Transitions

After just days in Pakistan, my father was again receiving threats to his life, this time for refusing to subscribe to the ideologies of the numerous warring Islamist factions. The little money we had, raised by managing to secure a quarter of the funds from the sale of our house in Kabul (the rest of which went to the ‘people’s’ communist state), had gradually been extorted. The threats escalated and would become increasingly real. Someone followed my father to the makeshift tent my family called home and informed him that, unless he paid a bribe, he would be listed as a communist and killed. Such was the punishment for refusing to take on this emerging and extremist form of Islam. But it had all played out once before – these were the same bullish and existential threats we had faced from the communist regime in Afghanistan, only this time from those who claimed to be its antithesis. It was the next tipping point, signalling that it was time, yet again, for us to leave.