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The Benefits of Spinsterhood

A bedroom with white walls and two large windows. In the middle is a bed covered with colorful blankets and pillows.
Photo by Emily May (CC BY 2.0)

Men who live alone have a special name for their homes: bachelor pads. But what do women who live alone have, other than the ability to absorb and discard endless comments about when they’re going to get married? In Curbed, solo-living advocate Ashley Fetters looks at the history, stereotypes, and trends around women who choose to maintain their own spaces.

Solitude is often considered a privilege when we can afford to choose it and a punishment when it’s thrust upon us, and the same seems to extend to solo-living situations: Moving out to a place of one’s own for peace, quiet, and privacy is an occasion for congratulations, while living alone as a result of being abandoned or left behind is a much more pitiable affair. In other words, there’s an assertive, active image of living alone and there’s a sad, passive image of living alone.

And as anyone who’s read Simone de Beauvoir might intuit, it’s easy to assign a certain masculinity to the “active” and a femininity to the “passive”—hence, for example, the disparity between the mischievous way one might say “bachelor” and the pitying or scornful way one might say “spinster” (no matter how much work women like Kate Bolick have put into arguing that spinsterhood is something to aspire to).

There’s been a tendency over the last century or two to imagine the solo-living man as someone who has chosen peaceful privacy and the solo-living woman as a sort of flawed societal leftover. Or perhaps more alarmingly, a woman who has chosen to reject her preordained role as helper to a husband and family.

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A Music So Beautiful the Birds Fell from the Trees

ISAF Public Affairs/ Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Maija Liuhto | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,978 words)

 

Late on a Thursday night in a faraway corner of Old Kabul, a community of musicians and worshippers gathers for an evening of solemn prayer, ecstatic singing, and melodies from days long forgotten.

In a small shrine rebuilt after having been destroyed during one of the worst periods in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, fires have been lit, milky tea is served, and hashish is being passed around. This shrine, called Charda Masoom (Persian for “the Fourteen Infallibles”), lies at the end of a muddy street with open gutters, lined with houses with cracked paint and tiny shops selling trinkets and household goods. On the surface, this congested alley looks like any other in this part of the city.

But what an outsider would not know is that for several hundred years, this street — known as Kucheh Kharabat, “the alley of desolation,” the word originally referring to taverns where people came to drink, dance, and listen to music — has been home to a vibrant artistic community of musicians, who now find themselves with their backs against a wall. Space for them in Afghan society continues to shrink.

Originally, many of them came to the area from India to provide entertainment in the 19th-century amir Sher Ali Khan’s court. Local Afghan musicians followed course and moved to this area to learn traditional Indian ragas from the foreigners, letting their own Afghan folk tunes mix with the melodies of the subcontinent. Day and night, singers sang songs by medieval Persian poets, full of references to wine, love, and passion. Tabla drummers gave rhythm to the heady, trance-inducing music.

This is how the music of Afghanistan was born, in this now-forgotten alley in the backstreets of Kabul.

But all of that is in the past. Tonight, one senses a feeling of dread. Only a week ago, the Islamic State attacked a Shia mosque in Kabul. The worshippers and musicians here, although not Shiite, also belong to a minority religious community despised by ISIS and the Taliban. They are Sufis, part of a mystical, tolerant, and inclusive strand of Islam practiced all over the Muslim world. Sufism, followers of which believe is the true heart of Islam, used to have a large following in Afghanistan, evident in the many shrines found all over the country. The Sufis’ love of saints, music, and tolerance was too much for the extremist Taliban regime, and so the movement was driven underground in the late ’90s.

* * *

Today, the Taliban are stronger than ever despite their regime’s fall 16 years ago.
The worshippers seem tense. Police stand guard outside the shrine while a group of men circle a tombstone inside, silently praying for the descendants of Prophet Muhammad who are believed to be buried here. Outside, another group of men huddles in a circle, wrapped in woolen shawls. Smoke rises from their midst and the heady smell of hashish wafts all the way to the street outside the gates.

Suddenly, small children who have been happily running around are gently asked to leave, guided to the gates by a malang, the caretaker of the shrine, who has messy hair and at least a dozen shiny rings on his fingers. A boy, curious to find out what happens after 10 p.m., lingers by the sturdy, carved wooden door — he hasn’t been noticed. He smiles cheekily and quickly runs after the others, fully aware that Thursday nights are not for children, only for adults.

The musicians have arrived. Inside the shrine, a stage waits for nights like these. A harmonium, tabla drums, and a chimta (jingling tongs) are ready for the men to start playing.


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But this is no concert or performance. This is a religious ceremony called sama, practiced by some Sufi orders, where music, dance, and chanting are used as a means to get closer to God. In Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the devotional music played at sama ceremonies is known as qawwali, made famous by the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the ’80s and ’90s.

It is time to begin. Abdul Waheed Shaidayi, a middle-aged man wearing a red Kandahari cap climbs on the stage, greets everyone, and starts playing the harmonium. While he sings the introductory verses in Persian, his voice slowly soars higher and higher, picking up the pace. The tabla and chimta players join in, drumming and jingling their instruments to an intoxicating, fast-paced rhythm. The worshippers gradually fall into a trance — some aided by the hashish they have been smoking — and shake their heads while clapping furiously. When the music stops for a while, they recite prayers.

These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.

These days, the sama nights are Shaidaiyi’s only chance to play the harmonium for an appreciative audience. Otherwise, he’s mostly idle, his work having long since dried up, save for occasional wedding parties where he is asked to perform. Even there, respect is hard to find, with wedding guests whispering behind the musicians’ backs, accusing them of being pimps and infidels because over the years of war people started believing music is prohibited in Islam.

These ceremonies usually go on until 4 a.m. Then, the worshippers perform morning prayers, go to sleep, and wake up around noon. Here, in Kucheh Kharabat, the community lives at night and sleeps during the day.

In Kucheh Kharabat, however, Shaidayi commands respect. Everyone greets him as he walks down the street the next day. In the local attorney’s office, a congested room where an electric guitar hangs on the wall, Shaidayi is joined by another well-known character in Kharabat: Naseer Hamahang, an imposing man in his 50s. His black hair is combed back and colorful rings decorate his fingers. Hamahang is Shaidayi’s nephew, but he is only two years younger than his uncle.

Hamahang lights a cigarette and takes a slow drag, enjoying this long-time habit that doesn’t seem to affect his singing. The two men, both native to this area, can trace their bloodlines 150 years back to all the famous musical masters of the past. Together, they have lived through days of glory, the horrors of war, and Afghanistan’s beleaguered present.

“People from other areas have come here, bad people,” Shaidayi says as he pours fragrant saffron tea for his guests. “They are insulting the street by calling it Kharabat.” In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.

* * *

During the 1990s there was war and years of religious extremism that turned people against this musical community and almost wiped out the culture of Kharabat. When Shaidayi and Hamahang were children in the ’60s and ’70s, their fathers Ustad Shaida and Ustad Hamahang were famous, admired musicians — so much so that most Afghans remember their names with fondness, even while musicians are simultaneously believed to be bad people by the strictly religious.

