Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  As Ismerai lit his second cigarette, Haji Khan appeared in the garden. His brown face was white, and tears hung in the corners of his eyes, waiting to be freed. My blood froze when I saw him, and I bowed my head as he walked over to us to take Ismerai’s cigarette from his hands.

  “I didn’t know,” I heard him whisper to Ismerai, who had got up from his chair. “She never told me, and now I can’t reach her.”

  “She needs time,” Ismerai replied, causing me to look up, remembering my mother’s own words.

  “No,” Haji Khan corrected, his voice sore and rough. “She needs someone better than me . . . we both know that. But how can I even let that happen? She’s my life.”

  As Haji Khan turned away he paused to look at me, and that’s when the tears fell, spilling out quietly from his dark brown eyes like two small rivers, kissing the edges of his nose as they ran to his lips.

  18

  “WHAT IN THE name of Allah is that noise?” I asked, finding James hiding in the yard after I’d finished the morning shift at school. Afternoon lessons were for girls.

  “That, my dear Fawad, is the Sex Pistols,” he informed me, which I took to be the name of the noise screaming English words from Georgie’s room. “Count yourself lucky,” James added. “It was Bonnie Tyler this morning.”

  “Bonnie who?”

  “Big hair, big shoulder pads, big headache—”

  “Hey! I like Big Bonnie Tyler!”

  Georgie appeared at the door. She was dressed in blue jeans and a tight long-sleeved T-shirt, and she was eating a piece of naan bread, which, if I wasn’t mistaken, was painted white with Happy Cow cheese.

  “God, I’m starving,” she added.

  As she walked past us carrying a box in one hand and her lunch in the other, I noticed her finger and her neck were empty of the jewelry Haji Khan had bought her just a few short months ago. I also noticed a pack of cigarettes sticking out from the back pocket of her jeans.

  “What’s in the box?” James asked as she placed it near the outside trash can.

  “Stuff,” she replied. “I’m spring-cleaning.”

  Once she’d disappeared back into the house and into the noise, James and I looked at each other and raced to the box. James got there first, but his legs were twice the size of mine and he’d also pushed me to the ground before we set off.

  “Ahhh,” he said as he reached it, pulling open the cardboard flaps for me to see.

  “Ahhh,” I agreed.

  Inside was a pile of neatly folded shirts of the finest silk, several perfume bottles, too many rainbow-colored scarves to count, and a bone-carved jewelry box.

  On top of them all sat Haji Khan’s photo.

  As Georgie welcomed in the spring by cleaning away her memories, my mother greeted the season by shaving off my hair. It happened every year, but it didn’t make the experience any easier.

  May laughed when she saw me. “Who loves ya, baby?”

  “Kojak,” explained James, which didn’t actually explain anything.

  “It’s for health,” I insisted, touching my head to rub away the humiliation my so-called friends were adding to.

  “It’s for lice, you mean,” corrected May.

  “Whatever,” I said, doing the W sign with my thumbs and fingers as James had once taught me in the kitchen after Georgie had teased him about Rachel.

  May laughed again.

  “Here,” she said, throwing me a blue suede coat, “see if you can find a happy home for this!”

  “It’s beautiful,” I replied as it landed in my arms, feeling the softness of it between my fingers and looking at the yellow pattern embroidered around the edges. “Why don’t you want it?”

  “I so do!” May insisted. “But Ismerai brought it round for Georgie, and she doesn’t want it. Sadly, I don’t think she’d appreciate me wearing it either. Women can be unpredictable creatures when they’re angry, Fawad.”

  “You’re a woman,” I noted.

  “Barely,” muttered James, who received a punch in the ear from May.

  “Why didn’t Georgie just give it back then?”

  “Ismerai wouldn’t take it,” May explained.

  “But who should I give it to?”

  “Anyone, as long as they don’t live around here,” she said, and walked back into the house just as the gate opened behind us and Shir Ahmad’s head appeared.

  “Fawad,” he hissed, waving at me to come over. “I think someone is looking for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Come see for yourself. I think he’s in disguise.”

  I followed Shir outside, and he pointed to a dark figure across the road, standing a little up the street from us. It was a boy drowning in a giant-sized patu, wearing dark sunglasses and apparently reading the Kabul Times. He looked suspicious, like a spy, and not a very good one at that because the whole street was watching him.

  As the newspaper lowered, I recognized my friend.

  “Spandi!” I shouted, which made him drop the paper altogether as he reached for the patu to cover his face and turned quickly away to look at the wall.

  I ran over to him, laughing. I’d totally forgotten he was still in hiding.

  “I’ve been a nervous wreck,” Spandi moaned as we walked toward Shahr-e Naw for no reason other than we had nothing better to do. We’d gone to Pir Hederi’s beforehand, but Jamilla had taken no orders before she left for school, so the old man told us to “go enjoy the sunshine before the government taxes that as well.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I told Spandi. “It left my mind.”

  “Honestly, I was convinced you’d be dead by now, but I had to check. I’m glad you’re alive and all that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’re a good friend, Spandi.”

  “The best you’ll ever have.”

