When you’ve survived a life in monochrome, the sudden arrival of colours can make your eyes squint. That is the change that Ahmed had brought into my life.

I wonder if he had opened vistas for me or just left me with a skewed view of the world that I lived in. Any which ways, my life changed direction only after Ahmed swaggered into my life.

I was around 10 years of age, and he was about the same though he had taken on an elder-brotherly role simply because of the place he came from. There was so much more to see and do in Shiberghan than Babai could ever offer its residents.

Babai had a ‘bleak landscape’ through most of the year, and this again was a fact that Ahmed educated me on! For me, Babai was all I knew and I thought the whole of our country was the same. The concept that there was a world outside of Afghanistan would require me to stretch my imagination beyond my capacity. Besides, at 10, being the oldest son in my *famil, I felt life was good, or at least good enough. Till Ahmed changed my mind.

We were simple folks. With simple names. In fact, our village shared its name with the mountains that fringed our lands.  The staid and somber Babai mountains that extended from the Hindu Kush towards the west and remained snowcapped throughout.

I don’t know if our folks were unimaginative or just so busy simply surviving that they did not have time to think of a decent name for our village.  Our cattle were our life and blood since farming wasn’t really possible throughout the year. But during the fleeting spring season, our lands gave us enough bounty to save for the winters.  Our parents were sheep herds and we lived as large families in our mud huts.

I remember the mornings of our childhood. We slept on the mud floor of our cave like hut.  Red blankets covered every inch of the floor in the large central room where we slept. That was the place where we spent most of our time when we were indoors. The only other rooms were the kitchen, the store cum shed to keep our cattle safe, and an extra room where the women in our family spent time.

Our plaar was a hardworking man and he looked after all his sons well.  Every morning after washing our faces clean of sleep, we would follow plaar to learn how to feed our sheep and milk them. I loved to take our sheep to graze on the grass that sprung up for a short while in spring. The monotony of the mud-brown and white terrain would suddenly be broken by flashes of green and yellow. The sheep too were enthused with extra energy during that time. They bucked and frolicked and soon we would have an increase in their number.

Ali was just a year younger than me, and followed me everywhere. Younger than him by a year was Aaban, followed by the twins Azeem and Azeez who were just four years old and remained home with our mothers and sisters. I had three sisters too between Aaban and the twins- Gulpari, Gulguti and Noor. They helped our mors or mothers with the household chores. Plaar had three wives and so we had three mothers. I quite liked that. If one scolded me, the others were there to soothe my ego.

Ahmed was our neighbor’s nephew. I don’t really know why he came to live with them, but I had heard plaar tsk tsking as he was telling our mors about what happened to Ahmed’s famil. It was something to do with guns and shooting and blood. It sounded frightening and plaar hushed his voice once he saw our little eyes grow to the size of potatoes. Neither me, nor Ali could grasp exactly what had happened, and that was the only topic that Ahmed never educated me on.

Oh! I forgot to introduce myself. I am Abed, and it took me twenty years or so to become the best Chapandaz in Shiberghan! The seed of that dream was, of course, sown by Ahmed, one spring, when we were both 10 years old and did not know the different directions each of our lives would take.

I remember the first time I saw him, he had just a little sack on his shoulders and was seated on a donkey being pulled uphill by his uncle, our neighbor. I had gone up to my haunt, the abandoned house on the hill, with Ali at my heels. I wanted to teach Ali how to count, just like my plaar had taught me.

Plaar instructed me to always count the sheep before I brought them home from grazing in the spring. So, he had taken some pebbles and told me a story while he taught me the numbers - yaw, dwaa, dray, salor, peenza...  I loved learning from plaar, and after that lesson, I never forgot to count the sheep before I herded them into their enclosure at home.

But sheep were a little boring sometimes and after a little while of watching over them, I would get restless. That’s when I had discovered the broken-down mud house atop a hill close to the grazing ground.  Once the sheep had settled into a good rhythm of grazing, I would run up to the dilapidated two-storey structure and try and imagine the people who lived there. One such day, just as I was drawing on the mud floor with a stick, a part of the floor had given way and opened into a small cavity to reveal a small wooden box.  Someone had buried the box there, but why?

I had reached out into the box to find colourful marbles…. only they looked more like stones than marbles! Did that family have a boy who loved to play marbles like I did? I had found treasure that day!  I would play with the marbles while the sheep grazed and time would just fly. I did not want to take the marbles home as all my brothers and sisters would want a share. They were too young to play or understand the game, but they would fight just to have something that I had. 