In Sufism, the word desolation has an entirely different, positive meaning. It is associated with the destruction of ego and union with God.

When the two men were little, Afghanistan hadn’t yet been through the four decades of war and political instability that changed the entire cultural and social fabric of the country. Before the communists, Soviets, and religious extremists came, the kings who ruled Afghanistan acted as patrons of the musicians of Kharabat.

As a boy, Shaidayi often accompanied his father to the royal palace where he performed for the then-king Zahir Shah. It was the king himself who would come and pick them up from Kharabat in one of his armored cars now on display in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul — now riddled with bullet holes, because the Taliban would decades later use them for target practice.

“My father would be shaving and the king would wait,” he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.

“One night I went with [my father] to the palace. I was about eight or nine years old. My father and the other musicians were singing in the king’s salon and I fell asleep. The queen came and took me to her son’s room and put a blanket on me.”

There were no formalities in the relationship between the royal family and the Kharabatis — they would all sit next to one another, enjoying the poetry and melodies of the songs.

‘My father would be shaving and the king would wait,’ he says, pointing out how much respect the monarch had for the musicians.

Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers. “All the palace’s workers came out and wondered what had happened. The king said, ‘Don’t touch them — it is just because of the music.’ When the music stopped, the birds came back to their senses,” Shaidayi recalls.

Even women in Kharabat used to sing, dance, and play instruments. Today, this is not possible anymore — it would be considered equal to prostitution and pimping.

“People think that we send our wives to perform at parties. But our wives are not artists, they wear headscarves,” Hamahang says, raising his voice.

Abdul Waheed Shaidayi and Naseer Hamahang. Photos by Maija Liuhto.

Back in the more tolerant days, all the great musicians of Afghanistan proudly called Kharabat their home. The street was lined with instrument shops and traditional cafés where the ustads, or masters, used to sit on takhts, traditional beds, and talk and play their instruments. Each of them had students who would come to learn the art of playing traditional South Asian and Afghan instruments in their talim khanas, or schools.

“From the day we were born we heard the sound of music,” Shaidayi says. “When the students came we would go too and listen and learn how to play the instruments.”

Once, when Shaidayi’s father was performing for the king with another musician, Ustad Nabi Gul, the birds in the king’s garden suddenly fell from the trees, he remembers.

“Growing up here was so much fun,” Hamahang says. “Our childhood was beautiful. Our fathers were very rich. They were living like kings.”

But Shaidayi was only 10 years old when he lost his father, Ustad Shaida, in an accident. “It became very difficult to survive,” he says. Not long after, his mother also passed away. He had to drop out of school after eighth grade.

“I started learning harmonium from one of my father’s students, Saleem Qandahari,” he tells me.

Qandahari’s house was right in front of Shaidayi’s. Back then, most of the musicians regularly performed live at Radio Afghanistan and would be busy until noon. Their songs were transmitted all over the city through loudspeakers, Shaidayi remembers. After that, they would come back to Kucheh Kharabat and take an afternoon nap. At 4 o’clock they finally had time to receive their students.

“Because my father was his teacher he had time for me — he respected me,” Shaidayi says. In return for the lessons, young Shaidayi ran small errands for Qandahari’s family, such as buying rice and coal.

As Shaidayi and Hamahang were slowly growing into adulthood, the prelude to war began. First, the king was overthrown by his cousin Daud Khan in 1973. But he was assassinated only five years later, in 1978, by communists who then took over in Kabul.

At the age of 18, both Hamahang and Shaidayi had to enroll in the newly communist country’s army. It was there that their musical talents were put to use for the first time.

“They noticed I was really good at singing so they asked us to create a group,” Hamahang says.

The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.

The communists were ruling the country with an iron fist. In a deeply religious country like Afghanistan, not everyone liked the atheism they were propagating. A resistance was being organized, led by a group of religious leaders who became to be known as the mujahideen.

Both Shaidayi and Hamahang — each around 20 at the time — were still in the army when the war started in 1979. The Soviet Union had decided to invade Afghanistan to put an end to the mujahideens’ revolt. While soldiers were sent to fight the guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan, Hamahang and Shaidayi stayed in Kabul, in a fort called Bala Hissar, whose ruins still overlook the muddy lanes of Kharabat.

The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.

But worse times were still to come. In 1992, three years after Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen took over Kabul. An interim government was formed, but not all mujahideen leaders were supportive of it.

A violent civil war erupted, as opposing factions started shelling Kabul, destroying much of the city and killing as many as 50,000 people. Kharabat was directly in the line of fire of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s rockets.

“It was like a rain of rockets,” Shaidayi says.

“We couldn’t go outside. No one even dared to look out of the window to see who was there,” Hamahang continues. “We stayed in the basement of our house. There was nothing to eat besides rice.”

In a matter of days, the entire city became a horrifying battlefield. Prisoners in their own homes, the Kharabatis witnessed what war can do to people.

“Many people were hit by rockets and we would have to bury them in their homes. A lot of people were buried in our homes, too,” Hamahang says.

Going outside was simply too risky. The mujahideen would periodically come to the Kharabatis’ houses, asking them to take their injured fighters to Bala Hissar, the army fort, where they could be treated. If they refused, the fighters would hang the men and cut off the women’s breasts, the men remember.

“I have seen so much cruelty in Afghanistan, so much cruelty,” Hamahang says, shaking his head.

Both men, who were now married, realized the situation was simply too dangerous for their families. They decided to leave their homes and take their families to safety in neighboring Pakistan.

“We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,” Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.

“We saw that they were injured, but we did nothing because in that situation you only think of yourself,” Hamahang explains, his expression turning somber.

‘We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,’ Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left. Had they waited only a moment longer, they may have died. When they turned to have one last look at their beloved Kharabat, they saw that rockets had hit their relatives’ homes.

A short ceasefire allowed them to get out of Kabul unharmed.

“We took nothing with us,” Shaidayi says. There was no time to rescue precious instruments or tape recordings of their fathers’ performances. Family heirlooms and wealth accumulated through generations were left to the mercy of looting militias.

“When we left, we thought we’d be back in a couple of weeks after things in Afghanistan would calm down,” he explains. Instead, weeks turned into almost 14 years.

When the family reached the border crossing into Pakistan at Torkham, it was nighttime. There was nowhere safe for the women to sleep, so the men decided they all had to sleep on the ground and make a circle around the women, making sure no one would touch them. Peshawar, the city where most Afghan refugees were headed to, was still hours away.

But once there, the family split: Hamahang, his parents, and his wife decided to stay in Peshawar, while Shaidayi took his sisters, wife, and children south to the city of Quetta, where his brother was waiting for them. Both cities were full of newly arrived Afghan refugees, many living in congested camps on the cities’ outskirts.

“We started from zero,” Hamahang says.

The musicians were in a slightly more fortunate situation than those living in camps however because they could use their musical skills to earn money. “We rented a house [in Quetta]. The house had four rooms and we were eight families,” Shaidayi says.

