A Fort of Nine Towers

It is in the nature of the world we live in to look at everything as a statistic, especially the stories of women and men displaced by wars. Since we seem to have too many wars, and too many stories taking birth from them, at all points in time, it has long ceased to be of any emotional significance to our collective psyche. And that’s a tragedy beyond all proportions, since it challenges our very basic tenet of being human, or being civilized. But then once in a while comes a work of literature, so honest, and so poignant, that it shakes alive that humanity we have been trying to bury deep inside ourselves. A Fort of Nine Towers, Qais Akbar Omar’s memoir about his growing up in Afghanistan amidst the turbulence we are all too well familiar with by now, in one such wonderful novel.

A young Omar, living as part of a huge joint family in Kabul, has a happy childhood among his many cousins. “In the time before the fighting, before the rockets, before the warlords and their false promises, before the sudden disappearance of so many people we knew to graves or foreign lands, before the Taliban and their madness, before the smell of death hung daily in the air and the ground was soaked in blood, we lived well”, he says. Till the year 1992 came along, and brought with itself the Mujahedins, or the Holy Warriors. And once of the first things Omar felt was bewilderment – he has expected these warriors who were supposed to liberate Afghanistan from the Russians, to be in “uniforms and shiny boots”; but here they were, in “beards, moustaches and smelly shoes”. Others around him felt hope, they saw this as the liberation from the Russians they had been craving for. But this hope was misplaced, soon fighting broke out across the city, and everything burnt. In its wake it burnt down generations worth of progress, and a couple generation’s dreams, hopes, and aspirations.

Omar’s family finds refuge in an old fort on the outskirts of Kabul, Qala-e-Noborja, or “a fort of nine towers”. As they seek shelter inside, the city outside becomes a playground of terror. Omar’s old home is captured by the extremists, and later when they try to visit it, they are horrified to find the neighbour’s garden filled with human skulls. They are even captured, and put to work in a tunnel. And what Omar experiences there makes him realize the dichotomy of being an Afghan mujahed – the captors were “one moment laughing, one moment shouting”, still the same people under the new exteriors they had now embraced playing their parts in a larger game.

As things got worse, Omar’s father decided to get the family out of the country. This leads to a very perilous journey, from living in caves behind the Buddha statue in Bamyan, to learning how to weave carpets in Mazar. This time spent on the roads brought Omar up. From a little boy, he straightaway grew into a man, skipping adolescence like the rest of his generation.

Opportunity to make way out of Afghanistan came later to him, but by then the course of events had made him a very different man, and he decided to stay on, and do whatever he could in order to rebuild the once-beautiful country he loved so dearly. Long before this, Omar has learnt the beauty of peaceful resistance – while he ran a secret carpet factory for girls, his parents taught them literature and science.

What shines through all these years of gloom, is Omar’s indomitable spirit. Over the last two or so decades, Afghanistan changed its political course many times, never without violence accompanying it. But not once does he sound bitter, or vengeful against his people. Omar does so with a fine balance – he is not even overtly sentimental, or attempting to create pathos. It is this maturity as a storyteller that Omar actually impresses the most. Very clearly, the book is written by someone who has experienced the very depths of what it means to exist as a human.

“How do I tell”, Omar asks in the prologue, “that though it sounds mad, I love Afghanistan?” And he follows this question up with roughly four hundred-pages of surreal poetry answering just that. Read this book for a man’s love for his homeland. But more than that read it for a man who has held on to his battle in the face of such mayhem, trying to “rebuild what so many others have destroyed”. It has been, and will be a long painstaking fight. As Omar writes, “I am a carpet weaver. I know how, slowly, one knot follows another until a pattern appears.”