No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal

Author:Anand Gopal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

PART THREE

8

Election Day

One day, a letter appeared at Heela’s home bearing an impressive blue seal of a type she had never before seen. When Musqinyar arrived, he read the message aloud. “Afghanistan’s first presidential elections are upcoming. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is seeking individuals to work in the forthcoming voter registration drive. Women are encouraged to apply.”

Heela and Musqinyar stared at each other. It was mid-2004, about a year since her neighbor Jamila had discovered Heela’s underground school and forced it to close. Since then, Heela had lost herself within the four walls of her house. It had been a particularly trying few months after her mother-in-law had passed away, for though the old woman had been a thorn in her side, the loneliness was oppressive. Now, this opportunity jolted her like news from a long-lost friend.

So she and Musqinyar began to plot. This time, they would have to be doubly careful. Jamila’s words—“Keep going on like this and no one will see a single family member of yours alive”—still rang in her ears. To pull this off, Heela knew, she’d have to work somewhere far from her village.

As the only educated woman in huge swaths of Khas Uruzgan, Heela had no trouble landing the job. Musqinyar was enlisted as well, and since Heela could not be trained directly, he was coached and passed along what he learned. One evening, he came home with a stack of voter registration cards that they were to distribute to poor villagers across the district. Most of the villagers had never voted for anything in their lives, but an unending stream of radio news and public service announcements had everyone thinking about the elections. People had started speaking knowingly about politics, the way they spoke about the coming rains or the year’s crops.

It was warm outside on their first day of work, and Heela was up earlier than usual. Climbing into the back of the station wagon, she waited until Musqinyar appeared, dressed as usual in a crisp white salwar. They set out before the sky dawned to avoid the neighbors. After an hour of driving on a broken gravel road that wound through the dusty mountain country, they reached the far side of the district, home to a different clan, where their family was not known. Heela sat in the car and watched Musqinyar speak to the malek, the village headman. After some time he gathered all the menfolk in front of the mosque. They thronged around her husband, kissing his hand, and she could hear them pleading for better roads and clinics. For these villagers, who had never met a representative of the government or the United Nations before, it was as if he were an emissary from President Karzai himself. As dozens of curious faces looked on, Musqinyar explained that his only job was to register them to vote. He described the registration process, which required each person to fill out a card. Since few could read or write, he ended up completing most of the cards himself.

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