Slowly, the people in Quetta started inviting Shaidayi and his brother to perform at their weddings. Many of them were Pashtuns, members of an ethnic group that lives on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shaidayi, an ethnic Tajik and Persian speaker, started learning Pashto so that he could perform at their weddings.

As they started making money they could soon afford a bigger house. But they still lived largely hand-to-mouth.

Years went by like this, exiled in a foreign country. But Kharabat remained in Shaidayi and Hamahang’s dreams.

One day, a few years after leaving Kabul, Shaidayi heard of a new militant group on television: the Taliban. The group had taken over most parts of Afghanistan, and its militants were now moving around Kabul, brandishing their Kalashnikovs and punishing women for as little as showing their ankles.

Kharabat was now empty. Countless musicians lay in their graves, buried under their houses which had been bombed to the ground. Or, if they had been lucky, they had escaped the rockets to Pakistan like Shaidayi and Hamahang.

With the Taliban’s rule of fear, a temporary peace also came to Kabul. But there was no question of returning to Afghanistan. Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.

“The Taliban didn’t allow music or musicians. All those things were forbidden,” he says.

Shaidayi heard from his friends that the Taliban had hanged musical instruments and cassettes from trees — just like men — as a warning to musicians.

In Kabul, people suddenly had to hide their radios and music players out of fear of the Taliban’s brutal punishments. An eerie silence descended upon the city, broken only by the azaan, the call to prayer that rang out like clockwork five times a day, spreading from the first mosque to the next, filling the entire valley of Kabul.

But Afghans were not isolated from the Taliban even in exile in Pakistan.

“The Taliban were there in Quetta, too, but they couldn’t say anything to us,” Shaidayi says. This, according to him, was because the group didn’t have the authority to do anything on Pakistani soil.

The Taliban in Quetta could easily be identified by the way they dressed and talked, Shaidayi remembers. They also frequently carried weapons.

Sometimes, Shaidayi found himself performing at parties members of the Taliban would attend. “They would come and listen to us there. They didn’t bother us,” he says.

* * *

Almost 400 miles north in Peshawar, Hamahang was leading a similar life, recording music with his father and playing at wedding parties.

One day, upon arriving to perform at a wedding, he saw a person with kohl-rimmed eyes and a large turban on his head. “I went to sit in a corner so that he wouldn’t see me. Then I asked who he was. He said he was the chief of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice in Kabul. I became very afraid,” Hamahang says.

The man had come to perform the nikah, the wedding ceremony, for the bride and the groom. He signaled Hamahang to come closer and asked him who he was. “I was shaking from fear,” he says.

When Hamahang identified himself as Ustad Hamahang’s son, the man said, “Your father had a very good life in Kabul.” Hamahang said, “Don’t do anything to me, the minute I walked up to you, I became ritually impure,” meaning he had wet himself out of fear.

“I could tell my companions to take you to the other side of Torkham,” the man said to him. “There, I could do anything to you. I could kill you, but I won’t. Don’t worry, don’t do anything, don’t sing while I’m here. I will wed the couple, I will go, and then you can sing,” the Taliban chief told Hamahang.

Once the man had left, Hamahang says he sang so well that the Taliban chief’s companions became drunk on the music. Later they brought alcohol bottles and started drinking — a serious offence under the Taliban regime.

For a while, it seemed the Taliban had meant to stay in Afghanistan. Years went by. At times, the families would visit one another; a week or two in Quetta, a month in Peshawar.

The year 2001 rolled in, at first like any other. But then came the 9/11 attacks in New York City. “We didn’t realize anything would happen to the Taliban when we were watching the attacks on TV,” Shaidayi says. But Afghanistan’s fate was about to change once again. In October, the United States invaded the country and chased the Taliban and their al-Qaeda associates away. But the country was in shambles following decades of war. It was not time to return yet.

While living in Pakistan, Shaidayi and Hamahang’s fame had started spreading to all the corners of the world where Afghan refugees lived. Hamahang had already toured the United States with his father in the late ’90s. While there, he had met several famous musicians from all over the world and had even been offered the opportunity to settle in the States. But the dream of one day being able to return to Kharabat had made him refuse.

* * *

In 2004, it was Shaidayi’s turn to see the world. One day, he received a phone call from London. An Indian man at the other end of the receiver wanted to invite him to perform at a Sufi concert along with other Afghan and Iranian musicians.

A few months later he found himself in England, sitting in front of a mostly British audience.

“A lot of people asked me what I thought about London,” he says. What I always remember is that when I was singing a song about Ali [Prophet Muhammad’s nephew] and the person who was playing tabla was translating the lyrics, all the British people were crying. It was very interesting for me.”

After the concert, a group of British people came up to Shaidayi and invited him to read Sufi poetry on a hilltop. They said they were followers of a Sufi saint, Hazrat Ghaus. “When I read the lyrics of a qawwali song, they all fell into a trance.”

* * *

In late 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president of Afghanistan. Hamahang and Shaidayi soon started hearing good news from Kabul. “Streets had been fixed, a lot of construction was taking place, and a lot of capital came to Afghanistan,” Shaidayi recalls.

In 2005, they finally packed their things, vacated their houses in Peshawar and Quetta, and headed for the Torkham border crossing, more than a decade after the first frightening night spent there.

Despite all the construction and development, a devastating sight awaited them on returning to Kabul.

“Kharabat had vanished,” Hamahang says.

Determined to see the area return to its old glory, the families started slowly rebuilding their houses. But nothing would ever be quite the same again. The years of war and horror had changed the people of Kabul.

Although many were glad to have music return to their lives after years of haunting silence, not everyone was happy to see the Kharabatis back.

“The people who had stayed in Afghanistan during the Taliban — the poor people who weren’t able to go to Peshawar — experienced a lot of terrible things, and they were psychologically affected. Because of that, some of them had very bad ideas about us,” Shaidayi says.

Still, most of the Kharabatis started teaching and performing again, hopeful that slowly things would get better. And for a good 10 years, Shaidayi had a steady, albeit meager, flow of students. But most of the students only took classes for a few months then disappeared. Two years ago, Shaidayi had to give up the small office he was renting as his teaching space. “I simply couldn’t manage anymore,” he says.

The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.

“Some days ago I met with a person who wanted to learn to play the rubab [a traditional string instrument]. He told me his wife had said to him, ‘Why do you want to learn music, it’s not good.’ This is because of illiteracy. People don’t understand,” Hamahang says.

The Taliban period had influenced people’s ideas about music. It was seen as something illicit now.

Music is not explicitly prohibited in Islam. There are scholars who believe it to be permissible and those who do not. Conservative mullahs and imams of mosques often speak against music in their Friday sermons, or khutbas, because they have been influenced by extremist interpretations of religion. Their words are taken seriously in Afghanistan.

There is a mosque near Kharabat where the musicians often go to pray. The mullah there behaves well with them, partly because the Kharabatis give him money each month.

“But he is against our work. He doesn’t view it positively,” Shaidayi says.

Once, Shaidayi went to pray in a mosque further away. The mullah recognized him. “Because of that, he started his khutba by saying that music is forbidden in Islam, music is bad, and that musicians make women dance.”