But that day, the day that I saw Ahmed for the first time, I had decided to take Ali to my favorite haunt and teach him to count and play marbles. It was early winters and I did not have sheep to look after, I could focus my attention on Ali and teach him a thing or two like an elder brother should.  But Ali just ran from one broken down room to another, from the ground floor to the first where the floor boards creaked when you walked. I shouted to him to be careful as the floor could give way. My voice echoed in the hills and Ali was fascinated by that too!

“Aaaabed…..” he yelled and chuckled in delight as his voice echoed back

“Aaaabed…. Aaaabed… Aaabed….”

“Aliiiiiii…. “ I called

“Aliiiiii, Aliiiii, ….” The hills echoed.

Ali ran down and hugged me! I beamed; I had gifted my brother something precious. And then, the day just got better for us.

“Hurrrr… Hurrr…” we heard a voice echo as though someone was dragging a horse or a donkey to move up hill.  I remember that sound and the first time I saw him as clearly as the light of the day… even after all these years…

I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near a frozen creek. That was a long time ago. But it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

I can still visualize him, a boy with a sac on his shoulders, slumped on the back of a donkey, being pulled uphill to our neighbor’s house. He sat slumped like a sack himself, but Ali and I were excited about the new addition to the village.

The next three days Ali and I had hovered around Jabbar kaka’s home hoping to see the new boy. Jabbar Kaka had 5 little daughters and a baby boy, so we did not have friends in that home to help us with our inquisitiveness. Just as we had abandoned our efforts and gotten back to our lives, Ahmed came out of whatever he was hiding from. He joined me as I sat outside my home waiting for my plaar to come back from the market place. Plaar would often go to sell some of our sheep in the nearing city where they fetched a good price and he would come back home with some grains, vegetables and kishmis for us.

“I saw your father taking your sheep and goats somewhere today.”, he stated it like a fact that I needed to be informed of.

“Yes, he goes to the city sometimes to sell them,” I replied.

“Do you know what happens to them after you sell them?” he asked mysteriously.

“No… what happens to them?”

“How old are you?”, he needed the information to gauge if I was old enough to handle what he was about to tell me.

“10.. I think” I said pulling myself up to my full height.

He studied me from top to toe making me nervous with his strange gaze.

“They get bought for a game of Buzkashi, if they are lucky!” he smirked.

He was a handsome fellow. Green eyes with eyelashes that were long and curved. His hair had a tinge of light brown and his alabaster skin shone even in the Babai winters.

“What is your name? “, he had asked then.

“Abed, what is yours?”

“Ahmed” he had flashed his smile and offered me his hand to shake.  I did not know what an extended hand meant at that time. I just assumed he was pointing to something and looked in that direction. He looked amused making me feel very insignificant and small compared to him.  He then laughed and took hold of my hand shaking it vigorously.

“Pleased to meet you, Abed!” He said as he held my hand and danced around dragging me in a circle with him.  His laughter was a little forced and quite different from how Ali and I laughed when we played.  That was the beginning of a relationship, the kind that develops between a storyteller and the audience. I was ever enchanted by the worlds he described to me.

Winter passed and a new season pushed itself out ground upwards.  This short period was when we had a lot of traders coming into our village with wares that ranged from utensils to dry fruits to toys. We even had small fun fairs organized in the grazing grounds. We were fascinated by the merry-go-round that one of these fun fairs had. It was a rickety structure but we did not know any better. The wooden horses with chipped paint went round and round and made us dizzy even as we stood by the sidelines and watched the scene.

That was the first time that my interest in our national game was kindled. The more Ahmed described it, the more I became besotted with the idea of becoming a Chapandaz.

Ahmed had jumped on to the already spinning merry-go-round and had swung his upper body down to the ground to pick up something, a stick or stone.. we did not see clearly, but he then stood up on the little planks designed to be the stirrups and swung his cap around with his hand yelling at the top of his voice….

“They are as fast has deer, as fit as foxes, as focused as tigers…  They are the Chapandaz! The gutsiest of them all, the Chapandaz!” 

Even little Azeem and Azeez trotted along on their legs like they were horses for the next few days. Every little boy in Babai was impressed by Ahmed’s performance and he had garnered himself quite a few fans. But he and I were friends already. Ahmed and Abed, the duo who were ready with some mischief or the other in the village.  Life had taken on a new delicious flavor for me once Ahmed befriended me.

