Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  Therefore, when our dinner was laid out for us and Ismerai joked that the household help had “better keep the knives away from the boy,” I didn’t laugh.

  “So, do you want to talk about it?”

  Georgie stopped to light a cigarette after beating me for the fifth time at carambul, a wooden board game imported from India where two players fight with their fingers, flicking bright-colored disks into four holes drilled into the corners. She was impossibly good at it for a girl.

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully, sensing that Georgie was looking for reasons for my behavior. “Maybe.”

  “Sometimes it helps to talk about things, especially difficult things,” Georgie pushed gently, fiddling as she did so with a box of matches showing the Khyber Pass on the front. “It’s a way of chasing the bad spirits out from your head.”

  “I guess,” I said, even though I was certain the devils that lived there were too strong for the magic of talk. “Okay. I’ll try.”

  Long before I was born my mother was married to my father, and together they made Bilal. He was my oldest brother. Three years later, when the Russians packed up to begin their long journey home, rolling out of Afghanistan in the tanks they had brought with them, my parents celebrated by bringing Mina into the family. In Pashto, her name means “love.” Some years after that Yosef, my other brother, arrived, and then finally, after all of them had taken up most of the space in our house, I was born.

  This was my family, as complete and happy as it would ever be.

  Then, one by one, like leaves falling from a tree, they began to die.

  First to go was Yosef, who stopped eating the day after he was bitten by a dog. I was a baby, so he was lost to us before I could remember him, but my mother says I’m a little like him and that Allah took him away because He needed more sunshine in Paradise.

  A year after Yosef died, my father also left us. He was a teacher, but he laid down his schoolbooks and picked up a gun to fight alongside the soldiers of the Northern Alliance with a group of other men from our village. Mother says his heart became furious as his eyes watched the Taliban change our ways, and because he was a man of honor and courage he felt it was his duty to stop them, being as he was a son of Afghanistan. Unfortunately for my father, it turned out that he was better suited to schooling than fighting, and he died in a battle near Mazar-e Sharif in the north of the country.

  That left my mother a widow, a widow with a baby and two young children. But because of her tears she clung to our home, as it still held the smell of my father and the ghostly laughter of my brother, even though everyone said she would be better off living with her sister.

  Of course, this being Afghanistan, things then went from bad to worse than bad.

  Sometime after my father died, and at the time when my head began to save the pictures of my life, the Taliban came to Paghman. By now I was no longer a baby—I was walking and talking—and I heard the fear in my mother’s voice when one night she shook me awake to pull me into her arms and carry me from my bed to the corner of the kitchen where my sister and brother were waiting. I remember it clearly now: my mother was trembling through her clothes, and outside I could hear the sound of heavy trucks filling the street with the noise of their engines.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Please, Fawad, please be quiet,” my mother begged. She was crying, and, outside, shouts and screams invaded the stillness of the night as the light coming in through our window burned the color of flames.

  As we hid in the corner, the sound of panic and pain grew closer, steadily creeping upon us, looking to find us. All this time my mother whispered to Allah under her breath, quick and quiet as she rocked on her legs, holding on to all three of her children. Her prayer was broken by a sharp intake of breath as the door cracked open at the front of our house and the barks of men we didn’t know began to fill our home.

  It wasn’t a big house, and it didn’t take long for them to discover us—five black shadows jumping on our huddle to snatch my sister’s arm away from our mother and shout their hate into our faces. As my mother leaped to her feet, one of the Taliban soldiers threw her to the floor, slamming his boot onto her head to keep her in place. My brother Bilal, who had the heart of a lion, immediately sprang from the ground, raining blows on the man’s back and kicking at his legs. Another of the men then grabbed my brother as if he were a toy. He smashed his fist into Bilal’s face and threw him across the kitchen, his head bouncing off the corner of a cupboard.

