Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  “So what? A goat’s a goat, born to be eaten or dragged around a field by buzkashi horsemen! What’s so special about some dumb cashmere goat?”

  “The wool, sweetie. It’s very expensive. Women in the West will practically sell their souls for sweaters and shawls made out of cashmere. And luckily for your country, Afghanistan is home to some of the finest cashmere in the world.”

  “So why aren’t all the goat herders rich then?”

  “Well, most goat owners don’t realize the value of what they’ve got, so they let the cashmere drop off, or they shear it off with the rest of the wool and throw it away. You see, it’s the soft undercoat of the goat which is the good bit, and it needs to be combed out and separated. In its raw, unwashed state, this can sell for about twenty dollars per kilogram.”

  “Ho, that’s not bad.”

  “It’s not bad, but it’s also not that good.”

  “No?”

  “No. Not yet.” Georgie smiled and raised her eyebrows as if she was about to tell me some big secret. “Even if the farmers know about the special wool, they will only collect it. It’s then shipped off to Iran or Belgium or China, where it’s mixed with inferior wool and sometimes reimported, which is pure madness. Now, if we could set up the facilities to treat the wool in Afghanistan and make it as good as good can be, your goat herders would be very rich men indeed. Well, compared to what they are now anyway. It would also create more jobs and develop into a proper industry. And that’s why I’m here in your country, to help everyone do just that.”

  Georgie leaned back into the seat of the car and seemed very pleased with herself.

  Personally, as far as secrets went I thought this had to be the worst of the worst. However, I quite liked the idea of her teaching the poor goat herders how to become rich. Most people only come to Afghanistan to help themselves get rich, or richer.

  “Will you take me one day?” I asked. “To see the goats?”

  “Yes, of course I will, as long as your mother agrees.”

  “I think it will be okay,” I said. “Unless you invite James, and then it might be a bit more complicated.”

  Georgie laughed. “Yes, I think you’re right about that. He’s not exactly her favorite person at the moment, is he?”

  No, he isn’t, I thought. Far from it.

  Ever since that night, my mother had stopped talking to James. Sometimes she couldn’t even bring herself to look at him, which was a bit embarrassing because he’d taken to bringing her flowers every day as some kind of peace offering. Unfortunately for James, this small effort had also landed him in hot water with Shir Ahmad, and I was certain that if the guard wasn’t being paid three hundred dollars a month, he would have had James murdered.

  I think Shir Ahmad had fallen in love with my mother at some point when I wasn’t looking, or maybe when I was looking at someone else. I guess this was because she was still very beautiful, and I felt a little sorry for him—as long as he didn’t try to touch her. For my mother’s part, she laughed at his jokes, fixed his tea, and cooked his food, but she seemed to prefer the company of Homeira across the road. So that left Shir Ahmad alone to take care of his hopeful heart—and to stare dangerously at James when he came home with yet another unwanted bunch of flowers.

  In fact, the only person who was allowed and seemed to want to talk to James these days was May, who had stopped crying and started getting drunk. I didn’t know which was worse. Either way her face was still red and puffy.

  “What’s happened to May?” I asked Georgie one day in the car.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s always laughing now.”

  “Well, that’s better than crying, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. And I’m not sure James does either.”

  Georgie smiled and turned to look at me. “Yes, she does seem to spend more time with him these days.”

  “She wants to be his girlfriend,” I stated knowingly, only for Georgie to shake her head and laugh hard.

  “I don’t think so, Fawad. She’s a . . . what do you call it in Dari? She’s a woman who likes other women more than she likes men.”

  My heart skipped a beat at this latest shock of information, and I felt the sticky prickle of sweat break out at the sides of my head.

  “What do you mean likes?” I whispered, asking about May but thinking of my mother and her many visits across the road.

  “Like husbands like wives . . . that kind of like,” Georgie explained with a wink, obviously mistaking my concern for surprise.

  I nodded my head, as if I didn’t care and to show I was a man of the world, but her words bumped around my brain like a death sentence. Like husbands like wives . . . like husbands like wives . . . It was unreal. It was unbelievable. That didn’t mean just talking. That meant kissing and everything.