Slowly, the men understood that the peace in the early years after the U.S. invasion had only been temporary. The Taliban had regrouped and Kabul became unsafe again. Now, bombs explode on a regular basis and ISIS has started targeting the Shiite community of Afghanistan. Corpses pile up and anyone who doesn’t agree with the extremists’ interpretation of religion must fear for their lives.

“From Amanullah Khan’s reign up until today, these mullahs have destroyed our lives. Not only ours, everyone’s,” Hamahang says, suddenly agitated.

And so it has become a question of life and death for the Kharabatis to prove that they are good Muslims, even though their ways of worshipping might be different from the mainstream.

“Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,” Shaidayi says. “They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.”

But it is not only mullahs, the Taliban, and other extremists who threaten the Kharabatis.

‘Our fathers were musicians, but they never sat behind their instruments without first performing ablutions,’ Shaidayi says. ‘They prayed five times a day and so do we. We are Muslims.’

One night, Hamahang saw two drunken men with guns outside his house injure a child. He ran outside and asked what was going on. “They shot me, too,” he says, showing his injured hand. The bullet went through his palm and now he is no longer able to move his right middle finger. The men, he says, were part of a criminal gang that sells drugs in Kabul. “No one can do anything to them because they are powerful.”

The gangs often lure the musicians to come to shady locations, speaking of parties and promising them money. “When we arrive, there is nothing there. They beat us, take our keyboards, and all our instruments,” Hamahang says.

Powerful former mujahideen commanders sometimes bring girls and young boys to dance at parties — a practice known by the name of bacha bazi that is often connected to sexual abuse.

“If we go to a party, how can we know that they are bringing a boy or a girl to dance there?” Shaidayi asks. “If we sing, it is uncomfortable for us when someone is dancing in front of us. And if we don’t sing, we will be beaten by them.”

It is a rainy Thursday afternoon. The houses in Kabul are cold and the smell of gas from heaters lingers on men’s traditional suits, or payraan tumbaans. Shaidayi walks down Kharabat wrapped in a woolen shawl. He has just returned from the mosque.

Hamahang appears from around a corner and greets Shaidayi. He has been invited to perform on Afghanistan’s largest TV network’s music program tonight. Occasionally the other Kharabatis go too. But interest in traditional music has decreased even among the more liberal and educated Afghans as Western-influenced music videos have taken over TV channels.

“Now people only watch. They don’t listen. … If there are no girls in the video, nobody is interested,” Shaidayi says.

While Hamahang prepares for his performance, Shaidayi wants to visit some of his former colleagues in the nearby Shor Bazaar where some Kharabatis have their offices. As he is starting to cross a busy road, a man who looks like a beggar comes to greet him. He is also a musician.

Not too long ago, the man’s desperate financial situation drove him to attempt to sell his daughter, Shaidayi explains. But the other Kharabatis, although poor themselves, intervened, collected some money, and prevented this from happening.

Finally in Shor Bazaar, Shaidayi sits in front of his harmonium on the carpeted floor of a room where some Kharabatis still continue to teach their students. The stuffy room smells of hashish and gas from a small heater. Shaidayi starts singing as the man to his left plays the tabla and the one to his right a clarinet. Immediately, everyone is transported to a different world, mesmerized by the melody and lyrics of the song. The piece is a ghazal, a genre of poetry popular in South and Central Asia, composed by Shaidayi’s father, Ustad Shaida. It tells the story of two lovers, Laila and Majnun, a Sufi parable for the relationship between God and his worshipper.

All of this would be considered haram, or forbidden, by the Taliban. But for the Kharabatis, this is the very essence of religion.

“The Taliban don’t like music. If they decide to kill someone [for that] we are the first ones to end up dead,” the tabla player in the corner says after the song has finished.

Shaidayi stands up to leave. Outside, the weather is murky and depressing. Winter has arrived. He slowly walks toward his rented flat in Kharabat, careful not to ruin his shoes in the puddles and open gutters. On the other side of the town, a bomb has just exploded. Sirens fill the air for a while as the injured and dead are transported to hospitals. Then, life must go on again. In the evening, Hamahang’s performance is broadcast on TV while the rest of Kharabatis prepare for another qawwali night in the shrine at the end of the street.

Kharabat may never again become like in the past, but the community worshipping inside the shrine will always welcome Shaidayi and Hamahang. There, away from the eyes of others, it can almost seem like no time has passed.

***

Maija Liuhto is a freelance journalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan. She covers Afghanistan for the Los Angeles Times and the largest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, the Christian Science Monitor, and VICE.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

The Inward Empire

(Sasha/Getty Images)
Christian Donlan | The Inward Empire | Little, Brown and Company | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,968 words)

I have never really liked the fact that I have a brain. The thought of it has always made me feel vulnerable and compromised and delicate, as if I am walking around with a glass of water balanced on my head, waiting for it to spill. And I now suspect that I am not entirely alone in this. When, recently, my daughter Leon first became aware of her own brain — when she first noticed the presence of her thoughts sounding inside her head — she assumed she was unwell.

One evening a few weeks back, I was drawn through the house by sudden sobbing. After I’d found Leon crying in the living room, and after I’d wiped her nose and pinned back her hair, she told me, with much floundering and fumbling to get the meaning out, that she had pictures stuck in her head and she didn’t know why. Read more…

Oral History Project Grounds Story of Monticello in the Lives of the Enslaved

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's House, in Virginia.

For Smithsonian magazine, author Andrew M. Davenport discusses the work of Getting Word, an oral history project that, since 1993, has collected histories of African American families who lived at Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, Monticello.

By identifying descendants of families owned by Jefferson—like the Herns, Gillettes, Grangers and the many branches of the Hemings family, among others—and carefully recording their oral histories, the project’s founders, Lucia “Cinder” Stanton, Dianne Swann-Wright and Beverly Gray, and their successors have learned from dozens of American families from the mid-18th century until the present.

The fact of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s relationship is now considered a “settled matter” by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, due to the work of Getting Word and years of scholarship by historian Annette Gordon-Reed. A space where Hemings is thought to have lived is now open, for the first time, to Monticello’s public.

At one point, according to Davenport, “about 400 enslaved laborers” called Monticello home. Getting Word conducted more than one hundred interviews and additional supplemental archival research over the years; they’ve unearthed a sprawling black community at the plantation, made up of individuals whose lives most people know little about.

In the summer of 2016, [descendants] Velma and Ruth had been contacted by Gayle Jessup White, a community engagement officer with Monticello and the only descendant of Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family employed there. From their aunts and uncles, Velma and her cousins had heard stories about descent from Monticello’s African-American community. They had heard stories that one female in each generation was supposed to be named Sally for Sally Hemings.

White had been researching her third great-grandfather, Peter Hemings, an older sibling of Sally Hemings and a talented man who served as a cook for Jefferson after being trained by his brother James, who had studied the art in France and is widely considered the finest chef in early America. Peter also learned to become a brewer and a tailor. In a letter, Jefferson once described Peter as a man of “great intelligence.”