In summer, he would incite me to run away with the clothes that were drying outside other homes. He loved it when the women of the house chased us with a stick.  He would ‘borrow’ little goats from the sheds of others to practice lifting it by the legs as the poor upside-down kid bleated and kicked to get free. A commotion seemed to follow him everywhere. One day, I decided to share my secret place with him to return the favor he was doing me and to bring about somewhat of a balance in the roles of our relationship.

I made him promise he would not tell anyone else about the secret I was about to show him, enjoying every bit of the drama that I created with the suspense. I told him I had shared this secret earlier only with Ali, my blood brother.

We had run up to the dilapidated home on the hill and scurried up light-footedly to the first floor. His eyes shone like I had never seen them shine when he held the box of marbles in his hands.

“These are not marbles, khara” he had slapped my forehead.

“No?” I was baffled

“These are gemstones! We are rich!”

I did not quite know how ‘we’ became rich, because rightfully the stones had been found by me! They were my secret! But I did not have time to follow this line of thought. Ahmed had pulled me to the echo point.

“Ahmed and Abed…. Blood brothers!”

“Ahmed … Abed…..” the hills had agreed.

Ahmed had rushed back to find something sharp and pointed and picked up one of the pieces from the box. He had punctured his thumb, and then taken mine to puncture it too.

We observed the ruby red blood ooze out and grow into the size of a small bead, the kind my mother wore in her necklace.

“Laa Ilaaha Illa Allah….” and saying that with reverence he had taken my finger and mixed our two bloods together.

“Now, we truly are blood brothers. Let us forever be ready to be there for each other.” Ahmed had looked intense.

That little ceremony held me spellbound as I pledged my allegiance to him from then on. 

“Promise me that you will not tell anyone else about this place or this box.” He whispered solemnly

“Oh! Okay!” I blurted a little confused for I wanted to extract that promise from him!

Spring turned to winter and the cycle repeated a few more times till we started believing ourselves to be grown men of 12.

We did not know what being grown really entailed till then, and so continued our antics with even more boldness.  The village women were getting increasingly fed up of us by the day…. till one day when the straw finally broke the camel’s back- in our story the camel was replaced by Jabbar kaka’s donkey.

Both Ahmed and I spent our time imagining ourselves as the best Chapandaz in our country playing in the national tournament of Buzkashi at Mazar-i-Sharif. We imagined the crowds going wild as we handled our handsome steeds expertly around 20 other players who jostled to get hold of the heavy goat carcass that served as a ball in this game. In the separate games going on in our heads, we each got a chance to be the hero.  I saw myself in full gear with padded pants and a Russian tank helmet feeling the chill winds against my face as I rode on in full gallop till I had jostled the carcass out from an opponent dismounting him at the same time. I galloped on… around the post and on to the ‘circle of truth’ where I dropped my load with style to score the winning point. So vivid was our imagination that we could hear the jubilant crowd chant our names …

“Ahmed, Abed, Ahmed, Abed… strong as oxes, focused as tigers and quick as foxes…. Our hero Chapandazes!” Then everything would turn into a loud cacophony of joy as Ahmed and I would turn round and round like swirling dervishes with our arms outstretched, imagining all the riches that would be showered on us!

The problem with imagining something is that at some point, one is bound to give it a try.  But we were not confident enough to ride horses and besides there weren’t any easily available at Babai. There was only one animal that could easily step into the hooves of a horse and that was Jabbar uncle’s khara. Ahmed hatched a plan that he would bring the khara, but I had to manage the goat. One that wasn’t too heavy for our bony arms, but not too light to be of no challenge at all.

On the designated day, I waited at the grazing grounds below our secret place with a week-old kid. Ahmed soon appeared, like he had promised, pulling the donkey behind him with a carrot in his hand as bait.  It was a funny sight and I had laughed hard.  Then, there was the problem of who would go first on the Donkey. Plaar would be livid if something happened to our goat, so I wanted to ride the donkey first, but Ahmed would have none of that. He said, I needed to see him ride first in order to get the tricks of the trade. He did have a point there, so I handed him the goat as he balanced bare back on the donkey.

“Hurrr…” He kicked the donkey hard and the animal sped off in the direction where the cliff ended in a steep fall.  The baby goat was thankfully under his arms and not hanging upside down like the carcass in Buzkashi.  With nothing to really grab on to except the little bit of a mane that the donkey had, Ahmed was soon thrown into the air. The whole scene unfolded in front of me like it was happening in slow motion.

