Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  “And what is your name?” the women would ask slowly. Pretty white faces with smiling red lips.

  “Fawad,” I would tell them.

  “Your English is very good. Do you go to school?”

  “Yes. School. Every day. I like very much.”

  And it was true, we all went to school—even the girls if their fathers let them—but the days were short and the holidays long with months off in the winter and summer when it became too cold or too hot to study. However, the English we learned came only from the street. It was easy to pick up, and the foreigners liked to teach us.

  And even if Jahid was correct and they did come to bomb our country and rebuild it again, I quite liked the foreigners with their sweaty white faces and fat pockets—which was just as well really, because that day I returned to my aunt’s house to be told we were going to live with three of them.

  2

  IT DIDN’T TAKE us long to move out of my aunt’s house, possessing as we did only one blanket, a few clothes, and a copy of the Koran. We would have taken more, but my aunt seemed to think that the few pots and pans we’d gathered over the years now belonged to her.

  Thankfully, my mother was in no mood to argue that day and simply spit at her sister’s feet before lowering her burka and dragging me out of the door.

  “Good-bye, Jahid!” I shouted behind me.

  “Bye, Fawad jan!”

  I looked back, surprised by the affectionate “jan” added to my name, and just in time to see my cousin wipe something from his one good eye.

  “Don’t forget us, you donkey cunt!”

  It was a quick extra that earned him an equally quick blow to the ear from the fat fist of his mother.

  It took us two whole hours to walk from Khair Khana on the edge of the city to Wazir Akbar Khan, the location of our new house, in which time I managed to get from my mother that we were to live with two women and one man. She said she only knew the name of one of the women, the one who had invited us; her name was Georgie. And apparently, she had been washing Georgie’s clothes for weeks.

  I couldn’t believe she hadn’t mentioned this before.

  “But why were you washing her clothes?” I asked.

  “For money, what do you think?”

  “Why doesn’t she wash her own clothes?”

  “Foreigners don’t know how. They need machines to wash their clothes.”

  “What kind of machines?”

  “Washing machines.”

  This sounded incredible to me, but my mother wouldn’t lie. Okay, she didn’t talk much, but when she did it was always the truth. I also knew that foreigners were a Godless people, so I had to assume that as well as going to Hell they hadn’t even been blessed with the common skills given to ordinary Afghans like us.

  “Does she sew?”

  “No.”

  “Can she cook?”

  “No.”

  “Does she have a husband?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Mother laughed and dragged me into a hug as we walked. I looked up, but I couldn’t see her face through the screen of the burka, so I held her hand tighter, my ears burning at the thought of having made her smile.

  This was fast turning into the best day of my life.

  Although I had no real memories of what it had been like before my aunt’s house, I knew my mother was miserable after we moved from Paghman. Locked in one room with a thin carpet that offered no comfort from the cold scratches of the concrete floor, we lived, ate, and slept like tolerated prisoners under my aunt’s roof. The toilet was also a constant torment to my mother, smattered as it usually was by the missed aims of four careless boys and a man whose bowels were as loose as a slaughtered goat’s; and we were plagued with illness, from malaria in the summer to flu in the winter, as well as the worms and bugs that permanently lived in our stomachs. Yet we had to appear grateful because my aunt had taken us in on the night we lost everything.

  Every year, people around us died from disease, rocket attacks, forgotten mines, the bites of animals large and small, and even hunger. And even if you did have food, that was no guarantee of coming out of the day alive. Mother cooked our meals on an old gas burner that sat in the corner of our room threatening to explode and knock the heads from our very necks. That’s what happened to Haji Mohammad’s wife three doors away. She was cooking chickpeas in the kitchen when the burner exploded into a ball of flames. It then shot from the floor like a rocket, taking her head clean off. It took him weeks to clear the blood and brains from the black remains of the kitchen. Even today, dents from bullet-propelled chickpeas scar the walls of the house, and Haji Mohammad won’t eat anything but salad, fruit, and naan. Anything, in fact, that doesn’t need cooking. Thanks be to Allah, though, because he’d been blessed with a second wife—and she was younger than the first.

  “So, how did you get to know her?”

  “Who?”

  “The foreign woman, Georgie.”

  “I found her.”

  “What do you mean you found her? How did you find her?”

  “Oh, Fawad! So many questions! I was knocking on doors looking for work, and she gave me some. After that she gave me some more, and then she invited us to come. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As we marched through the streets, dodging dog shit and potholes, and with my mother now refusing to give any more information as to how we came to be moving toward this sudden freedom, I tried to imagine the mysterious Georgie who had been found by my mother. I pictured a woman with long golden hair and an easy smile standing under a tree in Wazir Akbar Khan, looking lost with her arms full of the dirty clothes she had no idea how to wash. In my head she looked like the woman from Titanic. In reality, she looked more Afghan than I did.

