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  My father, on the other hand, leaves me alone and is happy as long as I do well in school. My parents know I’m not going to come home pregnant or on drugs.

  Unlike other Afghan girls my age, I don’t go home until I’m done with all my afterschool activities. I fight for the freedom to spend the night at friends’ homes, to go out as late as I want on the weekends, and to dress as I please. Sometimes I want to disown my Afghan identity when I see the inequalities between men and women, but I cannot. Being Afghan is deeply rooted in my soul, but it’s something I’m constantly trying to define. I seem to find the most in common with men my father’s age, who talk about politics and ideas. They also have a connection to our homeland that I share. The men, dressed in suits, visit our two-bedroom apartment and waste little time on small talk. They drink their tea and lose themselves in debate.

  “Islam is not the antidote to communism,” says Mr. Saboor, an engineer with expressive eyebrows. “Look at what the Islamic Revolution did to Iran—it’s where we went on vacation, and now it’s the last place I want to visit. The mujahideen are not going to offer us a better alternative.”

  My father nods his head in agreement. He is a believer in Islam but advocates for a secular government, just as his father, Baba Monshi, did.

  Mr. Aria, however, a descendant of a respected Sufi family, scratches his disheveled mustache and disagrees. “Islam is our heritage and the only ideology that is legitimate among the people. Nationalism and communism have failed, and this American democracy will not work in Afghanistan. The only viable and righteous option is Sharia and Islam.”

  These men indulge in their nostalgia and dream up scenarios for a peaceful Afghanistan. A lament I hear often from them is “Perhaps if we had stayed and tried to find a solution, things would not have gotten so bad.” I share their guilt for leaving, and I chastise my parents for not caring as much as they should have. The Afghan community in California stays connected to Afghanistan through extended family who still live there. But for my family, making a call to Afghanistan is too expensive (and the postal system in Afghanistan is too unreliable). The only time I recall my mother phoning Herat is when she asked for my now sister-in-law’s hand in marriage for my brother. “We would be honored to have your daughter Lila as our bride,” she said to the girl’s father, whom I call Uncle Zarif Khan. That day, the telephone connection was crackly and occasionally broke up.

  So my family stays connected by reading and listening to news about Afghanistan. The only way I can express my identity angst and biculturalism is in writing. When I am in the seventh grade, after my English teacher, Mrs. Lockhart, tells me I can write well, I decide I want to be a journalist. I love to travel, to write, and to get to know people. I pursue my journalism career beginning in high school, by writing a column about cultures in the school newspaper and joining a youth newspaper in San Francisco. One of the stories I do for the paper focuses on gangs, and when I go out to report, I see heroin addicts lying in corners of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, a city with one of the highest rates of drug addiction in the country. A couple lies in each other’s arms, their skin marked with needle punctures. They are pale, lifeless, and skeletal. I stare at them and the girl holds out a can. I have no change and walk away, but their image is imprinted in my head. Then I recall the boy I saw in my middle school library. These two have the same hopeless look on their faces. I wonder if the heroin they are taking comes from Afghanistan.

  At ten PM, on October 7, 2001, in Islamabad, I’m awakened by a knock on my hotel room door. It is what I’ve been expecting for days.

  “The U.S. started bombing,” Rasheed, a colleague from Agence France Presse, tells me. “You need to come down and work.” I do not tell Rasheed how sad I am to hear the news; I don’t share my feelings of ambivalence about the war. I want the Taliban defeated, but without any civilian casualties, which I know is naïve. I simply say okay, slip on my shoes, and walk out the door.

  For the next two months I spend my days on a satellite phone with Afghan mujahideen commanders who are on the front line fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The United States and its allies bomb from the air, while the mujahideen, reunited temporarily under the name United Front, fight on the ground. Afghan experts warn that empowering the mujahideen again will revive hostilities and may result in corruption and civil war. But the United States needs them on the ground—it’s not prepared to risk too many American lives, and besides, the mujahideen know the terrain. The commanders go back to their former territories, to the caves and hideouts they used when they fought the Soviets.

