Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  “I know so.”

  “Oh, here we go,” grumbled Pir as Jamilla giggled and corrected the scarf to cover the bruise her father had freshly planted on her face. “Stop it, both of you. I’ll have none of that romancing in my shop.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

  “Don’t be such a child!” Jamilla told me, laughing.

  “No, really, I think I’m going to be sick,” I insisted.

  And I was, right on top of Dog’s tail.

  I’d been feeling hot and sweaty all day and a devil had been sitting in my head playing the tabla drums for the best part of two hours when Haji Khan suddenly walked into Pir’s shop saying he wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes. All of us immediately stopped what we were doing—not that we were doing that much in the first place—and we followed him with our eyes. Anyone who happened to be watching us must have thought we were guarding the shop from Kabul’s best-dressed shoplifter.

  I knew he was lying, of course—about the cigarettes; he had men who brought in boxes of them from Europe. I’d never seen him smoke the Chinese horse shit that everyone else did here.

  “So, is everything okay?” Haji Khan asked as we watched him, and as Pir practically spun himself into a woman around him, inviting him for tea, offering him biscuits, and even telling him “it’s nothing” when he tried to pay for his Seven Stars, which was the first time I’d ever heard those words fall out of his cracked lips.

  I nodded in answer to Haji Khan’s question, knowing he was after more but refusing to give it.

  “No problems,” he tried again, “at the house?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. Yes, that’s very good. So, everyone’s okay then?”

  I nodded.

  “So, nobody was affected by the riots?”

  I shrugged and shook my head again.

  “And James? His work is going well? And May?”

  “She’s fine!” I suddenly blurted out, feeling embarrassed about the whole discussion that was taking place, which was being watched and listened to with great interest by my friends because I hadn’t yet told them that Georgie had cleaned out Haji Khan from her life. I could see they were a little confused about what was going on. Big men don’t often come into small shops for no reason.

  “Good, good,” Haji Khan repeated, looking huge and lost in the cramped space of Pir’s shop. “I just wanted to, well, you know . . .”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know.”

  And Haji Khan nodded and left, leaving the Seven Stars pack on the counter behind him.

  “It’s probably just something he’s eaten.” Dr Hugo stroked the top of my head to feel the heat of it before placing two fingers on the side of my neck to look for God knows what. “Plenty of water and some rest,” he added, leaning back on our cushions and picking up his tea.

  I put my head to one side and looked at him. I’d only heard him doctoring twice, once with Georgie and now with me, and it seemed to me that as far as he was concerned all anyone ever needed was a bit of rest. I seriously wanted to hear what he’d say if someone’s leg got blown off.

  “Yes, you’re probably right,” agreed Georgie.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “What was that look for?”

  “What look?” I asked, feeling my cheeks grow even hotter because she wasn’t meant to see it.

  “That look!” Georgie rolled her eyes around her head.

  “Oh, that look,” I admitted, rolling my eyes again.

  “Yes, that look,” she said, copying me.

  “Nothing.”

  “Boys!” She laughed, pulling me into her arms, which were getting softer now she was eating again.

  “Women!” I mimicked.

  “Are you two always like this?” interrupted Dr. Hugo as he dipped one of our biscuits into his cup. It broke off before it reached his mouth, and fell onto his trousers.

  “Nice,” said Georgie, rolling her eyes.

  Dr. Hugo had been coming to our house quite a lot lately, even during the curfew, because the government had given him a special password to stop him from getting shot at police checkpoints.

  I still wasn’t sure how good a doctor he was, but I was sure he would be good for Georgie if she let him. He was a bit messy, that was for sure, but he had a good heart. He told me he cried the other day when he had to cut off a woman’s arm after her husband shot her during an argument. And though Georgie and I hadn’t spoken about him, I guess she liked Dr. Hugo at least a little bit because all the makeup was back on her face. She didn’t touch him or stroke his knee or talk with her eyes like she did with Haji Khan, but she smiled when he was near and disappeared when he phoned, which was quite a lot compared to what she was used to.

  But then there were the other times, when Georgie’s phone rang and she just let it play its tune. We all pretended not to notice because we guessed it was Haji Khan reaching out for her voice and it was up to her if she chose to hide it or not. However, if she was truly over him, I knew in my heart she would just tell him.

  “I think Dr. Hugo wants to make Georgie his girlfriend,” I told my mother as we sat watching the Tulsi soap opera that came from India. Tulsi was a young bride who had married into a rich family, and everybody seemed to spend most of their time trying to ruin one another, or crying.

  “I think you’re right,” my mother replied as the program finished in another explosion of tears and sad music.

  “And do you think she will let him?”

  “I don’t know, but I think she deserves to be happy.”

  “Like Tulsi?”

  “Yes, like Tulsi.”

  “But Tulsi’s never happy.”

  “It’s only television, Fawad. It’s not real.”

  “I know that! I’m not stupid!”

  “Don’t act it, then.”

  I looked at my mother, who was now reaching for some sewing she’d stored underneath one of the long cushions. Sometimes it was really quite difficult to have a normal conversation with her because she didn’t listen that well. I wondered whether this had anything to do with her being uneducated.