  As the words slowly sank in and I pictured the full horror of my future playing out before my eyes, I realized I’d have to take drastic action, and quick.

  I’d have to force my mother to marry Shir Ahmad.

  “You’re a bit young to be looking for a woman, aren’t you?”

  Pir Hederi turned his white eyes in my direction. We were sitting side by side, in front of the shop, enjoying the warm breeze that breathed the end of summer on our faces.

  “It’s not for me,” I corrected, a bit disgusted at the thought.

  “Who for, then?”

  “Just someone—a man.”

  Since the shock of discovering my mother might be a woman who likes other women, I’d been trying everything I could think of to make her fall in love with Shir Ahmad, but nothing seemed to be working.

  The first thing I’d done was to convince James during the rare moments my mother left us alone in the house to hand over his flowers to the guard so that he might pass them on to her. Both men hesitated at first, not liking the idea of giving and receiving flowers from each other, but when I explained using a mixture of hand gestures and pieces of English that my mother might feel more comfortable getting gifts from a foreigner through an Afghan, they both agreed to try it. And although my mother now accepted the flowers, which she arranged in old coffee jars and placed around the windows, she didn’t seem to be moving any closer to accepting Shir Ahmad’s company beyond quick conversations during the handover of teapots and food plates.

  My next tactic involved making Shir appear interesting. “Oh! That Shir! He’s a funny man!” I’d laugh, collapse, and shake my head with the hilarity of another made-up story or joke he’d never told, hoping to arouse my mother’s curiosity. “Here, listen to this!” I ordered one evening, coming to sit by my mother’s side as she washed one of Georgie’s white shirts in a bowl of soapy water. “One day, a mental fell asleep by the side of the road. He was wearing a brand-new pair of boots. A man walked up to him and decided to steal the snoring mental’s boots. Carefully, the thief removed them and put his old pair of shoes on the crazy man’s feet. Not long after, a car came up the road and stopped in front of the mental. The driver woke him and told him, ‘Move your feet out of the road so that I may pass by.’ The mental then looked at his feet and said, ‘Brother, pass by. These feet don’t belong to me!’ ” I slapped my thighs, threw my head back in laughter, and waited for my mother to join in. But she didn’t. She simply gave me a look and asked, “Have you been drinking beer again?” before returning her attention to Georgie’s wet, soapy shirts.

  After the jokes failed to work, I slowly began to gather the threads of Shir Ahmad’s life, from the short conversations we shared as I left for and returned from school.

  “He used to have a wife,” I told my mother after I had collected all the facts and pulled them into something that might show him to be more than a man who just stood at the door.

  “Who did?”

  “Shir Ahmad.”

  Mother put down the knife she was using to saw up the fatty flesh of one of Afghanistan’s big-bottomed sheep.

  “So?” she asked. “What h
appened to her?”

  “It’s a sad story, Mother. A very sad story.”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Fawad.”

  She turned back to the raw meat and carried on hacking.

  “Okay,” I hurried, worried that I’d lost her so early on in the tale, “but it is sad.”

  I threw her a stern look to remind her that a good Muslim woman should have more sympathy.

  “Shir told me that he was married very young to an even younger girl from his village and that he loved her very, very much. Every day he would bring her flowers.” I paused, watching my mother as I stressed the word flowers, but she didn’t even blink. “So, he brought her flowers every day, and he would sing to her every night as she prepared their dinner. They didn’t have much because Shir only had a small job learning how to file paperwork at the offices of the Department of Agriculture. He was educated, you see. He could read and write; that’s how he got the job with the department, where you have to know your numbers. Anyway, Shir and his wife were planning on having a big family. They wanted at least five sons and as many daughters, but when the first child came—he was a boy—he got stuck inside Shir’s wife. For two days the women of the village tried to pull the baby from her stomach, and their house became filled with her blood and all of Shir’s tears. For those two days he never left his wife’s side, staying instead to hold her hand and press cold, wet cloths onto her head. Then finally, in the early hours of the third day, the women pulled the baby from Shir’s wife’s stomach. The baby boy was already dead, and as the women pulled him free that little dead baby took the last of his mother’s breath away with him.”

