Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  The next day I found out what Pir Hederi’s great idea was as he placed two wooden boards connected with string over my shoulders. On the front he had written in paint “Free Delivry” and our phone number; on the back it read “We Sell Cak.”

  “Are you joking me?” I asked.

  “Do you see me laughing?” he answered before practically shoving me out the door to walk the freezing streets of Wazir Akbar Khan.

  As I trudged through the snow I had to accept that this was probably the most humiliating experience of my life. My cheeks burned even hotter than the time when Jahid told Jamilla I’d pissed my pants after we’d had a competition to see who could drink the most water without going to the toilet. With every tenth step I took, another guard would appear from inside his hut to make some crack about my new costume and whether I might also be hired as a table, and the whole shameful experience wasn’t helped in the slightest by James, who passed me on the way back from wherever he had been and started laughing so hard he nearly wet his own pants.

  “Well, at least you won’t be contravening any codes of the Advertising Standards Authority,” he shouted as I carried on walking.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, and wandered off in the opposite direction toward the part of Wazir where the only Westerners trawling the streets were the ones looking for Chinese whores.

  Thankfully, the next day I was unexpectedly relieved of my new job as Pir Hederi turned up grumbling that he’d had “a devil of a night.”

  “It was past midnight, and the mobile phone wouldn’t stop ringing,” he moaned. “Every time I answered it there was some damn foreigner on the other end asking for ‘cak.’ I switched it off in the end.”

  “I think I know why,” I offered, coming over to sit by Jamilla close to the warmth of the fire. “James told me last night that when you read the sign out loud it sounds like the English word cack.”

  “And what does that mean?” Pir Hederi asked, wiping at his nose with a dirty handkerchief.

  “It means we sell shit,” I replied.

  14

  SEVENTY DAYS AFTER the end of Ramazan, a couple of weeks after the foreigners’ New Year, and the day after the pilgrims return from hajj, coloring the roads in cars decorated with glittering tinsel and flowers, Afghanistan celebrates Eid-e Qorban. This is one of our favorite festivals, and Muslims celebrate it in memory of Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son for Allah. For three days our country of tears and war becomes a place of fun, beauty, and full bellies, with everyone dressing in their finest clothes and those who can afford it slaughtering their best sheep, cows, or goats as a symbol of Ibrahim’s sacrifice. As it is written in the Koran, a large portion of the meat is given to the poor while the rest is served up for the family meal, to which friends and other relatives are invited.

  And even though Eid is always brilliant, this year was better than I ever remembered it being because it brought an armful of surprises into our lives that made the celebration come and go quicker than usual.

  First of all, Georgie announced she had given up smoking.

  “A New Year’s resolution,” she explained.

  “Bit late, isn’t it?” remarked James.

  “I had to get used to the idea,” Georgie snapped back, hitting him on the head with the empty pen she was now spending her days sucking on.

  Personally, I didn’t care whether her “resolution” was late or not. I took it as a sign from God that my prayers were working and that Georgie was finally moving in the right direction and away from the flames of Hell that were waiting to eat her.

  The next surprise was the fat-bottomed sheep that suddenly turned up in our yard, along with a local butcher to perform the halal act of slaughter. As we all gathered to watch him pronounce the name of God and slit the animal’s throat, May turned her back on the river of blood that quickly turned the snow red.

  “Christ, it’s enough to make you vegetarian,” she muttered.

  “I thought all you lesbians were anyway,” James joked, earning himself a kick in the shins.

  It appeared that in the West, if you were annoyed by just about anything you simply beat the nearest man to you.

  My next happy surprise was Haji Khan’s phone call to Georgie, which sent her running up to her room. She emerged thirty minutes later with the stupid grin covering her face that she seemed to save especially for these occasions.

  Then Rachel arrived at the house looking fresh and pretty and bringing a similar stupid look to James’s face.

