The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen

Author:Anna Badkhen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Ralph A. Bagnold, the British troubadour of sand, has described the rare hummed canticle as “the great sound which in some remote places startles the silence of the desert.” Bagnold had dedicated years to researching the behavior of desert sand in the ergs of Libya and in a personal wind tunnel he had built in England, and published his observations in 1941 in one elegant volume titled The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. Yet even to this scholar who had scrutinized the anatomy of dunes grain by grain, the mechanics of the song remained a mystery. The chapter on singing dunes is the book’s last. It ends thus: “Much more work will have to be done before the ‘song of the sands’ is understood.”

But in Oqa everyone understood: the dunes were singing a wedding song that morning.

• • •

Meanwhile, wedding guests arrived.

They had come from Khairabad and Karaghuzhlah, from Toqai and Zadyan. Warlords. Farmers. Merchants. Drug dealers. All relatives of the Oqans—brothers, sisters, third cousins, nieces. Some had arrived by donkey and motorcycle. Most had walked. A few families had rattled across the cracked desert in the flatbeds of zaranj motor-rickshaws. Someone even had hired a taxi from Mazar-e-Sharif. They bore wedding gifts of pewter serving trays, plastic pitchers, aluminum washbasins. By seven in the morning, the village had swelled to six or seven hundred people embracing, exchanging kisses and gossip, laughing, sharing their latest heartaches, pinching the cheeks of babies born since the last time they had seen one another. Men thronged toward the northern slope where the pilau was cooking. Women and girls took over the south and west of the hummock.

The women in their holiday embroidery twinkled like mermaids accidentally cast upon these landlocked sands. Two and a half dozen had crowded into Boston’s room, barefoot and lipsticked and glistening in unimaginable combinations of greens and blues and purples and pinks, and festooned with beads and sequins. All wore rouge. They dabbed sweat off their faces with the fringes of their brilliant scarves and shared two cigarettes, which they passed around clockwise, from one set of lips fuchsia or red or shiny oyster-blue to the next. They inhaled with somber concentration and tapped the ashes with elaborate hand flourishes on the straw mat that covered the earthen floor. Intricate henna flowers vined up their wrists from fingertips stained a deep brown. Most wore silver or gold jewelry in their ears and some in their noses and all on their fingers and wrists and necks. They had tuned Baba Nazar’s radio to an AM music station from Turkmenistan, and a few girls were swaying their hips, and the colored reflections of their sequins rebated off the walls like strobe lights in a disco. Thawra leaned against the wall in a crimson gown. Next to her, Choreh Gul, her beaked smile carmine with lip gloss, clutched the infant Zakrullah. The boy’s translucent thighs were bare and rounded at last with some fat. Little Leila wove around past

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