  As my brother slipped to the floor, no longer awake and no longer able to help us, my mother screamed into the Talib’s boot and pushed with all her power to reach her eldest child. As she threw herself at Bilal, the man who had hurt her came on her again and pulled her back to the ground. But this time it wasn’t the boot he laid on top of her; it was his body. I saw his hands ripping at her clothes while, from somewhere behind us, the smell of burning began to fill our noses.

  “Run, Fawad, run!” she shouted.

  The man hit my mother in the face, but as he did so another shadow came running into the room. His black eyes caught me first, and he stared at me for a moment that seemed to last forever. When I remember it now, I think I saw sadness written there. Releasing me from his gaze, he turned toward the man on top of my mother and pulled him from her, shouting something angry and hard.

  “Run, Fawad!” my mother shouted again.

  Because I was scared and I didn’t know what to do, and because my brother was asleep, and because one of the men had my sister’s arm, and because my mother had told me to, I did. I ran as fast as I could from the back of the house and found a place in the bushes near our home.

  Crouching low into the prickles, I watched the whole world catch fire. As the houses of my neighbors spat out flames, the screams of fear filling my ears gradually turned into howls of mourning as the men dressed in black ripped apart our lives, beating the old people with sticks and stealing the young from their arms. In the orange light of that night I watched those men drag my terrified sister onto the back of a truck, along with twenty other girls from our village, and drive her away.

  As the engines faded into the distance and the air died around us, leaving only the sound of fire and tears, I saw my mother come from the house, carrying my brother over her shoulder. Her face was pale, and blood poured from a cut by her mouth.

  “Fawad?” she shouted. “Fawad?”

  I stood up, and she saw me. The light of relief flickered in her eyes before she fell to her knees and opened her mouth to let go of a scream that would have frozen the blood of the devil himself.

  With our house now a broken shell of black and our neighbors just as broken, my mother, Bilal, and I walked from our home in Paghman to arrive at the place of my aunt. I remember nothing of the journey, so I guess I must have slept, my mother carrying me for most of it. I also can’t remember any discussion once we got to my aunt’s house, but I can clearly see the look in my mother’s eyes. It was one of death, and the blankness that went with it was mirrored in the eyes of Bilal.

  All I knew for certain was that my mother had been hurt by the Taliban; my sister, who was only eleven or twelve years old, had been taken by the Taliban; and my brother was now lost to the Afghan obsession with revenge.

  After waking from his sleep, Bilal had been greeted by the battered face of our mother and the hole in our family that used to be filled by our sister. Giant tears of anger came falling from his eyes, spilling onto the dirt that used to be our garden. Because Bilal had become the man of the house after my father was killed, he made himself crazy with thoughts that he should have done more to protect us. But he was only a boy—a boy up against an army of black turbaned devils. There was nothing more he could have done for any of us. Even so, for the next few weeks Bilal covered himself in silence, hardly able to speak through his own shame and dishonor, until one day his place simply stood empty. My only living brother had left our aunt’s house to join the Norther
n Alliance.

  He was fourteen years old at the time, an age when he should have been moving closer to God, as he was now old enough to deliver his prayers at the mosque and fast with the adults at the time of Ramazan. Instead, he gave himself up to war and revenge, and we never saw him again.

  Once the Americans had bombed the Taliban out of our lives, I wondered whether Bilal would return, but when the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul he still stayed away. Though neither my mother nor I said anything, we both knew he was dead.

  11

  IT WAS NIGHT when the lights woke me, the time of night when you’re stuck between yesterday and today and everything’s so quiet and deaf with sleep there’s no sign of the morning coming to get you. It was the time of night that calls for a stretch and a smile.

  And it was this time of night that Haji Khan chose to return home.

  It started with the sound of metal on concrete as the gates were pulled open and three Land Cruisers with blacked-out windows roared into the driveway, spilling guards from the doors and Haji Khan from the front seat. As two men with guns pulled the gates shut behind him, another man jumped into the seat he’d abandoned and the cars facing the house now turned in circles on the grass to point at the exit instead.