  That afternoon Massoud also turned up, and I went with him to take cuts of freshly hacked meat to the homes of Jamilla and Spandi, whose families filled my hands with sugared almonds and papered sweets to take back to the foreigners.

  One of the biggest surprises came on the second day of Eid when my aunt arrived at our house with her husband, my cousin Jahid, and their two other kids trailing behind. Although it is expected that Muslims should use the festival to visit their relations, I wasn’t sure this applied to relatives you had recently tried to kill. So, naturally, I was shocked when my mother’s family turned up out of the blue, though this was nothing compared to the shock of seeing my aunt again because it looked like someone had stuck a pin in her skin, letting all the air out and leaving her a shriveled copy of her old self.

  At the sight of my aunt, my mother started crying and immediately took her into her arms, which was a lot easier now she was half the size she used to be. Then my aunt started crying too, which set off May and Georgie, and pretty soon all four of the women were reaching for handkerchiefs hidden up the sleeves of their sweaters and coats while all the men, including James, coughed a bit and stood around looking embarrassed.

  Apparently, my aunt had also been struck down with the cholera—and by the looks of it she had come off a lot worse than my mother.

  In other ways, though, getting cholera was probably the best thing that could have happened to her because as well as sucking the fat from her body the disease had also sucked the ugliness out of her mind. The words that used to fall from her mouth to torment my mother were gone. Now my aunt was not only smaller but quieter than she used to be, and as she sat in my mother’s room holding her hand gently in the palm of her own, I felt a bit sorry for wishing death upon her.

  “Fuck, it was awful,” Jahid explained. “Shit everywhere. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. You wouldn’t have thought one person could make so much shit.”

  “Well, at least she survived. It’s a pretty bad thing to get over,” I replied, trying to block the image of my aunt shitting out half her body weight in the small house we all used to share.

  “True,” replied Jahid. “Two of our neighbors died actually, two of the older men, Haji Rashid and Haji Habib.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said, thinking of these two old men who had managed to survive the Russian occupation, the civil war, and the Taliban years only to die in their own shit.

  Sometimes, even during Eid, it’s hard to understand God’s plan for us.

  As the lights of our festival began to fade and we readied ourselves for normal life again, the final and best surprise of all came.

  Taking me by the hand, Georgie led me upstairs to her room, pressing her finger to her lips so I wouldn’t talk. We were obviously on some kind of secret mission, which was kind of exciting on its own. We positioned ourselves on the floor, and she reached for a small radio with a wind-up handle. As it whirred into action, she placed it in front of us.

  The soft, low sound of a man speaking in Dari came to my ears; he was introducing phone calls from other Afghans and repeating a list of telephone numbers. The calls were all short and sometimes hard to hear over the crackle of a bad connection, but they all had one thing in common: the faceless voices were asking for lost family members and friends to get in touch.

  It was all quite sad, and as I sat there I wondered why Georgie would want me to listen to such mi
sery at the end of such a beautiful Eid. Then the man introduced another load of callers, and I heard Georgie’s voice come dancing into my ears. Her message simply said, “If anyone knows the whereabouts of Mina from Paghman, daughter of Mariya and brother to Fawad, please contact me. Your family is well and happy, and they would love to see you again.”

  15

  IT WAS AGREED that neither Georgie nor I should tell my mother about the radio show because we didn’t want to get her hopes up. As Georgie said, the chances of finding my sister were smaller than finding an honest man in government; but at least a tiny hole of light had now opened in our lives, and it shone twice a week on Radio Free Europe’s In Search of the Lost program.

  In the meantime, as I secretly waited for Mina’s return, the world crawled its way through winter, forcing us indoors and turning our noses red. Like summer, winter brings great joy when it comes, but then—maybe because we celebrate it too much at the start—it goes on and on and on, outstaying its welcome until you spend every waking minute praying for it to end.

