Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [91]
As a final grand gesture, he even gave my father an entire mountain in Tora Bora!
My father was very pleased and grateful to the man who had never forgotten his contributions to the cause of freedom for the Afghan people.
Once Mullah Nourallah felt more confident about our safety, we were moved to the old palace. By that time, I was sick of the beautiful villa because we had been restricted within its walls. I was glad to try something new and found the palace most agreeable. It had been built in an ideal location next to the Kabul River, surrounded by grand old trees. There were ample grounds, with the palace circled by numerous delightful gardens. A riot of vividly colored flowers nestled in every available spot.
Although the old palace was in good condition, it was not a mansion that one would expect to be associated with royalty. Yet I was pleased, for if one compared the palace with other Jalalabad homes, we were living in the greatest luxury.
The palace was a rectangular building two storeys high that hinted at a time long past when workers had painted it a bright white, the color of choice for most expensive villas in Jalalabad. The roof was flat, similar to homes in Saudi Arabia and in Sudan, which was useful, for my father liked to survey his surroundings from rooftops.
At the entrance there was a wide corridor, covered with a red carpet. The hallway was filled with fancy chairs. There were ten rooms along the corridor, nine of them decorated with classic and elegant furniture that looked expensive, but ancient. I assumed it had once been used by the royal family. The tenth room had been turned into a kitchen. Interestingly, each of the ten rooms had its own bathroom, which was unusual for the time when the palace had been built.
After taking a systematic look at the first floor, we climbed the indoor staircase to the second—a duplicate of the first, but without a kitchen. All the interior rooms were whitewashed, all the floors covered with the same pattern of red as the corridors. Most handy to my mind, the electricity and water were in working order, although I knew my father would have preferred for us to haul water from the Kabul River and stumble around with flickering gas lanterns. He had become increasingly obsessed with the notion that anything convenient or modern was bad for a Muslim. Although I had known from the time we left Sudan that one day my mother and siblings and the other wives and children of my father would join us in Afghanistan, and I was eager for that day to come, I still cringed at the idea that they would live on Tora Bora Mountain in substandard housing.
Just as I was imagining the enjoyment my brothers and I would have playing in the gardens and swimming in the river, that bubble was burst by my father. “Omar, our stay here is to be temporary. We will soon travel to Tora Bora to claim our mountain. That is where we will live.”
I was speechless. While Jalalabad was reasonably safe at the moment, most of Afghanistan was still embroiled in a civil war, with every tribal warlord scrambling to rule the entire country. I had no idea whether the Tora Bora mountain area was gripped by war or enjoying peace.
Even if the area was peaceful, from what I had heard, Tora Bora was little more than mountains with caves. How could my father consider taking his family to such a place? While we older boys could live rough if necessary, what about my mother and aunties and the younger kids? Mountain life was not suitable for women and children.
Looking at my father, I knew that no one could dissuade him from moving us all into the desolate mountain ranges of Afghanistan. That was the precise moment that I realized that our bin Laden lives had dropped yet another level.
Despite my despair over my father’s news, the following two weeks in Jalalabad proved fascinating once Mullah Nourallah and my father decided it was safe to explore the city. Much to my excitement, off we went. Almost immediately I realized that the street scenes of Jalalabad were comparable