One evening Sharifa dolls herself up to visit some distant relatives. Normally they would not qualify for courtesy visits even though they live only a few blocks away. Sharifa totters along in sky-high pumps, followed by Sultan and Shabnam sauntering behind, hand in hand.
They are welcomed with open arms. The host puts out dried fruit and nuts, sweets and tea. They start off with formalities and the latest news. The children listen to the parents’ prattle. Shabnam cracks pistachios and is bored.
One of the children is missing, thirteen-year-old Belqisa. She knows to stay away; the visit is about her.
Sharifa has been here before, on the same mission. This time Sultan has reluctantly agreed to accompany her, to add gravity to the situation. They are there on behalf of Yunus – Sultan’s younger brother. He fell for Belqisa when he lived as a refugee in Pakistan a few years ago, when she was only a child. He has asked Sharifa to propose for him. He has never himself spoken to the girl.
The answer has always been the same: she is too young. On the other hand, if they wanted the older daughter, Shirin, who was twenty, that would be another matter. But Yunus did not want her, she was not nearly as beautiful as Belqisa, and anyhow, she was a bit too eager, he thought. When he visited she was always around him. In addition she had let him hold her hand when the others were not looking, and that, Yunus thought, was a bad sign. She was obviously not a virtuous girl.
But the parents held out for the older daughter, because Yunus was a good proposition. When Shirin had other proposals they approached Sultan and offered her to Yunus for the last time. But Yunus did not want Shirin. His eyes were on Belqisa and there they stayed.
In spite of being rejected, Sharifa has returned continually to ask for Belqisa. It was not seen as rudeness; on the contrary, it indicated the seriousness of the proposal.
Tradition says the mother of a suitor must wear out the soles of her shoes until they are as thin as garlic skin. As Yunus’s mother, Bibi Gul, was in Kabul, Sharifa, his sister-in-law, had taken on the role of go-between. She enlarged on Yunus’s excellence, how he spoke fluent English, how he worked in the bookshop with Sultan and how their daughter would lack for nothing. But Yunus was nearly thirty. Too old for Belqisa, the parents thought.
Belqisa’s mother had her eye on one of the other young boys in the Khan family: Mansur, Sultan’s sixteen-year-old son. ‘If you offer us Mansur we’ll accept on the spot,’ she said.
But now it was Sultan’s turn to dig his heels in. Mansur was only a few years older than Belqisa, and he had never even cast a glance in her direction. Sharifa thought it was too early to think of marriage. He was going to study, see the world.
‘Anyhow, she’s not thirteen,’ Sharifa said to her girl-friends a bit later. ‘I’m sure she’s at least fifteen.’
Belqisa walks into the room for a few moments so Sultan can give her the once-over. She is tall and thin and looks older than thirteen. She is wearing a dark-blue velvet costume, and sits down beside her mother – awkward and shy. Belqisa knows exactly what this is all about and feels uncomfortable.
‘She’s crying, she doesn’t want to,’ her two older sisters tell Sultan and Sharifa in front of Belqisa. Belqisa looks down.
But Sharifa laughs. It’s a good sign when the bride is unwilling. That indicates a pure heart.
Belqisa gets up after a few minutes and disappears. Her mother excuses her and says she has a maths test the next day. But the chosen one is not supposed to be present during the bargaining. First the opposing sides test the water before they get down to actual sums. How much the parents will get, how much will be spent on the wedding, the dress and the flowers. The groom’s family pays all expenses. The fact that Sultan is present gives the discussion gravitas; he has the money.
When the visit is over and nothing has been decided, they walk out into the cool March evening. The streets are quiet. ‘I don’t like the family,’ Sultan says. ‘They are greedy.’
It is especially Belqisa’s mother he is not keen on. She is her husband’s second wife. When his first wife never conceived he married again, and the new wife tormented the first one to such a degree that she could stand it no longer and moved in with her brother. Nasty stories circulate about Belqisa’s mother. She is grasping, jealous and avaricious. Her oldest daughter married one of Sultan’s relatives who said that she was a nightmare during the wedding ceremony, complaining constantly that there was too little food, too few decorations. ‘As mother so daughter. Belqisa’s a chip off the old block,’ states Sultan.
But he adds grudgingly that if she’s the one Yunus wants, he’ll do his best. ‘Unfortunately they’ll end up saying yes. Our family is too good to turn down.’
Having done his duty by the family, Sultan can at last start doing what he came to Pakistan for: print books. Early one morning he starts the next stage of the journey, to Lahore, the town of printing, bookbinding and publishing.
He packs a small suitcase with six books, a calendar and a change of clothes. As always when he travels, his money is sewn into his shirtsleeves. The day looks like being warm. The bus depot in Peshawar is seething with people and the bus companies struggle to make themselves heard over the din. ‘ Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore!’ By each bus a man stands and screams. There is no timetable; the buses depart when they are full. Before departure men selling nuts, small cornets full of sunflower seeds, biscuits and crisps, newspapers and magazines board the bus. Beggars content themselves with reaching hands through open windows.
Sultan ignores them. He follows the Prophet Muhammad’s advice with regard to alms which he interprets thus: First take care of yourself, then your closest family, then other relatives, then neighbours, and last the unknown poor. He might slip a few Afghani to a beggar in Kabul, but Pakistani beggars are at the bottom of the list. Pakistan will have to see to its own poor.
He sits in the back row of the bus, squashed between other travellers, his suitcase under his feet. In it is his life’s undertaking, written on a scrap of paper. He wants to print Afghanistan ’s new schoolbooks. When the schools open this spring there will hardly be any textbooks. Books printed by the Mujahedeen government and the Taliban are useless. This is how first-year schoolchildren learn the alphabet: ‘J is for Jihad, our aim in life, I is for Israel, our enemy, K is for Kalashnikov, we will overcome, M is for Mujahedeen, our heroes, T is for Taliban…’
War was the central theme in maths books too. Schoolboys – because the Taliban printed books solely for boys – did not calculate in apples and cakes, but in bullets and Kalashnikovs. Something like this: ‘Little Omar has a Kalashnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels. How many infidels does he kill with each bullet?’
Books from the Communist period cannot be used either.
Their arithmetic problems deal with land distribution and egalitarian ideals. Red banners and happy collective farmers would guide children towards Communism.
Sultan wanted to return to the books from the time of Zahir Shah, the king who ruled for forty comparatively peaceful years before he was deposed in 1973. He has found old books he can reprint: stories and myths for Persian lessons, maths books where one plus one equals two, and history books cleansed of ideological content other than a bit of innocent nationalism.
UNESCO has promised to finance the country’s new schoolbooks. As one of the largest publishers in Kabul, Sultan has had meetings with them and will give them an offer once he has been to Lahore. On the scrap of paper in his waistcoat he has scribbled down page numbers and formats of 113 schoolbooks. The budget is calculated at two million dollars. In Lahore he will investigate which printers come up with the best deals. Thereafter he will return to Kabul and compete for the gilt-edged contract. Sultan contemplates contentedly how large a cut he can demand of the two million. He decides not to be too greedy. If he wins the contract he is assured work for many years to come – from reprints and new books. He reflects as fields and plains whizz past along the road, which is the main thoroughfare between Kabul and Calcutta. The closer they get to Lahore the warmer it gets. Sultan sweats in his homespun clothes from the Afghan highlands. He strokes his hair, where only a few strands remain, and wipes his face with a handkerchief.