  So the next anticipated heroes for the citizens of Afghanistan are the Americans—most Afghans think they will be saved by them. I call my relatives in Herat and talk to Uncle Ahmed’s son, Bahram, for a minute. “We’re so happy the Americans are coming. We’re standing on our roofs to watch the bombs. It’s like fireworks here,” he says before the line goes dead.

  I’m living on coffee and cigarettes in an office with half a dozen male journalists from Europe, Australia, and Pakistan. We work seventeen-hour days covering the war. There’s no time to ponder the situation or allow my personal feelings about Afghanistan to affect my reporting. I know that the commanders I’m interviewing are professional killers without much regard for human rights. In late November 2001 my most informative source, Mohammad Ashraf Nadeem, a spokesman for the commander Atta Mohammad Noor in Balkh province, says the Taliban are surrendering in large numbers. “But we have some issues with the prisoners. They’ve staged a riot and we’re trying to regain control.”

  “Were they being treated with dignity?” I ask cynically.

  “Commander Atta Mohammad’s men have been fair to them, but others in the United Front are not so kind.”

  The extent of Nadeem’s understatement is revealed a year later by Physicians for Human Rights: fighters under Abdul Rashid Dostum, another powerful northern commander and rival to Atta Mohammad, trapped hundreds of Taliban prisoners in metal truck containers and let them suffocate, then buried their bodies in a mass grave.

  No matter how much I dislike the Taliban, I realize the mujahideen are not a reliable alternative government. The Taliban brought draconian rules to an anarchic country and successfully banished poppy. I wonder what the new U.S.-sanctioned government will do if farmers replant poppy. The world knows that the Americans and their allies will be the victors, but the real battle will begin after the triumph. The smuggling of illicit narcotics is just one of a hundred issues the new government will face.

  After the mujahideen head back to Kabul in November, flanked by American troops, and the United States declares victory, I head to Bonn, Germany, where a new Afghan government will be cobbled together by the victors of war. Hamid Karzai, an English speaker from Kandahar who comes from a respected Pashtun family, is posted as the interim president; three of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s sidekicks become ministers; and a women’s ministry is born. A five-year plan to rebuild Afghanistan is mapped out, and both Afghans and Americans celebrate the ouster of the Taliban. Refugees in Pakistan and Iran repatriate in the millions, and thousands in the diaspora in the West pack their bags, ready to serve their homeland. The doors to Afghanistan are open again.

  Even my disillusioned father is hopeful. “If anyone has the resources and ability to help Afghanistan, it’s the United States,” he tells me when I call home from Germany. “But the question is how long will it stick around and tolerate our ignorant mullahs? The U.S. is looking out for its own interests. We shouldn’t expect too much.”

  I’m more excited about the future than he is.

  Chapter Four

  My Father’s Voyage

  My father and his male cousins all bear nicknames they chose for themselves as young men, names to represent who they wanted to be. Their fathers were writers and they wanted their sons to continue in the same tradition. The nicknames their sons chose were meant to be pen names, but they evolved into their identities: Mr. Lama
y (light), Mr. Turfa (new), Mr. Shaheer (famous), and my father’s, Mr. Nawa (tune, voice, or solution). In his teenage years, when he began to write letters and essays, my father asked to be called Nawa. Now few people know his actual given name. His first cousins—some poets, some historians, nearly all of them gifted wordsmiths—wrote for pleasure and signed their writings with these monikers. My father’s work was not published inside Afghanistan, but coworkers and relatives who communicated with him in writing still praise his Farsi calligraphy and his prose. The only essay I have read of his is an account of our last few weeks in Afghanistan, which he wrote for his Fremont literary association’s publication in 1997. He describes a trip from Kabul to Herat during the Soviet invasion in this passage:

  Several other travelers and I boarded one of the only passenger buses [headed for Herat]. We were driving toward the city near Pashto Bridge and at a check post where many Russians and tanks stood, the bus stopped. Two of their soldiers came next to the bus and the other passengers and I thought we were going to be searched. But one of the soldiers approached the driver and said, “Hashish,” and the driver handed him some amount of hashish. Then the soldiers waved to us and left while the bus continued toward the city. The driver, who I was sitting next to, told me he has never used hashish in his life but in order to appease these soldiers, he has to carry the drug with him in the bus.

