It wasn’t the intrusive smell of cardamom, no. It wasn’t even the spicy aroma of cloves. It was something more secret, sweeter, because that fragrance existed only in my childhood. The smell of overripe bananas with sugar and cinnamon. My grandmother used to make that for me when I was young. And she made sure I had two helpings. That was my favourite smell. It was an unsullied, clear, unearthly tone with beauty and vigour, as if the fragrance could sing a clean high C as high as heaven and stars, and not show the strain.
Nabiha Gul, my grandmother, porcelain skinned, green eyed beauty who used Cuticura talcum in every crevice of her body for as long as I remember, outlives her siblings at sixty three, far older than the average life expectancy of 42 for Afghan women. The milky, musk scent that wafted from her fur mufflers and silkburqas invaded me like everyday breeze breaking through the branches and losing itself in me. She would fill our pockets with mulberries and walnuts, plait our hair and shove us out of our houses. “Cross your legs,” she would say, “lower your gaze. You must learn not to laugh, and if you must laugh, then see to it that you don’t cackle like Murtaza’s hens.” We had no chicken but the noise of the neighbours’ hens screeching and hooting and trespassing was enough for me to get the message. “If you must go outside make sure you are accompanied and that you and your company walk as far away from men as possible,” she would list out the dos and don’ts.
“There’s something else wafting in the air of Afghanistan now. The smell of detritus, diesel, burnt plastic and blood. The smell of blood coursing down men’s bodies. Fresh blood, dried blood, deep wounds…”
My cousins and I, all of us barely women yet, would sneak out into the blistering sun, climb the lower branches of poplar trees in market outside my father’s house, our salwar covered legs dangling over the hot sand and watch the hawkers go by. Hassan Ali baking bread over a bed of charcoal, tending his lamb-onion-tomato kebabs. They were beautiful. Cut into neat shapes, perfectly fried; the nose tickling pepper that he sprinkled on them, waiting to evaporate up our noses and trigger sensations. What the kebabs were not, however, was varied. His customers expected lamb kebabs, and that’s what he gave them. Then there were honeybees finding comfort in the sweetness of Farooq’s freshly extracted honey, often tumbling into the honey pot headfirst and dying a slow, sticky death. Another trader, with skin that spoke of his travels far and wide, sold emeralds from Panjshir valley. Of single profound saturated, transparent hue, not so much an emerald as the name would suggest, more the green starboard light of a ship gliding by in the dark.
The bazaar would empty by dusk, by the time mullah would bellow the azan from the Haji Yagoob Mosque, calling for the faithful to unroll their mats. I would trot back home in the mud between closely packed cubicles, where you could buy a newly slaughtered pheasant as well as fragrances in glass bottles- rose, lemon, orange blossom. A thousand flowers assiduously culled by lesser beings and mixed together like a chorus of praise to feminine beauty. And musk. Ah musk! Musk is what a spoonwing wasp would wear; all business like, straight wings, and austere stripes, settling on your hand and walking around briskly trying to figure out whether to bite deep, sting or simply ignore you. Musk is what my man would wear! I could ask Baba to gift my man a bottle for my wedding. Grandmother always told me even the Prince of Persia would marry me willingly, while I rested my head on her lap wondering if I would ever find a man as handsome as Baba? “You have your mother’s nose. And nose is symbol of woman’s beauty,” she would say, stroking my nose. And she would sing me an old Hazara song:
Noses have pity, a lover knows.
Noses always touch when lips are kissing.
And who would be bothered to kiss if nose was missing?
I know a nose, a nose no other knows,
‘Neath glittery eyes, o’er wine-coloured lips it grows.
One evening I was called to Baba’s study. Blue smoke swirled around his face as he smoked his tobacco; the medieval fairy tale smell of ink, smoke and woody mulch. His glare made my throat dry. I perhaps stood there for a minute. But to this day, it was one of the longest minutes of my life. Seconds plodded by, each separated by the next with infinity. Most days, I worshipped Baba to the point of religiousness. But that day, I wish my veins would open up and drain out his blood that I had in me. “Aisha, women are like flowers, or a rose. You water it and keep it at home for you to look at and smell. It is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled.” That was the first day I wore the burqa. A long blue nylon sheet that covered me from head to toe. For few panicky seconds, I could not find the net of the blue nylon that is supposed to go in front of your eyes so that you can see enough to walk on the street . This net, being my only link to the outside world. And then I got used to it. Just like I got used to the sweet-sour smell of sweat and saliva that it started to emit after an hour of use.
There’s something else wafting in the air of Afghanistan now. The smell of detritus, diesel, burnt plastic and blood. The smell of blood coursing down men’s bodies. Fresh blood, dried blood, deep wounds… There are huge piles of human shit where we live, mixed with pages from famous American magazines. A smeared Vogue cover; I think I see The Economist too and then Keira Knightly peers at me from between feculences, flies kissing her face like teenage boys probably do to their posters in their bedrooms. There is shade of post-apocalypse. Not like Iraq though. In Iraq, in Baghdad, they remembered that their capital was once beautiful.
We all stood there in the backyard yesterday. Me and my in-laws. Mullah recited the prayers, rubbing his thigh every now and then. He picked up the kitchen knife with a long blade. The convention is to let the goat not see the knife. Murad, my husband, fed the goat a sugar cube, to make death sweeter. The goat kicked, but not much. Just a second before Murad slivered the throat of the animal, I saw its eyes. It is a look that will haunt me for years. But I watched. I watched because of that look of acceptance in the goat’s eyes. I guess the animal sees that its looming demise is for a superior purpose.
I want to tear away from this place, from reality. Ascend up like a cloud and soar away, melt into the cold winter night and dissolve somewhere far over the hills. But I am here on a pile of snow, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs filled with the smell of Murad’s breath of onion and tobacco. I pass out. Then, in the middle of the night, I feel like there is cold water in my nose. I open my eyes and can’t even see because of all the blood. I hear chatter, subdued sobbing and sniffling. The elevator doors opening, the operator paging someone in English. And then the smell of iodine and peroxide hits me, and all I have time before I pass out is to see two men wearing surgical caps dressing me in a green gown. This was a day of firsts. The first time my father-in-law held my feet. The first time my brother-in-law held my arms behind my back. The first time I tried to run away from home.
I wake up to grandmother sitting on my bedside. Except my eyes, my face is covered in bandages. She begins to say something and her voice cracks. She closes her mouth, opens it and closes it again. She wipes her face and smiles. She pretended she didn’t hear who did this to me. Just like she pretended that she didn’t know Baba married me to a Taliban fighter to repay a debt. Just like she pretended she didn’t know I was made to sleep in a stable with animals. Or she hadn’t seen the dark stain on the seat of my burqa earlier in the evening. Or those tiny drops that fell from between my legs and stain the snow black as I stood bleeding at her doorstep. Like she pretended not seeing the blank space and blood on my face, where my nose should have been.
