Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  Through much trying and failing, I found the best time to watch my new friends was at night, when the lights were on, it was dark outside, and everyone thought I was asleep. Luckily, my mother was a great help when it came to my nighttime spying, as she had chosen to sleep in the TV room, meaning I now had a bedroom to myself for the very first time, which gave me complete freedom to explore my surroundings and their strange Godless inhabitants.

  Now and again, about an hour after I’d turned out my light, my mother would open the door to my room, which surprised me the first time because I was a breath away from leaving. But it was one of those warm surprises that make your toes tingle and your heart feel like it’s bleeding inside, because, thinking I was asleep, she kissed me softly on the cheek before returning to her own room, satisfied I was safely locked up in my dreams. Which of course I wasn’t. As a result of that first sweet surprise, I quickly learned to wait a good hour until after my mother’s visit before pulling on my shoes and allowing my adventures to begin.

  Creeping along walls and crouching in bushes, I listened to magical, mysterious conversations that exploded with laughter as Georgie, James, and May spoke with other white-faced friends around the table in the garden. Of course, I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but this simply meant I now had a code I would have to learn to decipher.

  Really, I felt like I’d been plucked from the flames of Hell and placed into Paradise. In those first few weeks I wasn’t simply Fawad from Paghman; I was Fawad the secret agent. In those days, Kabul was crawling with spies—British, Pakistani, French, Italian, Russian, Indian, and American men as big as giants who wore their beards long to try to look Afghan. My mission from the president was simple: to discover who in the house was working as a spy, and the identity of their masters.

  As I crept and crawled my way through the heavy heat of those Kabul summer nights, I wrapped layers of dreams and heroic tales around my adventures, and I plotted escape routes and hatched complicated plans to avoid detection so that I might hand over my carefully gathered information to my comrades at the palace. I lived in a world of hazy future glories, picturing myself as a national hero thanks to all the good work I had carried out as a mere boy.

  “He was so young!” the people would say as they listened to the story of my successes.

  “Yes, but he was a true Afghan,” President Karzai would tell them, smiling widely because he was the man who had appointed me.

  “So brave! So fearless!” they would marvel. “He must have had balls as big as Ahmad Shah Massoud’s.”

  “Bigger!” the president would correct. “The boy was a Pashtun!”

  In order to fulfill my mission, I kept a careful record of all the foreigners’ movements in a red notebook Georgie had given me to practice my writing. Because James was hardly ever there, and Georgie was too beautiful to work for the enemy, I decided to concentrate on May.

  Once my mother had gone to sleep, I would sneak out of my room and shimmy up the wall of the “secret” passageway. From there I could see the door to May’s bedroom, on which was hung a long woolen jacket. On the far wall there was a wooden board with a collection of photographs pinned on it. I guessed they were of her family because the people caught in various poses all seemed to be short and yellow, but in my imagination they were part of a terror network supported by the pigs of Pakistan. The ISI, the country’s secret service, knew that the Afghan government would never suspect a Western woman from America of carrying out their evil plans. In that way they were as cunning as the devil himself. But they weren’t clever enough for Fawad—Afghanistan’s silent protector.

  Unfortunately, though, May seemed to be going through some kind of trauma. Most of the time she just disappeared to her room. And if she wasn’t in her room, she would be shouting into her mobile phone. And if she wasn’t shouting into her phone, she would be downstairs picking at the food my mother had spent all day preparing for her, or even worse, she would be crying. Although it’s never good to see a woman cry, her face looked angry rather than sad, and I found it confusing. To be honest, I thought May was slightly mental, and by the end of the second week I decided to give up investigating her spying activity for the Pakistanis and dedicate my time to getting a look at her breasts.

  Now, there was one small problem with this new mission. I could see only a third of May’s bedroom from the wall, and it wasn’t the third she undressed in. After thinking about this situation as I waited for my mother’s light to snap off, I realized my only option was to jump from the wall onto her balcony. This meant I would have to clear a gap roughly a meter wide and try not to think about the fall below.