No surviving papers in Peter’s hand have been found. White learned that Peter and his wife, Betsy, enslaved at Thomas Mann Randolph’s Edgehill plantation, named one of their children Sally, after Peter’s sister. She would become Velma and Ruth’s great-grandmother, the mother of their grandfather Anderson. White’s great-grandmother was Anderson’s sister. In a memorable phone call, White confirmed the stories Velma and Ruth had heard and invited them to participate in Getting Word.

Later, Davenport describes how Getting Word got its start and considers how the project will likely change how the nation engages with narratives of its founders.

African-Americans were by far in the majority at Monticello. Monticello was a Black space. People of African descent shaped the entire landscape: how the food tasted, what the place sounded and felt like. Though Jefferson considered himself the patriarch, and though most every American identifies Monticello with Jefferson, it is important to recall that people of African descent, from the time the first brick of his “autobiographical masterpiece” was laid until Jefferson’s death, were in the majority…

“Jefferson was not a great man unto himself,” says [descendant] Jay. “He had unpaid, enslaved individuals who were extremely skilled and talented. And for the most part, they’re all from the same families. These five to eight families from the beginning to the end.”

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Alabama’s History Haunts, But It Also Instructs

BIRMINGHAM, AL - DECEMBER 12: Voters head in to cast their ballot as the doors open at a polling station setup in the St Thomas Episcopal Church on December 12, 2017 in Birmingham, Alabama. Alabama voters are casting their ballot for either Republican Roy Moore or his Democratic challenger Doug Jones in a special election to decide who will replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

In an essay for Harper’sscholar and writer Imani Perry tells a textured story of Alabama that moves through time and critical places throughout the state like Mobile, Birmingham, Selma, and Uniontown. “Alabama changes,” writes Perry. The author, an Alabama native, mourns, yet finds the space for hope. She predicts what recent, local events—such as Doug Jones’ black voter-powered fall 2017 Senate victory, or the opening of the nation’s first lynching museum—could mean for the whole of America, if we pay attention.

If you drive from Mobile to Birmingham, you can take the interstate, 65, which would bring you through Montgomery, the capital, the home of Rosa Parks, the site of the bus boycott and Martin Luther King Jr.’s onetime church. Or you can take local Alabama roads. The roads less taken are instructive. On another route, about an hour west, is a little-known place called Uniontown. It is in the Black Belt of Alabama, a region of double meaning: named for rich soil and the poorest people, slaves and later the barely emancipated Black sharecroppers and convicts leased out to do the hellish work of clearing land. The Black Belt is drier than the rest of Alabama. Yet thick forests remain even this many years after the wreckage that was king cotton. There are legions of cypress, oak, and loblolly trees, purple blazing star flowers, and all sorts of animals, especially the massive bucks that hunters pridefully kill.

Nearly two centuries ago, statesmen carved Alabama out of Mississippi, and then pushed out the indigenous—Cherokee and Creek—at the edge of bayonets. In swarmed the slavers hungry for cotton wealth in the nineteenth century. And that sensibility, although with some labor, still breathes.

The Black towns in the Black Belt are now dumping grounds—of fantasies and waste. In random assortment through the woods there are abandoned cars rusted to the color of dried blood, and stacks of old unwanted papers. But worst is what comes from out of state. Matter of fact, our nation has turned Uniontown, Alabama, into one of its trash cans, burying it in the refuse of thirty-three states. “Landfill” is too clean a word for what they do. And that’s not all. As part of Uniontown’s sewage system, liquid waste is spewed into the air to land on the hard Alabama clay earth. The town is showered in shit.

Uniontown is 90 percent Black and nearly all poor. A fact of modern living is that the least valued carry the heaviest burden. They’ll die first, at least that’s what the wealthy are banking on. And the dead are killed once again. The graveyard of generations of Black Uniontown residents, since before the Civil War, stands right outside the landfill gates, where descendants worry about the graves being disturbed, despite the corporate promise to treat the departed with respect. It has become harder to honor them. And, in truth, we are all probably somewhat ashamed to face them.

Alabama’s tough earth is either black or red, like what is found in much of West Africa. In preparation for a lynching museum in Montgomery, helmed by the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, jars of Alabama earth have been collected from the sites of lynchings all over the state. Lined up, they are a hauntingly beautiful array of colors, from jet black to rust and copper. The red clay soil of Alabama, a form of ultisol, is produced by intense weathering, season after season with no new soil. My grandmother’s grandmother, like many old-time Black Southern women, used to chew and swallow that dirt—a mineral-rich taste that strengthened weak blood. Change the joke, slip the yoke, then they find a new yoke. Propose strangulation by trash and shit when the ropes will no longer do, and everyone, even the holier-than-thou North, will pitch in with their leavings. That is what the nation does to my state.

Except for on the King holiday weekend in January. And then the ossified sculpture of Alabama is brought out, shiny, stoic, and noble, and broadcast nationally. It often takes the form of a symbolic ritual of civil rights memorialization in Selma, Uniontown’s neighbor, especially during election cycles. The candidates theatrically walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge during a celebration called the Jubilee, in remembrance of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. But there are no weapons aimed at them, there is no Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam.” There are self-congratulatory crowds announcing, “Look how far we have come,” and, holding on, gripping, are organizers trying to find a way to use the iconography, to reshape it as a weapon for freedom. Alabama organizers have literally never stopped fighting. But the nation’s eyes haven’t thawed enough to see it.

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The Bungled Bank Robbery That Ended in a Landmark Legal Ruling

Illustrations by Juan Esteban, Archival illustrations by Alex Tatusian

Thomas L. Dybdahl | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,642 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

In early June 1958, 25-year-old John Leo Brady was in love. He was also in some trouble. His sweetheart, Nancy Boblit McGowan, had just told him she was pregnant, and he was the father. But she was only 19, married to another man. And Brady was broke.

He’d never had an easy life. He grew up poor in southern Maryland. His young parents, scraping their living from a small tobacco farm, couldn’t cope with a fussy baby. They gave him to his paternal grandparents and his Aunt Celeste, who raised him. From infancy through his late teens he suffered from serious otitis media, and his ears regularly oozed a thick, vile-smelling pus. At school, his classmates called him “stinkears.”

Brady gladly dropped out during the eighth grade to work full-time on his uncle’s farm. At 19, in 1951, he enlisted in the Air Force and served as a military policeman at bases in Washington state and Greenland. Then, over the space of four years, his otitis stopped, he got married, left the service, earned his high school equivalency, got divorced and returned home to Maryland.

In March of 1958, Brady met Nancy and her brother, Donald Boblit, because their parents were good friends with his aunt. Donald was 25, gawky, lonely and barely literate. Nancy was “just a dumb, good-looking blonde,” according to a friend, in the pre-feminist jargon of the ‘50s. Although both she and her husband, Slim, were living with her parents, they hardly spoke, and she let everyone know she intended to do whatever she wanted. Brady and the two siblings soon became close, and he and Nancy fell in love. Then Nancy got pregnant.

