Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  As me, Spandi, and Jahid sat watching at the window—a five-minute walk from where the soldiers were eating, smoking, and laughing—we all confessed to being mightily disappointed at the lack of fighting. For weeks the Taliban had been spitting insults and threats across the radio, vowing to fight the Northern Alliance and their infidel backers to the very last man. But when the time came to stand, the Taliban ran away like frightened dogs, leaving only the Arabs and Pakistanis to carry out their suicidal ideas of war.

  “We should go down and welcome them,” Jahid suggested as we watched the swarm of figures silhouetted by the headlights of their vehicles.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Not so fast, gentlemen,” Spandi ordered, his face a lighter shade of gray than it is today. “You can’t know a man’s real intentions in only one night.”

  I looked at Spandi with something close to wonder. It was the wisest thing I’d ever heard anyone say.

  Smiling shyly, he added, “My father told me that.”

  “Your father should be working for the Genius Ministry!” I laughed, because Spandi’s father was one hundred percent right.

  My mother told me that when the Taliban originally came marching from the south to lay claim to Kabul, they were welcomed like saviors. The capital had become a city of rubble after the Russians left because the victorious mujahideen had turned on one another, fighting like dogs over a piece of meat—and Kabul was that piece of meat. In the chaos and confusion of civil war, crime was everywhere; shops were made to pay special taxes, homes were taken, people were murdered, and their daughters were raped. But when the Taliban came, it all stopped. Order was brought, and the people were grateful. However, as Spandi’s father said, you cannot know a man’s real intentions in only one night, and over the years the Taliban showed their true colors. They stopped women from working, they wouldn’t let girls go to school, they roamed the streets beating people with sticks, they jailed men with short beards, they banned kite flying and music, they chopped off hands, they crushed people under walls, and they shot people in the football stadium. They had freed Afghanistan from war, but they locked up our people in a religion we no longer recognized. And it was only the warm winds of autumn that finally blew them away.

  “The Taliban were bastards all right,” declared Pir Hederi as I sorted through the crates of fruit and moldering vegetables to see what could be saved for the morning. “Thick as cow shit as well. Most of them were small men from small villages who’d never been taught to read and write. Hell, even their leaders were illiterate.”

  “Can you read and write?” I asked, scraping the mold off one potato and putting it in the “for sale” box.

  “No, Fawad, I’m blind.”

  “Oh yeah, sorry about that.”

  “Blame the wife.”

  “So how did they get to rule Afghanistan then,” I asked, “if they were so stupid?”

  “Through fear,” mumbled Pir as he picked the dry dust from the inside of his nose. “Your mother was right: when they first arrived everybody more or less loved them. The country was being bombed to hell by warlords who worked only to fill their own pockets, and the people were scared and tired of being scared. Suddenly this group of fighters emerged from Kandahar promising order, preaching Islam, and hanging child rapists. Who wouldn’t welcome them?”

  “Welcome who?” Spandi asked, arriving out of the dark, his can hanging smokeless and hooked on the waistband of his jeans.

  “The Taliban,” I answered.

  “Oh, those bastards.”

  Pir started cackling. “Exactly, son. Come, take the weight off your feet.”

  Spandi pulled up a crate and kicked off his shoes. He had become a regular visitor to the shop after finding me throwing rubbish into a ditch at the end of the street a few weeks back. He had been walking to Old Makroyan at the time, the sprawl of flats he and his father had moved to after the fall of the Taliban. In their golden days the blocks of Old Makroyan were the pride of the city, but now they were no more than slum dwellings, a new hole for Kabul’s lost to fall into. But they were closer to the city than Khair Khana, which made it easier to find work.

  “So, where was I?” Pir asked, magically picking out a can of Pepsi, which he handed to Spandi.

  “The people were welcoming the Taliban because they killed child rapists and talked about Islam,” I reminded him.

  “Oh yes, Islam.” He sighed, nodding his head thoughtfully. “Of course, it was a very strict interpretation of sharia law that they preached, and it brought back public executions and floggings. Kites were also banned, as were televisions and music. You couldn’t even clap your hands at sporting events anymore—not that I’ve ever been able to see who was winning anyway. At one point they even put a stop to New Year celebrations. In fact the only thing we were permitted to do was walk to the park and sniff at the flowers. Damn homosexuals. But really it was the women who had it worse than anyone else.”

  “I know,” Spandi interrupted. “My father knew a woman who had all of her fingers cut off by the religious police just because she’d colored her nails.”

  “See!” Pir shouted. “That’s exactly what they were like!”

  “But why did they do it?” I asked, unable to understand why anyone should cut off the fingers of someone’s mother just for the sake of some paint.

  “They said it was to protect women’s honor. In reality it was because they were out-and-out bastards. Why do you think anyone who was anyone tried to escape to Pakistan?”

  “The Pakistanis are all bastards too,” mumbled Spandi.