  As I finished the story, my mother paused to wipe some strands of her hair away from her face using the back of the hand that still held the knife.

  “We have all known suffering,” she said quietly. “This is Afghanistan after all.”

  As she turned back to the meat, my brain finally caught up with my mouth and I felt bad. I suddenly realized I’d reminded her of all those things she was trying so hard to forget. It was a stupid mistake to make, and I kicked myself on the way back to my room. Properly. However, after my story, which was more or less true, my mother smiled at Shir Ahmad a little more kindly whenever she saw him, which was great, but it was hardly the breakthrough I’d been waiting for. And she was still spending too much of her time with the woman working across the road.

  I decided to seek advice.

  “Money,” announced Pir Hederi as he cleaned his teeth with the frayed ends of a twig. “That’s the only thing women want or understand. Money, and maybe gold. They seem to like that too.”

  I thought about this idea for a while, but couldn’t imagine Shir Ahmad had a lot of either. He was far too skinny. In Afghanistan, the wealthier a man is, the bigger his belly.

  “I think he’s more poor than rich,” I confessed.

  “He’s screwed then,” Pir grumbled, patting Dog on the head as he did so. Dog thumped his heavy tail on the floor, then got to his feet and walked over to my side, where he nuzzled his face in my hands. After I’d spent a few weeks working at the shop without trying to rob or further cripple his master, me and Dog got on just fine.

  At that moment, Georgie’s 4 × 4 pulled up in front of us. She’d started passing by after work to see if I wanted a lift home, and though it was only a little thing it made my head grow fat with pride. Georgie opened her door but didn’t get out.

  “Salaam aleykum, Pir Hederi. How are you? Are you well? How’s your health? Everything fine? Are you good?”

  As Pir answered that he was okay, he was well, his health was strong, everything was fine, and he was good, I picked up my schoolbooks, stroked Dog good-bye, and jumped into the car.

  “Don’t forget, Fawad!” Pir shouted after me. “Money and gold! Money and gold!” He started cackling the way old people do, then got to his feet and headed back into the shop, Dog padding after him.

  “What was that about?” Georgie asked as I settled in beside her.

  “Oh, nothing,” I lied. “He’s crazy.” Which was true.

  “Fair enough. So how was school today?”

  “Pretty good. Our teacher dropped dead from a heart attack.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No, really, it’s true. One minute he was standing in front of us writing Pashto spellings on the board the Americans gave us; the next he was on the ground, completely dead.”

  “That’s awful, Fawad. Are you okay?” Georgie reached for my hand.

  “Yes. It was quite interesting really. The teacher hit his head on a table when he fell, and there was blood coming out of a cut by the side of his ear. It made a small picture on the floor. It looked like a map of Afghanistan. Don’t you think that’s interesting? Have you ever seen anything like that?”

  Georgie shook her head. Her hair was covered by a dark brown shawl that matched the color of her eyes, and I thought she looked more beautiful than ever. I realized then that if I was ever going to marry her I’d have to be very, very rich indeed, possibly the richest man in all of Afghanistan.

  “Why do women like money so much?” I asked, turning to look out of the window to hide the red heat I felt breaking out on the tops of my cheeks.

  “Who told you they do?” Georgie asked.

  “Pir Hederi. He said women only like money or gold.”

  “Oh, that’s what he was shouting about.” She smiled. “I think that despite his age Pir may still have a lot to learn about women.”

  “Really?” I almost pleaded, hope coming once again for Shir Ahmad’s so-far doomed romance with my mother.

  “Yes, really. Although money is useful, there are far more important things in life to wish for, like being healthy or finding true love.”

  “Are you saying you could love someone who was poor?”

  “Of course I could.” Georgie laughed, flicking her finished cigarette out of the car window.

  “What, even a goat herder?”