  Turning left, just before Massoud Circle, we crisscrossed three roads lined with concrete barriers protecting huge houses that peered over high walls with curls of barbed wire fixed on them. Men holding guns stood guard every ten paces, and they eyed us with lazy suspicion as we moved farther into the residential area of the rich. Eventually we came to a standstill in front of a large green metal gate. Another guard wearing a light blue shirt and black trousers came out of a wooden white hut positioned nearby and greeted my mother. He then opened the side door and shouted inside. As we stepped through, a woman came walking toward us with hair as long and dark as my mother’s. She wore a white shirt over blue jeans and looked quite beautiful.

  “Salaam aleykum, Mariya!” the woman sang, clasping my mother’s hand as she did so.

  “Waleykum salaam,” my mother replied.

  “How are you? How is your health? Are you well? How was your trip? No problems?”

  As my mother rattled off her replies, I stared at the woman I guessed to be Georgie, surprised to hear her speaking one of our languages and surprised to find that not only was she dressed like a man, she was also as tall as one.

  “And this must be your handsome son, Fawad. How are you, Fawad? Welcome to your new home.”

  I held out my hand, and Georgie shook it. Although I tried to speak, my mouth was a few steps behind my head and I couldn’t find the words to answer her.

  “Ha! He is a little shy, I think. Please, come in, both of you.”

  My mother walked farther into the yard, where she felt free to lift the burka back from her face. My first thought was that she looked afraid, which didn’t exactly set my mind at rest. But then I realized that, like me, she didn’t quite know what to say.

  Silently, we followed Georgie to a small building sitting behind and to the right of the gate.

  “This will be your place, Fawad. I hope you will be happy here.”

  Georgie pointed to the building, waving at us to follow her in. So we did.

  Inside there were two rooms separated by a small, clean toilet and shower area. As she opened the door to the first room I saw two beds with blankets sitting upon them. They were still in their plastic cases and lo
oked new. In the other room there were three long cushions, a small table, an electric fan, and a television—a real live Samsung television! And it looked like it might even work! All my life I had dreamed of owning a TV, and I felt tears sticking sharp pins in the backs of my eyes at the very sight of it.

  “Come,” Georgie said with a smile, “leave your things here and I’ll show you around.”

  My first day in the new house was a blur of sights, smells, and sounds. There was our home and a bigger building where Georgie and her friends lived upstairs. There was a kitchen the size of the yard where my mother was told she would do much of her work, and a sitting room with another television (much bigger than ours), a music system, and a pool table. To the back of the house was a massive lawn framed with rosebushes. When I saw them parading their pretty colors in the sun my heart leaped at the thought of my mother once again being surrounded by such beauty.

  But then I saw a man standing in the middle of this beauty with his chest as bare as that of Pir the Madman, who played with the dogs in Shahr-e Naw Park, and I began seriously to worry for my mother’s reputation. The man was holding a long stick in his hand, a bottle of beer in the other, and he had a cigarette balanced between his teeth. He had been using the stick to hit a small ball into a glass lying on the ground, and not doing very well by the looks of it.

  “Hello, I’m James,” he shouted, looking up in time to catch us staring at him.

  He wandered over to offer his hand to my mother, who, quite rightly, waved but didn’t accept it. Georgie said something sharp in what I recognized was English, and the man gave a small easy laugh before reaching for his shirt, which lay close by on the back of a white plastic chair.

  “This is James,” explained Georgie. “He’s a journalist, so please forgive his manners.”

  After James pulled on his clothes he walked back to us saying something I didn’t quite understand before reaching out with his right hand to mess up my hair. I shook my head, knocking him away, and threw him a look to warn that this kind of attention wasn’t appreciated, but then he rolled his hand into a fist, knocked me on the chin, and started laughing. Georgie spoke again, and James raised his arms in pretend surrender before putting his right hand to his heart and smiling at me. It was a true smile that made moon-shaped holes around his lips, and I accepted it with one of my own. I knew then that I liked the man James. He was tall and thin, and he had a dark beard. He could easily have passed for an Afghan if he managed to keep his clothes on.

  Behind us I heard the gate open, and a woman came striding into the garden. She looked angry and slightly confused, but when Georgie spoke she smiled and waved.

  “Our final house mate,” explained Georgie. “This is May; she’s an engineer.”

  May greeted us with handshakes. She was short, with yellow hair escaping from a green headscarf. She had spots on her face, and she also looked nothing like the woman from Titanic. The man called James gave her his beer, and she seemed happy with this. And although I tried not to look, I could see that under her blue shirt she had the most enormous breasts I’d ever come across. I wondered whether James had seen them.

  “We are all quite friendly here and very relaxed, so please treat this place as your home for as long as you need it,” said Georgie.

  My mother then thanked her and led me back to our rooms—away from the foreigners who had invited us into their home and away from the sight of May’s chest.

  Over the next few days, as my mother washed and cooked and basically did everything the foreigners seemed incapable of, I kept a careful eye on my new landlords. Although I was glad to be there, I had to protect my mother, and to do that I needed to know just who and what I was dealing with. My main concern was the naked journalist.

