Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  Georgie nodded, but I saw the questions sitting in her eyes.

  As I didn’t know what to say, I kept my mouth shut.

  “My father’s playing at the cards again,” the girl finally explained as we sat there in silence. “And when he loses we pay for it. It must be Allah’s punishment for the sin he’s committing. I mean, just look where we’re living now.” The girl waved her hands at the hut, which was more of a tent really, a flimsy house of wood covered in plastic sheeting bearing the initials of something called UNICEF.

  As the girl spoke, her mother approached. She was a tiny woman with a face that could have been carved out of the mountains behind us. She greeted Georgie affectionately but didn’t hang around. After nodding her head at her daughter, they both left to round up the goats, but as she turned away I caught the look on her face, and it was one of deep shame. I understood then that the lifelong humiliation she had suffered at the hands of her husband had been the cause of the ugly lines cut into her skin. And now that the girl was speaking of the family’s dishonor to virtual strangers, there wasn’t any use in pretending life was anything different.

  Sometimes, when you possess nothing at all, the only thing you can do is hang on to your dignity. But even simple words can take that away from you if you’re not careful.

  “Was Haji Khan happy to see you?” I asked Georgie as we continued to await Baba Gul’s arrival.

  “He was tired, but yes, I think so,” she answered, fiddling with the frayed ends of her jeans as we sat on the grass.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Well . . .” Georgie breathed in deeply and then out again. “No, I don’t really.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. As far as lovers’ reunions went, this didn’t really sound up there with Laila and Majnun.

  Theirs was a story Jamilla had told me one day in Chicken Street after her mother had told it to her one night to take the sting out of her father’s fists. In the legend, Laila was a beautiful girl born to a rich family. Of course, when she grew up her family wanted her to marry a rich man, but instead she fell in love with Majnun, a very poor man. When everyone found out, there was hell to pay, and Laila and Majnun were banned from seeing each other ever again. Laila’s parents then forced her to marry a man of great wealth, and he took her away from the area. But even though she had a beautiful home, her love for Majnun stayed strong, and one day when she couldn’t stand being apart from him any longer, she killed herself. When Majnun heard of Laila’s death he went mad-crazy with grief, and in the end he died on her grave.

  In no part of the story did I hear that Majnun was a little tired and might or might not have been happy to see Laila.

  “Were you pleased to see him, then?” I asked.

  “Fawad, I’m always pleased to see Khalid, but life is complicated, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know actually. I’m only a boy; I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

  Georgie smiled.

  “Sorry, Fawad, sometimes I forget your age because you’re so wonderfully grown-up! But you’re right, there are complications in life you won’t know about just yet. So, yes, I was happy to see him, of course I was, but then we argued a little and there were a lot of hot words said, and that doesn’t really make me very happy at all.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  “I don’t know really . . . the usual. We never used to fight like this, not back when we first met. In those days everything used to be quite lovely. But things change, don’t they?”

  “Yes, I guess they do,” I replied. Then, bowing my head to look at her from the side of my eyes, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it? I mean, sometimes it helps to talk. It chases the bad spirits out from your head.”

  “Well, that serves me right, doesn’t it.” Georgie laughed, recognizing her own words from the day before. “Okay. I’ll try.

  “When I first met Haji Khalid Khan I was working on your country’s first ever elections. It was an exciting time, a moment of real hope and opportunity, and walking into all this crazy expectation came the most beautiful man I had ever set eyes upon. Up to that point I’d never believed in love at first sight, and it’s not something you can easily explain, but it’s a state of the mind and heart that makes your body feel alive and makes each morning that comes worth waking up for.

  “So there we were, me and a group of other internationals and a team of Afghans who had arrived in Shinwar to prepare for the elections. In those days Shinwar was said to be a pretty dangerous place, filled with hiding Taliban and bloodthirsty bandits, so Khalid offered our party a place to stay and also his protection.

  “Coming from London, it was all terribly exciting—we don’t have men with Kalashnikovs driving us around there. And your country was just amazing to me right from the start: the incredible scenery; the beautiful call to prayer that would drift into my dreams at five in the morning; the people we met who had lived such hard, broken lives yet retained the most wonderful spirit. You know, one day I went to visit a refugee camp to speak about the coming elections, and the people I found there were so horrendously poor that they were saving animal dung to burn for the winter, yet when we turned up they immediately offered us tea and what little bread they had because we were guests. To me that was really very humbling, and I began to feel something really special for this country.

  “Of course, not every Afghan I met was that poor, and even in those days Khalid was a rich man. But it wasn’t his money that brought me to him, no matter what your friend Pir Hederi likes to think; it was his attitude, his warm humor, and his tenderness. He was really kind, Fawad, and in those days he taught me so much about this country and about your ways without me even realizing it. I’d never met a man like him before, and looking back on it, I think I fell in love with him almost immediately.

  “Although my colleagues and I stayed in his house, which wasn’t as big as the one in Jalalabad, we rarely saw him throughout the day, as we were all busy with our jobs and he was always locked in talks with various elders, politicians, and military men. However, sometimes when we used to return to the house he would be sitting in the garden amid a circle of men dressed in turbans and lavish robes, and when we passed by to go to our rooms I would glance in his direction and our eyes would meet and I would see a small smile play on his lips.

