Laila
aila was glad, when the Taliban went to work, that Babi wasn't around to witness it. It
would have crippled him.
Men wielding pickaxes swarmed the dilapidated Kabul Museum and smashed pre Islamic
statues to rubble that is, those that hadn't already been looted by the Mujahideen. The
university was shut down and its students sent home. Paintings were ripped from walls,
shredded with blades. Television screens were kicked in. Books, except the Koran, were
burned in heaps, the stores that sold them closed down. The poems of Khalili, Pajwak,
Ansari, Haji Dehqan, Ashraqi, Beytaab, Hafez, Jami, Nizami, Rumi, Khayyam, Beydel, and
more went up in smoke.
Laila heard of men being dragged from the streets, accused of skipping namaz, and
shoved into mosques. She learned that Marco Polo Restaurant, near Chicken Street, had
been turned into an interrogation center. Sometimes screaming was heard from behind its
black painted windows. Everywhere, the Beard Patrol roamed the streets in Toyota trucks
on the lookout for clean shaven faces to bloody.
They shut down the cinemas too. Cinema Park. Ariana. Aryub. Projection rooms were
ransacked and reels of films set to fire. Laila remembered all the times she and Tariq had
sat in those theaters and watched Hindi films, all those melodramatic tales of lovers
separated by some tragic turn of fate, one adrift in some faraway land, the other forced into
marriage, the weeping, the singing in fields of marigolds, the longing for reunions. She
remembered how Tariq would laugh at her for crying at those films.
"I wonder what they've done to my father's cinema," Mariam said to her one day. "If it's
still there, that is. Or if he still owns it."
Kharabat, Kabul's ancient music ghetto, was silenced. Musicians were beaten and
imprisoned, their rubabs tambouras, and harmoniums trampled upon. The Taliban went to
the grave of Tariq's favorite singer, Ahmad Zahir, and fired bullets into it.
"He's been dead for almost twenty years," Laila said to Mariam. "Isn't dying once
enough?"
Rasheed wasn’t bothered much by the Taliban. All he had to do was grow a beard, which
he did, and visit the mosque, which he also did. Rasheed regarded the Taliban with a
forgiving, affectionate kind of bemusement, as one might regard an erratic cousin prone to
unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal.
Every Wednesday night, Rasheed listened to the Voice of Shari'a when the Taliban would
announce the names of those scheduled for punishment. Then, on Fridays, he went to Ghazi
Stadium, bought a Pepsi, and watched the spectacle. In bed, he made Laila listen as he
described with a queer sort of exhilaration the hands he'd seen severed, the lashings, the
hangings, the beheadings.
"I saw a man today slit the throat of his brother's murderer," he said one night, blowing
halos of smoke.