  After a fortnight of undercover operations I’d discovered that the buzz of the generator, which gave light to the house every second night when the city electricity took a holiday, easily hid any noise I made as I scrambled around, so with no fear of alerting May, even if I fell to my death, I climbed up the wall opposite the edge of her balcony and concentrated on the railings in front of me. Twelve bars across. I just had to jump and reach out for one of them.

  Taking five deep breaths, I closed my eyes, offered a prayer to Allah, and pushed my feet from the wall with every bit of strength my legs had in them. Suddenly, almost as if I hadn’t yet decided to jump, I felt my head slamming against the railings, and by some miracle my hands had hold of two of the bars.

  Dazed and not quite believing I was there, I took a moment to breathe the silence back into my thumping heart. Only one small kick, and I could swing my legs onto the edge, pull myself onto the balcony, and the secrets of May’s balloonlike figure would be mine. I’d get to see her breasts, possibly more. If I was really lucky, I might even see her—

  “A-hem.”

  A sound came to worry my ears. It was a sound like a cough, and it seemed to be coming from below.

  “A-a-hem.”

  There it was again.

  Slowly, hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I looked down, a little to the right, and saw James standing there, shaking his head and wagging his finger at me. I looked back at the bright light coming from May’s bedroom, then back at James. He hadn’t gone anywhere, which would have been the polite thing to do. He was obviously waiting for me to make some kind of move.

  “Salaam aleykum.” I smiled weakly.

  I let go of the bars and fell to his feet, rolling myself into a tight ball as I landed to kill the blow of the soon-to-come assault. After a silence that lasted only seconds but seemed to last at least half of my short life, I heard another cough. I looked up to see James smiling. His eyes were shiny like glass, and he was swaying slightly. He then nodded his head in the direction of the garden and waved at me to follow.

  I was in no hurry to go, but I decided it would be better to take a beating as far away from the front of the house—and as far away from the chance of my mother seeing my shame and adding her own style of torture afterward—as possible. So, holding my head high like a man, I followed James to the plastic chairs standing ghostlike in the gloom of the garden.

  Without a word he invited me to sit next to him. He then reached down to his side, picked up a bottle of beer from a cardboard box, knocked its metal cap off on the edge of the table, and handed it to me.

  It was obviously a trick, but I took it anyway.

  James then reached for another bottle, opened it the same way, hit it against the one I held in my hand, and slurred something I didn’t understand. His breath smelled of old cheese.

  Carefully I watched him, not daring to move, but he tipped his hand to his lips, showing that I should drink. So I did.

  At first the beer tasted disgusting, bubbly and bitter like rotten Pepsi, but this was obviously my punishment and it was better than being beaten with a stick, so I took another sip, and then another, and another, and another.

  In no time at all, I found my head had gone numb. A warmth, different from heat, breathed through my body, traveling up inside my veins to finish at
my cheeks, making my eyes feel starry. Everything around me seemed to be muffled by an invisible blanket, and James was speaking in a language I didn’t understand. As I continued to drink, I began to talk to him too. I couldn’t help myself; the words were jumping from my mouth as if they were racing down a hill, rolling over and over one another. Neither of us knew what the other was saying, that much was still clear, but it didn’t seem to matter. It felt like the best conversation I’d ever had in my life. The fact is, James really seemed to understand me.

  By the end of my second bottle I’d told him all about Jahid and Jamilla and my best friend, Spandi. I revealed the secrets of our wages, our trips around the city hanging off the back of trucks, how we once found Pir the Madman asleep in the park and put wet mud in his pants so he’d think he’d shit himself when he woke up.

  As the night grew old and the edges of the world blurred, I confessed to spying on May. At the sound of her name, James wiggled his hands in front of his chest, waved his cigarette and beer in big circles, and laughed. I laughed as well, although I wasn’t sure why, and soon James was jumping up from his seat, slapping me on the back, crashing his bottle into mine, and rubbing my hair, which I didn’t seem to mind anymore.