Brady didn’t know what to do. He was working at a local tobacco packing company for $1.50 an hour. He had recently bought a maroon 1947 Ford and was behind on his bills. But he wanted Nancy to know how much he was committed to her. She had planned a trip to New York to visit family for a week, leaving on Monday, June 23. That Sunday, when they were together, on an impulse he wrote her a check for $35,000, post-dated to July 6.

It was a dream sum—a huge number just pulled out of the air that he guessed could solve all their troubles, if he could only make it real. Nancy asked no questions; she put the check in her purse. Brady reminded her to wait. “Somehow,” he said, “in two weeks it’ll be in the bank.” Read more…

La Otra

Getty / Sire Records / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | June 2018 | 19 minutes (4,721 words)

1985. These were the days of Menudo and “We Are the World,” the year boxer Macho Camacho gave a press conference in a leopard-skin loincloth as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” blared from radios across the United States. In one month, the space shuttle Challenger would explode while all of America watched on television, entire classrooms full of kids, everyone eager to witness the first teacher ever launched into space. My mother had just turned 22, and a week later Levy turned 8. By then, Mami had three children. She’d already been a mother for more than a third of her life.

In those days, Mami teased her blond hair like Madonna, traced her green eyes with blue eyeliner, applied several coats of black mascara, apple-red lipstick, and matching nail polish. She wore skin-tight jeans and always, no matter where she was going, high heels. She dusted her chest with talcum powder after a bath, lotioned her arms and legs, perfumed her body and her hair. My mother loved lotions, perfume, makeup, clothes, shoes. But really, these were just things to her. The truth was my mother loved and enjoyed her body. She walked around our apartment butt-ass naked. I was more used to seeing her naked body than my own. You should love your body, my mother taught me. A woman’s body was beautiful, no matter how big, how small, how old, how pregnant. This my mother firmly believed, and she would tell me over and over. As we got older, she would teach me and Alaina about masturbation, giving us detailed instructions about how to achieve orgasm. This, she said, was perfectly normal. Nothing to be ashamed of.

While my father only listened to salsa on vinyl, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Ismael Rivera, my mother was all about Madonna. She was American, she liked to remind us, born in New York, and she loved everything American, including her music. She belted the lyrics to “Holiday” while shaving her legs in the shower, while making us egg salad sandwiches for lunch. She talked about moving us to Miami Beach, where most of our titis and Grandma Mercy lived, about making sure we learned English.
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City on a Hill

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes 2,944 words)

 

At the top of Riverdale, at the top of the Bronx, there is a city on a hill. The city exists within a single building; there are single rooms with no locks, each with a bed, a dresser, and — if the resident’s family provides one — a television set with which to while away the hours. Time is measured by the same clock as it is in other cities, but here it curves and collapses, compresses yet languorously stretches. Once a week there is a hairdresser and a manicurist, too. It is lovely — and dreadful. You can visit the citizens here, and you are free to leave when you are ready, if freedom is measured by the movement of one’s feet. My mother lives in this building, which is a nursing home. We signed the contract for her just last month, in what might have been human blood.

The city-building overlooks the Hudson River, which today glimmers silver under a portentous sky. It’s spring by the calendar, but winter has persisted in the Northeast. I trudge west from Riverdale Avenue bundled into my down coat, the wind biting at my neck. I like to pretend that my mother is expecting me.

She has lived there only a few days. I am acquainting myself with the place every time I visit. She lives on one of the dementia floors, the medium security floor, with other people who are social and display a level of intellectual competence that affords them the illusion of freedom — they do not require help from aides with dressing and bathing, for example, and they may choose where to sit at dinner.

She lives on one of the dementia floors, the medium security floor, with other people who are social and display a level of intellectual competence that affords them the illusion of freedom…

There is a code to gain entry to the elevator, and another to make the elevator move. We are asked not to let the residents know these numbers, although this seems to miss the point; no one who lives here could retain the numbers long enough to use them. Still, I take the piece of paper on which the nurse has written the codes and stash it deep in my coat pocket, checking it discreetly before punching in the numbers.

The unit has a hospital floor plan, which casts a gloom over the space, a reminder that this is a ward, not a home. Still, the idea of a central nurses’ station affords some comfort — someone is just down the hall in case of emergency. My mother has one endless emergency here — her own urgent need to leave.

She looks up eagerly when I cross the threshold bearing my weekly gifts — this time, a CD player, some photos to hang, cookies, fresh underwear and socks. Everything she owns must be labeled; dementia-floor residents can be found in each other’s clothing routinely. “You have to have a sense of humor about it,” my mother’s social worker tells me.


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Her room has a river view. I wonder what it’s like not to know which body of water it is that one sees through the glass; not to know that the sun will set over this water because one is facing west; not to know which way the bathroom is or what time it is or how to find the phone; not to remember the combination of numbers that will allow you to reach your children; to know you have children, but not to remember their names.

“It’s so large,” my mother says, as we stroll down the hall, gazing at the paintings on the walls. We take the elevator to the mezzanine, where we can get some food. We walk down another long hall, passing a small pool, a gym, a spa. “Isn’t this nice, Mom?” I ask, and she nods agreeably.

I hear music, an accordion bleating out a melody in a minor key.

Those were the days, my friend
We’d thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d thought we’d never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.

I smile; it is comically, tragically apropos for a nursing home. Still, I guide my mother toward the music, which is both lively and disturbing, as though accompanying the final sequence in a horror film.

We arrive at a small ballroom in which a crowd of mostly wheelchair-bound seniors sit, nodding to the music, enlivened and demonstrating as much to the height of their ability. It reminds me of bar mitzvahs I attended long ago — the wall-to-wall carpeting, the tinny music reverberating in the stale, enclosed space. I turn my head toward the door and notice a bird cage. It’s actually a glass enclosure, in which parakeets and cockatoos chirp and flit from one end to the other.

“Let’s find the café, Mom,” I say, and she replies that she will follow me anywhere.

I direct her out of the ballroom. We walk until at last I see sunlight. They call it the River Cafe; it looks like a bodega. Here we can buy cookies and toiletries and coffee. Booths line a glass wall affording a dazzling view of the water.

“Look at the view!” I have been saying this a lot today, as if the sight of the river were recompense for her confinement.

“Yes, it’s lovely,” she replies, “It’s very nice.”

She is uneasy, asking me constantly if after this tour I will be taking her “out of here.”

“Look at the view!” I have been saying this a lot today, as if the sight of the river were recompense for her confinement.

Yes, I tell her, we are going to my sister’s house, it’s not far at all, we are walking there.

“Thank god,” she says. “ I can’t tell you how happy I was to see you walk in.”

* * *

Almost no new memories imprint; I am struck by the specific details she retains: my entrance into her room, what she felt like at that instant, how desperate she felt just before. Will this crystallized moment be sent down the pipe to long-term memory? Or will she have it only for today?