  Watching this dance of headlights from my window, I saw Haji Khan lead a group of men into the house. His face looked fierce, and I wondered whether he’d just found out that Ismerai had let Georgie and me come to stay.

  I tiptoed toward the bedroom door and pulled it ajar, blinking at the sudden light that shone from the floor below. Rising from the ground, a mumble of voices came to my ears, low man sounds it took me a few seconds to catch properly. Then, above them all, I heard Haji Khan’s words filling the air like coming thunder.

  I opened the door a little farther and leaned into the crack, which allowed me to see what was going on through the wooden pillars of the balcony. Haji Khan was now standing by the door, with five men nearby holding quiet conversations with one another. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they looked pretty rich, dressed as they were in pressed salwar kameez with large, heavy watches hanging off their wrists.

  Haji Khan was talking to the small man who had taken my bags upstairs when I arrived. The man nodded upward to the side of the house where Georgie was sleeping, just along the corridor from where I should have been sleeping, and Haji Khan’s gaze briefly followed the man’s head, causing me to catch my breath and fall a little farther into the darkness of my room.

  If he didn’t know we were here before he arrived, he certainly did now.

  After a few seconds, and when no sound of footsteps came to throw us out of our beds, I inched forward again.

  Haji Khan was now sitting on one of the sofas, his pakol balanced on his knee and a cup of green tea in his hand. As he reached for the sugared almonds that had been placed on a table before him, a man approached holding a mobile phone. Haji Khan put it to his ear, and though he never shouted, his voice echoed loudly around the room, causing the other men to stop their conversations and eye one another from beneath bowed heads and heavy eyebrows.

  “I don’t care how you do it, just do it,” Haji Khan ordered. “I want him out by the morning.”

  He clicked the phone shut and handed it back to the man who had given it to him, and I wondered if this was the reason Haji Khan never called Georgie: he’d lost his phone and had to keep borrowing someone else’s.

  In the morning I went downstairs looking for breakfast and found the hall empty of the big men who had filled it the night before and busy with three small ones armed with cleaning cloths and a vacuum cleaner. A boy a little older than me was playing carambul by himself on the platform floor close to the TV.

  “Salaam,” I said, going over to join him. “I’m Fawad.”

  The boy looked up from his game.

  “Salaam,” he replied. “Ahmad.”

  He then carried on playing, and with nothing else to do, I sat on a long cushion and watched him. He was very good, flicking the disks effortlessly into the holes opposite him. He also looked very clean, new even. But although his skin had the look of the rich about it—a soft creamy brown—his eyes held an old man’s stare within them.

  We were the only children in the room, but the boy called Ahmad didn’t seem in a rush to talk, so I was glad when my breakfast arrived because it at least gave me something to do. I was also starving, which was strange, because I never usually had much of an appetite. “You eat like a bird,” my mother once remarked, and I immediately wondered how worms tasted.

  After I’d finished my eggs and a cup of sweet tea, Ahmad knocked the carambul board in my direction and jerked his head upward, inviting me to play. As I shuffled toward him to take up the challenge, he set the pieces in place and let me go first.

  “You came with Georgie, didn’t you?” he finally asked.

  “Yes,” I admitted, badly missing the cluster of disks I had to break. The boy waved as if he didn’t care and let me take the shot again, which I thought showed very good manners.

  “I saw you last night,” he said as I carefully lined up my shot, “spying on my father.”

  The disks clattered around the board as I hit them, and Ahmad reached for the large one to take his turn.

  “I saw you across the hall,” he continued as he casually flicked a blue piece into the far right hole. “My bedroom is opposite the one you’re staying in.”

  “And your dad is?”

  “Haji Khalid Khan. Who else?”

  I looked up, surprised. Although I knew Haji Khan had children by his dead wife, I was a little shocked to find one of them sitting opposite me because Georgie had told me they stayed with his sister.