  He laughed. And though I joined in and called him a homo, in my bones I knew he was right.

  After we walked past the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, trying to sneak a look at the ladies as we went because it annoyed the guards, we moved on toward Chief Burger to pick up a Beef 5—a fried sandwich of shredded meat, potato, and egg that left your lips slippery. After the winter our whole bodies were dry as old twigs, and the grease felt good, like medicine.

  With our bellies full, we wandered over to the park where the poor and the hungry gathered to share their misery and jump on anyone fool enough to join them. There, by the side of the wall, opposite the A-One supermarket, we found Pir the Madman, picking through a rotten heap of rubbish with the rest of the city’s unwanted dogs. He wore no shoes on his cracked black feet, and his wild curly hair had matted together, making it look like he was wearing a badly made helmet.

  “Fleas!” he shouted as he saw us coming. “The fleas return to bite the dog!”

  “The only fleas are on you,” said Spandi, laughing.

  “Fleas on me, fleas on you, all fleas pleased to be fleas,” the mental sang, roughly scratching at his head as he did so. “Isn’t that so, little flea?”

  “I guess,” I replied, realizing he was talking to me and wondering how it was possible to fall so low that you had to spend your day ankle-high in shit.

  Nobody really knew Pir the Madman’s story. He was just the mental who managed to survive everything Kabul could throw at him. But I guessed it was a bad one, and it made me sad to think that at some time in his life he must have been a boy like me with everything to look forward to.

  “Here, Pir,” I said, moving over to him and holding out the coat May had given me, and that Ismerai had given Georgie, “a coat for the king of fleas.”

  Pir roughly snatched it from my hands and tucked it under his arm, quickly shifting away from us, back toward the park, as if he was scared I might change my mind. As he reached the wall, he cocked his head to look at me in a way I didn’t understand. Then he jumped over the wall and ran in zigzags across the mud brown grass.

  “A coat for the king of fleas!” he shouted. “All hail, the king
! The king of fleas!”

  “Nutcase,” Spandi remarked as we turned to walk back to Wazir Akbar Khan.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Still, that was a good thing you did there, Fawad.”

  “Not really,” I said. “It was just a coat that nobody wanted.”

  19

  “COME ON, FAWAD!” Spandi said, running toward me as I cycled to Pir Hederi’s to start work for the afternoon. “Kabul’s on fire, and we’re missing it!”

  “What do you mean, ‘on fire’?” I asked, bringing my wheels to a stop to look at the sky for smoke and flames and other fire-type signs.

  “The Americans have killed a load of people, and now everyone is rioting,” he explained, reaching my side and collapsing against the seat of my bike. “The radio says hundreds of people are marching in the streets and burning everything in sight. Someone told me they even set fire to a Chinaman in Shahr-e Naw.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, really!” Spandi insisted, his cheeks red with excitement where they used to be gray.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why not?” he replied. “It’s a riot! There are no rules!”

  “Okay then, let’s go before we miss it!”

  Spandi jumped onto the seat of my bike and grabbed hold of the back of my jacket for balance, and we raced off looking for the riot.

  Now, you would think it would be quite easy to find hundreds of rioters setting fire to Chinamen in the city, but by the time we got to Shahr-e Naw the place was empty of anyone looking even a little bit angry. Only the charred remains of police checkpoints, broken shop windows, and stolen goods dropped on the street showed that anything serious had happened there. However, after following the trail and asking a few other boys where everyone had got to, we finally found a small crowd of people in Taimani shouting “Death to Karzai!” and “Death to America!”; they also held posters of the dead Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud high above their heads. We guessed this was about as good as it was going to get, so we joined them.

  By the time we fell in behind the snake of people, there weren’t that many left and most of them looked like students, but we decided to help them anyway, shouting “Death to America!” because that seemed to be all you had to do to become a member of a riot. A man in black just in front of us turned around with a smile when he heard our voices, which encouraged us to scream even louder. “Death to America! Death to America!” we yelled at the top of our lungs, laughing together in the excitement of it all.

  As we marched through the streets like a crazy gang of American-hating brothers, a couple of the older boys tried to pull down any guard huts they found outside houses with foreign signs in front of them. And although Spandi and I weren’t strong enough or brave enough to help them, we made up for our weakness in noise, scrunching our faces into masks of hate like we saw the others doing.

  “Death to America!”

  “Yeah! Die, America! You’re rubbish!” Spandi shouted.

  “And you smell of cabbage!” I screamed.

  “And dog shit!” added Spandi.

  “And you fight like girls!”

  “And cry like women!”

  “And you all eat babies!”

  “And shag worm-bum donkeys!”

  “And—”

  I felt a tug at my neck.

  “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” an angry voice exploded in my ear.

  I turned around to see James behind me. Once again I’d forgotten he sometimes had to work for a living. Along the road behind us were a handful of other white faces holding pens, notebooks, and cameras.

  “We’re protesting because the Americans murdered five hundred Afghans,” I shouted above the other rioters, whose voices seemed to find more power in the journalists’ presence.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” James shouted back, which was true actually. “This isn’t a game, Fawad. Get home now; otherwise I’ll take you there myself—and I’ll tell your mother exactly what you have been up to.”