We buy a cookie then leave the café. On the way to the elevator, a small room set up like a museum alcove catches my eye. Pickles and Egg Cream reads a sign overhead. It’s an exhibit of dioramas in which a woman named Ruby G. Strauss has recreated scenes from her parents’ years on the Lower East Side. I peer into a scene of passengers exiting the subway stop at Broadway and 14th Street, another of Strauss’s grandmother’s garden in summer, wedged between two tenements, a line of clothes drying above children skipping rope and a man in a straw hat reading the paper. There are dozens of little figures holding tiny props: a man drinking wine by a cathedral radio in his parlor, a bride and groom on their wedding day, a grandmother wearing wiry glasses, knitting.

Like the parakeets, the dioramas are too easy a metaphor. Life under glass. Life observed through glass. Life imprisoned within glass walls. I pull my mother out of the alcove. Her eyesight has been failing, so for her the exhibit is a blur.

I punch the code in and the elevator arrives. We emerge on the first floor and exit through the lobby, passing a collection of dolls made in the images of American First Ladies. I can see my mother’s reflection — her long coat and dark hair — in the glass that encases the dolls, moving swiftly and enthusiastically toward the lobby door.

A shock of cold wind hits as it slides open.

“It’s really a nice place,” I say. “In spring all these trees will bloom and they have barbecues in the garden.”

“Yes, I’m so lucky,” my mother says. “Are we leaving now?”

As we walk down the hill toward the guard booth, I think of an Isaac Asimov book I read in my youth. In Caves of Steel, he envisions a futuristic city complex where New York City once stood. It is entirely enclosed, without a drop of fresh air seeping into its midst, contained under metal domes.

The air is so qualitatively different outside the walls of the pavilion in which my mother now lives, which hums with the electrical energy of a well-run hotel. Its seamless wall-to-wall carpet obliterates any hint of nature, the scent of cateria food permeates the first floor corridors, the ring of elevator cars creates a perpetual dinging soundtrack in the lobby.

A siren goes off, as though a dog had jumped a security perimeter. It’s my mother’s electronic bracelet, which they’ve attached to prevent her from wandering off the property. I negotiate our departure without alerting my mother to this indignity.

We proceed eastward on a paved path. Alongside the path runs a tall metal fence that separates us from some tan, patchy grass — the sort that works as visual shorthand for the ravages of winter. I’m breathing better now, as is my mother, who has all morning complained of agitation.

“I was so glad when I saw you in the doorway,” she says again, as we walk into the wind toward Riverdale Avenue. We cross it and as we do, seem to travel through a time portal. The red-brick houses are narrow and built right next to one another; they have small porches, and I see a window sign declaring that We are all made in God’s image. There is a cozy, nostalgic compression to the neighborhood, some sense of Americana that is absent from the busy streets of Manhattan, where I live. I see errant crocuses defying the angry winter wind and a daffodil or two, flags, rusty porch swings, and broken children’s wagons on tiny front yards.

“Where are we going?” my mother asks.

“To your daughter’s house,” I reply. “We’re almost there.”

“That’s right,” my mother says. “I know I have to go back tonight, to the place, but I don’t want to think about it now.” She smiles and plays with the electronic bracelet on her arm, unaware of what it does.

I bring up the river, again, out of habit.

“There’s a beautiful view from your room, Mom,” I say, finding my own smile sinister.

“Yes — ” she starts. “I’m so lucky.”

Another universe unfolds inside my sister’s house. It is organized along the principle of family: children’s bedrooms, toys organized by age appropriateness and size, a kitchen stocked with packaged soups and treats young children like. Still, the wreckage of six children and two dogs is everywhere in evidence: chewed pillows, fights underway, dirty dishes on the table, crayons on the floor. My mother settles on the couch after asking if she can be of any help. She smiles at me, looks around for my sister, asks where the house is. I am not sure how to answer. I tell her it is down the street from where she lives, but this means almost nothing to her. We are supposed to give her something to do, something to occupy her hands and provide her with a sense of her necessity; I have read that all humans need this. Sometimes we do find tasks, but sometimes we lack creativity and tell her she should just relax. She cannot relax; there is nothing relaxing about perpetual confusion. She asks again if she can help. I ask her to pick up the crayons. I find later that she’s put them in the dishwasher.

Noam, who is 7, kisses his grandmother when it’s time for me to walk her back. He looks at her as though in love, and I wish this were all she needed, all anyone needed. I assure her that she will return to this house soon. Right now, it’s time to go. She sighs; I hear a whistle in her breath that betrays more than passing reluctance.

The clouds have drowned in the ink of a night sky; I sing a familiar tune and hold my mother’s hand as we walk back to the nursing home. I assure her I’ll be back soon. It jangles my heart, this wrongness, this dropping off, this dislocation of a family member, the exile imposed by decline. The lobby murmurs with electricity, the First Lady dolls stare expectantly from behind their glass.

It jangles my heart, this wrongness, this dropping off, this dislocation of a family member, the exile imposed by decline.

I punch in the code and we ascend in silence to the second floor. My mother suddenly squeezes my hand and tells me she loves me.

The air in here is stale as ever. Both of us feel the panic return.

I have an impulse to seize my mother’s arm and run. I want to bring her home and put her in bed and sing to her until she falls asleep. Instead, I pick out a nightgown and pat her head. She tries not to cry.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom,” I offer.

“Will you?” she asks.

And I retreat — from her, from her pain, from mine, from the city on the hill.

I punch in the code and the humming box takes me down. First floor. Past the First Ladies. Out into the night air. Onto the BXM2 bus, which will carry me home to Manhattan.

* * *

Reality is a a series of universes with membranes loose and undulating. Where does one end and the other begin? Is there a wall between the perceptions of the “demented” and the rest of us, who retain enough memory to support a more continuous vision of our histories, our days, to support a logic dependent on past and future? Or is it more a window, or more alarming yet, a swinging door?

All realities exist near porous borders — for example, my mind has flown into fantasy as I mentally retrace in words the cavernous, tiny universe of my mother’s nursing home complex. I’ve fashioned it into a cave of steel, in the image of another reality, stolen from within the pages of fiction. The path between it and my sister’s house is now a time machine of my own construction, my sister’s street is a world built of images I see in the past of a country in a time before I was born. My mother merely wants to know whose house we are visiting; her “sane” daughter, her guardian, is dreaming of the way in which streets, houses, concrete walkways, and riverside high-rise complexes splinter and spiderweb outward into separate communities from the moment humans began interacting with time. Which of the two of us, my mother or I, is more connected to reality as we define it as an everyday convenience? Surely my mother’s questions are more practical, more connected to pragmatic concerns, than mine, which are based on hallucinatory impressions of time and space. I have fallen somewhere on this visit, stumbled and slipped into fantasy, allowed the home that keeps my mother safe to drive me close to madness. I am not sure where anything begins or ends anymore, not sure that anything does.

The bus is turning off the Major Deegan Expressway now, it rolls steadily down Fifth Avenue. The trees on either side, illuminated by a flush of light from a streetlamp, are bare and white and wild-limbed against the black sky. They incline toward the street, forming an archway under which we sail. There’s the time portal again, coming into view: the buildings lining the avenue, stately and majestic, are alive with the ghosts of the 19th century, one can see the horses and carriages clopping underneath the arboreal canopy, one can smell the pipe smoke and the dirt, see the women in full skirts hurrying across this boulevard two centuries ago.