  Afghans do not refer to my dad as a writer; they know him as a personality. Mr. Nawa can make anybody laugh in painful situations, especially me. Once, while on a visit to Fremont during my travels, I sat with my father on the couch drinking hot black tea. He was recounting for me the follies of kings in the history of Afghanistan, scratching his clean-shaven face, a habit he has when in serious conversation. I picked up my just-poured cup of tea to take a sip, but I was so engrossed by his words that I spilled the scalding tea on my chest. He drove me to the emergency room, waited five hours while I was treated for first-degree burns, and then carried me to the car to drive me back home. When I woke up after twelve hours woozy from Demerol, he sat next to my bed with a cup of hot tea.

  “You want some? Or have you forgotten altogether where the path to your mouth is?”

  I forgot my pain and hid my head under the blanket in hysterical laughter.

  My father’s not an extraordinary achiever, or the hardest working family member, but he is an avid reader and harbors an unquenchable desire for knowledge. In Afghanistan, from the age of sixteen, he held many positions, mainly as an administrator, in various government jobs. He ran the literary club in Herat, and worked closely with hippie American tourists at the government tourist office. His last and most lucrative job was at the fertilizer company. He taught himself English and Russian, becoming a translator of Russian in the 1960s, and read and understood Arabic. He married my mother when he was twenty-one and she was fifteen (their generation married young).

  “Mr. Nawa was a person whom you wanted to work with,” says Mr. Herawi, one of my father’s closest friends and former colleagues, who now lives in Fremont. “He had several employees working under him, and he dealt with them with respect, and dealt with problems with a sense of humor. He never took anything too seriously.”

  My father was fond of what were considered forbidden vices in Afghanistan, including alcohol and cigarettes. Mr. Herawi recalls, “He would light one cigarette, place it on the ashtray, and then forget about it and light another, especially while he was writing something.”

  Parties with live music, alcohol, and a four-course meal prepared by hired cooks made our home a revolving door for my father’s friends on weekends. The most serious issue on his mind was how to spend money. To my mother’s dismay, my father’s paycheck often didn’t last through the month, because he liked to buy what he wanted when he wanted it. My mother says he rarely thought about saving for a future. Life was now—until the Communist coup.

  Then Mr. Nawa met the agony of war.

  He lost his closest brother, Fazel Ahmed. His son, Hadi, had to flee the country. His job became a dangerous chore. Communist Party members put daily pressure on him and other employees of the fertilizer company to pay allegiance to communism. The employees collectively refused, despite threats to their lives. Even during the Communist takeover, my father continued to wake up at seven am; put on his wrinkle-free slacks, shirt, and blazer; shine his shoes; and go to the office. With his country disintegrating, the routine was a comfort to him. Still, his mass of dark hair turned gray, and the defined lines on his forehead deepened. After my school was bombed, my father began to think about a future without a homeland. He had no illusions that at age fifty-two he would find a better life elsewhere. But life wasn’t about him anymore—it was for his children.

  Two real estate textbooks lay on the coffee table in our California apartment. My father walked around the table, smoking a cigarette, and opened one of the books, read a page, then closed the book again. “Could you bring me a cup of tea?” he asked my mother, who was cooking dinner in the small kitchen. I was thirteen and confused as to why my father wanted to study real estate. He was not a salesperson.

  “Agha, why don’t you study something you like?” I asked.

  “Because I did what I liked in Afghanistan. Now I have to make money,” he explained.

  But he did not finish reading the books, and he did not take an interest in any other subjects or long-term jobs. He spent his days riding around in his Mazda station wagon, buying groceries, helping my mother with housework, watching TV, listening to the radio, and reading. He also dedicated his time to Faiza and me. He drove me to and from school, taught me how to ride a bike, taught us both how to drive, and was there to listen if we needed him. The burden of providing fell on my siblings and the American government. My mother sewed clothes for my teachers, but she was too ill to work full time. With a slipped disc in her back, she could barely do the housework. At age thirteen I started working as a babysitter, for two dollars an hour.

