In 2000, as the Taliban regime planned to promote cricket, I was at a loss to understand how a tyranny would introduce cricket into Afghanistan without any knowledge of a game that encourages individuality, confidence, courage and defiance. The Taliban had banned every form of entertainment from music to movies. Then surprisingly, the regime announces cricket can be played in Afghanistan. The Taliban applied to the International Cricket Council for associate membership, backed by Pakistan. The council did not respond until after the regime was driven out of power in 2001.
That was the genesis of the idea. I wanted to write about tyranny and what it does to people, and how people subtly rebel against it. Cricket was the ideal game for the project, deceptively calm yet with simmering discontent below the flannels. I needed to create a cricket match between the state-sponsored team and another local one. Since cricket was an unknown in Afghanistan, who would train this novice Eleven to take on the semi-pros and win. An Indian or Australian Test cricketer? That was not exactly exciting.
I love cricket. I was nurtured on the game, along with my sisters and female cousins, and I thought here was a chance to create a woman who could play the game and inspire her cousins, spiritually, to rebel, through this game, against the Taliban regime. However, as a woman, she could not be a member of the team.
But how would she know the game? Afghan women over the centuries had been discouraged from playing any kind of sport. And the only popular sport in the country was Buzkashi — a game with the players mounted on horses and a headless goat as the ball. So having decided to make the cricket coach a woman, I had to get her to learn the game in another country. In this case, India, where her father is a diplomat and she learns cricket in school and college.
Under any tyranny, women are affected first and the most. They are enslaved, raped, taken into forced marriages, trafficked, and deprived of economic opportunities which could give them independence. So many crimes are committed against them by men. Under the Taliban rule, they are stigmatised for being women. That baffled me — they were into suppressing their grandmothers, mothers, sisters and wives.
Home and grave
The regime had a bizarre Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice and it ruled that women should be seen only in the home and the grave. Already today, women are confined to their homes and can only leave accompanied by their mahram, a male relative.
Back then, I started making notes on a possible book, but after the Taliban lost power in 2001, I set the idea aside. The Taliban slipped off the radar. However, when the Taliban reappeared again in greater force over the past few years, I looked at my early notes and decided to write about that time when it decided to introduce cricket.
I set my novel in 2000, and researched Afghanistan’s long and turbulent history. In the first Anglo-Afghan war, on January 9, 1842, 16,500 British soldiers and civilians retreated from Kabul. Only William Bryden survived the massacre. Also I read about Malalai, a woman from a small village, who rallied the Afghan fighters in the second Anglo-Afghan war. When the Afghan flag-bearer died, Malalai used her veil as a banner to lead the Afghan soldiers. She died in the battle, but was never forgotten. Many schools and hospitals are named after her, and she is considered Afghanistan's greatest heroine — that nation’s version of Joan of Arc.
Besieged city
I then visited Kabul, was met at the airport by a trained driver, guide and bodyguard, and the introduction to the besieged city was a stark warning. To enter my hotel, I passed through three barriers protected by three gunmen and 10-foot blast walls. I had introductions to meet men and women. We see Afghans through the dust and mourning of a television camera and over the days, I found them to be the most hospitable, friendly, generous people. An official who took a day off from work drove me around the city and out to a distant lake. We ended up at the Kabul football stadium. He told me as a boy it was compulsory to attend the matches and at half time, the Taliban executed people for entertainment. It made him sick and he managed to avoid many matches. He insisted I lunch at his home. I did and his driver too sat with us around the platters of food in the centre. I learned that Afghans treat all people with the same respect. My host’s wife, however, remained hidden from view as his son served us.
I needed to hear of the lives of women who had lived under the Taliban regime, and survived, for my story. That was not a problem at all. I met them in their offices and homes — stylish, smart, with a sense of humour — and listened to their past experiences. They were free and independent now, but still wanted anonymity. Ironically, they all felt sorry for their men who had to grow beards and perform prayers five times a day under the Taliban. They laughed at their memories of how when they first wore the burkha, they tripped over the hems; on the road they had accidents as they did not know how to turn their heads to look left and right, and not glance as their vision was restricted by the veil.
And on the streets, I saw the schoolgirls in uniforms on their way to school, like children all over the world; women alone, in pairs, fashionably dressed, and bold with makeup; even those in burkhas wore high heels. One young, vivacious woman with an easy laugh caught my imagination, and she was my Rukshana. She is a journalist reporting, under a pseudonym, on the atrocities of the Taliban.
As a woman, how could my Rukshana teach her cousins this great game? In a burkha, how could she bowl, play a cover drive, run to catch a high ball for the boys to learn. I discovered that many Afghan families, from all classes, if they do not have a son, they disguise their young daughters as boys — bacha posh, which means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari. When the bacha posh outgrows the male deception, she reverts to being a daughter. I dressed Rukshana as a young man to teach the game in the seclusion of the deserted Kabul University campus. But she does end up batting and keeping wicket, dressed as a big bacha posh.
Violent turn
Over the past few days, many leaders have criticised the abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, worrying for the women and children back under Taliban rule. An Afghan woman said, “Now I have to burn everything I achieved.”
In negotiating with the Taliban, a key clause was women’s rights, which the Taliban refuse to discuss. The Taliban are only one in a long line of religious bigots who have suppressed women throughout the ages. We live in a world tyrannised by what one can only think of as a small group of men. They use violence to impose their beliefs on and against others.
In this war on terror, their effect on us is the erosion of our freedom, an impact far larger than the size of their army. We have less freedom to travel freely, we are watched and monitored in our daily lives, we move cautiously because of the dangers that can explode around us. The Taliban, like extreme right wings of other religions, are trying to create a parallel universe to the reality — a parallel religion, a parallel culture, tenuously linked to the real religion and the real culture. And this is just the beginning. We have years more of such erosions awaiting us.
Tyranny is a contagious disease. If we look around our 21st century world, there are many potential autocrats who are eroding fragile democracies. As the Taliban return to bloody power, I think of my Rukshana and the women I met years ago, and their female children, returning to the confines of the home or the grave.
Aleph published The Taliban Cricket Club in India.
tnmurari@hotmail.com