How easy it is to slip into reverie, to slip across the boundary from one reality to the other, one fancy to the next, especially in this city. New York is known for its boundaries between rich and poor, but also for the suddenness with which the neighborhoods change. Swank lobbies with doormen line one block, graffiti-worn bodegas and chain link fences line the next. This is how fast Madison Avenue shifts between 94th and 96th Street.

My mother is confined in her cave of steel, trapped within the boundaries of her forgetfulness. I am trapped in my own universe of half dreams and meditations. Her worries are immediate and connected to the hardness of her reality, mine are existential, free to float philosophically above her everyday concerns.

We walk the halls of her city on the hill together, unavailable to each other, trapped under different kinds of glass.

My bus drops me at my West Side stop; I exit to the sight of hot dog carts and the scent of park-bench smokers, to the music of barking dogs and basketballs bouncing. Though now walking a familiar route home, the sensation of wandering does not abate. Maybe it is merely the tableaux of street life shifting and sliding past that evokes my dizzy sense of dislocation. I think it is something more, though — I walk as if chased by the wind, or worse. I slow down, speed up, ascend the stairs to my apartment; still I am pursued. I go to bed and dream of the city on the hill. It is now a castle in which old people turn young, wrinkles are smoothed into satin flesh, the people dance and flick their skirts and sing.

We walk the halls of her city on the hill together, unavailable to each other, trapped under different kinds of glass.

A river runs past this castle, and boats too, in which the people make their escape. I do not see which boat my mother takes, or who ferries it, but when I return for our next visit she is not waiting on her bed for me, gazing at an unknown vista. I am so very glad — when I arrive at her threshold — that this time I do not see her there. She has crossed the perimeter between her world and my reverie, traversed the undulating boundary between reality and fancy, between mother and daughter, between dementia and freedom.

But this — this is only in my dream.

* * *

Leslie Kendall Dye is an actress and freelance writer based in New York City.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Illustrator: Katie Kosma

Haruki Murakami Strolls Through His Childhood Home After the Hanshin Earthquake

AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko

The Osaka region was struck by a 6.1 earthquake this week. Born in Kyoto, novelist Haruki Murakami grew up in the smaller cities between Kobe and Osaka, a strip of land people call Hanshin-kan. In 1997, two years after the great Hanshin Earthquake decimated Kobe, Murakami decided to walk from the town of Nishinomiya to Kobe’s center, where he spent so much of his teenage leisure time. Murakami wrote about his walk at Granta.

Murakami enjoyed growing up in the Hanshin region, though he also loved spending time in downtown Kobe and eventually moving to bustling, sophisticated Tokyo. To him, there are two types of people: those who feel drawn back to their childhood home, and those who know they’ll never live there again. “Like it or not,” he says, “I seem to belong to the second group.” He took this walk to see how time and the earthquake had changed his childhood home, and to see how his old home looked now that he had so little connection to it. What he found was a sort of average, in-between place haunted by a sense of violence. Although Murakami has published a lot of nonfiction in Japan, little of it has been translated into English, which makes this journey a rare treat for his millions of fans.

I strode on from Nishinomiya to Shukugawa. It was not yet noon, but sunny enough that, walking briskly, I started to perspire. I didn’t need a map to tell me roughly where I was, but I had no memory of the individual streets. I must have walked down these streets hundreds of times, but now I was drawing a complete blank. Why couldn’t I recall them? It was strange. I felt bewildered, as if I’d come home to find all the furniture replaced.

The reason was soon clear to me. Places that used to be empty lots weren’t empty any more, and places that hadn’t been empty now were – like photo negatives and positives replacing each other. In most cases the former were empty lots that were now residences, the latter where old houses had been destroyed in the earthquake. These before-and-after images had a synergistic effect, adding a fictitious wash to my memories of how the town used to be.

The old house I had lived in near Shukugawa was gone, replaced by a row of town houses. And the grounds of the nearby high school were filled with temporary housing put up for survivors of the quake. Where my friends and I used to play baseball, the people who lived in these prefab shelters had hung their laundry and futons out to air, in what now seemed like a tight, cramped space. Try as I might to find vestiges of the past, there were almost none. The water in the river still flowed as clean and pure as before, but it gave me an odd sensation to see how the riverbed was now neatly lined with concrete.

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On Saving the Cuban Crocodile from American Invasion

The Cuban crocodile, C. rhombifer (Getty Images)

At Hakai Magazine, Shanna Baker reports on the ongoing bid to preserve C. rhombifer, the breed of Cuban crocodile beloved of Fidel Castro, who was known to send living and embalmed versions of the animal to allies around the world. The Cuban croc is endangered, not only due to shrinking habitat, but also to hybridization as its gene pool gets polluted by natural encounters with the bigger, shyer American crocodile.

Beside a spit of land jutting into a swampy enclosure, a female crocodile breaks the waterline, the bony ridges on her back jagged like an electrocardiogram. Her eyes track six sweat-soaked men standing in a haphazard semicircle, gripping poles twice their own height, as mosquitos orbit their straw hats. Another man works quickly with a hoe, leveling the dried grasses of her nest and chewing up the earth until he finds her unborn brood, laid just three days ago. The crocodile thrashes and lunges forward, but two men raise their weapons, ready to deliver a hard thump to the snout if she approaches.

She sinks back as the man in the middle of the mob loads her few dozen eggs plus a second set from a nearby nest into a plastic pail, cushioning them between layers of dirt. At the top, he places four last eggs—the rejects—each the size of a small mango. They feel like unpolished marble and all bear a sizable dent. The tiny would-be Cuban crocodiles (Crocodylus rhombifer) inside are goners—the membranes are too damaged—but the others are destined for an incubation room, where air conditioners humming round the clock will hopefully hold them at a steady temperature. If all goes as planned, in 75 days or so, hatchlings will emerge and help move the needle on C. rhombifer’s prospects for survival.

Conserving the Cuban croc was one of Fidel Castro’s first priorities after he steamed into power in 1959. Just months into his rule, he ordered the creation of the Criadero de cocodrilos, Ciénaga de Zapata—or Zapata Swamp Captive Breeding Facility—a cluster of ponds, rows of concrete-block pens, and a couple of narrow one-story buildings split into modest offices and workspaces for staff two and a half hours south of Havana. Castro always had a predilection for wild spaces and things, says environmental historian Reinaldo Funes-Monzote of the University of Havana. Whether he cherished endemic species because they fit with his hypernationalistic sensibilities, or he related to their untamed energy, or he was just enlightened to the inherent value of wildlife is a guess, though crocodiles must have become a point of pride for him at some stage—he eventually developed a habit of gifting them, either living or embalmed, to foreign allies.

The Cuban is bolder and hunts during the day. It has a stubby snout, a reputation for jumping, and a tendency to walk with its belly high off the ground. The American is bigger, more apt to hide, searches for prey at night, sports dark bands on its back and sides, and has a long, pointed snout and extra webbing on its hind toes. The differences are as distinct as red from blue.

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