99 Nights in Logar Read online

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  An imprint of Penguin Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  Published in Hamish Hamilton hardcover by Penguin Canada, 2019

  Simultaneously published in the USA by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  Copyright © 2019 by Jamil Jan Kochai

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A portion of this book appeared in slightly different form as “Nights in Logar” in A Public Space.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Kochai, Jamil Jan, author

  99 nights in Logar / Jamil Jan Kochai.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735235595 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780735235601 (electronic)

  I. Title. II. Title: Ninety-nine nights in Logar.

  PS3611.O342A614 2019    813'.6    C2018-904245-1

                     C2018-904246-X

  Book design: Amanda Dewey

  Interior images: (pattern) A-R-T, (crescent moon) Krauchanka Henadz, both

  Shutterstock.com; (circle) Islamic Design, Dover Publications, Inc., 2004.

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Cover image: CSA Images / Getty Images

  Version_1

  For Moor o Agha

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1‎On the Thirty-Second Morning

  ‎On the First Day

  ‎On the Thirty-Second Morning

  ‎On the Fourth Day

  ‎On the Thirteenth Day

  ‎On the Thirty-Second Day

  ‎On the Seventeenth Day

  ‎On the Thirty-Second Day

  On the Thirty-Second Night

  ‎On the Thirty-Third Morning

  ‎On the Thirty-Third Afternoon

  ‎On the Thirty-Third Evening

  ‎On the Thirty-Fifth Day

  Part 2‎On the Thirty-Fifth Day

  ‎On the Forty-Second Day

  ‎On the Forty-Ninth Day

  ‎On the Fiftieth Day

  ‎On the Fifty-Seventh Morning

  ‎On the Fifty-Seventh Day

  On the Fifty-Seventh Night

  On the Fifty-Eighth Day

  On the Seventieth Day

  Part 3On the Ninety-Seventh Morning

  On the Ninety-Seventh Day

  On the Ninety-Seventh Afternoon

  On the Ninety-Seventh Night

  On the Ninety-Eighth Morning

  On the Ninety-Ninth Day

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Parler une langue, c’est assumer un monde, une culture.

  —FRANTZ FANON

  Herein he is as unaccountable as the gray wolf, who is his blood-brother.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  1

  On the Thirty-Second Morning

  Budabash got free sometime in the night.

  We didn’t know how. Just that he did and that we needed to go and find him. Me and Gul and Zia and Dawood heading out onto the roads of Logar, together, for the first time, hoping to get Budabash back home before nightfall.

  This all happened only a few weeks into my trip, my family’s homecoming in the summer of ’05, back when it cost only a G to fly across the ocean, from Sac to SF to Taipei to Karachi to Peshawar all the way up to Logar, where, at the time, though it wasn’t dead, the American war was sort of dozing, like in a coma, or as if it were still reeling off a contact high from that recently booming Afghan H, leaving the soldiers and the bandits and the robots almost harmless. So that all that mattered then for a musafir from America was how he was going to go about killing another hot summer day.

  Gulbuddin said it’d be a four-man operation.

  He said it in Pakhto because my Farsi was shit.

  “You see,” he told me, Zia, and Dawood as we huddled in the orchard before our chase, “more than four and we’ll look like a mob, but any less and we might get jumped.”

  Gul sat at the head of our circle, twirling one end of the thick black mustache his older sisters were always trying to tear from his lip because it made him look too much like the beautiful Turkish gangsters from their soap operas. From where he was sitting—up against the mud wall that ran between the courtyard and the orchard—he could spy on all the apple trees and the cow’s pen and the big blue gate and even the very corner of the orchard where Budabash once sat and slept and ate my goddamn finger.

  Gul was my little uncle. About fourteen. The oldest of our bunch.

  “What about four and a half?” I said, thinking about my little brother.

  “What did I just say, Marwand?”

  “More than four is a mob,” Dawood answered.

  “But an extra half might come in useful,” I said.

  “Not the half you’re talking about,” Dawood said, squatting at the farthest edge of our circle, taking up too much space.

  Dawood was my other little uncle. Around twelve years old. Same as me.

  “Listen, fellahs,” I went on. “Five is a good number. Five pillars. Five prayers. Five players on a basketball team.”

  “Only five?” Zia asked.

  “Well, is it four and a half or five?” Dawood asked.

  “Futball is better,” Zia said. “In futball everyone gets to play.”

  “What do you think?” I looked to Zia. He was my cousin. Rahmutallah Maamaa’s oldest kid. Probably thirteen—though you could never be too sure with the kids in Logar. But Zia just shrugged his skinny shoulders and aimed the barrels of his fingers at Gulbuddin. “Chik, chik,” Zia said, “pow, pow,” and pulled his triggers twice.

  Gulbuddin nodded at Zia and pressed down on the air with his hands. His eyes, green like duck shit, shifted from us, to the gate, to the courtyard, where the rest of the family still slept.

