The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Read Online Free PDF Page B

which turned the world slightly blue.
    The family invited Malika to stay for dinner, and after sharing a plate of rice and potatoes by candlelight on the living room floor, she stood up and put on the chadri. The hem of her fashionable brown suit pants stuck out from beneath the veil. Malika had worn the covering only a few times before when visiting family in the provinces, and she now found it tricky to maneuver among the slippery pleats and panels. She struggled to see out through the small eye vent, which was just two inches long and three and a half inches wide. She tripped over the fabric while saying her last good-byes to Soraya's family.
    “One of my sons will bring the chadri back to you soon,” Malika said, embracing her friend and rescuer.
    She took Hossein by the hand and began to walk home under the starry evening sky, stepping slowly and carefully to make certain she didn't trip again. She prayed the rockets would wait for her to make it back safely.
    Days would pass before she would see her family in Khair Khana and share her harrowing story. Malika, it turned out, was among the first to experience what lay ahead for them all. It would be just as the young woman at Sayed Jamaluddin had predicted.
    2
    A Time of Good-byes
    The radio hummed static from its perch on the living room shelf. Kamila's father, Woja Abdul Sidiqi, placed his ears against the old Chinese machine's black speakers and tried to decipher the BBC reporter's words. An imposing man with a shock of white hair and an angular, nearly regal visage, Mr. Sidiqi revealed his army roots in his military posture and serious demeanor. The children looked on silently; no one ever dared interrupt this somber evening ritual. He gingerly adjusted the aging machine's dials and soon the living room was filled with the sound of the BBC's Persian news service broadcast live from London. The evening program, always a staple of Mr. Sidiqi's dinnertime routine, had now become the family's main link to the outside world.
    Dramatic bulletins had arrived over the radio in the month since the bearded, turbaned young Taliban troops rolled into Kabul in heavy tanks and shiny Japanese pickup trucks, euphoric in what they claimed was their divine triumph. On the first morning they hanged the communist former president, Dr. Najibullah, from a red and white striped traffic post in Ariana Square, right in the center of downtown Kabul. Since he was loathed for his close ties to the godless Soviets and his crackdown on Islamist figures during the 1980s, the Taliban put his assassination on grisly display for all the world to see. They dangled cigarettes from the former president's lifeless mouth and stuffed his pants pockets with money to symbolize his moral bankruptcy. His battered and swollen corpse languished for two days at the end of a rope.
    Mr. Sidiqi had been recruited to the army as a teenager in the 1960s by a government official who had come to visit his home province of Parwan. He saw a great deal of political turmoil in his military career as an artilleryman, topographer, and senior adviser, including the 1973 overthrow of the sitting king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, by his former prime minister Mohammad Daoud Khan. Daoud dissolved the monarchy and declared the country a republic, but five years later he was murdered by an educated group of communist hard-liners who routinely imprisoned, tortured, and killed their opponents. The Soviet Union became convinced that the revolutionaries they once supported could no longer be trusted, and in 1979 the Red Army invaded. Afghanistan had been at war ever since.
    Each of the governments Mr. Sidiqi served had faced a near-constant threat of overthrow from rivals both within and without, and all relied on the army to maintain stability. But today a vastly different military force was in control, and their tactics were very new and very public. Crowds of boys and men piled into the busy intersection at Ariana Square to see for