Free A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar Page A

rockets, bombs, and rifles being fired on the other side of the mountain, they laughed and enjoyed one another’s company, my father among them. Hearing the sound of their laughter made us hopeful.
    Often Haji Noor Sher asked his cook to prepare special food, such as a big
qabli pelau
, with its mountains of rice mixed with shredded carrots, raisins, and nuts heaped over big pieces of meat. Or there were lamb kebabs, or lamb soup. He asked my mother to cook her famous corn bread for dessert. Every day felt like a holiday when he was at Noborja.
    In the mornings, as soon as I had woken up and splashed some water on my face, I ran to his rooms, where some mullahs he had known for years were reciting verses from the Holy Koran with melodic voices. I sat in a corner and listened, or took a Koran and followed the lines the mullahs were reciting by heart.
    After breakfast the mullahs left, and musicians would come and start singing sweet
ghazals
softly accompanied by a
tambour, sitar, tabla
, and harmonium. The music went on until lunch, when there was a one-hour break for naps. Then some other friends of his, who were the best storytellers I have ever heard, came and told stories about almost anything.
    Haji Noor Sher always sat in his chair like a king on his throne while his guests sat on the
toshak
cushions on the floor around the room. His eyes were closed. He fingered his
tasbeh
prayer beads, moving his head gently as if in a trance. If in the middle of a story one of the servants knocked on the door, he opened his eyes and said, “Stop.”
    The storyteller immediately halted.
    He said, “Come in.”
    The servant would come in with a fresh pot of tea in his hands. Haji Noor Sher looked at the glasses on the floor, which was the sign for the servant to fill them up. The servant stepped lightly from one cup to the next, then left the steaming pot on the floor in the middle of the room and softly walked out.
    Haji Noor Sher turned to the storyteller and said, “Continue.”
    At night, he turned on his generator so that all of the kids could watch an Indian movie with him in his room. He often fell asleep in the middle of the film, half sitting and half lying on his bed. When the movie ended, we pulled his blanket over him, turned off his light, tiptoed out of his room, turned off the generator, and went to our rooms to sleep.
    One day, when Wakeel and I were on the roof with our kites, we noticed that below us in the courtyard the house servants and all the other servants, who kept the gardens and looked after the animals, were doing unusual things.
    They were shampooing the deer and tying pretty ribbons to their antlers. Later, they strung multicolored lights along the tops of the courtyard walls and hung paper lanterns from the graceful, bending canes of the lilac bushes. Then they hung a very large square of brightly covered cloth from the upper terrace. It draped over the windows of the rooms on the courtyard level until other servants set poles under its lower edge and raised it up to make an awning. Under the awning they built a low platform.
    The servants did not stop for lunch but kept on working, washing the large, square paving stones in the courtyard floor. Haji Noor Sher said they had been part of the Buddhist
stupa
that had stood here for centuries before the Qala-e-Noborja had been built by Abdur Rahman, the king, for his
wazir
, his most important minister.
    As the evening approached, the courtyard became even busier. Haji Noor Sher was ordering the servants to do this and that. Hurricane lanterns were set up along both sides of the paths around thecourtyard and next to the flowerpots overflowing with blooms. Some of the flowers were bright red and tall, some wound like vines up the walls, and some were orange and gold.
    Wakeel and I had long stopped flying our kites for the day, and were watching all the activity, wondering what was going on.
    My father had come into the courtyard and was standing next to Haji