  “Once the sun had gone down and the guests had gone home, Khalid would come to our rooms to sit and talk with us for a while, joking with the men and charming the ladies, and I think every one of us fell in love with him—even the boys! But even though the room was full of people, it felt like we were alone. Of course, I didn’t know for sure at that time that he was really interested in me; it was just a feeling I had. But for my part, I spent the days desperate to be back in his company, and most nights his face filled my dreams.

  “Then one day, while I was visiting a village some thirty kilometers away from his home, a convoy of cars pulled up and Haji Khan stepped into the sun. All the villagers we were talking to immediately ran to greet him, treating him like a king and leading him to the elder’s home for sweet tea. I kept a discreet distance, but as he passed by me he stopped to shake my hand and said under his breath, ‘See what you are making me do just to get one look at you?’ I nearly fainted with the heat of his words, Fawad, and I knew then that there was something between us and it wasn’t only in my head.

  “That day, after drinking himself full of tea, Khalid said thank you to everyone as his driver handed out money, and then he offered me a lift home in his car. I remember looking at my driver, not sure if that was really allowed, as we hadn’t even finished half of our work in the village, but then Khalid spoke to him. I didn’t know Pashto or even Dari in those days. My driver just shrugged and nodded his head, so I left with Khalid. He immediately jumped into the front seat in order to drive, and the door was opened for me by a guard so that I could take my place in the back. Then, as we pulled
out of the village I noticed Khalid adjust his mirror so he could see me. Every time I found the courage to meet his gaze, his eyes were so dark and intense that I felt like my skin was on fire. I wanted that journey to last forever. But of course that would have been impossible.

  “Anyway, when we got back to the house I was relieved to find that my colleagues hadn’t come home yet, and Khalid and I took the opportunity to drink tea in the garden together—we obviously couldn’t sit in the house alone, so we had to sit outside where everyone could see. Still, the guards kept their distance, and we were able to talk for once without everybody else wanting to join in.

  “As we sat there talking and picking at our biscuits, Khalid revealed a little of his life to me: about how he had fought the Russians alongside his father as soon as he was man enough to do so; about how his family had moved to Pakistan in fury and disbelief as freedom turned into civil war; about how he had returned to fight again when the Taliban took control; and about how he had been captured trying to creep back into Pakistan one night. You know, Fawad, he spent six long months locked inside a Taliban prison in Kandahar, where he was whipped almost daily with electric cables on the soles of his feet. Even now he suffers from those beatings. His legs cramp with a pain so bad he can barely walk.

  “Khalid eventually escaped thanks to a sympathetic guard and a healthy bribe, and he fled to Iran with another man, who lost his life when their vehicle hit a land mine. Amazingly, Khalid escaped with only cuts and bruises. After that he traveled to Uzbekistan and met up with some leading members of the Northern Alliance. He agreed to join their war, bringing what he could to the effort via his contacts in Pakistan. Unfortunately, this is probably the reason that his wife and daughter were murdered.

  “After their deaths, Khalid said he was almost numb with grief, but he had one more daughter and a son to think about. You see, Khalid loved his wife very much. They were cousins, but because they had grown up together and the adults saw it was a love match they were allowed to marry—something pretty rare in Afghanistan. And then there was his daughter, his first child. Khalid was so proud of her because she was such a clever little girl.

  “Well, as you can imagine, after they were killed, Khalid went wild with rage, and he sneaked back into Afghanistan on a regular basis to fight to the death if need be. When the Taliban finally fled and ran into the mountains of Tora Bora, he even followed them there. By then the war was all but over, and when the trail of the Taliban and al-Qaeda grew cold he returned home to the land he loved, satisfied that he had honored the memory of his wife and his daughter.

  “As he spoke, Fawad, I was spellbound. Khalid had done so much in his life compared to me; he had seen so many things that usually come only from the pages of storybooks in my country. I thought he was incredibly brave and honorable, and as this man opened up before my eyes, laying his history in my lap for me to wonder at, he suddenly, out of nowhere, told me he loved me.

  “I laughed in his face at first, which wasn’t the reaction he was expecting, and I told him that it was impossible; that we had only known each other for five minutes and that was far too quick for anyone to sensibly fall in love. But he answered me by saying, ‘I’m not joking, Georgie. I know my heart, and my heart is telling me I love you.’ And that’s when I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this man.

  “After that conversation it became almost unbearable to be in his company with so many people watching us, to be unable to do anything but touch with our eyes. But as the weeks went on everyone seemed to notice, and we were given space to spend more and more time alone, until I was certain that his words weren’t just words and that they came from his heart.

  “It was a magical time, full of late nights talking amid the buzz of the gaslight or sitting under the stars on the flat of his roof. Everything was so beautiful: the brilliance of the stars; the giant moon that hung in the sky; and, of course, Khalid. ‘You see how close the star comes to the moon?’ he asked me one night. ‘Well, you are like that star and I am like that moon, but soon that star will begin to fall away from the moon and slowly that star will disappear into the darkness and become lost to the moon.’

