The Kabuliwala

The narrator is a writer who lives in Kolkata. His five-year-old daughter Mini cannot stay quiet for a single minute. Her mother scolds her for chattering, but her father enjoys every word. One morning, while he is trying to finish the seventeenth chapter of his novel, Mini runs to the window and shouts, 'Kabuliwala! Kabuliwala!'

In the street below walks a tall Afghan in loose, dusty clothes and a turban, with a bag over his shoulder and boxes of grapes in his hands. He is Rahmat, who comes down from Kabul every winter to sell dried fruit. The moment he turns towards the house, Mini panics and hides — she is sure that his bag is full of children like her.

Her father calls Rahmat in, buys something and introduces him to his daughter. Rahmat offers Mini raisins and almonds; slowly she comes out from behind her father's knee. A few days later the father finds her sitting on a bench by the door, chattering non-stop, while the big Kabuliwala listens and laughs, her little lap full of nuts.

They become the best of friends and share private jokes. 'Khokhi, are you ever going to your sasurbari — your father-in-law's house?' Rahmat asks. Mini, who has no idea what a father-in-law's house is, asks him the same question back. Rahmat shakes his huge fist at an invisible enemy: 'I'll thrash my father-in-law!' and Mini laughs until she can hardly breathe.

Sometimes Mini asked Rahmat whether he would take her to Kabul. He would laugh and describe a long road through the mountains, high passes white with snow and caravans moving slowly through them. Mini imagined Kabul as a place just beyond the next lane. Rahmat never corrected her. For a little while, her questions took him home, and his answers brought that distant place close to the writer too.

Rahmat began coming several times a week. He brought raisins in a twist of paper, told stories of snow on the Kabul passes, and once taught Mini a song in his own language that she sang all wrong for a month. The household got used to the pair of them: a five-year-old girl and a huge mountaineer sitting on the doorstep, talking nonsense with total seriousness.

Mini's mother is uneasy. She has heard stories of men from Kabul stealing children and wishes the friendship would end. The father, who longs to travel but never leaves his desk, enjoys Rahmat's tales of mountains and deserts, and quietly pays him for the fruit he keeps giving Mini.

Rahmat had left a small daughter behind in Kabul — a girl just Mini's age. It was for her, he said, that he came down every winter to strange lands to sell his fruit. When trade went well he thought of her; when he was cheated in the bazaar, he thought of her. Once he said to the writer, half laughing and half not: 'In my country, the father of one daughter is the poorest and the richest man at once.'

In Mini's cheerful chatter Rahmat found an echo of the daughter he had left behind. A question about Kabul, a joke about marriage, or a handful of raisins could make the crowded Kolkata lane feel less foreign. The writer watched them and understood that their friendship needed no shared language or country; it grew from the simple pleasure of being welcomed and listened to.

Before going home each year, Rahmat goes round collecting money owed to him. One winter morning the narrator hears shouting in the street. Two policemen are leading Rahmat away with his hands tied, his clothes stained with blood. A neighbour had bought a Rampuri shawl on credit and then lied that he had never bought it; in the quarrel, Rahmat stabbed him.

Mini comes running onto the veranda. 'Kabuliwala, are you going to your father-in-law's house?' Rahmat laughs even now. 'Yes, that's exactly where I'm going,' he says, and holds up his bound hands. 'I'd have thrashed my father-in-law — but my hands are tied.' He is sentenced to several years in prison.

Time passes, and Mini forgets her old friend, as children do. She makes new friends, then grows into a young woman. Her father, too, rarely thinks of the Kabuliwala. Then comes autumn, the season of Durga Puja, and Mini's wedding day. The house is full of noise: musicians play the shehnai, workmen hang lamps, cooks bustle in the courtyard.

The wedding that day was of the old, full kind: conch-shells and ululation from morning, drums at noon, priest, sacred fire, flowers, and a house so crowded that the cook had to fight for a place to stand. The writer, half host and half spectator, watched his daughter with wet eyes — five years ago a chatterbox, today a bride.

That morning a man appears at the study door and salaams. He is thin, his head is shaved, and the narrator only recognises him by his smile: Rahmat, released from prison that very day. 'Is the khokhi here? May I see her?' The narrator, uncomfortable on such an auspicious day, says that the house is busy and he should leave.

Rahmat's face falls. At the door he turns back and holds out a few grapes and raisins wrapped in paper. 'I brought these for the khokhi. Please don't pay me.' Then he reaches into his loose shirt and takes out a crumpled, grubby piece of paper. On it, pressed in soot, is the print of a small child's hand.

It is the handprint of Rahmat's own daughter, far away in Kabul. Every year, as he sold his fruit in the streets of Kolkata, he had carried it against his heart. The writer suddenly sees that the rough fruit-seller and he himself are the same: both are fathers of little girls. His eyes fill with tears.

The little hand on the paper had darkened and faded at its folds, but Rahmat had kept it carefully through years of travel and prison. The writer looked from that print to the preparations for Mini's wedding and felt time gather in the room: his own daughter had grown up before his eyes, while Rahmat's daughter had grown up unseen, an entire mountain range away.

He sends for Mini. She comes in her red wedding sari, sandalwood patterns on her forehead, shy and bride-like. Rahmat is startled. He tries the old joke — 'Khokhi, are you going to your father-in-law's house?' — but now Mini understands the word, blushes and turns away. Rahmat sits down heavily. He realises that his own daughter, too, must have grown up, and that he will have to get to know her all over again.

The narrator takes a banknote from the wedding money and gives it to Rahmat. 'Go home to your daughter, Rahmat. May your meeting bring luck to my Mini.' To pay for it he cuts back the wedding: the electric lights are fewer and the brass band is cancelled, and the women of the house grumble. But the writer feels that the wedding has become brighter, because in a faraway land a father will see his child again.

The women of the house grumbled about the lights, but the writer did not argue. In his heart he had settled the account in his own way: in this world one thing carries many names — in his house it had been a wedding, and on the Kabul road it was a father going home to his daughter.