The Women Among Us

This is a story about an Afghan woman who has the spirit of an boxer who stands until the last round with scars upon her face and blood breaking up her vision.

Discovering the most critical elucidation of the choices that are faced before me, I hurdle myself at the mercy of those who are my executioners.  I will not relent.  I will not relent, but I will, I must look into their eyes, each and every one of them as the pull the cool trigger of death, taking another life in an unspeakable act that seems so much like another turn of the page.  My crimes were few.  I was an honest woman who felt that it was within her rights to speak up and exercise just exactly who she was.  I wanted to show myself to the world, take down my headdress, removes my scarf with all of its historical implications and go naked before the tribe.  I had seen the brutality that was committed against woman who had committed such acts of treason by showing themselves without the traditional garb in the open squarer and the powerful wrath which they invoked had more layers than a 1 1000 years old tree’s rings.  Wisdom, it was said, was silence.  That was the way of the omen in my village.  We trotted along, keeping to ourselves  as the men grew increasingly more frightening with their bulges of powerful ostentatiousness.  That and their guns.  It was always their guns that changed the shape of the dynamic, like a calm breeze that brushed the mosquitos out of your face on a cool summer’s night.

When me and my sister Eliana and her best friend Ikabal were smoking by the fire, we began to let the demons of temptation flow through our very brains.  We let the poppy seeds explode in a world of exultation which was unspeakable to the terrestrials who had never experienced it before.  There was no space, there was not time, there was only thought and ideation and chaos, with a fine veneer of salt that was brought in by the Indian Sea’s fine waters.  We were off.  Off far and away from this dreaded place and spinning like three satellites without a sense of their orbit.  We were drifting, tossing and turning, but elated in our new freedom from the shackles that tied us down each and every night and the dark, smelly sweat of the men who would shove themselves onto us and into us as if were were the goats running through the center of town.  The freedom was essential, it seemed real, if but only for a moment and the three of us would treasure these times when we could escape with the poppy into another world, one where we could finally be free.  

But with time that freedom began to demand a cost.  Our bodies began to hang ********from stars as the future began to underestimate us just the way the present did, in a way that was dismissive and insulting all at the same time.  F**k the stars.  F**k them in all of their insolar madness.  Why does the future need to judge us in the way that it does.  Why does the future need to decide if we are going to contribute to the line that is being towed by all of humanity of whether we are going to question it and demand the truth for all to see.  it is those who demand that truth that are beseeched in thto the wilderness.  They are cut off from the pomp and the circumstances and isolated out into the margins.  A marginal existence where the crazies are in control and they are the only ones you can bounce a sane idea off of.  A place where reality has lost its firm grip, a place where no one will believe a word you say, but everyone believes in the conspiracy.  The conspiracy that says that someone was acting against you.  Someone was unmerciful in their denial of your true passions, your true feelings, your soul.  You have been cast out.  Cast out of the web of humanity and into the poor righteous excrement where together you are strong, but often in this extraneous world it is so difficult to be together.  If only there was a common voice, a common language for all to speak of the misdeeds that have been done to the collective whole.  There were misdeeds to be sure.  A wide variety of them that led us here to this place and to this time.  The time where no one will believe and no one will listen and no one will insist that you have a right to state your case, to speak your mind.  You are not forgotten, however.  That would be too easy.  That would be too obvious.  You are discarded and remembered, a fate altogether worse than the latter.  One where the intent of the evil inflicted is unmerciful and knowing in all its pain and in all of its sorrow.  One push of the finger toward a grave that you are yet to know, but the future has already dug for you.  A place where the witches hunt, where the merchants embezzle and the roaches cackle in the dark, black night.  It is the grave to which you are pushed that has so many of the answers to the riddles of the here and now.  It has so many of the overlapping lands of the spider’s threads of the past and the foggy future.  One where free will seems like a distant memory, one where the machines have long since taken over and humanity only has the faintest wink in the eye of history.  What will the story tell, you ask?  Who will be the one to reveal all of the damage that has been done, all of the verdicts concealed, those that were decided before the evidence had discovered the truth and those who had seen the truth, and then chose to sweep it all away under that cataclysmic lies of a society that values the pursuit of the highest god of money above all else. It is here where the kingdom is built atop the burned carcasses of those who have attempted to bring about its destruction.  It is atop these carcasses that the future lay, with all of its darkness swirling among the young, sleepless sheep who walk into their deaths with the finality of sheep grazing on grass that is too young to have seen the sun shine in the morning dew.  These sheep, do not know to look up.  They do not know to question for they have been happy all of their lives.  They have been happy to eat and feed upon the seeds of their ancestors that they have laid down in the soil so rich from the blood stained wars that have rotted these lands.  Of course, the sheep did not know that it was the flesh of their own ancestors that they were being feed.  It was the destruction of the past that kept them so happy and willfully blind to what was going to occur in the future.   The sheep always kept their heads down..  They always just kept their heads down and just kept marching on taking orders from those ahead and from those behind, being one of many riding the assembly line of their own destruction.  Once and a blue moon, a young goat would stick her head up, for some reason, she would pause for a brief moment and stick her head up above the crowd to take a look in some vacant direction, not for any purpose, but because something in the wind or in the heavens had made her stop and feel a change in the wind.  A change that was not even perceptible to this young creature.  One that was a whisper in time, a whisper washing over the world in a sea change of detachment.  And in that moment, when the sheep lifts its head to see what is going on, to take a quick look at the world that she has never seen before for some unknown reason, she is struck down by the mighty sickle of the shepherd and is taken.  Taken as one of many who have been taken before her in the name of solidarity, in the name of obedience, in the name of the mission.  It seemed so innocent, so infinitesimal, so miniature, but where there was one, there were many thousands more and the speck of a judgement amassed, and with millions of others like her, cast out a great shriek that would demand justice be done to her oppressors.  But it was just as this shriek began to take shape in the throat of this lamb, that she would be silenced.  Her voice was silenced and never to be heard from again, like the countless others whose candle had been extinguished and whose spirit had died.  That day, like countless other days, a voice was struck down.  But that day, unlike the endless others that had passed by since the reign of the Coda Culas, there would be one voice, a quiet internal voice that would speak up and never be silenced.  For this was the type of voice that never could be.

