“The Suffering of Ayub”
In Memory of My Young Deceased Cousin
Ayub, born amidst the throes of poverty in a secluded Daikundi village, knew adversity from his earliest days. In 1997, when he was just a young child, the Taliban abruptly halted vital transportation links to Hazarajat. Consequently, hunger and deprivation swept through the region like a relentless storm. Among tens of thousands of others, Ayub’s family managed to survive for an entire year on the meager sustenance of sweet grass sprouts, carefully dried in the warmer months of spring and summer.
Ayub’s cloth was limited to a single outfit for an extended period, expanded solely by the painstaking addition of patches. As Ayub learned to walk, his family’s circumstances dictated that he assume the role of a shepherd for their sheep and goats. For two-thirds of the year, he engaged in this arduous endeavor, chasing the animals across the precipitous landscape of Miramor’s village, often stumbling and weeping. His body became a canvas of scars, his face perpetually marred by dust and cold, and his small hands cracked and bloodied.
As Ayub matured, he toiled alongside his father, brother, and sisters, tending to the family’s humble plot of land. Sometimes, he worked for others, receiving a paltry wage in return. Their collective labor throughout the year barely produced enough for the family to survive. In his teenage years, Ayub faced the difficult decision to undertake the perilous path of migration and labor. He suffered brutal beatings from smugglers at the border and, on one occasion, nearly suffocated to death while crammed into a car trunk with other desperate individuals.
After enduring countless tribulations, Ayub finally arrived in Iran. For several years, he labored in a variety of fields, such as poultry farming, cattle herding, construction, and gardening, all to ensure that his elderly and sick parents would have food on their table.
In Iran, Ayub’s journey was marked by relentless toil and determination to survive and improve his family’s circumstances. His labor was often backbreaking, but he persevered, driven by a sense of duty to provide for his ailing parents.
Upon his return to Daikundi after years away, Ayub had been transformed. No longer the struggling youth of his past, he stood taller, stronger, and more dignified in appearance. Yet, fate continued to deal Ayub a cruel hand. The family’s meager ancestral lands lay fallow, the trees they had painstakingly nurtured desiccated by relentless droughts. Their once reliable source of sustenance, now barren, Ayub and his brother were compelled to relocate their family to the fringes of a bustling city, where they eked out a living through manual labor. Brickmaking, well-digging, construction work, and vegetable-selling filled Ayub’s days with sweat and toil but offered no improvement to his lot in life.
Twice more, Ayub ventured across the scorching deserts of Nimroz, Sistan, and Baluchistan, lured by the prospect of work in Iran. Each time, however, he was caught by Iranian authorities, subjected to brutal beatings, shattering his bones before deporting him back to Afghanistan, battered and famished.
With no other recourse, Ayub turned to the perilous work of coal mining. In the suffocating darkness of coal mining, he labored amidst the smoke and shadows of the subterranean tunnels. Time blurred as Ayub lost track of the hours spent underground and the months away from home and family. Despite his unrelenting trials, Ayub remained steadfast, disposition amiable and kind-hearted. Even in brief encounters, he would share a joke or a tease, his laughter resonant and genuine.
Ayub endeavored to embrace life with a smile, but it offered him no reprieve. Instead, his short life was fated with constant hardship and pain, or as the eleventh-century Persian poet and mystic Baba Taher put it, “bread mixed with blood.” His existence was defined by adversity, from the moment he was born to the day they retrieved his lifeless body from beneath a pile of coal rubble, bruised and battered, his bones crushed. Ayub’s life was an unending journey through suffering, yet he persevered with a resilient spirit, laughing and loving until the very end.