  “All I’m saying is I’m not sure Georgie can love Dr. Hugo as much as she loved Haji Khan, and I don’t know whether she ever will.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “A feeling . . .”

  My mother raised one eyebrow and looked at me, straight in the eye.

  “Okay, okay. I caught Dr. Hugo trying to kiss her the other night, but she hid her lips from him and he ended up kissing her ear.”

  “Fawad! I really wish you wouldn’t keep spying on people. It’s not nice.”

  “I wasn’t spying; I just happened to be there!”

  Of course, that was a lie, because it’s hard to be in a place by accident when it’s close to midnight and you should be in your bed, but my mother let it pass.

  “Well, it’s early days,” she replied. “Georgie may still love Haji Khan, but things change—people change. They just need a little time.”

  “Time’s all good and well,” I said, getting to my feet because I was a little mad with all this talk of rest and time and sleeping and everything else adults throw at you when they don’t have any proper answers. “The trouble is, Mother, Georgie hasn’t got a lot of time left, and she’ll have to pick someone to make her happy soon because she’s not getting any younger. And neither are you, come to think of it.”

  “I beg your pardon?” My mother looked up, surprised.

  “I’m just saying, that’s all.”

  “Saying what exactly?”

  “Look, there’s a man outside these gates”—I pointed my finger at the window to make it clear exactly which gates I meant—“and he’s learning computering and trying to better himself, and I don’t think it’s because he wants to be the most big-brained guard in Wazir Akbar Khan, do you?”

  “Now look here, young man—”

  “No! You look here! Do you people ever stop to think about me? T
o think about how I feel? Do you ever wonder why my eyes are always half closed in the morning? It’s because I’m up all night worrying about who’s going to take care of all the damn women in this house!”

  “Don’t use that language with me!”

  “Language! Language! Who cares? It’s only words. Actions count more than words. If I’m not worrying about you and who will make you happy when I grow up and get married, then I’m worrying about Georgie, whose head is with one man and whose heart is living with another, and if it’s not Georgie, it’s May, who hasn’t got a chance in hell of marrying anyone unless she unlesbianizes. I mean! Do any of you have even the faintest idea of the kind of stress I am under?”

  And with that I stormed out of the room, leaving my mother still as stone, her mouth hanging open, for once empty of anything to say.

  21

  AFTER MY OUTBURST, Allah punished me with a night of almighty misery that brought every evil in the world to my house so it could move into my stomach and explode from my bum. “Rest,” that’s what Dr. Hugo had said, which as far as I was concerned absolutely, beyond one hundred percent, proved he didn’t know shit about shit—especially the shit that had been pouring from my hole like an open tap every fifteen minutes.

  Luckily, my mother did. Having woken up to the sound of my groans and farts bouncing from the walls of the toilet for the hundred millionth time that night, she gave me a spoon of pomegranate dust washed down with a glass of warm milk and took me back to bed, finally rocking me to sleep with the soft sound of her singing.

  “I love you, son,” was the last thing I remembered her saying.

  We don’t have much in Afghanistan—apart from drugs, guns, and great scenery—but over the years we’ve learned how to get by without all the pretty colored pills and buzzing machinery the sick surround themselves with in the West.

  If we feel dizzy, we have a glass of lemon juice, water, and sugar. If we have a sore throat, we stick our fists in our mouths three times in the morning to open up the channel to our stomach. And if we have the shits, we eat dried pomegranate skin. Of course, our self-doctoring is not always perfect. I recently read in a cartoon made by an NGO that putting fire ash on top of a wound might actually kill you rather than cure you, and I knew that after taking my mother’s medicine I wouldn’t go near a toilet for at least three days. But by and large it works.

  Like with the drug addicts and the mentals. When it gets too much for their families, they simply chain them up to a holy shrine for forty days so that God can sort out the problem. And, okay, it’s not brilliant for the junkies and the crazies because they only get to eat bread and drink green tea for more than a month and most days they get stoned by bored kids, but that also works. If it doesn’t, they die, and that must have been God’s plan for them all along. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been mental or addicted to drugs in the first place; they would have done well at school and become a lawyer, or something. Or, in Pir the Madman’s case, they would have grown up to be the king of fleas.

  However, absolutely the best thing about being ill is that you don’t have to go to school the next day. It’s not that I didn’t like the lessons; they were easy enough, and I was still getting good marks for my handwriting. But if I had to make a choice between a warm bed and a wooden chair I share with a boy whose armpits smell of beans, the bed would win every time.

  And if the front gate hadn’t kept banging open and shut, forcing me out of my dreams, I’m sure I would have slept right through until the middle of the following week and missed even more school. But I didn’t because the front gate kept banging open and shut. So eventually I got up to see just what the hell was going on.

  Walking out into the sunshine that was annoyingly bright and trying to stab my eyes with its light, I followed the hum of grown-up talking. Rubbing at my face and scratching at the soft layer of fur now growing on my head, I wandered into the garden to find Georgie, James, and May sitting on a carpet on the grass, sorting out plates and bread on a plastic mat, getting ready for lunch. With them were Dr. Hugo, Rachel, and a woman I’d never met before. Her hair was short and dark, and her face looked a little hairy.

