Page 272 - Leadership in the Indian Army

windows. Everywhere, the Beard Patrol roamed the streets in Toyota

trucks on the lookout for clean-shaven faces to bloody.
They shut down the cinemas too. Cinema Park. Ariana. Aryub.

Projection rooms were ransacked and reels of films set to fire. Laila

remembered all the times she and Tariq had sat in those theaters and

watched Hindi films, all those melodramatic tales of lovers separated by
some tragic turn of fate, one adrift in some faraway land, the other

forced into marriage, the weeping, the singing in fields of marigolds, the

longing for reunions. She remembered how Tariq would laugh at her for

crying at those films.

"I wonder what they've done to my father's cinema," Mariam said to her

one day. "If it's still there, that is. Or if he still owns it."
Kharabat, Kabul's ancient music ghetto, was silenced. Musicians were

beaten and imprisoned, their rubab% iamboura% and harmoniums
› ›
trampled upon. The Taliban went to the grave of Tariq's favorite singer,
Ahmad Zahir, and fired bullets into it.

"He's been dead for almost twenty years," Laila said to Mariam. "Isn't

dying once enough?"

* * *

Rasheed wasnt bothered much by the Taliban. All he had to do was

grow a beard, which he did, and visit the mosque, which he also did.
Rasheed regarded the Taliban with a forgiving, affectionate kind of

bemusement, as one might regard an erratic cousin prone to

unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal.

Every Wednesday night, Rasheed listened to the Voice of Shari'a when
the Taliban would announce the names of those scheduled for