  Aside from a two-year stint as an assistant at a nonprofit for Afghan refugees in Fremont, Mr. Nawa became homebound and reclusive. He no longer cared for parties or entertainment. The skills he had could not get him a job in the United States. His respected family and intellectual background, both so important in Afghanistan, did not matter anymore. During our first decade in the United States, his cousins and other relatives who lived nearby gathered with him to talk poetry and politics. Some of the intellectuals from Herat even formed a literary association, with its own publication. But over time, as they became older, the men, like my father, dispersed and began battling various illnesses, including depression. For my father’s generation of Afghan men, America was not the land of opportunity but a place to die. Exile was the end.

  But after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban in 2001, my father showed a desire to return home for a visit. I quickly responded and bought us both tickets. In May 2002, after a twenty-year separation from his homeland, Mr. Nawa returned to his birthplace.

  For the second time, I stand in line at the Afghanistan-Iran border. I keep my Iranian hijab on, happy not to have to wear a burqa this time. My father wears his signature slacks and collared shirt. The Taliban have been gone for six months, U.S.-backed Karzai is president, and eleven thousand international troops have occupied the country. Ismail Khan, the mujahideen leader, has returned to power in Herat. The changes made since the fall of the Taliban are immediately obvious at the border. The visa representatives and guards do not have beards, but some of them have an untanned shadow of skin on their faces, where their beards once grew. Afghans tend to smile often, and whoever we talk to is eager to express his ideas. A sense of hope—no, euphoria—is omnipresent among the people, the feeling that life will change now that the United States has come to save them.

  “Welcome to the new Afghanistan, where you don’t have to cover your face and live in fear,” the woman who searches my purse chimes. “Look at me, I can laugh again.”

  My father cannot contain his
excitement; the grin on his face seems tattooed there. He hands out big Iranian bills that amount to a dollar each to the children gathering around him. They are the daily border beggars who rely on the generosity of returning Afghans. “Agha, stop giving away all your money,” I tell him as if I’m his guide. “There are people inside Afghanistan who are much more needy.”

  “I’ll give the needier kids bigger bills. Stop fussing. Let’s get to Herat.”

  We hail a taxi. When it pulls up, one of Ismail Khan’s armed soldiers asks if he can hitch a ride with us. On the highway to Herat, the view of desert and dust remains unchanged from my last visit, in 2000. But on this ride, the adventurous taxi driver, Eraj, speeds thirty miles faster than his car can take. I ask the soldier, Dastoor, a stocky, gregarious former guerrilla fighter, about the opium trade.

  “The Taliban were able to get rid of poppy planting so fast,” I say. “Can the new government keep it up?”

  “We’re definitely going to stop this evil business from expanding,” Dastoor shouts through the noise of the fierce wind and the cracking of rocks under the tires. “The Taliban were only doing it because the prices of opium had gone down. It’s haram [forbidden by religion], and we must get rid of it. Afghanistan is going to be known for better things than opium and war from now on.”

  Eraj claps in agreement. “Yes, life is going to change, Inshallah. America is going to help rebuild Afghanistan, because it is in its interest to do so.”

  My father and I look at each other skeptically as if to say, “They don’t know the United States very well.”

  The American government is in Afghanistan to oust the terrorists who allegedly engineered the September 11 bombings, none of whom were Afghan. The reconstruction of the country is a burden the international community is willing to bear in order to fight the terrorists, but it’s not a priority. The new Afghan government the United States has helped install is filled with ruthless warlords and corrupt officials who know only how to resist. Neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan will continue to support rivaling factions of the mujahideen and Taliban who serve their interests. The dearth of infrastructure and education in the last two decades is a formidable challenge that will take decades to overcome. Still, I push my cynicism to the back of my mind.