  “But James—”

  “Don’t ‘but James’ me,” he demanded, which didn’t make any kind of sense at all, though it put a stop to the argument.

  Spandi and I agreed that we had done our bit to honor the memory of the murdered Afghans, and although it would have been fun to stay with the rioters, they probably didn’t have mothers at home who would torture them, and their friends, with hard looks and silence.

  And just in case James did turn us in, Spandi and I decided to go our separate ways at the corner of my street.

  “Your mother can be pretty fierce,” said Spandi.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I walked home slowly, now dreading the return of James, who was usually the easiest member of the house to get along with. However, when he did eventually turn up, about two hours later, he simply nodded at me to join him in the garden.

  “Look, Fawad, what you did today was pretty silly,” he told me. “People got hurt in that riot, and a lot of families lost people they love. It was a very dangerous situation that could easily have got further out of hand. I’m sorry I shouted at you and all that, but I was worried for you. If you had been injured, I would never have forgiven myself. Anyway, you’re safe now, and that’s the main thing. So, are we cool?”

  “Yes, we’re cool,” I told him, my heart growing big at the thought that he cared so much. “We’re very cool.”

  After James went inside to write his story, I joined my mother in the kitchen. She was listening to a report about the trouble on the radio as she prepared a stew of sheep’s bum and carrots. Georgie and May hadn’t come home at all. My mother said they had phoned Shir Ahmad and Abdul, who were both guarding our gates with brave talk that didn’t match their faces, to say they had been ordered to stay behind the high walls of their office compounds until everyone was sure the rioters had got tired and gone back to their own homes. Finally, at nine at night, Georgie and May appeared, looking serious, a little drunk, and talking about “the end.”

  The next day, while sitting on a crate of Iranian yogurt cartons, I found out what had really happened as I read Pir Hederi the report from the Kabul Times. Apparently a U.S. military truck had lost control in Khair Khana, where we all used to live, because of “mechanical failure.” It hit a load of cars, killing someone. The report said some soldiers, American or Afghan, started shooting as people picked up stones and threw them. That killed another five people. Then, as the protesters marched into the city, even more people died, and offices belonging to foreign aid agencies were set on fire as well as a whorehouse. There was no mention of a Chinaman, though. The newspaper also said the rioters were not all real protesters but “opportunists and criminals” trying to cause trouble. What’s more, the government had promised to arrest them—information that made my heart race because it meant that Spandi and I were now wanted by the cops.

  Because of the riots the government ordered everyone to stay in their houses after ten at night. This was called a “curfew,” said James, and it was the first time Kabul had seen one for four years. Personally, I was quite glad no one was allowed out because it kept all my foreign friends at home, which I thought might be useful if the police came to raid the place looking for me.

  “It’s getting bloody tense out there,” James told Georgie one evening as they sat in the warm night air eating the chickpeas and potatoes my mother had prepared for us all. “You can almost taste the hate growing, on both sides.”

  “It will pass,” said Georgie, who didn’t sound too convinced of her words.

  “Will it?” James asked her. “The Afghans aren’t exactly renowned for their tolerance of occupying forces.”

  “We’re not occupying!” Georgie almost shouted. “Nobody thinks that.”

  “Not yet they don’t,” James said seriously. “But it only takes a couple of fuck-ups for that dynamic to change.”

  I said nothing, mainly because I didn’t want the adults
to move their conversation inside the house, where I wouldn’t be able to hear if James was going to betray me to Georgie, but I knew he was right. In the newspaper reports over the past two weeks I’d read of fighting between the international soldiers and the Taliban. The week before the American truck had done murder through mechanical failure, about thirty Afghans had been killed by bombs dropped from airplanes, a family in Kunar had died the same way, and roadside bombs and suicide attacks were causing death and misery everywhere.

  Maybe May and Georgie were right when they first came home after the riots. Maybe this was “the end.”

  20

  “YOU KNOW, HAJI Khan really is very handsome,” remarked Jamilla in the singsong voice she sometimes used to annoy me, “like something out of a storybook.”

  “He’s okay,” I admitted.

  “If you go for that good-looking rich-as-a-king kind of thing,” agreed Spandi.

  “Oh yes,” added Pir Hederi, “he’s a heartbreaker all right.”

  “How can you even know that?”

  My hands flew up in amazement at the old man’s gift of apparently knowing everything about anything even when he could see nothing.

  “I can smell it.” Pir laughed. “He smells like a man women would die for . . . and men too for that matter.”

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “Gross,” agreed Spandi.

  “I’d marry him,” admitted Jamilla.

  “Would you now?”

  Spandi jumped down from the counter and moved over to her.

  “Well, he’s a bit old and all that, but if no one else asked me I would.”

  “Don’t worry, Jamilla, I don’t think you’ll be short of offers,” Spandi told her as he helped her down from the chair she’d been standing on to wipe the rows of cans on the shelves. “You’re a star that shines in the darkest sky, girl. You’ll have men falling at your feet in a couple of years.”

  “Really? You think so?”