  The freezing cold seemed to be good for Pir Hederi’s business, though. We were now getting up to five calls a day from houses wanting their shopping delivered. What it wasn’t so good for was my toes. After being soaked to the bone in the snow and warmed up again by the bukhari in the shop, I returned home one night to find them swollen and blue. I remembered Pir Hederi’s story about the doomed mujahideen in the mountains and cried myself to sleep worrying that I’d wake up and find ten rotten holes where my toes used to be. My mother went mental when she saw the state of them the next morning and immediately stomped around to Pir Hederi’s to warn him that she would visit a million curses on him unless he took proper care of me. The next day Pir Hederi sent me off on my deliveries with two plastic bags tied to my feet. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, and handed me a chocolate bar to pay for my silence.

  Back at the house, the long gray of winter was also starting to creep into our lives. After a promising start, Haji Khan’s telephone calls had slowly drifted away with the sunshine, and Georgie was becoming increasingly angry, losing her temper every five minutes as she battled with the cigarettes and Haji Khan’s silence. James wasn’t really helping the situation because he was still smoking like a bukhari, but one evening he left the house with a rucksack slung over his shoulder and he explained that because he was really quite a good friend to Georgie he was choosing to spend the next few nights at Rachel’s place in Qala-e Fatullah, which I thought was nice of him. However, I wasn’t as stupid as he obviously thought I was. I guessed the real reason he had gone was that he had already made Rachel his girlfriend.

  A few days after he moved out, James actually left Kabul altogether—to chase the sunshine and bombers in Kandahar for a couple of weeks, he said. It was sometimes easy to forget that James actually worked for a living. In fact I think he also forgot this quite a lot, until his newspaper rang to remind him.

  Throughout the month of February, May also spent more than a few evenings away from the house, even though she didn’t smoke. I later learned this was because she was visiting Philippe. When I was told this, I wondered whether the Frenchman was staying away from our house because he was scared of me or scared of coming face-to-face with my mother.

  So that left pretty much only my mother and me to take care of Georgie’s sadness.

  “Haji Khan is probably stuck in the mountains,” I said to Georgie one evening as we both ate with her in the big house to stop her from feeling lonely.

  Georgie smiled, but I caught the look she swapped with my mother and it didn’t match.

  When James finally returned to the house he didn’t do much to brighten anyone’s mood as he filled our heads with talk of rocket attacks and fighting in the south.

  “The insurgency is starting to gain momentum,” he told Georgie as she made herself a sandwich in the kitchen, and though I didn’t know what momentum meant, I didn’t think it sounded good. “By the way, Georgie, a second on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” he added, which again I didn’t understand.

  “Oh fuck off, James,” snapped Georgie, which I understood perfectly well.

  Two weeks after James returned to tell us about the troubles he had seen, a massive bomb blew five people to smithereens and wounded thirty-two more in Kandahar city, which added some power to Pir Hederi’s opinion that the country was “once again going to shit.”

  “But why are the Taliban bombing Afghans?” I asked as I read the story out loud from the Kabul Times.

  “Because they’re all bloody Pakistanis,” Pir Hederi replied, which I knew wasn’t true because, for one, they were led by Mullah Omar, and though he had only one eye he was still an Afghan.

  “They’re not all from Pakistan,” I corrected.

  “Okay, maybe not,” Pir accepted with a grumble, “but the bastard suicide bombers are. Afghans don’t go blowing themselves up. It’s not the way we do things here. This is something brought in from the outside. In my time we fought because we wanted to see victory, not to watch our legs fly past our bloody ears.”

