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EXCERPT
Entry from Anna’s Diary: A Year of Keeping Bees
15 March 1980
When we first decided to become hobby beekeepers,
it was because our friend Ole had been doing it for a very long time
and seemed to find a lot of solace in the rituals and
responsibility. But I had some doubts.
The wings of honeybees stroke about 11,400 times
per minute—hence the distinctive buzz. I wondered about the buzzing
of the bees. I was sure that constant hum would drive me crazy. But
now, after a few seasons, the buzz of the bees is like a soothing
rhythm, almost like a song, the song of spring.
Chapter One
Skive, Denmark
January 2002
Bzzzzzz, that was
how she thought it sounded.
Bzzzzzz, like the
buzzing of a thousand bees.
The same sound she
used to hear when she visited her, uncle, Chacha Bashir in Baharak.
He had been one of the wealthiest men in town with his silk and bee
farm. Silk and honey, he would say, “The riches of the kings are
mine.” Then the Taliban killed him and no one knew what happened to
his family.
That was how the Danish language sounded
to Raihana, like the buzzing of Chacha Bashir’s bees.
The Danes mumbled, she thought as she
watched them in supermarkets, on television, and on the streets. She
had never seen so many white people before, and this was the first
time she was seeing white people at such close proximity. So she
stared at them, she just couldn’t help it.
They were different
from what she had imagined. They were not all tall and fair and
beautiful, some of them were short and ugly. And they mumbled when
they spoke. The standing joke, Layla had told her, was that they
spoke like they had hot potatoes in their mouths and Raihana agreed.
She had escaped a second brutally cold
winter at the Jalozai refugee camp in North Western Pakistan when
the Danish government offered her asylum. It was difficult for a
single woman with no family, no husband, and no education to
survive. Her choices had been limited. She could either die in a
refugee camp where the cold wind from the mountains pierced its
frozen fingers through the tents to all but peel the skin off the
bones, or she could go to this country where her distant cousin and
his wife had agreed to give her a home.
A part of her didn’t want to leave the
camp. She had to wait, she thought, wait for Aamir, or maybe go back
and look for him? But even she wasn’t foolish enough to go back to
Kabul. Everyone knew that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the
plane attacks in America and everyone knew that the Taliban were the
same species as Al Qaeda. America would attack; that’s what powerful
countries did. The Taliban would fight back, they said, and though
the Afghans in Denmark, like many others, didn’t like the idea of
American troops on Afghan soil, it was better than the Taliban. Some
thought the Taliban had been unjustly rousted out of power, that
they were the good guys.
So Raihana joined the small number of
refugees living in Denmark, all of whom watched the news with
desperation, wondering when they could go back. Afghanistan, they
knew, would be a war ruin for several decades to come, but there was
still hope. They wished that, somehow, Afghanistan would no longer
be synonymous with tortured men and women living in penury. Maybe
things would change and Afghanistan would become a safe haven, a
progressive country, a normal country.
“Have to go home someday, can’t live
here all our life can we?” Kabir would say almost every day. “Don’t
unpack everything, Raihana, we’ll go back soon.”
“Go back to what?” Layla would ask her
husband, her hands on her hips as her son, Shahrukh, pulled at her
salwar.
“Mor, slik,” he said, pleading
with his mother to give him candy, which she had strict rules about
not giving to him.
“Look at him, hai, Shahrukh, it
is not Mor, it is Ammi, say Ammi,” Kabir said
as he always did, but Shahrukh never took him seriously. “Mor
is some Danish woman, not Layla, she is Ammi. Now say Ammi.”
“Leave him alone, he’s just two,” Layla
said. “And he’s calling me mother, not some evil name. All his
friends call their mothers Mor, so he calls me Mor.”
Raihana watched the young couple battle
about going back, about staying. She had been scared when the people
from the Danish immigration told her that Kabir wanted her to live
with him. She remembered Kabir from her childhood, a long time ago.
He was her mother’s sister’s husband’s brother’s son. The families
had not been close, only meeting at weddings and celebrations.
Kabir’s family had lived in Kabul while hers settled in a village
outside Kabul. But he was the only one who had offered her a chance
to leave the refugee camp and she had taken it. She hadn’t had much
of a choice. The rumor was that Aamir had died in a Taliban prison,
but a part of her never believed it. However, she knew she had to
leave Pakistan because whether she liked it or not, there was a good
chance the rumor about Aamir was true.
But she wished—wished until she went mad
with it—that he was alive. She wished they had been able to leave
together. She wished she wasn’t alone and cold because even though
Kabul had been hell, she had had someone to share it with, someone
to keep her warm. But in the refugee camp in Pakistan, there was
emptiness, insecurity, threats from other men, and fear.
