Part Two
The fire that love sets ablaze in the heart—no one else can feel its heat. Only the lover knows how consuming that flame can be.
Lala Mohsin once said, “Love is a strange, incurable pain. No one knows when it will come to a person.”
One day, Sonia and I were walking home from school.
Sonia asked me,
“Will you come to my wedding?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I replied.
Then she told me about her fiancé. He was one of her relatives.
Their house was filled with music and singing.
My grandmother began cursing them. She closed the ursi windows and complained that we lived in Kucha-e-Kharabat.
Shafiq was sitting there holding a glass of water, wearing his characteristic smile, and was just about to drink.
And I, like a rooster crowing at the wrong time, suddenly said,
“Why, Bibi Jan? After all, it is Sonia’s wedding. They should have music and singing.”
Shafiq squeezed the glass so hard that it shattered in his hand.
The water mixed with the blood from his wounded hand and splashed across the tablecloth and the food.
His secret love had been exposed.
The tray of his hidden shame had fallen from the rooftop.
My mother and father angrily scolded and punished me for what I had said.
I answered,
“Mother, whether I said it or not, the wedding is on Friday night, and Sonia has invited me too.”
My grandmother poured a thousand curses upon Sanju Lall’s daughter.
“Now I understand why my Shafiq has become so yellow and worn out. Oh, why didn’t I go to a mullah and have my boy’s fortune opened? Woe to me! Dust upon my head!”
Shafiq lost control of himself.
His heart was breaking with grief.
He slammed the door and left the house.
The music coming from Sanju Lall’s house struck his heart like arrows.
From that day on, Shafiq became someone who avoided home.
He would go to Khwaja Safa, play the tula, and express the sorrow in his heart through the language of the flute.
He also confided in Lala Mohsin, the ice-cream seller.
Lala Mohsin was famous for keeping people’s secrets.
He could read what was hidden in Shafiq’s heart, and he kept that sorrow locked inside his own chest so that it would never become the gossip of the town and marketplace.
Shafiq cried.
He played the harmonium.
He sang songs of love.
He released the sorrow from his chest.
He made the university his brother, and in the university of Sonia’s love, he became first in the class.
Lala Mohsin was a doctor of the hearts of lovers.
When he was young, he himself had loved a girl named Fariba, whose body was like a flower. Her charming heart had captured him in its delicate hands.
When Fariba and Lala Mohsin fell in love, their hearts were warmed by the flames of love.
But without Lala Mohsin knowing, Fariba had already been promised to her cousin before they had even been born—before their umbilical cords had been cut.
He, too, had become a captive of love for Fariba, and she had made him a Majnun.
He understood the burning, melting, and pain of love.
That was why he could express the sorrow of his own heart through the poetry of Ashqari.
Whenever I remember the flower-faced beauties of Kabul,
I swallow cups of the poison of separation.
I have grown old; my body has bent in two, yet still,
Like a wine vessel, I bubble with longing for you.
So that you may never again discover the secret of my love, Ashqari,
Whenever I see my beloved, I pretend not to notice.
By then, Lala Mohsin’s hair and beard had turned completely white, like cotton.
People respectfully called him Lala Mohsin Asir—Lala Mohsin, the Captive.
He promised Shafiq that the following day he would tell him the story of his own captivity.
Then Lala Mohsin said:
“Shafiq Jan, I know what kind of fire love carries. It turns a person into ashes.
“No one sees its burning or its flame. But the lover feels the fire in his heart, and the smoke of that fire comes through his eyes and moistens his face with tears.
“Slowly, the lover’s heart becomes like a rock, indifferent to all the beauties of the world.
“But if a breeze of affection should blow from the mountain of the beloved, the ashes of that burned heart will burst into flame once again.
“Shafiq Jan, I can feel the burning of your heart.”
The back room of Lala Mohsin’s ice-cream shop was, during the day, a meeting place for hundreds of young lovers.
At night, however, it became a place of poetry and song for these two lovesick madmen.
Shafiq would say:
“O misguided heart, you fell in love for nothing—and with someone whose hem I cannot even reach.”
