[That was five years ago. He remembers that even in those first moments, when the reality of his blindness made him howl with grief, another realization took his breath away: His love for his childhood sweetheart had already been difficult because the girl’s family did not see him as worthy. Now, it was surely doomed.]
By
Mujib Mashal
 |
|
Zaheer
Ahmad Zindani, 22, who was blinded five years ago by a roadside bomb,
at
a mosque in Ghazni, Afghanistan, in June.
|
KABUL,
Afghanistan — The last time
Zaheer Ahmad Zindani thought he could still see, he was 17 and in a hospital
bed, heavily drugged and covered with shrapnel wounds from a Taliban bomb.
He asked the doctor for a mirror.
“The doctor told me, ‘Son, you don’t have
eyes, how will you be able to see your eyes?’” Mr. Zindani recalled. “I raised
my hand to feel my eyes — it was the ashes after a fire has burned, and nothing
else.”
That was five years ago. He remembers that
even in those first moments, when the reality of his blindness made him howl
with grief, another realization took his breath away: His love for his
childhood sweetheart had already been difficult because the girl’s family did
not see him as worthy. Now, it was surely doomed.
“If I had lost my eyes and had her hand, I
would still be happy,” he said. “But now I neither have eyes, nor her.”
Now, Mr. Zindani is one of the founders of a
march for peace that reached Kabul, the Afghan capital, in June after a nearly
40-day, 400-mile slog from the south of the country through summer heat and
war-torn territory.
He is protesting a war that has, so far,
swallowed his father, his uncle, his sister, his eyes and his love.
Like many Afghans, especially in the
countryside, he was not born with a last name. Some later pick their own, and
after he lost his eyes, he chose Zindani. It means “imprisoned.”
Along the way, when the march would stop at a
village to rest, Mr. Zindani, now 22, tall and handsome, would find a corner
and lie down for a while, losing himself in thought.
Sometimes he would stand up, feeling his way
around the mosque from column to column, following the voices to get closer to
the discussion. Other times he would whisper the name of the fellow traveler he
is closest to, whose shoulder he would hold onto during their long march.
“Kitab? Hey, Kitab, where are you?”
Mr. Kitab, a father of three whose birth name
is Inamulhaq, joined the march along the way. The name he chose for himself
means “book.” He cannot read.
Mr. Zindani is also illiterate. But he is a
poet. At home, he has 50 pages of original poetry that he dictated to his
siblings.
Their march passed through cities and villages.
But often, they would find themselves in long stretches when it was just them,
the sky above, the asphalt beneath, and the vastness of the desert all around.
His hand on Mr. Kitab’s shoulder, Mr. Zindani
would recite poems.
Even
after I died, my eyes did not shut
Waiting
for you, I remained looking at the door.
When Mr. Zindani tells his own story of life
and love, he evokes a series of images — beautiful in their detail,
heartbreaking for what he holds on to.
When he was 7, his family lived in Gereshk,
in Helmand Province. They farmed opium poppy, wheat and grapes along a main
highway used by coalition forces to supply the military units that were pushing
into what had been Taliban territory.
One day, his father and uncle had cut down
the poppies and were preparing the fields for a second crop, onions, when they
were hit by an American airstrike, Mr. Zindani said.
“We found nothing of them, not even their
blood,” he said. “It was just a large crater, and dust.”
His father, Ghulam Wali, was 29 when he was
killed. He was tall and wore his beard trimmed short, just like his son now.
At his father’s funeral, Mr. Zindani
remembers family friends running kind hands over his head and handing him
money.
“I was confused why people were giving me
money,” he said. “I was actually nervous — that my father would show up and he
would get angry at me for accepting money from his friends without his
permission.”
He added: “I had seen weddings, but I hadn’t
seen funerals.”
After the airstrike, Mr. Zindani’s family
moved to Kandahar, near distant relatives who had a young daughter. She was
also 7, and the two children were often together. When they played hide and
seek, Mr. Zindani would find himself “deliberately” hiding with her.
“I just liked her way of talking, her
walking, her scent, everything about her,” he said. “Wherever she would be
walking, I would find myself there. I didn’t know it — I would just end up
there.”