It had been a stroke of luck that when
she rattled out the names of relatives and where she thought they
lived, she had named Kabir. The others had not panned out, maybe
they couldn’t be found or maybe they hadn’t wanted her, she didn’t
know. What she did know was that Kabir and Layla had welcomed her
with open arms and that was a debt she would never be able to repay.
As she sat at the dining table chopping
carrots for the Kabuli pilau she was making for dinner,
Raihana was grateful for the turn her life had taken after she’d
moved to Denmark. When she first came to Skive six months before,
she had been worried that Kabir would be a religious type. She
didn’t intend to wear a hijab or an abaya not after
having left Afghanistan and the rules of the Taliban so far behind.
Kabir hadn’t asked
her to wear a hijab and neither had Layla, who never went out
without donning one herself, in addition to an abaya. Kabir,
who drank merrily on Friday nights to celebrate the weekend, didn’t
ask his wife to get rid of her hijab and she didn’t ask him
to stop drinking.
“Islam says smoking and drinking is
wrong,” Layla told Raihana on one of the Friday nights when Kabir
was out of the house. “What do you think?”
Raihana didn’t know what to say about things like this. She
believed that people should do what they wanted but knew that was
not what Layla wanted to hear.
“I think it is wrong,” Layla said before
Raihana could answer. It wasn’t like Raihana was talkative, and she
didn’t always respond to people. Layla had met women like her, men
too, people who had scars so big hidden under their skin that they
were really one big wound. She didn’t know the details about
Raihana’s life in Afghanistan, but no one knew the details. Raihana
wasn’t talking and her past was not well known.
When Raihana had first arrived, Khala
Soofia, who lived next door, had tried to get Raihana to talk about
her past, about her life in Kabul, the dead husband but Raihana
didn’t say anything. Khala Soofia had come to Denmark in the early
nineteen nineties. Her husband had been a doctor in Jalalabad. Her
son had died of cancer, and her daughter had moved to America with
her husband, also a doctor, and their children. Soofia talked about
moving there all time.
Soofia’s husband, Dr. Sidiq Rehman, had
spent several years when he first came to Denmark, petitioning the
Danish Integration Minister and the Danish Medical Association, and
writing letters to EU Parliament members, that he should be allowed
to work in Denmark without having to go to medical school again. He
understood that he had to learn Danish, which he had done by
diligently going to language school.
Now he’d stopped the petitions and the
letters. He didn’t come out his house much. He was depressed, they
said, because he couldn’t practice medicine. Still everyone called
him Doctor Chacha. While Doctor Chacha silently mourned the loss of
his life’s work, Soofia kept hoping that her daughter would send for
her.
“Visa problems,” she always said. “But
it will happen soon. You know daughters, they need their mothers.”
Everyone nodded patiently and no one
pointed out that Soofia’s daughter rarely wrote and when she did the
letters were filled with excuses as to why she couldn’t find the
means to bring her parents to America. Soofia read out the letters
to whoever would listen and would try to put a positive spin on her
daughter’s excuses.
“You are just like my daughter, my
Deena,” Soofia told Raihana when they met at a birthday party. Habib
and Jameela were celebrating their son’s first birthday and had
invited all the Afghans in Skive for a party. It had been a
tumultuous first year for the boy, who had been born with heart
problems, but after two surgeries he seemed fine and the doctors
predicted he would have no further problems.
Raihana was barely paying attention to
Soofia, who talked constantly, either about her daughter or about
local Afghan community gossip. But soon enough, Soofia got to
Raihana.
“So, where is your
husband?” she asked.
Raihana was not stupid. She knew people were curious.
“Dead,” she said
quietly and then tried to change the subject by asking Soofia about
her gold bangles. Soofia was easily distracted, especially when
someone talked about her jewelry or her clothes. She had brought
along her things from Jalalabad. She’d had the time. She had not
been rushed to save her life. She had not had to escape after seeing
a bloodbath, running and hiding through plains and mountains to
enter another hell in a refugee camp in Pakistan.
“Dead? How?” Soofia asked and Raihana
just smiled and shrugged. “You have to talk, if you keep it bottled
in…talk, tell us. We’re your family now,” Soofia insisted, but
Raihana didn’t have the words. She was considered strange by most, a
little too quiet. She had obviously been through some unspeakable
tragedy, they all sensed. When she talked about going back to Kabul,
it just confirmed their suspicions.
“From Iran it is easier to get into
Afghanistan,” Walid Ali Khan told her as he sipped tea from Layla’s
priced tea cups.
Walid Ali Khan and
Zohra were Kabir and Layla’s closest friends and they visited them
often for lunch on the weekends and then stayed through dinner and
past their children’s bedtime.