  “It’s a combination of things—a lot of little things coming together all at once,” James explained as we walked home together after he had come to the shop to buy some cigarettes for himself and a package of biscuits, a Twix chocolate bar, and some Happy Cow cheese for Georgie. “First of all, the coalition—those are the Western troops, Fawad—never finished off either the Taliban or al-Qaeda in 2001, giving them the chance to disappear for a while and regroup, to come back together again. Then, the reconstruction that was promised has been slow to make an impact—to be seen—especially in places where it is more dangerous, like in the south and east. And then there is growing resentment—anger—about the government. The Pashtuns think there are too many members of the Northern Alliance in top jobs, the Northern Alliance feel they have been sidelined—had power taken away from them—even though they credit themselves—give themselves a pat on the back—for winning the war. Then there is the corruption problem, with money talking loudest in government departments, offices, and on the streets with all the bakhsheesh-taking policemen. When you add it all up, people are bound—are sure—to get pissed off. Then along comes the new Taliban, and the fighting starts again and people begin to question—ask—where all the security and promises went until pretty much everyone is spoiling—everyone is ready—for war again.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I admitted.

  “No, it doesn’t especially, does it?”

  James flicked his cigarette into the thawing alley of waste and rubbish that lined the road back to our house.

  “Why doesn’t President Karzai fix it and stop all the corruption, and then the people will be happy with him?”

  “I guess it’s not that easy, Fawad. He has so many powerful men here and abroad to keep happy, and he needs support from all of them if he is going to make your country peaceful again.”

  “Then why don’t the army and the Western soldiers just go and kill the Taliban properly?”

  “Well, that’s not so easy either. They keep bloody hiding!”

  With that, James swooped down, grabbed me by the legs, and raised me to the sky on his shoulders, catching me by surprise and nearly losing me down his back as he stood up again.

  “Come on, Fawad! Maybe we should go to the south and fight jihad against the bad guys!”

  “Yeah!” I laughed. “Let’s go and kick Mullah Omar in the ass!”

  “Why don’t you stab him there instead? That’s usually your modus operandi, isn’t it?”

  Although I didn’t quite get the words, I understood James’s meaning and I laughed out loud because for once my attack on Philippe seemed quite funny. Then together we galloped toward the house, just like the Afghan warriors from my country’s past, except I was on the shoulders of an Englishman instead of trying to kill him.

  As we ran to the gate, Shir Ahmad saw us coming and saluted as he opened the metal side door, swinging i
t wide as we rushed inside. James came to a stop with a stamp of his feet and a lip-splitting neigh.

  “James?”

  Georgie’s voice rang out from behind the door.

  “James?”

  “God, she’s impatient for her biscuits, isn’t she?” James laughed. “Coming, dear!”

  But before he could get to the door it opened in front of us and Georgie fell into our path, holding her stomach. There was blood on her skirt, and it covered her hands where she’d touched it.

  “James?” she cried, holding her hands out to him.

  “Oh Jesus, darling. Jesus. No.”

  Part Two

  16

  WHEN GEORGIE LOST her baby, it was as if a little something inside all of us died, even those of us who didn’t know a baby was coming in the first place.

  But because Allah is merciful, even to unbelievers like Georgie, he took away her baby and gave her Dr. Hugo instead.

  Of course, it took Georgie a long time to see the good doctor because her eyes were clouded by tears and bad dreams for weeks after the baby left her. She was like a ghost living in our house, a white space of sadness that ate all the happiness from our lives—and for a while I was convinced she would leave us too.

  After James brought Georgie back from the hospital, he walked her to her bed and gathered the rest of us in the front room downstairs to tell us she had suffered something called a “miscarriage.” James explained that although there was nothing wrong with her body and that a miscarriage was quite normal for women whose babies are still so tiny in their stomachs, Georgie’s mind would be broken for a while and she would need all of our help to make it better again.

  So for the next few weeks that’s what we all tried to do.

  James spoke to Georgie’s boss at the goat-combing company, and she was allowed to stay at home and still get paid. May forgot about the Frenchman and stayed by her friend’s side in the evenings, reading to her and trying to get her dressed. During the day my mother took on the job of sitting by her bed as May went out to do her engineering. She spent most of her hours up there just stroking Georgie’s hair and begging her to eat. But Georgie’s mouth was too full of grief to make room for food, and it was a daily battle even to get her to eat some Happy Cow cheese, and she used to love Happy Cow.