Ghosts of War and Living History

It was a little unnerving to read Jamil Jan Kochai's 'The Haunting of Hajji Hotak' published in The New Yorker on November 1, 2021. Halfway through the short story, I still didn't know how it was going to end. Or rather, I hoped it wasn't going to end in the way I thought it might. 

The narrator's assignment is to watch this immigrant American-Muslim family living in West Sacramento, California. Watching listening via planted bugs. Readers are introduced to all the family members, and are privy to their intimate conversations, thoughts and habits, bills owed, relatives' health and such. We learnt of the family's links to Afghanistan, and how the children have assimilated. But even in this age, the eldest son Mo is expected to agree to an arranged marriage with a girl of the parents' choosing — either a girl from Kabul, a niece of the mother's, or a girl from Logar, a niece of the mother's. But the parents didn't know that Mo is already in love with a girl nearer home from Sac State.

The narrator/watcher does this for hours on end, day after day, week after week, month after month. It was monotonous to plough through hours of recorded conversation and footage, but it was a job. The narrator/watcher is doing surveillance sanctioned by the government. I could only guess that this is just part of the US national security agencies 'gathering intelligence' on 'potential threats'. 

Six months into your assignment, you begin to doubt your purpose. Hajji is falling apart. His doctor has advised him to undergo spinal surgery that may leave him paralyzed. In another era, in a different body, perhaps Hajji could have been dangerous. But here, now, debilitated by pain and trauma, the old man is no threat at all.

You should update your superiors. You should advise them to abort the operation. But you won’t. Not now. Not when Mary is about to apply to colleges, not when Mo is planning to propose, not when Marvin is making new friends on campus, not when Habibi’s parents are applying for a visa to the States, not when Hajji is deciding whether or not he will go through with the surgery, not when Bibi is losing touch with her brother, not when Lily is on the brink of an artistic breakthrough. There’s too much left to learn.

One night, Hajji had a fall and no one knew. The narrator caved to his emotions and called an ambulance. But that led to him gaining a new obsession and being haunted by it. He's not wrong, but he doesn't have the technology to trap the narrator/watcher or scan for bugs. 

This short story will be part of a collection of short stories by the author due to be released in July 2022. The book is titled 'The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories'. These are stories about Afghanistan, its people and the Afghan diaspora. The blurb stated that the book is a "A luminous meditation on sons and fathers, ghosts of war, and living history that moves between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora."

The story ended on the oddest note, which might or might indicate the mental state of Hajji falling apart and giving in to all his suspicions about American military. 

The next day, as soon as he returns home from the hospital, Hajji purchases a phone recorder on Amazon and, when it arrives, has Marvin hook it up to the landline. No one questions him. No one argues. He listens to hours and hours of recordings in his bedroom, alone or with Habibi, and during awkward moments of silence, pauses in conversations, he stops and rewinds and listens again. “Do you hear it?” he whispers to Habibi in Pashto. “The breathing?”

She waits and listens again and nods her head.

You know this is impossible. You know there is no way for them to hear you, and yet, when you are listening to a conversation, and there is a pause, a silence, you find yourself holding your breath.

Hajji becomes relentless.

He searches for you on the phone, in the streets, in unmarked white vans, in the faces of policemen, detectives in street clothes, military personnel, and his own neighbors. He searches for you at the hospital, at the bank, on his computer, his sons’ laptops, in Webcams, phone cameras, and on the television. He searches for you in the curtains and in the drawers of the kitchen and in the trees in his back yard, in the electrical sockets, the locks of the door handles, and in the filaments of the light bulbs. And, even as his family protests, Hajji searches for you in shattered glass, in broken tile, in the strips of his wallpaper, the splinters of his doors, his tattered flesh, his warped nerves, and in his own beating heart, where, through it all, the voice whispering that he is loved is yours.