Dr Rasul
Another cloud of thrown up dirt struck my face, filling my mouth with the familiar taste of mud and clouding my throat. The men in those trucks have no Nang, they have no Namas, they are boys dressing in the lungee’s of men. I have no respect for this, and how that spit at me and taunt my hollowed eye yet I am chained here in my soiled garbs, chained to her to watch the parade. They sully the name of our great country. Suddenly a ray of sun pierces the dull grey clouds, falls upon the arid lands and falls into my eye. The once familiar burn of the sun. The sun still shone nowadays but never as it did back then.
I had once worked in the university, a place lush with pastures of knowledge and learning. It was a place of freedom where through the words of Rumi and Beydel literature I could take my students anywhere. Now we are stuck. They took my one love from me deeming it unfitting to a man to waste time on flowery words when there is war to be won. They told me the women had no place in learning let alone on my course. They took it all. And when they could take no more, they took my eye for reading. I still remember the cold, green painted metal of the gun chipping as it struck my eye followed by the burning rush. How the blood meandered over the valleys of my unfamiliar and emaciated face, falling to feed the ground. That was the day I knew I could fight no more.
I thought the world was cruel, how could it turn its back on us? Leaving those who could not flee and those who would not flee to be treated by the will of those hounds. My soul shifted as I met a new man, I asked for money feeling I would know the answer “Bas” but I was proven wrong. I could see in his eyes there was something not so wellcome by nowadays. Hope. The unfamiliar men I see with their fake beards may speak my language and wear my clothes but I know they are just more hungry men here to ‘take what’s theirs’ just to return for the comforts of safety of a foreign land, I turn my head and whisper Mashallah, it is not my fight. He spoke a familiar name, a name of a beautiful soul I find lost comfort in. My old friend Sofia Akrami. And I trust, this man is different, something tells me he has no foul intention and no craving for money left here, he is honest as his mother once was.
As I float back to now on the sweet memories of almond cake overstimulating my dying taste buds I hear the yells of the Taliban roaring down the path towards me. I feel there is a shift in the world, I feel an and is coming and before I can stop it, spit flies towards them and they stop. Here is the end, so it is in Allah I trust.
Amelia Russell 