumbling verses from the Koran, which he had probably learned by heart as a young boy, just as I had learned to pray the rosary when I was a little girl.

I looked down at the crucifix on my rosary and, instead of reciting the Lord’s Prayer, found myself asking God a lot of questions.
Who are you? Who are you listening to? I know he’s as much of a human being as I am, but if we both believe, how could you allow them to take me like this and keep me here, and create such chaos in the lives of my family and friends? I don’t understand.

The more I thought about it, the more upset I got, so I put the rosary away and took out my notepad.

Tuesday, October 14, 10 a.m.

Dearest P,

Another day and another long wait for something to happen. Shafirgullah, the one who stabbed me on the first day—is my guard today. He’s teaching me some words in Pashto to help pass the time. He’s a funny dude—very conscious of cleanliness and appearance. He must have combed his hair twenty times this morning. I’ve never met another Afghan man quite like him.

I hope that wherever you are, you’re okay, and I think—if I know you—that you’re in Kabul by now, trying desperately to find out where I am. If I knew, I would tell you, but I have no clue where this hole is and I’m starting to feel a little desperate.

Khalid said he would take me out for a walk sometime—I’m not sure what that means, but it would be nice to breathe some fresh air. So many things we take for granted that we don’t realize until it’s taken away or until we don’t have it anymore. Even something as simple as fresh air and sunshine. And a bathroom, or a toilet. Or food.

It’s funny, you know, I remember being at the refugee camp wondering how people live—how they pack their families into these small living quarters.

In my mind’s eye, I could still see the camp and all the families crowded into it. I had spent a few minutes in a small mud hut covered with a makeshift roof of corrugated metal, a pile of blankets
on one side. It was maybe twice the size of the hole I was sitting in. A father, mother, and their five children, ages approximately three to sixteen, were crammed inside. The father had told me he was a cobbler. He had made shoes in a shop in Kandahar City, and his eldest son was his apprentice. They described the life they had left in Kandahar as a happy one, even though they did not have a lot of money. The small business had brought in enough to feed his family, and he was happy that his son was able to work with him.

It all changed in the summer of 2008, when the fighting in Kandahar got worse. Not a day went by, he told me, without the rattle of gunfire, the explosions of mortars, and the constant threat of a bomb. I remembered the cobbler’s feet. They were shoeless and so caked with mud that you could barely see his toes—it was hard to believe this man made shoes for a living.

The family had left with everything they had and were now trying to survive in this small space. Yet, he was more than welcoming to two journalists, insisting on making tea from his small black kettle and pouring it into small glasses for me and Shokoor—we were his guests in his small mud hut, and he treated us as such.

We drank the tea quickly, thanked the family, and left.

I’d never felt so helpless as I did during my time at that camp. All those families—widows, children, babies, puppies—with nowhere to go, victims of a war they wanted no part of. But that’s why I was there. To tell their story, and hopefully make people see how much suffering there is among the innocent civilians caught in war. It might sound a little corny, but it’s why I became a journalist in the first place. I thought that if we could understand each other a little more, the world might be a better place. (I remember watching stories about the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s and then trying to convince one of my grade school teachers that we should all go on a fast for several days, so we might be able to understand what people in Africa are
going through.) I’ve always believed that if even one of my stories could move just one person to think about something differently, understand something a little more deeply, maybe write a letter to the governor or premier, then I’d done my job and done it well. And that’s what I was hoping to do at the refugee camp.

We have no idea in the West how much we have,
I continued writing.
If people in the West could even get a glimpse of how most Afghans live, maybe we’d be a little more thankful for what we do have.

“You hungry?” Shafirgullah had finished with his morning prayers.

I shook my head.

“Cigarette?” he offered.

I couldn’t help it. Again he lit it for me and handed it to me, the smoke already beginning to fill the air. Then he pointed at my shoulder. It had been more than a day since I had dressed the stab wound. The pink toilet paper I’d used to staunch the bleeding was now glued to the wound by blood, becoming part of the scab that had formed.

“Hurt?” he asked.

“It’s okay, a little pain, yes.”

“I sorry,” he said. It was maybe the third or fourth time he’d apologized for stabbing me. I wondered if a tenet of his religion was that one should not hurt women.

“It’s okay. It will be okay.” I wished I knew more about Islam so I could better understand where he was coming from, particularly because there was already a language barrier. I knew that women generally had fewer rights than men. The sexuality of a woman is veiled so as to prevent men from being tempted into committing a corporal sin. It’s not for me to be critical of other religions. God knows there are enough problems with Christian fundamentalists
in Western society, but it always struck me that the subjugation of women in Muslim culture was the root of many of that society’s problems. Young girls are painfully circumcised. Then they’re covered up and hidden from view, the property of a husband in an arranged marriage. Men are seen as owners of their women, whether they’re daughters or wives, sisters or cousins.

So much has been written about the stifling morality that separates men and women. Some hold the view that sexual frustration of Muslim men is at the root of male aggression. Whatever it was, I didn’t know how to reconcile the two religions, the two beliefs. Women in Islam are just viewed differently from women in Christianity. But yet, from what I could gather through conversations with my kidnappers, they were treating me differently, maybe better, than they would if I were a man. I didn’t doubt them when they told me they would have left me alone in the dark for days without light or food. I believed them when they said they would have beaten me with their guns.

Shafirgullah’s phone rang.

“As-Salaam Alaikum,” he said. He spoke for a while in Pashto before hanging up.

“Khalid,” he said to me.

“Where Khalid? He is coming tonight, yes?” I asked. “Khalid, Kabul.”

“Why Khalid go Kabul?” I asked. I was speaking in broken English, maybe subconsciously hoping he would understand me better this way. He just shook his head.

“So Khalid not coming tonight.”

“No, he no come.”

This was upsetting, only because it meant I wouldn’t be able to ask Khalid everything I wanted to know. Had his father contacted the network? Had he called Paul? Were they talking about money? They had been so focused on money that it would have
been naive of me to think they would release me for nothing. I know that my company had insurance for situations like this, but I felt guilty about all the money that was sure to be spent on gaining my freedom, whether it was for hiring negotiators like AKE or an actual ransom payment, which is something I felt very uncomfortable with. I was a hostage because others had paid these kidnappers. If they got payment for me, the vicious cycle would be perpetuated. I silently vowed that however much it cost, I could always take out a big loan and pay it back. I just wanted to know that there was movement, that talks were happening, and that maybe I would get to go back to my life soon.