  Thankfully, the layout of the place gave me the chance to observe pretty much everything, unseen. The passageway behind the house allowed me to watch the garden unnoticed; the big windows gave me a grand view of what was happening downstairs, when it was dark outside and the lights were on; and the high walls and balconies gave me a way in to some of the sights above. Now and again my mother would catch me spying on the foreigners and shake her head, but although her eyes looked puzzled they seemed fairly unconcerned. She’d also taken to laughing more—and mainly when one of the guards, Shir Ahmad, came from his hut to refill his teapot.

  I made a mental note to investigate Shir Ahmad as soon as I’d finished with the foreigners.

  With so much spying to do, for the first few weeks after we moved to Wazir Akbar Khan I kept away from Chicken Street, despite the almost unbearable ache to tell Jahid about our television, and fill Jamilla’s head with the sights and sounds of my new home. Instead, I would return from school, sit in the doorway of the kitchen, chat with my mother as she did her chores, and wait for Georgie, James, and May to come back from wherever they had been.

  “How does Georgie know our Dari language?” I asked my mother as she peeled potatoes for that night’s dinner.

  “From her friends, I think.”

  “She has Afghan friends?”

  “Apparently so. Pass me that pan, will you, Fawad?”

  I reached for the metal container, tipped a dead fly out of it, and handed it over.

  “So, have you seen these friends?” I asked, settling back onto the kitchen step.

  “Once, yes.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Afghans.”

  “I know that!”

  My mother laughed, throwing the naked potatoes in the pan as she did so. “They are Pashtuns,” she finally offered. “From Jalalabad.”

  “Oh, she’s got some taste then.”

  “Yes.” My mother smiled before adding somewhat mysteriously, “Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “They’re not . . . how should I put it? They’re not the kind of friends I might choose for you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re my boy and I love you. Now that’s enough, Fawad. Go and finish your homework.”

  Dismissed, and left dangling once again by my mother’s riddles, I returned to my room to practice the multiplication tables we had been given at school that day. I guessed that in the same way I’d found out about the Taliban shadow, the reason Georgie had sort-of friends would become clear at some later stage of my life. However, I was glad they were Pashtun, like me. If they had been Hazaras, they would have cut off her breasts by now.

  As we actually had water connected to the house, I no longer had to make the backbreaking trip to the nearest tap to fight with other kids and dirty dogs for a bucketful of liquid that lasted five minutes, and so after I completed my homework my only real job was to run to the baker’s each evening with a handful of afs to collect five hot fresh long breads.

  Other than that, my life usually involved waiting for the foreigners.

  Georgie was normally the first to arrive home, and quite often she would allow me to sit in the garden with her as she drank her coffee. Although my mother was always invited, she rarely came to join us. She had quickly made friends with a woman across the road who managed a house for the wife of one of the Ministry of Interior’s men. Her name was Homeira and she was pretty fat, so I guessed they paid her well. I was happy my mother had found a friend, so I felt no jealousy when she spent much of her time talking to her in our rooms or at the house of Homeira’s employer. In fact, I was more than happy; I was amazed. It was as if a hidden key had turned in my mother’s head, releasing a river of words that had been locked in there for years.

  More amazing, however, was my mother’s willingness to let me stay in the house alone and to sit with the Westerners for as long as “they don’t become bored.” Perhaps she thought it would be good for my English, although James was hardly ever around, May always seemed to be crying, and Georgie and I usually spoke Dari together.

  From these little conversations I learned that Georgie came from England, the same country as London. She’d been in
Afghanistan for ages and came to live with James and May two years ago because they had become friends and James needed the rent money. She worked for an NGO and combed goats for a living, and because she knew the country and traveled a lot she had made loads of Afghan friends. In that way, and many more, she was different from most foreigners I had met, and I think I fell in love with her instantly. She was gentle and funny, and she seemed to like being with me. She was also very beautiful with thick almost-black hair and dark eyes. I hoped one day to marry her—once she had given up smoking and converted to the one true faith, of course.

  The engineer, May, was usually the second one home and tended to disappear into her room as soon as her quick greetings were over. Georgie told me she came from America on a contract with one of the ministries and that she was “a little unhappy right now.” She didn’t explain further, and I didn’t ask more. I liked the mystery it gave to May’s tears.

  As a rule, James was always the last one home, and at least twice a week he would return very late, bouncing off walls and singing to himself. The more I got to know him, the more I was convinced he was related to Pir the Madman.

  “He works very hard,” Georgie explained, “and mainly with the ladies.”

  Georgie laughed at that, and I wondered how these women got permission from their husbands to work so late with a man who freely showed his nipples to the world as if they were medals of war.

  “What work does he do with them?” I asked, causing Georgie to laugh even louder. It was a good, strong sound, like thunder in summer.

  “Fawad,” she finally said, “you’d best ask your mother that question.”

  And that put a stop to that.

  And because that’s always the way with adults—they shut you out just as things get interesting—I had no choice but to carry on with my own investigations, investigations my mother might call “snooping.”