Walid and Zohra
came to Denmark six years ago with one child. Between maternity
leaves and giving birth to two children, Zohra still went to
language school, while Walid worked at the supermarket Kvickly.
“But now is not a
good time to go. You know how the Americans are bombing from Kabul
to Kandahar and everything in between?” Walid said shaking his head.
“Killing Taliban they say, but they are
also killing innocent Afghans, bastards,” Kabir said. “Bastard
Americans and bastard British people! All of them saying we Muslims
are evil. Propaganda like that is not right. Yesterday, in business
school my marketing teacher asks me if I think my wife should wear a
burkha and sit at home. And she asks me if I think it is okay
to beat my wife. What kind of questions are those? What kind really?
Hai, Layla, have I ever hit you?”
Layla sighed. “Kabir….”
“Have
I?”
“Allah, you are stubborn!”
“Maybe I should,” Kabir said angrily.
“Apparently, all Muslim men beat up their wives. What, Raihana, your
husband beat you too?”
And then all eyes turned to Raihana in
the hope that she’d drop another scrap of information about her past
and her husband. The bits and pieces Kabir had garnered from friends
and family who lived in Pakistan and told the others was not much.
Apparently, Raihana’s husband had been a teacher and the Taliban had
been after him for not following their new curriculum. His
brother-in-law had also been anti-Taliban, a doctor who treated
women when the Taliban had prohibited it. He had been killed, and so
had his wife.
“Walid hit me once,” Zohra said
suddenly.
“I didn’t hit her, a book slipped and
fell on her head,” Walid cried out and the conversation turned away
from Raihana.
In the small city of Skive in northern
Denmark, there were just fifteen Afghan families, and these Afghans
had achieved what they never had in Afghanistan. For the first time
in her life, Raihana saw a Pashtun eat at the same table as an
Uzbek. The Pashtuns, the Hazara, the Tajik, and the Uzbeks had been
fighting for as long as Raihana remembered and now in this strange
country they huddled together, accepting each other and their
differences because beyond the huddle was the white man, looking at
all of them with equal suspicion.
To Raihana it was
still unreal—that she was not in Afghanistan anymore, that she was
in this cold, and wet country. Sometimes she closed her eyes and
pretended she was back home, surrounded by the smells and scents of
Kabul. Sometimes she remembered the taste of sugarcane juice and
felt her insides churn in thirst.
But life in Skive was not bad; she had
to admit, especially for a family like Kabir’s. She didn’t
understand why Kabir complained so much. They had rented a nice
house with two floors, bought a 20-year old and functional car and
installed their son in a free daycare, which was paid for by the
county.
Kabir made frequent
trips to Germany to buy spices and other things they needed, and had
even been to Pakistan on vacation the year before to visit his
uncle, who was dying of cancer. Since he hadn’t died yet, Kabir was
planning another trip to Lahore as soon as he had enough money
saved.
Money was always
tight in the house, but they still went to Legoland with Shahrukh,
sometimes drove to the zoo in Aalborg, went to the movies and
entertained friends. Kabir and Layla had a full life with friends,
family and most of their material needs fulfilled.
“But we have to learn Danish,” was
Layla’s big complaint about living in Denmark. “And it is so hard,
Raihana.”
Raihana couldn’t even comprehend how she
would learn a language that sounded like buzzing bees. There didn’t
seem to be any substance to it, just froth lolling out of everyone’s
mouth.
“You’ll start in module 1 because you’re
a beginner. There are five modules and I can’t wait to be finished
with this stupid language,” Layla told her as Kabir drove them to
the language school on Raihana’s first day.
It had taken the
Skive County over six months to get Raihana signed up for language
school, which had been just the right amount of time. Raihana had
had the time to learn about her surroundings and get through the
cruel Danish winter. With spring getting closer, the idea of
bicycling early in the morning to go to school was not as
frightening.
In the winter,
Layla seemed to have managed riding to school, the supermarket and
ever where else with just minimal complaining, while Raihana had
stayed at home. She had cooked and cleaned and had baby sat
Shahrukh, allowing Kabir and Layla to go to a Hindi movie in Aarhus
or to visit friends in Copenhagen, which was too long a drive to
make with a little boy.
By the time the
Integration Centre had sent her a letter stating that she had been
signed up for language school, she was ready to leave the house and
do something beyond housework.
Layla was exceptionally proud of her language
accomplishments. She had passed module 4, which meant that she could
reasonably communicate in Danish and understand most Danish, spoken
and written. She hoped to pass the final exam, Prøve i Dansk 3,
in the summer, after which she could look for a job.
“Maybe I will go back before I have to
pass all these modules,” Raihana wondered aloud.
“Yes, yes,” Kabir said and Layla
snorted.