  We quieted down.

  “We’ll put it to a vote,” he said. “Raise your hand if you want Gwora to come along.”

  Dawood rubbed his skinned head as if he were going to vote for Gwora but couldn’t make up his mind.

  Zia’s scrawny fingers stayed nestled in his lap, counting out the ninety-nine names of Allah.

  Gul didn’t even move.

  Only my busted hand went up into that morning chill.

  “Well, fuck,” I muttered in English, and relented to the will of the jirga.

  With my little brother rejected, I didn’t say much e
lse for the rest of the meeting as they shifted, almost rapid fire, from one topic to the next: how to start, where to look, where to stop, where Dawood would sniff, when Zia would pray, what Gul would chance if we met a marine or a djinn or a bandit or one of our other uncles who’d already gone ahead of us on the chase.

  “We go out. We find Budabash. We bring him home,” Gul said. “Simple as that. Dawood does some sniffing. I ask a few questions. Zia says a few prayers. And if we run into Rahmutallah, Marwand makes sure we don’t get whupped. Right, Marwand?”

  Rahmutallah Maamaa—my oldest uncle—was already out on the road looking for Budabash. Had he caught us that day, I was supposed to tell him that our mission was my idea.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll lie.”

  “You swear to God you’ll lie?” Dawood said.

  “Don’t say it unless you mean it,” Gul said.

  “You’ll be bound by Allah,” Zia added.

  Gul and Dawood made pistols with their fingers and pointed them at my chest. I made a pistol too but put it to the temple of my head.

  “Wallah,” I said, cocking my finger. “I won’t snitch.”

  Gul laughed and reached for my hands and put them between his own. “All right,” he said, being careful with the gauze wrapped around my torn finger. “We were just joking, you see, a joke for the road. You understand?”

  I said that I did.

  After we gathered our supplies—biscuits and apples, four small knives wrapped in butcher paper, eight water bottles, the first siparah of the Quran, a packet of matches, two notebooks me and Gwora filled up with our observations on Budabash, four bundles of rope, duct tape, and my Coolpix—we headed out toward the big blue gate, and it was there, at the threshold of the gate and the road, the compound and the village, that Gwora, my little brother, caught me slipping.

  He stumbled into the orchard, his arms filled with a jumble of papers and notebooks, howling about our work, our agreement, and pleading for me to take him along. I explained to Gwora in English, real calm, that he couldn’t come, that it wasn’t up to me; but he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t understand, and all that time the fellahs were watching me from the gate, whispering to one another in Farsi, until I told him one last time, in Pakhto, why he had to stay home, and when that also didn’t work, I showed him why.

  It didn’t take long.

  After the whupping, I left Gwora in the orchard all crumpled up, trying again and again not to cry, while me and the rest of the fellahs headed out onto the roads of Logar to search all day long for the wolf-dog who, just a few weeks ago, had bitten the tip off my index finger.

  On the First Day

  Wallah, on the morning of my homecoming in the summer of ’05, I arrived at Moor’s house: carsick, pockmarked, jet-lagged, and barbecued raw by the Pakistani sun after an eight-hour trek through the White Mountains (Kabul’s airport belonged to NATO then, so we had to fly into Pakistan and drive up from there), while sweating floods in a black kameez and partug, two sizes too small, which Moor made me wear just before we crossed the border.

  And although I was already confused by the earlier events of the morning—we first stopped briefly at Watak’s marker, which was just this tattered red flag nestled in between some stones, in between a stream and a mulberry tree, whose story no one was willing to tell me—my mind fell into a deeper frenzy when we entered Moor’s compound for the first time in six years.

  About fifty of Moor’s relatives had jammed themselves into the garden of the courtyard, up against the big green gate, and a flood of sparkling dresses and scarves swallowed me as I stepped in. Rahmutallah Maamaa locked me up in a bear hug as Baba stroked my hair and wetted me with old-man smooches, before Abo tore me out of my uncle’s arms and enveloped me into her chest. She stroked my dirty hair with her calloused hands and kept cursing America for stealing her children.

  A short while later, I found myself sitting in a big room of clay, not knowing how I got there, wondering where my parents were, and trying to avoid eye contact with forty or so relatives. I had so much Farsi hurled at me all at once; I didn’t know what to do with it. When I told my khalas and maamaas and cousins that I couldn’t speak Farsi, that I spoke only English and a little Pakhto, most of them murmured and tsked and smiled at me sadly—but not to be outdone, they started to speak, as best they could, in a butchered mixture of English, Pakhto, Farsi, and sign language.

  They asked me if I was hungry, if I was sad, if I was tired, if I was thirsty, if I was happy, if I was scared, constipated, lonely, sick, confused, nauseated, stupid, smart, always this dark, always this cute, always this chubby, always this hairy, this tall, this quiet, nervous, shy, lost.

  I said yes to every single question.

  So they asked me what I wanted more than anything.

