A Kingdom of Their Own by Joshua Partlow

Author:Joshua Partlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

Martyr Khalil Karzai, whose body was temporarily buried in the refugee cemetery in Pishin, was moved to Afghanistan as the new sun rose by his son, Hashmat Khalil, and his dear friends, on January 2nd 2002, and he was buried in his ancestral cemetery may God bless his soul.

The eyes of flowers are brimming with tears.

There is no laughter but only crying in this garden.

The one I was visiting with used to smile;

now I am carrying him to his grave in tears.

—

“Watch your head,” Farid Karzai told me. We ducked off a crowded Kandahar sidewalk, passed through a low metal door, and walked down a dark concrete corridor that opened up into a narrow courtyard. The apartment felt like a safehouse. He didn’t know who might be looking for him, and he didn’t want the “Big Karzais” to know where he lived. Farid, the son of Yar Mohammed Karzai, was engaged to marry, but his mother, Farida, was so worried for his safety that she’d asked him to postpone the wedding. Sonia, his fourteen-year-old sister, now rarely slept through the night. We sat down in the concrete courtyard on a yellow patchwork carpet festooned with roses.

“Thank you for coming,” Farida told me. “Thank God there are still people who come and listen to people and take their messages and their voices.” Then she started to cry.

Farida had met Yar Mohammed in the Iranian border town of Zahedan, after he had fled Pakistan following Khalil Karzai’s killing. They met through relatives, married, and lived in refugee camp squalor, surviving for a time by selling flour and cooking oil out of their home. For a long time they wandered in exile, welcome neither in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan nor outside it. Then one day American fighter jets appeared overhead, their contrails tracing a white script altogether different.

“My cousin is the president of Afghanistan,” Yar Mohammed told his wife. “How long are we going to live in a foreign country?”

By then, Farida had borne Yar Mohammed two sons, Farid and Waheed, and a daughter, Sunita; their youngest daughter was still to come. The family rented a truck and filled the bed with their meager belongings and drove back to Karz. The village was almost unrecognizable. The only thing that remained from the buildings where Yar Mohammed and other Karzai relatives had grown up were the weathered ruins of a few mud walls. The area around was sunbaked dirt and a trash-filled swamp that smelled of sewage.

Yar Mohammed and his sons set about building a new home, living in a tent on their plot of land while the work progressed. Yar Mohammed was too old and gaunt for much physical labor, so Farid and Waheed worked on the house after school. They supervised the work of local masons and builders as they fashioned a small, one-story, L-shaped concrete house with a flat roof. It had four small bedrooms, each with its own door facing the main gate leading into the yard, and a concrete staircase near the kitchen that rose to the roof.

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