  “I thought you lived somewhere else,” I said.

  “I do. I sleep at my aunt’s place usually, but the noise is a nightmare. Too many women in the house, that’s the problem. Here, your turn.”

  I took the disk and managed to slide one of my whites close to a hole.

  “Not bad,” Ahmad said. “Of course, you seriously need to practice.”

  “I only started playing yesterday.”

  “Yes, and you seriously need to practice.”

  Ahmad laughed, and as he did so I saw some of Haji Khan in his face.

  “Your father seemed a bit angry last night,” I mentioned, watching Ahmad steadily demolish the board in front of me.

  “Ha! He was pissed all right.”

  “Is it because of us?”

  “Who?” Ahmad looked up from the game, genuinely puzzled.

  “Me and Georgie,” I explained. “Is he angry because we turned up uninvited?”

  “No, of course not.” Ahmad shook his head. “Georgie has always been welcome here. This is her home, that’s what my father says.”

  “Oh.”

  “No, if you must know, he’s pissed about some family business, but it’ll soon be sorted because it always is.”

  About three hours after I’d finished my breakfast, and about two hours after Ahmad had disappeared back to the house full of women in one of his father’s Land Cruisers, Georgie appeared downstairs looking fed up. “Come on, Fawad, it’s time to see a man about some goats,” she said, and we grabbed our boots, jumped into another of Haji Khan’s cars, and roared out of Jalalabad.

  It was a beautiful day with brilliant skies that carried none of the dust and car-fog hanging above Kabul, and an Indian love song played from a cassette. As well as me and Georgie there was a driver and a guard with a gun placed between his legs in the front seat. He didn’t belong to us, so I guessed he must belong to Haji Khan.

  Driving out of the city toward Pakistan, we passed a large portrait of the martyr Haji Abdul Qadir, the former vice president who was murdered eight months after the Taliban fled. Jalalabad had been his home, and I thought the people must have really loved him to place his picture there.

  Climbing out of the city, we drove higher, through a mud village and on to a large flat space of brown befo
re dipping back into green, passing rows of olives trees, and into a tunnel of giant trees that seemed to be leaning over the road in an effort to hug their friends on the other side. As we came to another village, we turned right off the main road, through a small bazaar and onto a rough track taking us to Shinwar. This was where we would find a man and his goats, apparently.

  As we drove farther into the countryside, we passed scores and scores of old poppy fields. I’d recently seen photographs of them printed in one of the Kabul newspapers Pir Hederi had me read to him. The poppies shone bright and pretty from the pages, and I remember thinking at the time that if they tasted as good as they looked it was no wonder people became addicted.

  As we passed an old man with a donkey laden with twigs, Georgie rolled down her window, and after saying her hellos and asking after his family, she asked where we could find a man called Baba Gul Rahman. The old man lifted his hand and revealed that we could find him at the hut over the next field under the hill. “If he still has a hut,” he grumbled. Georgie said thank you, looked at me, and shrugged, and then we all set off toward the hill over the next field to see if Baba Gul still had his hut.

  When we arrived at the foot of the hill we were relieved to find Baba Gul’s hut was still standing, but annoyingly for us there was no Baba Gul in it. One of the children we assumed to be his went running off to the next village in search of him.

  Sitting on the grass, watching a herd of goats eating and playing, we passed the time drinking tea given to us by a girl who was about my age or a little older. She was Baba Gul’s oldest daughter, revealed Georgie, who had met her before. Her name was Mulallah, and she had the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen.

  “How are you doing?” Georgie asked as she came to sit with us. “Your goats look well.”

  “Yes, the goats are good,” she replied, roughly wiping the hair from her face and frowning.

  “Something wrong, Mulallah?”

  The girl shrugged. “This is Afghanistan, Khanum Georgie. Sometimes, life is not so easy. You know this better than us.”