 I awoke from a deep slumber as the poppies began to wear off and that medicinal taste began to deliver itself to the back of my throat.  I had returned.  Returned from my trip and now I was back in my tin thatched house that leaked every time the Gods decided to let the rain fall down from the clouds.  How I hated the rain, no matter how good it was for our fields, no matter how good it was for the village.  Somehow, the drops from the sky felt like they were poisoning me, just a mere mockery from some distant world that I would never see.  Only in my dreams.  Only in my dreams.  Like a slap in the face, my husband’s smell began to waft over me as I knew he had discovered my transgressions from the night before. 

The beatings would come and I knew that I had to leave my body quickly.  That was the only way I could endure the pain.  The heroin had taught me that.  How to leave.  How to escape.  How to be in another far off land when in reality I was actually just eating the grass in the fields, or feeling the sting of the ring of the back side of my husband’s hand.  He beat me, alright.  And this time, it was unmerciful.  I could not see for two weeks because the skin over my left eye had been blown up so much that it felt like a balloon that was near explosion.  The throbbing was unbearable, but the way that I was able to continue on was the satisfaction that I was able to derive from the the horrified expression from nearly everyone that I encountered.  I did not even need to speak, for they all know from whence my wounds came.  They injuries almost became a badge of honor for me, one that I could carry around in grand defiance, as if to say to the world, “This is who my husband is, this is what India is and I am not ashamed to wear this badge of defiance.  Look at me, look into my eyes and you will see the pain of all of my ancestors and their ancestors before them.”  

I knew I had not been the first to have been beaten in my family, as I washed my bloodied, swollen face by the water well.  There had been many before and there would be many in the future, but I was not going to be someone who had gone the way of throes before me.  I was going to stand tall.  I was going to wear my wounds like a badge of honour for all the village to see.  And I would not look down.  I would not look away, for I was not ashamed of the things I had done.  It was my husband who should be ashamed and all of the villagers for allowing this to happen.  

My son, Akbar, was only three and did not know what had happened to me.  Or rather, I should say, it was not that he did not know, but it was that he did know where I had received my injuries or that this was anything unusual because he had seen this type of injury from me before in the past.  Sadly, my husband Jamba, was one of the most vindictive men in the village and also, one of the most foolish.

We had been married when I was 12 and he was a handsome young man of 20.  I had been sold off to him from my parents who felt that this would be the best thing for me.  Akbar was my father’s cousin’s son.  We were second cousins and this was a near perfect match given our ages, and our family connections.  My father paid Akbar’s father a princely sum to take me off his hands.  My father and I were never close and I had expected the day of my marriage to come sooner than it did.  I was ready.  Ready to leave my house.  My father had made it almost impossible for me to have any kind of life because he was always demanding my attention and trying to bend my will to his beliefs.

I remember being a small child and willfully disagreeing with him on the way we were tending the herd.  He felt that the herd had to be dealt with with a strong and swift hand, one that showed no mercy for the goats that were slow or for those who were unhealthy.  He had a staff that he used to wield over them and beat the ones who were not quick enough.  There was one excruciating hot day where the sun almost cut through my skin, it was so hot that I saw deep into the recesses of my father’s soul.  He had been rounding up the goats, trying to bring them to the market, where they would be milked and, in turn, the milk would be sold to the rest of the villagers.