  “I want to see the old dog,” I said in English.

  None of them knew what I was talking about.

  “Sag,” I said in Farsi.

  They blew up with laughter, cursed me and my moor, and dragged me out to the orchard.

  Wallah, when I first saw big Budabash standing three-legged beneath his apple tree, pissing on the bark he was chained to, I still thought he was the same old mutt I met and tortured the first summer I came to Logar in ’99. And though I don’t remember much of that first trip, my memory of this dog haunted me all throughout grade school, leaving me sleepless most school nights, so when Agha announced, in the spring of ’05, that he’d scrimped together enough cash for us to visit Logar again, all I could think about was how I was going to get the old dog to forgive me.

  In the orchard, as soon as I saw Budabash, I broke off from my family and rushed his tree with nothing but sabr in my heart and love leaking out my fingertips (Wallah!), and it was only after he crouched and lunged and swallowed forever the very tip of my index finger, that I saw in his blue-moon’s eye, in the heart of the eyeball, what no one else was willing to see up until that point: that Budabash was not a dog at all but something more like a mutant or a demon.

  Wallah.

  So seeing what I did, and with nothing much else to do in the country while my cousins were off at school, for the next few weeks I called a jihad against Budabash. Until, of course, about thirty-one days later, when he got free.

  On the Thirty-Second Morning

  Just outside the big blue gate of Moor’s compound, I rubbed my brother’s snot off my knuckles and followed the fellahs toward the path. The road we walked curved upward into a bend that would lead into a sort of maze of interconnected clay compounds, which would then open out onto the main trail cutting through Naw’e Kaleh, Mohammad Agha District, Logar Province. If we walked this trail for long enough (a few miles or so), it would take us all the way to Agha’s compound.

  When we entered the first alley of the maze, I started counting the iron doors that appeared on either side of me, but because the walls of the compound all blended into one another, I soon got dizzy from all the twists and turns and lost track of where one compound ended and the next began. Luckily, we had Gul guiding us. We followed him, hopping back and forth along both sides of a drain or a little canal that was supposed to collect runoff from the neighboring rows of compounds.

  If you didn’t know your way, Gul explained, or if you didn’t have a guide, it was easy to get lost in the alleys. That’s part of the reason why the Russians had such a hard time taking Naw’e Kaleh in the early ’80s. No space for the tanks, you understand, or larger artillery, but plenty of room for mujahideen ambushes. Some twenty years later, the American troops would have the same problem.

  But that day no one seemed too worried about getting caught up in any Afghan-American crossfire. While places like Kandahar and Helmand, I heard, were getting fucked up with drone strikes and night raids, the US Army in Logar mostly carried out their secret operations in the surrounding black mountains, bombing the shit out of the burrows where the Ts and th
e other rebels (Pakistani double agents? Arab mercenaries? illiterate goat-men?) were supposed to be hiding with Baba Bin Laden and Mullah Omar and Carmen Sandiego, so that those of us down in the river valleys only ever heard the softest hum of gunfire, the gentlest tremble of stone.

  Really, if we had anything to be worried about that day, heading out onto those roads, it was running into Rahmutallah Maamaa.

  Earlier that morning he’d gathered the four of us together in the den and told us not to follow him. “I need some men to stay home in case Budabash comes back,” he said. “You understand?”

  He stood in the doorway with Budabash’s chain slung over his shoulder. His kufi on his head. His black beard dripping sweat or morning dew. Whether Rahmutallah Maamaa was praising your crop or threatening your life, he always spoke in a calm, soft tone like he was just reading his thoughts aloud to no one in particular.

  We all nodded our heads wildly even though we knew he was talking only to Gul.

  Gul didn’t argue, but after Rahmutallah Maamaa left, he scoffed at him and started talking shit. “Men?” he said, spitting on the carpet. “He’s treating us like kids.”

  “We are kids,” Zia told him.

  “You stay a fucking kid,” Gul said, and walked out of the den, leaving me and Zia and Dawood behind. The three of us stood in the doorway, not saying a thing but communing among ourselves with gestures and worried looks and groans. Zia seemed the most hesitant. He’d be risking more than the rest of us since Rahmutallah Maamaa was his father. Disobeying an uncle, like I was about to do, or disobeying an older brother, like Gul and Dawood were about to do, was nothing compared with deceiving your own pops. And if it was anyone else calling us out, we probably would’ve obeyed our natural instincts to avoid, at all costs, an ass whupping. But it wasn’t anyone else. It was Gul.

  So we followed him.

  After Gul got us out of the maze, we found ourselves on the main road for the first time. It was made of a hard, dark clay and it sloped down in between some fields and another series of compounds. Rows of chinar and a thin stream ran along its edges. In the fields near the road, farmers and their laborers tended to their crop. The sun (acting ahjez) barely showed its face. I watched all this as a rush of wind rolled down somewhere from the black mountains and hit me square in the mouth. It stank of smoke, and I started coughing.