KABUL, June 6— The children’s gathering point is the grave of one Bibi Jawaher. She has been dead for 27 years, the inscription on her headstone so faded that you have to run your fingers over it to fully make out her name and the year of her death.

But the central location of her resting place, on a little hill in the middle of the sprawling Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery in western Kabul, gives the pack of young hustlers a sweeping view of potential customers visiting the thousands of graves dotting the mountain skirt.

There is the middle-aged jeweller making his weekly pilgrimage to his mother, who died of cancer; he pays extra to have her grave washed with the precision of a sponge bath. There is the mother haunted by nightmares that the grave of her 15-year-old son, who killed himself over failed love, is engulfed in flames. She comes regularly to check on the headstone, which bears a portrait of her son in a jacket and tie, and offers the children a small amount to ritually sprinkle water on it.

The sprinkling of water on graves is an old tradition in Afghanistan, believed to keep the memory of the dead fresh and to help absolve them of the sins they committed in life.

Right over Jawaher’s body, the children wait with their large buckets, filled from the well of a nearby shrine and carried in on their backs. Once they spot a client, they rush in with smaller buckets, often fighting one another along the way. But in the end they always keep to their unspoken code: Once one reaches a client, the rest back off, immediately scanning the field for the next opportunity.

Ajmal, 10, right, and Zikrullah, 14, carry water for sale to wash headstones at Karte-e-Sakhi cemetery, where children hustle for tips, a cotton-candy seller circulates and cockfights are held every weekend, in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 7, 2016. — Picture by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times

The children look for fun where they can, but their business is serious. It puts food on their families’ tables. They make about 10 afghanis for each small bucket they pour — the price of a loaf of bread, about 15 cents. On lucky days, they will get much more in tips, some as big as US$10 (RM41) or even US$20, forever marking that grave as auspicious, distinct in their memory.

They have come to rely on a harsh reality of Afghan life: After decades of war and staggeringly frequent tragedy, more and more Afghan families have some business or another in Kabul’s cemeteries, where an ever-larger slice of everyday life is now centred.

“Ajmal usually pours water without asking for permission,” said Jamshid, 10, who teams up with him on busy days. It is an effective tactic: Once the water is poured, the mourner must pay.

“Who says I do that?” protested Ajmal, who is also 10. “OK, maybe I did it once. Or two times.”

Behind them, another boy was straddling Jawaher’s headstone like a toy horse.

“We don’t leave her dirty like that,” Jamshid said about their graveside base. “We wash the grave with the remaining water before we go home.”

Women photograph themselves while picnicking at Karte-e-Sakhi cemetery in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 8, 2016. — Picture by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times

Cockfights and cotton candy

Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery comes to life on Thursdays and Fridays, the Afghan weekend. Specific grave markers have become the landmarks for new communities, some transitory, others more persistent.

Children with chapped hands play marbles by the grave of Zaher Turkman. Two men smoke a joint near the grave of Sayed Rohullah Sadat. (They turn out to be policemen.) A university student wearing a blue jacket, lecture notes in hand, paces between graves, trying to memorise them before an exam.

The cemetery is a godsend for young lovers, a place of privacy where, with a buffer of assumed mourning around them, they can speak on their phones uninterrupted by the harassment that is otherwise too normal here. In one tucked-away corner, a pair of teenage girls sit on the edge of a grave, one of them on her phone, smiling and blushing. A cotton-candy seller moves around on his bicycle.

Every weekend, there are cockfights by the grave of Sayed Faqir Hussain. Men sit in a ring, and the trained birds are brought in under the arms of their owners. Presiding over the games, as godfather and referee, is Said Gul Agha, who goes by the nickname The Mechanic, his weekday vocation.

A flock of sheep graze among graves at Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 7, 2016. — Picture by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times

The graves at Kart-e-Sakhi have become remarkably ornate lately. There were always poetry and flower patterns, but now there are massive headstones with etched portraits and even posters hanging on the railings enclosing the graves.

The new crop of ornate headstones is largely the work of one artist, Muhammad Zahir, who signs his address and phone number at the bottom of each work.

Zahir spent 25 years as a labourer in Iran, where he learned to build sculptures, fireplaces and fountains out of stone. Etching headstone portraits was a small part of his business.

When he returned to Afghanistan more than a decade ago, he first tried the sculptures, the fireplaces and the fountains. They sold during the gush of money that came with the massive international military presence, but sales dropped and then halted.

“We were left making these headstones,” he said, “because death is easy here.”

An Afghan family picnics near the graves of relatives at Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 7, 2016. — Picture by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times

Running out of space

In a small but overpopulated and unplanned city like Kabul, the logistics of dealing with death at such a rapid rate over three decades has brought dilemmas.

“We are facing a lack of space for graveyards in the city,” said Abdul Rahman Ahmadzai, the director of the department of the Afghan Ministry of Religious Affairs that oversees the roughly 30 cemeteries in Kabul, 12 of them huge ones like Kart-e-Sakhi.

Since the civil war, which began in the 1980s, unplanned graveyards have popped up all across the city. In the 1990s, when factional fighting intensified, people could hardly move out of fear of rockets, so they often buried their loved ones in any plot of land they could find. Now, each grave site is a land dispute for the government to solve.

“Our policy is that anywhere that bodies are buried automatically becomes government property,” Ahmadzai said. “If it is people’s property, the government gives them property elsewhere.”

Ahmadzai’s department has been working to acquire land in the districts outside the city’s gates and move the cemeteries there. And he has rigidly enforced the space limit for individual graves: 1.5 metres by 2.5 metres, a dimension he says is called for under Shariah.

An Afghan man rests on a gravestone at Kart-e-Sakhi cemetery in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 20, 2016. — Picture by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times

Ahmadzai knows about the children’s water hustle in Kart-e-Sakhi, of course. That goes on everywhere, and there is a comforting tradition behind it, he said: “Spraying water is good, because if the dead had sinned, we know that even the smallest plant praises God, and the water may help plants and weeds grow.”

Scramble for cash

The young hustlers themselves, ranging in age from five to 13, have more temporal concerns on their minds, mostly. They have been roughened by competition, hard circumstances and the crowd they mingle with.

One Thursday evening late in the fall, the children waited for business at Jawaher’s grave. The cemetery was quiet. One boy, Edris, his clothes dirty, his face chapped and snot dangling from his nose, sat astride the poor woman’s headstone, rocking back and forth. (On a visit just a week later, Jawaher’s headstone would be found broken to pieces.)

Edris looked no older than 6, but when asked how old he was, he counted his fingers and said 22. What grade was he in? “This much,” he said, showing the fingers of both hands: “22.”

“He is here all day, and he goes home with us in the evening,” Ajmal said. “When his family changes him into new clothes, he doesn’t like it. He changes back into dirty ones and comes out here.” — The New York Times

Karte-e-Sakhi cemetery at dawn in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 7, 2016. After decades of war and staggeringly frequent tragedy, more and more Afghan families have some business or another in Kabul’s cemeteries, where an ever-larger slice of everyday life is now centred. — Picture by Adam Ferguson/The New York Times