Ahmed’s body arched backwards as his legs seemed to fly in the air.  The goat dangled from under his arms for a while before it slipped and fell right across the donkey’s eyes, blocking its vision for a while before being thrown onto the ground in a lifeless heap. The donkey meanwhile was so terrified at having his eyes covered that it ran right to the edge of the cliff in panic. Once there, he tottered to gain balance but lost the battle, tumbling right over the loose soil and falling down into the cliff.

I ran to Ahmed who was down on the ground too.

“Are you okay…. Ahmed…?” He seemed stunned but sat up with his hands to his head. The full brunt of what actually happened hit us a little later. We were terrified and tried to think of ways to get ourselves out of this jam. But no matter how much we thought, we could not figure out a way to make a dead goat and donkey alive.

I remember the thrashing from plaar. He had dragged me by the ear to Jabbar kaka’s home and caned me in front of him asking me to beg for his forgiveness.

“You have taken two lives today unnecessarily!” plaar had never before scolded me as harshly as he had done that day.

“I will punish my son, Jabbar, but it is that boy of yours that you better take care of… he is at the root of all of this! Saying that, plaar had dragged me back home making me promise that I would never mix with that Ahmed again.

I had cried myself to sleep that night, but I would never forget Jabbar kaka’s face that evening.  The Donkey was his only mode of transport to the city where he worked as a labourer. That was his only source of earning and their family was one of the poorest in Babai. No cattle, no crops, just the donkey.

I woke up late next morning to find plaar telling my mother that Ahmed was missing.

“Jabbar tried his best to bring up the boy” my mother sympathized.

“Yes, it’s probably for the best that the boy has run away… Jabbar has one less mouth to feed.” The conversation had ended there.

I was told to wash every corner of the shed that day as punishment.  My plaar did not speak to me for the next three days.  That was part of the punishment too.

But I was worried about Ahmed. Where did he go? I knew that he did not have anyone else other than Jabbar kaka.  When I was finally allowed to take the sheep grazing again, it had been days since Ahmed was gone. I sat with the sheep not really feeling like going to the old house.  But then, what if Ahmed was hiding there and needed something to eat?

I remember running up the hill in double step and panting hard to catch my breath. 

“Ahmed…” I had called out loud. But only the hills had answered back.  I had gone up to the top floor to find the box out of its hiding place and completely empty!

A thousand thoughts had run through my mind at an alarming speed.  How could he do that to his blood brother? The cheater!

That day, I had learned my first lesson on betrayal. Thanks again to Ahmed for another milestone in my life.  I started spending more and more time in the company of plaar and going with him to the city to sell our sheep and goats.

“What happens to the goats we sell, plaar?” I had asked him.

“They fulfil their destiny by serving us humans.” He had said. He did not need to explain any more to me, I knew where the meat in our plates came from.

“Plaar, can you take me to see a game of Buzkashi, one day?”, I had pleaded with him then.

He had looked at me intently before asking “You really do have your heart set on being a Chapandaz, don’t you?”

I had nodded enthusiastically. He had taken me to the stable of a rich man that day.  And after a little while of negotiating, I was actually allowed to stay there and learn riding as well as the game of Buzkashi.  I was overjoyed!

I would stay there all week till Thursday and return home on my own on Friday.  My famil was looking forward to my becoming a Chapandaz. They perhaps hoped the financial conditions of our famil would improve once I started winning money.  In the city, I had seen several Chapandaz with good clothes and sunglasses. Some of them even had cars! I wanted to be like them and put my heart and soul into working in the stables for my malik.

I must have been around 16 when I saw Ahmed again and I could not believe my eyes!

I wondered how stars had entwined my life with Ahmed’s that I had to meet him again just a few days before my first Buzkashi match!

Malik often hosted parties in his home. The guests were the rich and famous of the city! Some of them seemed to be high-ranking officials from the Police too! Since I always slept on a machan over the stables that overlooked the party room, I could see colourful lights through his windows and hear the music too.  I would sometimes see silhouettes of dancers, twirling and entwining their bodies around Malik and his friends.

Malik was training me to be one of the best Chapandazes that Shiberghan had ever seen. If I became one, not only would I get rich, I would bring my Malik more prestige and money than I could ever imagine. Over the years, Malik had developed a soft corner for me, but that did not make him include me in the parties that he hosted.  I was still a stable hand, looking after the horses and training to be his top Chapandaz. There was a Buzkashi tournament in a couple of days. Maybe that is why Malik had thrown this party.

