After calling morning greetings to Ahmad and Hadi, Babur placed the table – his only concession (other than food) to pretensions of a restaurant – out the front of his café for his two favourite customers. From there Dr Jabril and Imam Mustafa would be able to enjoy their food while greeting old friends, discussing the affairs of the day, and lamenting with Babur on the passage of time and old age that none of them could believe had arrived so promptly. In winter Mustafa and Dr Jabril ate inside with Babur’s other customers, perched on a raised wooden platform against the wall, but on fine Kabul days, between the hours of one and two, or thereabouts, the table outside the famous chaikhana belonged to them.
Sofia suspected that Jabril would have preferred to sit inside, for the tiny café chairs balanced on the ancient cobblestones were far too precarious for his ample girth, but he believed that his friend preferred the table outside, and so that was where they sat. On the other hand, Mustafa’s painfully thin and wiry body, hidden under his black robes, probably felt the cold even when there was none, making the table in the square far too draughty for his tastes. The imam would have much preferred to eat in the warmth inside, but knew that his old friend liked to keep an eye on the comings and goings of the square, and so that was where the two friends sat, each satisfied that he had ceded his own little bit of comfort for the happiness of the other, and no one in the square, including Sofia, was ever going to tell them otherwise.
While Babur’s family had been in Kabul since 1504, when his famous relative Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur – a warrior from the far north and a direct descendant of Genghis Khan – had conquered the tribes of Kabul and built the first Mughal Empire, the chaikhana had only been around since the late 1600s. A famous teahouse and inn along the Silk Road, the chaikhana served all manner of thieves, charlatans, wise men and traders, who arrived with dreams packed high on camel trains. Gradually, Shaahir Square had grown around the family’s famous inn, and while the other establishments had not survived the demise of the Silk Road, Babur’s chaikhana and the square that framed it had, along with the pistachio and fig trees that marked its centre and had once been part of a beautiful garden built by Babur’s namesake.
Ancient and beautiful Kabul, with the majestic Hindu Kush mountains rising high above, had so captivated Babur’s great-great-great-grandfather that he had asked for his body to be buried there and his tomb to be inscribed with the words, ‘If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’
The tea house’s other great claim to fame was that the Diamond Sutra, the oldest complete book in the world, had spent at least one night under its roof while on its way to the British Museum in London, where it rests to this day in safekeeping for the not-so-grateful Chinese. Babur’s relatives were said to have held the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text written in Chinese script six hundred years before Gutenberg had even begun to dream of a machine that would print words, although there were some in the square who called this claim false. Whatever the truth, Babur’s chaikhana had a sign hung outside that read, ‘The Diamond Sutra, the oldest book in the world, slept here.’ The sign had disappeared during the time of the Taliban when Babur feared any affiliation with a book other than the Qur’an might see the chaikhana go the same way as the giant buddhas of Bamiyan, but on that morning, as Sofia sat at her window watching the square come to life, the sign was there for all to see.
In all its rich history, Sofia believed the chaikhana had never seen such mismatched friends. Western-educated and urbane Dr Jabril Aziz was short, rotund and debonair, with a thick thatch of curly black hair receding on top. The village boy Mustafa, lacking any formal education other than the extraordinary ability of perfect recitation of the verses of the Qur’an, was tall, thin and wiry, with unseemly strands of scraggly grey hair that stubbornly resisted all efforts of capture under his tight black turban. While Mustafa, a much revered and admired qari of Kabul, looked at the world through the surety of his holy book, his love for his fellow human and his watery unseeing eyes, Dr Jabril looked at life through the imperfect and glorious vision of an idealist.
Tapping his way past the shops each day at the allotted time, the blind imam would stop exactly one step before the table, reach out his hand to find the back of the chair Dr Jabril had positioned just so for his friend, and sit before taking up the menu Babur had only recently introduced to the chaikhana.
‘And what might we have today?’ the imam would enquire.
‘Perhaps what we had yesterday?’
‘Good choice.’
The two men would place the unseen menus back on the table for Babur to take before bringing out the palau and goat that had been their lunchtime repast for as long as anyone in the square could remember.
There is a beauty to rituals that bind us, Sofia thought, as she watched Babur disappear back inside the chaikhana. This ritual between the imam, the doctor and the chaikhana owner belonged to all who lived in Shaahir Square, and while it remained so Sofia was sure the world she knew would retain its centre.
3
LIKE MOST MORNINGS, Jabril had woken in a good mood, but as he was about to open his front door his heart sank. Would he find another note pinned on the other side? Three notes in three weeks, all with the same message: If you don’t stop, someone will get hurt. Jabril had no idea what it meant. Stop what? Who will get hurt? Not for the first time he wished whoever penned these notes could be a little less obtuse. When the second had arrived Zahra had told him he had to do something, but what did you do about night letters when you didn’t know who sent them or why?
‘Maybe I’ll tell Chief Wasim,’ he had offered when the third note arrived.
‘Ha!’ Zahra had scoffed, discarding the idea as easily as spoilt milk. ‘What can he do? Our friend might be the chief of police, but everyone knows he’s a puppet for the men above him and cannot control those below. Don’t bother with Chief Wasim. Pay someone to protect us like everyone else in Kabul does.’
Jabril knew that something had to be done about the night letters, he just didn’t know what. He considered Zahra’s idea again that morning and found it as unappealing as it had been the week before. Surely if someone wanted to kill him they would have done it by now? Why wait three weeks and why send these stupid notes? He and Zahra had received notes like these six years before when she had been supporting a group working to improve the rights of widows and they’d come to nothing. Probably the best idea was to forget about them. Steeling himself, Jabril opened the door. No note. With a sigh of relief, and with his good mood restored, he set off for Babur’s chaikhana for his morning tea.
As he entered the square, Jabril was surprised to see Sofia still sitting at her window until he remembered this was the day the man from the UN was coming to see her. He wished he knew why; he hoped it wasn’t to poach Sofia away. When she smiled and waved to him his happy mood only got better. Jabril loved Sofia like a daughter. Her arrival in the square had been the greatest of blessings.
‘First impressions count,’ Zahra had said the morning he was to collect the new Australian doctor from the airport. At the time he had been disappointed that his wife was not coming with him to meet her, but in retrospect it had been a blessing. The gabardine pants he had chosen to wear were possibly a little too shiny and the shirt, with the buttons straining and his flesh trying to escape underneath, a little too tight. And, of course, there had been the sign. Five years on and the thought of that sign still made him squirm.