Then came the civil wars and the rocket attacks.
Hindus and Muslims alike were forced to leave their original homes and seek refuge in foreign lands.
Sanju Lall’s family went to India.
The music and string instruments that had once filled Sanju Lall’s house fell silent.
Kucha-e-Kharabat also became silent.
Their fate, too, carried them toward Western countries.
Under the warm sun of the West, the long years of exile gradually cooled some of the warmth in their hearts.
Even my grandmother’s old story of Hindus and Muslims slowly faded from her mind.
Everyone was trying to learn the cultural language and the new language of the country where they now lived.
My grandmother enrolled in a language-learning class.
There, people of different religions sat together.
Not only Hindus, but people from other faiths as well.
Although the language was difficult, she learned one or two words about the new culture and began talking with her classmates.
Sometimes they would sit close together on park benches, knee to knee, and my grandmother would tell them stories about the war in our homeland.
Young people would pass before her, embracing and kissing one another.
In Kabul, such behavior had been considered a great sin—something that could burn a person’s afterlife.
My grandmother would think of Shafiq, her youngest son, and say to herself:
“I wish we had come here a few years earlier, when Shafiq had not yet fallen in love. Perhaps one of these cultured people could have become my son’s destiny.”
She remembered Shafiq’s youth and sighed with regret.
When she looked at the coffee shops, she saw young and old people sitting together, drinking coffee and finding their partners.
“Woe to me, my Shafiq…”
Whenever she became discouraged, her heart felt squeezed under the pressure of the West.
A bitter grief twisted inside her chest.
Because of the language barrier, she sometimes felt humiliated.
She thought:
“If I had not been uprooted from Kabul, I would never have experienced this humiliation.
“There, I was respected and valued as the woman of my household.
“Why did I become dependent on this infidel country?”
But gradually she adapted to the new society.
Little by little, the old ways of thinking began to change within her.
Her former pride and prejudice against Hindus disappeared.
There were several Hindus in her language class, and she began speaking with them as though she had found someone she had lost long ago.
She would even praise the Hindus of our homeland and speak warmly about them.
Our family was surprised—and amused—by the difference between the things she had said yesterday and the way she spoke today.
Both Shafiq and Qasim would laugh and say,
“By God, Nene Jan, you have become an intellectual—a free thinker!”
But Shafiq’s love for Sonia had transformed him.
He became an extraordinary painter.
He painted Sonia again and again, dressed in colorful Indian saris, and beneath each painting he wrote one or two verses by Ashqari.
It was as though the fiery sighs of love had flown from his head to Mount Qaf, while the tears he shed day and night for Sonia’s love had covered his head with white cotton.
Sonia’s love had broken his heart so deeply that not only did his heart tremble, but when he painted, even the fingers holding his small brush trembled, sending the trembling through his entire body.
In the land of exile, there was no Lala Mohsin to understand the language of his love.
So, with fine brushes and good-quality paints, Shafiq replaced his love story with images of Sonia.
He spoke through her painted portraits.
Little by little, Shafiq became known as a gifted and beautiful-creating painter.
All the students and professors knew him.
Sometimes university professors introduced him to artists’ associations.
One day, at a painting exhibition, a beautiful portrait of an Afghan Hindu girl won first prize.
The painting became news on television around the world.
Journalists began following Shafiq and interviewing him.
Every reporter asked the same question:
“What is your final message for television viewers?”
Shafiq had only one message.
It was written beneath the beautiful painting that had won first prize:
“May it reach my beloved.”
And beneath it were these verses:
May you live long, my beloved;
You made me like a mirror.
You made me a pious man,
A Sufi, and a night worshipper.
I was unknown in this world;
I had neither name nor worth.
You gave me a name and a place in the world,
And made me a man of dignity and honor.
— Poetry by Ashqari
Then Shafiq said:
“She must know that the fire of her love is still burning in my heart.”
Sonia, who knew nothing of Shafiq’s one-sided love, watched the images of herself on Indian television.
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The End