  “Well, maybe not a goat herder,” she confessed. “They tend to be a bit smelly. Like their goats. But really, money isn’t that big a deal. Maybe some women might be attracted to money, gold, and power, but many more will find a good character and personality—and a nice smell—far more important qualities to have in the men they choose to marry. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, it’s not important,” I lied again. “It’s just that I was thinking one day you might . . .”

  As my thoughts gathered to speak the words I’d been hiding in my heart for so long, Georgie’s phone rang.

  “Sorry, Fawad jan,” she said as she interrupted me to take the call.

  “It’s okay,” I lied yet again.

  “Hello?”

  I heard a man’s voice on the other end of the line. Worse than that, I heard him use the word jan.

  “Khalid!” Georgie shouted, her face lighting up in a way I’d never seen before. “Where are you? What? No, I’m nearly home. In fact we’re just turning into the road now. Hey! I see you!”

  As Massoud pulled up, Georgie snapped her mobile phone shut and practically jumped out of the car before the wheels had stopped turning. I leaned forward in my seat to find out who she was running to.

  In front of the house I could see three large Land Cruisers surrounded by fifteen or more armed guards. Two of the guards stood on the opposite side of the road facing the house, more stood in front of and behind the vehicles, and the rest were gathered around a tall man dressed in a sky blue salwar kameez. He wore a gray waistcoat that matched the color of his pakol.

  I thought he was about to either be arrested or start a one-man war.

  As Georgie walked up to him, quick and easy as a cat, his face creased into a large, friendly smile. He took her hand and covered it with both of his own before leading her into the house. Our house.

  I quickly grabbed my books and mumbled my good-byes to Massoud, disturbed that I might be missing something and upset because Georgie hadn’t even looked back to make sure I
was following her. At the sight of this man she’d forgotten all about me, and I suddenly felt small and childish. Even the army of guards surrounding our house ignored me as I walked past them, talking among themselves and lighting up cigarettes now their boss had gone. It was as if I was so small I didn’t even exist. I was a nobody, a tiny little nobody that nobody cared about and nobody saw, which is great if you’re a spy, but I wasn’t a spy, not really. I was just a boy in love with a woman called Georgie.

  I entered the yard and saw that the man still had hold of her hand. I felt daggers hit my heart and an anger creep into my stomach. The man seemed to be apologizing for something.

  “You have to take more care of me,” I heard Georgie tell him.

  “I will. I promise. Just forgive me,” he replied.

  His voice was deep and low, and it suited his face, which was strong and framed by thick dark hair, a trim black beard, and heavy eyebrows. He looked like an Afghan film star, and I hated him for it.

  Slamming the gate behind me, I broke up their embrace, and Georgie held her now-free hands out to introduce me. The man was called Haji Khalid Khan, and I realized from her actions and in spite of her words that she was in love with a man who was not only very rich but also powerful enough to have a lot of enemies, judging by the number of bodyguards now swarming around our house.

  4

  AUTUMN IS MY favorite season in Kabul. After the burning heat of summer, the air relaxes, allowing a cool wind to travel through the city, carrying the smell of wood fires and smoking kebabs on its back. The night comes early, swallowing up the day before it’s barely begun, and a million gas burners and single lightbulbs shine from stores built out of old shipping containers that snake through the city, making it glow like a massive wedding party.

  I know most people think of spring as the season of new beginnings, when women chase the winter dirt from their homes, when the plants come out of hiding and the animals give birth to their babies, but for me autumn is the season that whispers fresh promise.

  Coming as it did during the holy time of Ramazan, when the adults step closer to Allah through fasting and prayers, it was autumn when the Taliban finally gave up control of Afghanistan. One November night they simply fled from the capital in pickups and stolen cars as the soldiers of the Northern Alliance rumbled in from the Shomali Plain to take Kabul without a fight. At the gate of the city where the hill dips to an easy slope, I watched from Spandi’s house as thousands of men dressed in uniforms and salwar kameez gathered in groups, leaning lazily on the tanks and jeeps that had brought them there, their guns slung casually over their shoulders. It was like a huge picnic rather than a war as local men came out of their homes to offer what food and water they had to the new conquerors of Afghanistan.