That particular night the music and laughter were loud and I spent the night trying to imagine what exactly was happening inside.  Were there girls?

The Taliban had allowed the game of Buzkashi to flourish again after having declared it immoral for a couple of months. They had perhaps understood that to control the people, they needed to allow them some concessions. Buzkashi was thus now a Taliban sponsored state sport. The prize money was considerable and so the teams vied with each other very seriously. But parties with nautch girls? that wasn’t a possibility at all! The Ministry of Vice and Virtue had clamped down hard on women working outside of their homes. And nautch girls were the height of immorality! So, who was dancing in those parties?  These questions would arise in my mind and I would quash them all with my single-minded focus on my goal.

I had just closed my ears and my eyes with my pillow and gone to sleep despite the noise of the revelry in the room across reaching me in high decibels.

In the wee hours of the morning, I was woken up by the sound of the window opening. It was a woman without a purdah! She was craning her neck out of the window trying to get a closer look at the horses.  I rubbed sleep out of my eyes and tried to get a clearer look at the woman, but it was strange!  The face seemed familiar, yet … something was not right. It didn’t look like a woman! The eyebrows were plucked thin in a high arch, the hair was a light brown and fell over the forehead like a swathe of silk, but the nose was large and her breasts looked comically conical! I rubbed my eyes again… and then a veil lifted!

“Ahmed!” – my voice was loud enough for the woman to shift her eyes from the horses to me!

The expression on his face changed in an instant as he recognized me. The color drained from his face and he slammed the window shut! I was shaken too. A thousand little questions ran through my mind.

“Why? How? When?”  I sat there too stunned to move. But I had to find answers to my questions so, I waited. I waited for the entourage that had arrived the evening before to depart. I waited for the cars to line up before the guests hurried into them and drove away.  I waited at the gate outside.

I guess, Ahmed felt he owed me an explanation too. It must have taken him a lot of courage and I do not truly know the extent of the risk he took to come down and meet me. But there he was … quietly sneaking out of the door and shutting it behind him before grabbing me by the hand and rushing me back to the stables.

“What are you doing here?”, he asked. His voice was beginning to crack as was mine. Another thing that juvenile boys had to deal with among other problems.

“What am I doing here?? What are you doing here? And why do you look like this?”, my questions outnumbered his.

“What else was to become of me with my kismet!” he said with bitterness as he spat on the ground.

“I am a slave to these Baccha Baazes…” he said when my expression looked puzzled.

“Baccha Baazi!!!” I was shocked. It’s not that I was innocent and had no clue as to what he was talking about. Baccha Bazi had been a dark practice in our country for ages. I had heard men and women talk about it in hushed tones and giggling. But this was not a joke to Ahmed anymore. He was a sex slave to men in power; men in a country where women were under purdah. Poor boys often fell victim to this crime.

“How?”

“I had run away to the city with your gems thinking they would buy me a new life. But I was too young to fight the goons who snatched them from my hands and turned me into this… Don’t worry my patrons look after me! I get clothes and food …and I will continue to get all that till my skin and flesh are tender…”

“But look at you!” He had seen me with the horses and started connecting the dots.

“On your way to be a top Chapandaz, eh?” He smiled while his eyes brimmed with tears.

“Trying …someone important in my life had planted a seed in my mind that I could never get rid of!”, I replied my own eyes defying me and running like tap.

“I tried too… but ended up being the goat!” he laughed a long deliberate laugh.

“There has to be some way to get you out of this…”  

“Yes, there is … but that’s only in my hands,” he said enigmatically.  But before that, I must see you “Fit as a fox, focused as a tiger….”

We laughed despite ourselves. Ahmed had to run back quickly as we heard noises coming from the main house. He did not want to get caught talking to me.

That was the last time I saw him.

I still scan the crowds at every Buzkashi game, hoping against hope to see him standing and twirling his skull cap jubilantly, celebrating the fact that at least one of us made it to becoming a top Chapandaaz!

 Glossary:

Famil – The word for family in Pashto language

Chapandaz -A horseman, a player in the game of Buzkashi

Buzkashi – The national sport of Afghanistan where riders compete to seize and retain control of a goat or calf carcass that has to be dropped into the goal called the circle of truth.

Khara – donkey in Pashto

Plaar- Father in Pashto