Red Sky Over Kabul: A Memoir of a Father and Son in Afghanistan
Baryalai Popalzai with Kevin McLean
Speaking Tiger
Pp 288, Rs 499
Knowledge is not man’s monopoly. Women also deserve to be knowledgeable. These words aren’t spoken by women currently protesting against banning them from educational institutions by the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They were uttered more than a century ago in Kabul by the sister of the then King Amanullah Khan who succeeded his father to the throne in Afghanistan in 1919. One of Amanullah’s first acts as the new king was to summon the British envoy to his palace.
“Afghanistan is as independent a state as the other states of the world. No foreign power will be allowed to have a hair’s breadth of right to interfere internally or externally with the affairs of Afghanistan, and if any ever does, I am ready to cut its throat with my sword,” the king told the Queen’s envoy. After the British ignored his warnings, the king ordered Afghan military commander Nadir Shah to attack the British in western India. The Pashtun mercenaries deserted the British this time and joined Nadir Shah in inflicting a heavy defeat on the British. The end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1921 led to the Treaty of Rawalpindi that recognised the country as an independent nation.
Having won freedom, Amanullah and his wife Soraya, whose father Mahmud Tarzi was known for his liberal views against religious extremism, set out to make Afghanistan a modern nation. Following a visit to Turkey and many European countries, the royal couple expanded women’s rights, built schools for girls and allowed women to wear western dress. Amanullah soon faced opposition against his reforms from the tribal lords, which led to his abdication and flight from the country in 1929.
Half a century later, a similar flight from Kabul would visit Baryalai Popalzai, the author of Red Sky Over Kabul, a memoir that recounts the rule of kings like Amanullah who wanted to transform his country as well as palace feuds and politics that drove Afghanistan into ceaseless wars. A member of the Popalzai tribe that ruled Afghanistan for centuries, Baryalai was a teacher in Kabul when he was forced to flee after a relative alerted him to a possible arrest by the Russian security services roaming the streets in the Afghan capital.
Baryalai, now living in the United States, co-writes his memoir with American author Kevin McLean (Crossing the River Kabul, 2017). “My story is not only the story of Afghanistan, it is the story of a relationship of a father and son,” writes the author though the book is more about how he escapes from Kabul on a frosty October dawn that sets the stage for a long ordeal as a refugee across many national boundaries. Red Sky Over Kabul begins with a visit by Baryalai’s cousin Kader who implores him to leave immediately. It doesn’t take long for Baryalai, who lives with his parents and wife and their two children, to come to a life-altering decision. On October 4, 1980, he boards a flight from Kabul to Jalalabad armed with a plan to cross into Pakistan and secure a visa to go to the United States.
“The world only knows of the Afghanistan of endless wars: the war against the Russians, the war of the warlords, the war against the Taliban. But I knew a very different Afghanistan,” says Baryalai, who left the elite Habibia High School in Kabul in 1972 for India to study at the Elphinstone College in Bombay. Six years later, the Russians would arrive in Kabul following the assassination of a founder of the Afghan Communist Party, ending the rule of the kings and creating a theatre of conflicts in the Indian sub-continent for global domination by the superpowers.
Red Sky Over Kabul, which arrives at the second anniversary of the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, a change that has ended education and jobs for women in the country, provides a rare insight into the era of the Afghan kings and their own power politics. The author’s proximity to the ruling families until the Russian invasion sounded the death knell for Afghan royalty informs the reader about the many failures in politics that kept his country divided and the seats of power always at loggerheads with each other.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
