The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen Page A

cranking them open just a tad wider than usual to usher in a little extra of the year’s first sunshine. The holiday’s name, Nawruz, meant “new day,” or “new light,” in Farsi.
    “Wa shoma ham Sal-e-Nau mubarak.” And a happy New Year to you, as well. Women greeted early guests with haft mewa , a heady compote of dried fruit and nuts drowned in giant vats of boiling water and steeped overnight, and samanak , a sweet paste of wheat germ, sugar, and walnuts. Only women were allowed to prepare samanak , and a few days before the holiday they had taken turns stirring it for twenty-four hours over wood fires in their walled yards and singing and trading vulgar jokes and braiding one another’s hair and trying on one another’s lipstick. Traditionally, had a man glimpsed the preparation, the dessert would have had to be thrown out, and the man derided.
    A twelve-year-old boy in my house inscribed on graph paper the nascent year’s name: 1390, per a countdown formally begun in the last decade of the Sassanid rule of the Khorasan. The holiday itself was so old its origins were lost. As old as man’s Manichaean desire to simplify the world into manageable opposites, light and dark, good and evil.
    On city roundabouts, papier-mâché tulips bloomed. At the Blue Mosque, Zoroaster’s reputed burial place, thousands of white doves cooed in satiated unison, and mullahs prepared to welcome pilgrims descending upon the city from all over Central Asia. This was Mazar-e-Sharif, the city of mystics, and both the mullahs and the visitors were eager to forsake Islam for a day of pre-Mohammedan hedonism that culminated with the raising of a ribboned and beaded maypole in the mosque’s vast yard tiled with black-and-white marble. For a week already, hunched dervishes from Iran in swags of rosaries had been pounding sidewalk dust with their walking staffs, entranced, declaiming fervently and at random to passing cars and horse-drawn buggies and motorcycles snippets of decadent verse by Omar Khayyam and Hafez, and drawing stares. Domestic and international politicians and luminaries were also expected. Ten thousand policemen and soldiers in armored vests blotted the sun-gorged streets because city officials anticipated a major terrorist act. The terrorist act would rend the city ten days later, when six Taliban would lead an enraged Friday mob from the Blue Mosque to the United Nations offices to topple guard towers, set walls ablaze, and, beneath the alluvial slopes bloodred with wild spring poppies, slaughter twelve of the agency’s employees, mostly Westerners. On Nawruz, though, war seemed to be elsewhere—on the other side of the Hindu Kush, where most of the hundred and forty thousand foreign troops and elusive and sandaled guerrillas were fighting one another and killing and maiming in the process farmers and day laborers and their families with roadside bombs and missiles and small artillery, or at the very least outside the city limits, where insurgency was quietly gathering steam, uncontested, unstoppable.
    The day passed in comings and goings of guests, in exchanges of kisses and the euphonious singsong of greetings. The family in whose house I was renting a room did not go to the Blue Mosque to watch the maypole ceremony—too dangerous, they said, not worth the risk. Instead, they celebrated the New Year indulging in the discreet domestic pleasures of Afghanistan’s wannabe bourgeoisie, taking in the sun and telling jokes and smoking a mint-flavored waterpipe on a takht , a carpeted and pillowed wooden platform they had established in the center of the yard. Guests and family members of both genders and all ages took turns shaking off their slippers and climbing on, dragging on the pipe, sipping tea and haft mewa from glass cups, shucking sunflower seeds into cupped palms, squinting at the tall sky, moving around the dial of the takht to make room for newcomers, and talking, talking. Like guests at the Mad Hatter’s