  But then, as quickly as it had started, it all stopped.

  Like a street dog caught in headlights, James turned and froze, his hand raised above his head, still holding the bottle of beer. Everything around us seemed to grow still, even the air we were breathing, and I watched mesmerized as the ashy tip of his cigarette floated to the floor and a dark figure emerged in the distance in front of him. It looked something like Georgie.

  She was staring at us, and she didn’t appear happy.

  She was dressed only in a long black T-shirt, her legs were bare, and her dark hair whipped about her head like a mass of angry snakes. She looked more magical than normal, furious and amazing, and I thought my heart would break at the dark, angry beauty of her, but then maybe it was the shock of her arrival, I don’t know, or the sight of her naked legs, or the heavy thumping in my chest, or the sudden weight of a thousand camels that had come to drag at my head, but at that exact moment I leaned forward in my chair and threw up on my shoes.

  3

  THE DAY AFTER I covered my shoes in vomit was possibly the worst day of my life. Well, not the worst. But it was pretty damn bad.

  My throat was sore, all dry and swollen; my stomach ached, feeling empty and rotten; my skin was damp and cold; my head had a million steel workers hammering inside it; and my mother had found me a job before noon, even though it was Friday and nobody was working—yet another example of the mysterious magic mothers carry out when their eyes burn with anger. From now on, for two hours after school I would have to play servant to Pir Hederi, a shopkeeper as old as the King’s Tomb whose sight had disappeared behind milky white curtains.

  I was beyond annoyed.

  “If you can’t behave, you’ll have to earn,” my mother stated matter-of-factly. “And from now on you stay away from James. Do you hear me?”

  I groaned. It was just like Jahid all over again.

  “How am I supposed to do that?” I whimpered.

  “I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”

  My mother was impossible. In fact, she was more impossible than all the warlords trying to run this country, and that was pretty much as impossible as you get. Thank God, then, that Georgie informed her only that I’d been drinking beer. If she knew I’d also been trying to sneak a look at May’s breasts before I fell to the ground and hit the bottle, I’m certain she would have packed me off to a madrassa, right there and then.

  “Drinking alcohol is against Islam,” she reminded me. “Now you’ll have to pay for your sin in the fires of Hell. You’re probably not even ten years old, Fawad. At this rate you’ll be burning for eternity along with all the Godless foreigners!”

  “I didn’t know it was beer!” I shouted back.

  “There! That’s another ten years in Hell for lying, plus five more for shouting at your mother. I’d shut up now if I was you.”

  “But—”

  “But! But! No more buts! Get out of my sight before I change my mind and beat you!”

  I shook my head slowly. It appeared Jahid was right. There was just no reasoning with women, especially when the woman was your mother.

  I turned from the kitchen and shuffled toward the garden to escape the fury I didn’t feel I strictly deserved. I was a boy after all. What about James? He had made me commit the sin, and he was a man. Would he be forced to work for Hederi the Blind for a handful of afs I could just as easily find in the gutters of Chicken Street? No such luck. And this was the new democratic Afghanistan!

  Further evidence of this great injustice appeared as I turned the corner to seek refuge in the garden and saw James, my great undoer, sitting hunched over his laptop wearing dark glasses. His forehead looked like a great weight was hanging above it, pressing deep lines into the skin below.

  “Brilliant,” I mumbled, and turned back toward my room.

  Defeated, I crawled into bed to sleep off the sickness that was crawling over my skin like body lice.

  Pir Hederi’s shop was on the corner of Street 15, opposite a roundabout and close to the British Embassy. It was a messy place with cans spilling from shelves, boxes piled high on the floor, bleeding cloths, towels, and other cleaning stuff, and crates of fruit that had seen better days but still seemed to sell. During my first day on duty he told me that I’d been hired because he’d sacked his “bastard shit of a nephew” who used to place boxes and chairs in his path just to see him fall. He was also a thief, apparently.