  “We both sat silently on the carpet that had been laid out on the rooftop for us, and he gently reached for my hand—brave now because only the tea boy remained with us, to fill our cups when needed, and the boy needed the money too much to tell anyone.

  “It was a very sweet moment, but it was also a very sad one because we both knew the story of the star and the moon was true. I did have to leave soon because my job was coming to an end. And even though we tried to treasure every moment we had left together, we felt the days slipping away from us like sand through our fingers.

  “Eventually, and because the world does keep on turning and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, the day came when I had to return to Kabul, and then to London. Khalid traveled with us, and we were able to steal a few more days together in the capital before I left. We even went to your district one night.

  “As soon as I saw Paghman, driving past the old golf course and over the bridge, I was amazed by how pretty it was. It felt like I could have been visiting somewhere in the Mediterranean, which is a warm place where people from my country go on their holidays. And it was in Paghman, as we sat on a stone wall in front of the lake, that Khalid looked at me and whispered that he loved me with all his heart. For the first time I told him that I loved him too, but then his eyes turned sad and, staring hard at me, he said, ‘Thank you for that, but I know I love you more. You are my world, Georgie.’ It was a beautiful thing to say, because I suppose that’s all anybody ever wants in life—to find someone who thinks the world of them.

  “Then, as we carried on talking, he said there may be times in the future when I wouldn’t hear from him and that I shouldn’t become ‘hungry for other men’ when that happened. I laughed at that because I thought he’d said ‘angry for other men,’ but as I did he looked at me and said, ‘I’m serious, Georgie. You are my woman now. If you leave me, I will kill you.’ And of course I laughed again, but although he smiled I couldn’t be sure that his eyes were doing the same. In fact I still can’t be sure that he was joking, even today.

  “Anyway, after I returned to London my life felt pretty empty. No one talks about the moon and stars in my country, and everything seemed so dull and ordinary compared to Afghanistan. I think I became a little obsessed, and I began to fill my time with everything Afghan: watching every documentary about your country, reading every book, helping out at a local community center for asylum seekers, even learning Dari. I chose Dari because it was a lot easier than Pashto, and besides, Pashtuns are so clever they know both languages. But I was waiting, you see, waiting and killing time until I found another job to take me back to Khalid and this country I had so quickly fallen in love with.

  “Although it was almost like torture in those first months away, Khalid would call me maybe twice a week, staying on the phone for hours at a time, and we would playfully discuss the future and how he wanted to have at least five children with me and how we would spend our days drinking pomegranate juice in the Shinwar sun.

  “Needless to say, within six months I couldn’t stand the separation any longer, and I returned to Afghanistan just for a holiday. For two weeks I stayed at Khalid’s home in Shinwar and his new house in Jalalabad. We spent the days traveling around, visiting old friends and making new ones. I came to know his family, and he showed me all the projects he was working on. We walked through giant fields filled with tiny ankle-tall saplings that would one day become fruit trees, olive trees, and perfume bushes. Everything was just as I had left it, and more, and I felt the pull even more strongly to return to him once and for all.

  “When I flew back home again I applied for every job going, and in the meantime Khalid kept up his calls, whispering his love over satellite phone lines. But then, as the months dragged on, Khalid’s calls began to fade, first to once a week, then to once a month
, until, by the time a job offer did eventually arrive and I’d packed my bags for Afghanistan, I hadn’t spoken to him for three months. I was livid with him, but I couldn’t allow myself to believe that everything he had told me was lies, so I carried on with my plan and returned to the country, without even telling him.

  “For that first month, I lived in Kabul under a cloud and cried tears like you wouldn’t believe, wondering what I’d done and thinking it was all one big giant mistake. Then one day the doorbell rang at the house I was staying at, and it was Ismerai. I’d first met him in Shinwar and had seen him again during my holiday. Even so, I was pretty shocked, although overjoyed, to see him. He told me that Khalid had sent him to track me down after one of their friends had spotted me on the street one day waiting for my car. ‘Kabul is a big city,’ Ismerai told me, ‘but if we want to find you we can.’

  “However, even though Ismerai had dutifully found me, Khalid still didn’t call. It was two weeks later that I was summoned to Jalalabad and brought to his house like a naughty schoolgirl.

  “When I arrived, Khalid’s hall was full of guests so our talk was careful and polite, but when the men finally grew tired of their curiosity and left for their own homes, Khalid turned to look at me as the doors banged shut and his eyes burned bright with fury. ‘You come into my country, and you don’t even tell me?’ he shouted. ‘I know you are angry because I didn’t call you, and I know what I did was unacceptable, but what you have done is even more unacceptable to me! If I came to your country, the first thing I would do is come to your door.’

  “He was right, of course, and I felt ashamed. I tried to argue back, but Khalid was so concentrated on the offense I’d caused him and his own sense of outrage that he wouldn’t budge.

  “Thankfully, the next morning he was calmer, and the day after that he was calmer still, until we were laughing and joking and talking of our love in the way we used to. Even so, I sensed he was different in some way I couldn’t yet understand; not quite the man he used to be. But I ignored the feeling and let my love continue to grow for him until it was the only thing left holding my life together.