  “Don’t you people have jobs to go to?” I asked.

  “Afghanistan can do without us for one early lunch,” replied May, waving me over to sit at her side.

  “I suppose so.” I smiled. “Especially in James’s case.”

  “Feeling better then, are we?” James replied, laughing along with the rest of them.

  It felt good to be surrounded again by these white-faced people who seemed to like being surrounded by me.

  “How we doing, little fella?”

  Dr. Hugo leaned over to me, and as he did so I noticed Georgie touch his knee, which surprised not only me but also the doctor, judging by the quick movement of his head to look at her.

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Fawad, this is Geraldine,” interrupted May, placing her hand on Geraldine’s knee.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” Geraldine said back.

  I looked over at James. I noticed he was touching Rachel’s knee.

  Something was definitely going on.

  Behind me I heard the gate open and shut again, and Shir Ahmad came in, just in time to help my mother carry glass plates of mantu and salad over to us.

  “Salaam,” he greeted everyone.

  “Salaam,” everyone said back, and James edged himself closer to Rachel so he could join us on the carpet.

  I watched my mother carefully as she came over to join us, lightly lowering herself to sit by Georgie’s side, her covered knees far enough away from Shir’s hands to stop me from having to make a scene.

  Yep, something was definitely going on.

  “It’s the spring,” explained Pir Hederi, “also known as the mating season.”

  “Oh please . . . ,” I protested.

  “Just telling it like it is, son.”

  I looked at Pir, slightly disturbed by the picture he had just painted in my head, and even more disturbed by the orange glow of his beard, which he had freshly hennaed. Why men did this to themselves was a mystery to me, and right now I had enough mysteries on my mind without him adding to them.

  After lunch had broken up and everyone had let go of everyone else’s legs to return to their jobs, my mother had agreed that some fresh air would do me good, so I’d gone to the shop to pass some time with Jamilla before she went to afternoon school, and to ask the old man about the ways of adults.

  I knew it was a mistake almost as soon as I felt the words fly from my mouth.

  “Yes,” he said, “sounds like the adults are getting frisky.”

  “Frisky?”

  “Yes. It’s the effect of another glorious Afghan spring: the sun is bright, the skin grows warm, and the blood heats up after winter. And when the blood heats up it rushes straight to the heart, causing everyone to make a damn fool of himself.”

  “Isn’t that called love?” asked Jamilla, who was trying to clean what was left of Dog’s teeth with the wooden brush Pir Hederi used for his own. He’d have gone mental if he could have seen her.

  “Some call it love, some call it madness, little one.”

  “Who calls what madness?”

  Spandi walked into the shop swinging his chain of plastic cards behind him. He had been spending a lot of time with us lately, which had made Pir Hederi remark the other day that the place was looking more like an orphanage than a place of business.

  “Love,” answered the old man. “The stuff of poets, teenage girls, Indian dancers, and overpaid Westerners.”

  “Haven’t you ever been in love?” Jamilla asked him.

  “Never had time,” he replied. “I was too busy—”

  “Fighting in the jihad!” we all finished with him.

  “It’s true!” he barked. “Besides, it’s hard to fall in love when all the women are covered from head to toe and you end up marrying your own cousin.”

&n
bsp; Despite Pir’s crazy old-man ways, and despite the fact that he’d chosen to look like a can of Fanta, there was always something a little real to his words.

  Take the other Friday. My mother had dragged me along to her sister’s house as they were now talking again. When we got there we were shocked to discover my aunt had another baby growing inside her belly. As she hadn’t grown any more beautiful since the last one, I guess my uncle must have been feeling the power of spring in his blood when he made it.

  “It’s too disgusting for words,” Jahid had spat when I congratulated him on getting another brother soon. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  I didn’t blame him. I felt genuinely sorry for him too because sex was usually the only thing Jahid wanted to think about.

  “It must be awful never to know love,” Jamilla remarked as Spandi and I walked her to school.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I guess,” agreed Spandi.

  “Do you think we’ll marry for love?” she asked, which was a bit of a shocker.

  “Who? Me and you?”

  “Not me and you.” She laughed. “All of us.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

  “I hope so,” admitted Spandi, and we all fell quiet, because in each of our hearts that’s all any of us wanted, if we were honest about it.

  The trouble is, in Afghanistan marriage is all about deals. Your father, or in my case mother, arranges the match, sometimes even before you’re born, and you just have to do it—usually to a member of your own family, so I wasn’t sure who I would be married off to, what with all my cousins being boys. But Spandi had girl cousins, so he might end up with one of them, and Jamilla, well, that was a different story. As she got older, the danger grew of her father selling her to someone for drugs. I didn’t like to think about that too much because she was my friend and she was a good girl, so I really hoped she could marry for love because I knew that’s what filled her dreams at night and it’s also what kept the darkness in her life from covering her completely.

  “Okay, I’ll have to love you and leave you,” Spandi said with a wink as we turned the corner at Massoud Circle. “I’m going to hang around here for a while and try and sell some cards to the Americans.”