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It was a cold winter in Kabul, on my way to school, I saw a young woman sitting on a rock. I stopped. I stood there, watching her, both of us silent. The woman did not move, like a marble statue, it seemed. I had my physics exam. I turned and walked inside the school gate. The next day, I looked for the woman sitting on a rock. I will invite her home to share my lunch, I thought. But the woman was gone. A few days later, news of a young woman’s dead body found behind our school. What was her story, I wondered? To die in the cold, alone. Each winter, in-between autumn and spring I remember the woman. She comes and sits on that rock. The hand of winter wraps around her. Creeping in the middle of the night, from across the plains and above the trees, her unknown face, like the silent music of the snow, comes to me.
78 The Woman on the Rock
n Search of a Woman
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As morning melody breaks, this city breathes in the middle of some dried dust. Street vendors start by the river selling all kind of drugs for the city. This opaque people smoking hashish. Its once inky blue river twisted through the city. It is now a broken river, its banks darkened by trash of all kinds.
2 Once, after midday prayers, women headed to the city’s river to wash their clothes, rubbing and pounding them on its stones. Crossing the blue carpet of the river, the sky was in the turquoise water, a mirror, an immortal soul of the city.
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Now after midday, this riverbank is home for this opaque people. As the Mughreb evening sunset fades out, these men head to the mosques.
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