  “Don’t try anything on, son,” he warned me. “I may not have eyes no more, but I can still see.”

  He pointed his gnarly hand at the doorway, where a dog as big as a small donkey stood guard, watching me as if I was that day’s dinner.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, keeping a careful eye on the beast that threatened to eat me. He was as old and as ugly as his master, with gray stumps for ears, marking him out as a former fighter.

  “Whose name?”

  “The dog.”

  “Dog.”

  “Yes, the dog.”

  “Dog. His name is Dog.”

  “Oh.”

  Despite his appearance, and obvious lack of imagination, I soon found out that Pir Hederi was actually quite funny. And from what I could tell, he didn’t need my help at all. If a man came in asking for shaving foam, Pir would move from his seat in front of the cigarette counter, shuffle over to the far right corner, reach out to the second shelf down, and come away with the correct can. If some no-good kids came in and tried to lift any of the stock, Dog would block their way out, growling and snarling, spit hanging from his teeth like slimy string and the hairs on his back standing to attention, until the would-be thieves pissed their pants and cried for their mothers. Pir would then charge them fifty afs for a safe exit.

  No, he didn’t really need me, but I got the impression that Pir was a lonely old man looking for someone to talk to. So, the first week, I mainly poured him tea and sat on the Pepsi boxes eating dry chickpeas as he wandered through his thoughts and war memories.

  “We lost a lot of good men that day,” he said one afternoon after recounting another tale about his time with the mujahideen. I nodded wisely, then grunted after remembering he couldn’t actually see me. There had been sixty of them that day, all Pashtuns, “all committed to the cause of freedom,” and they were armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. They’d just carried out a daring daylight attack on a Russian base north of Kunar. “Hundreds of enemy soldiers died in the assault,” said Pir, “caught unawares by the sheer daring of our raid and knocked senseless by a lifetime of vodka. We’d also battered them with rocket-propelled grenades and a wall of bullets fired by men with nothing to lose and everything to gain.” It was a famous victory for the mujahideen, he told me, a triumph that was spun into songs and sung a
round campfires for years to come. And as quickly as they had appeared, rising from nowhere to unleash hell on the Russians, they melted away again, “like ghosts drifting back into the landscape.”

  But they hadn’t got away with the attack.

  As the victorious mujahideen crossed the mountains of Nuristan, marching their way toward secret war camps dug into rock, they were swallowed up by a blizzard that ripped at their clothes and tore at their skin. In the roar of the wind they failed to hear the blades of the helicopter that came whooshing over their heads, dropping brilliant burning light upon their path. As they ran for their lives, the Russian air force tracked them every step of the way, on and on into the night, finally forcing them into a narrow gorge where they were ambushed by five hundred waiting Russian soldiers. The mujahideen didn’t stand a chance, but somehow they fought their way out of the valley to split and scatter under the cover of a leafless forest, throwing themselves into icy mountain rivers and burying themselves under a meter of snow.

  “Yes, we lost a lot of good men that day,” said Pir with a sigh. “We also lost most of our toes . . .”

  I looked at Pir’s cracked feet. All ten toes peeked out from the leather straps, carrying thick yellow nails.

  “So, is that how you came to be blind then? From fighting in the jihad?”

  “Mercy, no,” he grumbled. “I lost my sight the day I got married. I saw my wife for the first time, and she was that ugly my eyes closed down and refused to work again.”

  Pir usually finished with me about five thirty in the evening. If I timed it just right, I’d hit the main road about the same time Georgie was being driven home, and I would hitch a ride with her back to the house. Like most foreigners, she had her own driver, Massoud, which I thought was pretty good considering she only combed goats for a living.

  “They’re not just any old goats,” Georgie told me one day as I laughed about her being the richest goat herder in the whole of Afghanistan. “They’re cashmere goats.”