A Khatam, A Community, Its People and Their Stories

Opened up 'On the Night of the Khatam' by Jamil Jan Kochai, published in The New Yorker on February 19, 2024. It's a tale of hidden stories behind people, what more people who have seen blood, revolutions, death and wars. You wonder at their stories, their youth, and you remember them in death. What more could anyone do?

In this story, a khatam, is a party, and a gathering of Afghan refugees living in Sacramento. They gather to chat, pray and read the Quran. Although the hosts and their guests in this khatam come from different family backgrounds, stories and political affiliations in Afghanistan. Through the story, we see every name come alive with their quirks and health conditions and beliefs.  

Hajji Hotak is the host of this particular khatam. In general, only the men attended, and they don't bring their wives. However, Hajji Hotak's wife Bibik Hotak sent every wife a personal invitation to this one, and so every wife went along. And everyone somehow blamed their wives who made them turn up late to the khatam. LOL

until, inevitably, we found ourselves waiting in empty living rooms or pacing back and forth on dreary porches, every few minutes shouting up the stairs or into the house, or quietly muttering to ourselves that we were late, goddammit, forever late, forever late and waiting, our wristwatches ticking as if time had no meaning, as if we weren’t hurtling toward the oblivion we had seen in the gaping mouths of boys with guns, but our clever wives—plucking and pruning and painting themselves—paid us no mind, or else shouted back that when everyone is late no one is late, which is true, in a way, because if we had arrived at six in the evening, as instructed by Hajji Hotak, our host would have been horrified to see us standing at his front door an hour and a half before anyone else.

Fahim also attended. They call him 'Engineer Fahim'. He was accepted by the community until he descended into alcoholism. Then he's ostracized by the community because he's rather sober, and is a lousy alcoholic; behaving terribly when drunk. He had earlier wrote for a Communist paper in Kabul, criticizing the hardline, and stirred up all sorts of sentiments among the Khalqists, the Parchams and the Islamists. But he made his peace with the community because he died of cirrhosis three months after attending this khatam.

Ten minutes later, at exactly eight-fifteen, Sheikh Burhan barged into the house with a legion of disciples—mujahideen veterans and reformed Taliban and distant cousins and American-born students from his Islamic school. They squeezed themselves into the already cramped guest room as Hajji Hotak and two of his sons rushed about the house, collecting plastic lawn chairs and kitchen stools and swivelling desk chairs and the upstairs love seat and a purple beanbag. Sheikh Burhan glided swiftly through the carrousel of chairs in his enormous white thobe and aviator sunglasses, distributing hugs and cracking jokes and commenting on Hajji Kareem’s weight and Engineer Qasim’s dyed hair and Achakzai Sahib’s black eye and Hajji Hotak’s headstrong wife, which, we all knew, was a misstep by Burhan, though we didn’t expect Hajji Hotak to respond with, “It’s too bad, Burhan, that you couldn’t bring your first wife to the khatam,” an obvious allusion to the rumor that Sheikh Burhan had recently taken a second wife, in Karachi. We all hushed. Burhan towered over our host, but Hotak was built like a barn door. It would have been a good match in its day. Podcast: The Writer’s Voice Listen to Jamil Jan Kochai read “On the Night of the Khatam” 

“That’s because I’ve got a handle on my household,” Sheikh Burhan replied.

The unnamed narrator is Hajji Hotak's son. All we know is that he's a Ph.D student. Engineer Fahim died and had left him a 500-page manuscript that's supposed to be a novel — a story of a young poet in Kabul who is "swept up in the political machinations of a revolution." And we readers are left wondering if that's a novel of fiction or an actual biography of Engineer Fahim's earlier life, whom he never really told to anyone. 

The narrator doesn't seem have a story here. He literally narrates everyone else's stories. That's exactly what the author intended. In an interview, the author said, 

Initially, I tried writing this story in a singular first person, from the perspective of Hotak’s son, the unnamed Ph.D. student, but I found that the more I wrote the more the narrator disappeared into the story, into this chorus of other voices and opinions, and so eventually I just decided to let the singular first person evaporate into a collective voice, and it turned into this roving, bodiless, almost omniscient presence that is attempting to speak for (and about) the men in the story but, I think, is failing in the process. 

You know, it’s odd, because at a gathering like this you may find yourself witnessing intense moments of vulnerability. One man might describe how he was tortured as a prisoner of war, or another might recall the day his brother was hauled away from their home, never to be seen again. But, even amid these memories, these recollections, so much is left unsaid that you can leave the encounter feeling that you know even less about the person, or the community, than you did before. We speak and speak, we narrate, we attempt to communicate, and yet, the gulf widens, or, at least, becomes more mysterious.