Circles in the Sand

In Yasmina Khadra, Kabul finds its most skilled chronicler yet. YK is actually a nom de plume for Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian military man. His publishers say he took the pseudonym, a female one at that, to escape requirements that his manuscript be cleared by military censors. This biographical sketch carries no information about the extent of his interest in Afghanistan — but the slim, stylistic novel gathers his Kabul into a metaphor for the ravages of totalitarianism.

Khadra’s narrative is bookended by two gatherings. In each, like the whirlwinds in the Afghan countryside that sweep along everything in their path, carrying all stray particles with an accelerating, deafening momentum, residents of Kabul too are drawn towards the appointed public square almost against their will. Part herded by the Taliban militia, part attracted by the barbaric spectacle, they assemble to witness, and even to participate in, public executions of deviant women — one an adulteress, the other a murderer. These two executions set the fictional grid for Khadra to explore life at a time when the Taliban police both the streets of Kabul and the imaginations of residents.

In Khadra’s Kabul, the wars and politics of the Taliban have seeped into ordinary homes, their savage dictums and insistent policing are leaching the very last vestiges of civility and humanity from ordinary folks. It is in this Kabul that a few good men and women engage in an end game to grasp some initiative to render their bleak, banal years meaningful.

The dos and innumerable don’ts that latticed Afghanistan under the Taliban are well-known. The warrior’s campaign and the fanatic’s agenda effectively separated men into two categories: those wielding a gun, and therefore part of the new order, and those without. The women were herded as one into their veils, and these nameless, faceless women flitting around in their blue garb are the swallows of Khadra’s title: “Women are only ghosts that pass practically unnoticed along the streets; flocks of infirm swallows — blue, yellow, often faded, several seasons behind — that make a mournful sound when they come into the proximity of men.”

Zunaira and Musarrat are two such swallows. Zunaira was once a confident magistrate, beautiful and learned. Today she has been banished to her veil, she strains to summon some sense of self-identity in loneliness, irrelevance, anonymity. Her husband, whose family’s business has been destroyed, now roams the streets and cemeteries maniacally to stop himself from thinking unthinkable thoughts. On one such walk he strays into a public execution and shocks himself by hurling three stones at the woman. When he confesses to his wife, Zunaira is shattered. Their relationship crumbles into a heap of petty cruelties.

Meanwhile, that condemned woman’s jailer, Atiq, too is fleeing his home for mindless walkabouts. His wife Musarrat is dying; that grief and his membership in a barbaric order are driving him towards a new prison, a mindspace where he can disconnect from the numbing certainties of Talibanic Kabul and measure his activities against more eternal points of reference. This brooding is true madness, warn his friends. But Musarrat is delighted, for her this flickering of humanity is unexpected solace.

One day, a woman is brought to Atiq’s jail. She awaits public execution for murdering her husband. In their once desolate home, Atiq and Musarrat cook meals to sustain her, they plot audacious escapes for her. Will they succeed? Who is the woman in blue who appears for execution, as people take their assigned spots to witness the final act? All the threads tie up.

But in Khadra’s bleak landscape, there are no happy endings. Just the tiniest glimpse of hope is a prized possession. It is not easy to carry off such a neat, aesthetically symmetric plot, but Khadra appears to have an immense reservoir of guile and empathy to manage the task.