“We are here, Raihana and we live here,”
she said. “If you keep one foot in Afghanistan, you will be neither
here nor there.”
“But we will go back,” Kabir insisted.
“Don’t listen to Layla! Soon, very soon things will be….”
“Don’t listen to him,” Layla snapped.
“He has passed the Danish exam and is going to business school. He
doesn’t have to pass anymore Danish exams. He talks about going back
but knows there is nothing to go back to. We now live in Denmark.”
“Just until we get citizenship and then
we leave,” Kabir continued. “But soon, Raihana, soon, we will go
back, you wait and see.”
Layla snorted again. “You are here,” she
said, “Live here, not in the past in a country that you can’t go
back to.”
The language school was small and was
housed in the VUC, Voksen Udannelses Center, Adult Education
Center. It was on the second floor and had six rooms dedicated to
it. Four were classrooms, one a large computer room, and one an
office with an adjoining copy room. Downstairs were the teachers’
lounges, one smoking and one non-smoking, and a small kitchen.
Students were not allowed to use the kitchen. In the basement there
was a large dining area and a vending machine, which Layla told
Raihana not to use. It was cheaper to bring cola or water from home
than to buy it from the vending machine.
The woman who ran the language centre
was tall and white. She wore her blonde hair tied in a tight bun and
dressed in a pair of black pants and a black jacket. She had
silver-framed glasses perched on her nose and she looked very stern.
“Layla says that you understand
English,” Sylvia Hoffmann said in heavily-accented English.
Unsure of herself and everything around
her, Raihana nodded and looked at Layla. She had gone to English
school in Pakistan at the refugee camp for almost a year and Aamir
had tried to teach her English as well. She knew how to say “how are
you” and “thank you” and understood some of what was said when
people spoke in English, especially in movies, but regular
conversations? She felt her palms go cold with fear.
Sylvia smiled. “Maybe we can talk in
English then?”
Raihana shook her head violently.
“I not English well,” she managed to say
without stammering.
Sylvia said something to Layla in that
bee-buzz language.
“She says that I can translate for you,
okay,” Layla told her in Dari and Raihana sighed with relief.
“You live with Layla and Kabir, and they
have come a long way in the past three years they have been with
us,” Sylvia spoke in Danish now. “You will pick up Danish better if
you speak it at home with Layla.”
After that Sylvia tested Raihana’s
Danish abilities. She showed her pictures and asked what they were.
Some Raihana knew in Danish, most she didn’t. But she knew the
Danish words for the everyday things, like butter, milk, oil and
flour. She had seen them often enough on television and in the
supermarket when she went shopping with Layla.
Sylvia Hoffmann didn’t indulge in any
small talk and Raihana wondered if it were even possible to chit
chat when you had to talk through a person. Layla was merrily
translating from Dari to Danish and Danish to Dari without stumbling
on her words.
Layla was so competent, Raihana thought and
panicked some more. She would never be as proficient as Layla, she
thought, never be able to speak Danish like this. She would never
finish her education and she would never find a job and then…then
what? Would they send her back to Afghanistan? She felt fear race
through her and she had to force herself to pay attention to Sylvia
Hoffmann, calm her breathing and quiet her racing heart.
“You can come to class tomorrow,” Sylvia
Hoffman said.
Raihana nodded. “Tak,” she said.
“Velbekomme,” Sylvia said.
“That means welcome,” Layla whispered to
Raihana in Dari.
Raihana said Velbekomme under her
breath and decided to use it the next time someone said thank you to
her in Danish.
“Hvad hedder du?” Layla began
Raihana’s private Danish class as Kabir drove them back home. “That
means, what is your name. Hvad hedder du, Raihana?”
“Are you starting the Danish lesson
already?” Kabir asked. “Sylvia said that if we speak Danish
at home Layla will learn faster,” Layla said. “It is hard in Denmark
without Danish. You can’t go to the supermarket, get a job, go
anywhere, do anything.”
“She will do fine,” Kabir said. “Stop
scaring her, Layla.”
Raihana wasn’t sure what to believe. On
the one hand she understood that she had to learn Danish so that she
could earn a living, on the other hand the Danish government did
give her some money to survive on every month. It wasn’t much but
she didn’t have many expenses. She gave money to Kabir and Layla for
food, lodging, and other necessities, but she still managed to have
some money left in the bank every month.
If only Aamir could
find his way here. What if he showed up at Layla and Kabir’s
doorstep? Could that happen?
It was a sweet dream, like the fantasy
of a child who wished to meet dinosaurs or fly to the moon. It was a
futile hope. Aamir was probably dead as so many people had told her,
but she was not ready to believe that.
Excerpted from The Sound of
Language by Amulya Malladi Copyright 2007 by Amulya Malladi.
Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of The
Random House Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
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