In any war, those who live to tell the tale are usually extraordinarily lucky. So it has been with Qais Akbar Omar, the writer of the memoir A Fort of Nine Towers, an account of him and his family during the civil war in Afghanistan, which destroyed the country over a period of 20 terrible years. Omar’s memoir is an account of the last 10 years of this war, ending with the American occupation.
Omar was a young boy when the war began for him, with the Mujahideen defeating the occupying Russian-backed government forces in 1992. As we know in retrospect, this didn’t lead to peace — Kabul was torn apart by different Mujahid groups, all firing rockets and grenades at each other and snipers controlling different streets and neighbourhoods.
At the time, Omar lived in a large joint family in his grandfather’s home. They were well-off: his mother worked as a nurse, his father was a dedicated teacher and amateur boxing coach and his grandfather had a flourishing trade in carpets. All that fell apart when they were forced to leave their home in Kabul, for the relative safety of another locality from which the book takes its title: the sprawling old home of his grandfather’s business partner, a man who gave them shelter in the best Afghan tradition of hospitality and friendship.
Omar’s story is about this strange duality of Afghanistan: a catalogue of torture and brutality as people turn on themselves, as well as a heartfelt insight into the Afghan spirit. His accounts of sadism and crimes beyond any redemption almost seem incredible — surreal twists of fortune return him to his family after he is captured and tortured more than once by different factions. At one point he walks home and into his own funeral. He sees his coffin, packed with his few treasures — books, kites and marbles — and his devastated mother ready to bury these in the absence of his body. At the time he’s barely more than a boy, and this makes his narrative especially troubling — to read about the kind of brutality that can stoop to the torture of a child. But Omar writes with no self-pity or regret, and in his summoning the story through the eyes of the child he was, there are glimpses of the people his tormenters were before war degraded them beyond recognition.
I find it difficult to read books about the horrors of Afghanistan, perhaps because I lived there myself when I was a child, and remember an indescribably magical place, the same magic which is recalled in the works of Rumi, Babur and Robert Byron. Perhaps no one can ever live in Afghanistan without being moved in some way by its landscape, the profound blue of the lakes and the sheer white mountains that seem always about to topple into them. And it is to Omar’s great credit that the centrepiece of his memoir is devoted not to the war but to a narrative about the spirit and beauty of his country. During an unexpected six-month period in the war, he and his desperate parents and sisters try to out-drive the war and leave Kabul, travelling from place to place in the Afghan countryside looking for refuge. This becomes Omar’s true education — not one of trauma and bitterness, but an encounter with all that is best in Afghanistan.
This pastoral, spent with an old man who owns a pomegranate orchard, with Kutchi nomads who turn out to be distant relatives and camping in the Bamiyan caves next to the smaller Buddha are beautifully felt and described. Omar sees much of the beauty and humanity of the country: he writes about people who grow roses with the passion of connoisseurs and who live by the words of Rumi and Hafiz. The old orchard owner is upset that Omar felt compelled to steal pomegranates for his starving family. He says he would have made a present of them if Omar had only asked. Omar himself is deeply upset about having been thought of as a thief (he was stealing on the instructions of his father), and this bothers him for some time. I find it wonderful that a young boy should be bothered by a small transgression when the whole world around him is clearly going to hell.
Eventually, chance leads him to a deaf and mute Turkmen girl who is a carpet-weaving genius and who becomes his spiritual guru. With her he learns more than just the discipline and non-compromise of art: he also learns to trust that the pattern of his and his country’s fragmented life will reveal itself. Having had this spiritual lesson, his dignity never leaves him for ever after.
Eventually, the family is forced to return to Kabul, and the war rages on endlessly. They live through the Taliban rule.
A Fort of Nine Towers is a mesmerising account of surviving the worst of evil fates in the only way that matters — by never losing the human self. It would be wonderful if somehow that could turn out to be true for everyone in that sad country.
Anupama Chandra is a film editor and bibliophile