Free A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar

like holy men on their broadcasts during the night. They always introduced themselves as the holy warriors and said that they were fighting against evil. Day killers; night liars.
    I started to hate the broadcasts. None of them gave us any good news; they were all the same. They made my grandfather, uncles, and father unhappy, which made us feel sorry for them. I decided to break all the radios. Then I thought that it would make them even sadder. The BBC was the only thing they had to look forward to all day.
    Now, for the first time, there was serious talk among my father and my uncles of leaving Afghanistan. My grandfather did not say anything this time. Sometimes late at night when they thought I was asleep, I would hear my father telling my mother what the men had been discussing.
    My father again wanted to go to Russia, as he had proposed the year before when we were still at home. He had been in touch with his friends there from his boxing days. They had offered to help us get settled once we arrived. But now the borders were tightly closed, so we would need a lot of money to pay smugglers to get all of us across.
    My father’s only income in those days came from the carpets that he had gathered from the villages before the fighting had started, and which Haji Noor Sher still sold in his shop in India.
    He had not been paid in several months for his job teaching physics at Habibia High School. Though the fighting had closed the school, which had been hit by rockets, he was still supposed to be receiving his government salary.
    Some Kuchi nomads had been trapped in the building during oneof the times when a ceasefire had suddenly ended. They had been passing through Kabul on their way from their summer grazing lands in the mountains near Bamyan to their winter base in the lowlands near Jalalabad, but had to hide their sheep, donkeys, camels, cows, and horses in the basement of the school. Some of the local factions discovered them and took the sheep to feed their soldiers. For months after the Kuchis left, the whole school smelled like a barn.
    Every morning when I woke, I was still confused for a moment until I looked around and saw my family sleeping on the floor nearby and remembered where we were. But in other ways, our lives had settled into routines.
    My uncles still went to their jobs in the city when there seemed to be a break in the fighting. Sometimes it would suddenly end, and things would be quiet for weeks. Then, without anybody knowing why, it would start up again as fiercely as before.
    My mother stopped going to the bank. She did not feel safe traveling across the city. Also, she was much busier than before going to the bazaars to buy food, which was sometimes hard to find—mostly rice and whatever vegetables the farmers could bring to the market, and not the meat that Afghans love. At Grandfather’s house, she had had a lot of help from my uncles’ wives, my father’s unmarried sisters, and even my older sister and my girl cousins. At Noborja, my grandfather’s family was still living together, but we had been shattered into small parts as we tried to survive.
    Though his family was in Delhi and he had shops in both Kabul and Delhi, Haji Noor Sher preferred to be in Kabul. In Delhi, he had rented an apartment for his family in the Lajpat Nagar area, but hated living in it, he told us. He had grown up in a large house with a big garden, and the apartment felt like a prison cell to him. Even worse, he did not know many people in India and felt very lonely there.
    During his stays in Kabul, his wife often called from Delhi andbegged him to come there. He would put off going as long as he could, and then left only when the fighting heated up. As soon as he heard that there was a ceasefire in Kabul, though, he was back with us in the fort.
    Each time he returned, his friends would start showing up at Noborja that same day. Somehow they knew he was back. Though we could sometimes hear the sounds of