  “Right again, son,” Pir agreed. “But at least they offered people some standard of living. Despite the promises, this place went to shit under the Taliban. There was hardly enough food, minimal clean water, and even fewer jobs. The government was a shambles, and the whole damn machine began to grind to a halt. Then, what do you know? When food prices soared and conditions sank so low we could no longer see the sun, or feel it in my case, the Taliban’s planning minister, a man called Qari Din Mohammad, told the world we didn’t need international help because ‘we Muslims believe God the Almighty will feed everybody one way or another.’ Bullshit! God had enough on His plate trying to keep us alive.”

  God, Afghanistan, and the Taliban were complicated subjects when put together, and difficult to make sense of, especially when you were only a boy, because the bottom line was this: a good Muslim should never question the ways of the Almighty. A good Muslim would trust in God to provide, no matter what, and even if He didn’t provide, a good Muslim would trust that the hunger, death, fighting, and disease that came to visit his door were all part of God’s plan. And given that knowledge, the Taliban planning minister must have been right and his regime must also have been part of God’s plan for Afghanistan. And that’s quite an argument when you’re taking over a country.

  Taliban basically means “religious students,” so it must have been easy to convince ordinary Muslims living in the countryside, who couldn’t read and write, that the orders they gave came straight from the pages of the Koran. If it says in the Holy Koran that girls should not go to school, who was a farmer to question the Word of God? Of course, my mother said the Holy Koran doesn’t say any such thing, although how she knows this, being illiterate herself, I’m not sure, but she seems pretty confident. However, when a Talib tells a man with no schooling that it is written just so, how can he argue against such knowledge and learning, and therefore against God Himself? He has to accept it. And that’s why the best weapon the Afghan people have against the Taliban or any other terrible power that may choose to put itself in Afghanistan is education. At least that’s what Ismerai told me.

  Ismerai was the latest newest person in my life, and he was Haji Khalid Khan’s uncle.

  “When you can read and write and discover facts for yourself, it is far easier to see God’s truth,” he explained as he leaned back on the blanket that had been laid on the grass
of our garden, sucking deeply from his hands, which were wrapped around an Afghan cigarette. “Education is the key to Afghanistan’s successful future, Fawad, because it fights ignorance and intolerance and brings the blessing of opportunity. When a man has knowledge he has power—the power to make informed decisions; the power to distinguish truth from lies; and the power to shape his own destiny in accordance with God’s will. He is stronger than the ignorant man, who can do nothing but blindly accept the supposed learning of another. And speaking of the blind . . .” Ismerai paused to force a huge smoke ring from his mouth. “I’d advise your friend Pir Hederi to be a little more careful when speaking about the Taliban in the future. Any man can shave off his beard and swap his turban, but it doesn’t mean he is a changed man.” Taking another pull on his cigarette, he added mysteriously, “We are not alone.”

  I nodded slowly, letting the words take shape in my head so that I’d remember them. “Okay, I’ll tell Pir Hederi,” I promised, because I looked up to Ismerai and I trusted what he had to say. He also smoked drugs, and though my mother disapproved, I thought it made him funny and interesting.

  Ismerai and Haji Khalid Khan often visited the house together because, apparently, Georgie was friends with the whole family. She told me she knew his brothers and cousins and even his children, so I realized it was little wonder she’d never found time to learn how to wash her clothes. She was too busy collecting Afghans.

  Since the day Haji Khalid Khan had come into my world, with his army of bodyguards and two-hand embraces, my relationship with Georgie had been, at best, polite. We would talk now and again, but I preferred to keep my distance, and Georgie didn’t push it. We were growing apart, and though it was all my doing, I couldn’t help myself. I felt betrayed. I felt like she’d let me down. Led me on and let me down.

  I think Georgie realized I was upset because when she came to pick me up from Pir Hederi’s I would make up some excuse or tell her I was busy rather than accept a lift home—and I wouldn’t let her hold my hand anymore. “I’m not a child!” I’d shouted at her the last time she’d reached for me, and I knew I’d hurt her feelings because she said very quietly, “Fawad, I have never, ever treated you like a child.”

  “You told my mother I’d been drinking beer!” I sharply reminded her.

  “Okay, apart from that time,” she agreed, then walked off, leaving me feeling angry and horrid because it wasn’t really her fault and the blame lay completely in my own head.

  “She’s a good woman, you know,” Ismerai scolded me as we sat in the garden passing another hour together as Haji Khalid Khan took Georgie inside to do God knows what with her.

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t,” I snapped.

  “No,” he admitted, “but your actions talk for you, and it’s not a nice way to behave to someone who’s a guest in our country and, even more than that, a friend.”

  And of course he was right. I was jealous without having the right to be jealous. I should have been pleased to see Georgie happy. But it was hard, and I was annoyed by the smile that played on her face now. I hated the fact that she drank her coffee with Haji Khalid Khan in the late afternoon when it used to be me, and I was wild with anger that at least twice a week she would stay away from the house and I knew she was with him.

  “Your time will come, child,” Ismerai said, “but it won’t be with Georgie.”

  And I realized he’d looked deep into my heart and knew everything.

  Despite the hurt that covered my insides like a bad bruise slowly going yellow, it was hard not to like Haji Khalid Khan.

  “He’s a charmer,” my mother admitted as we talked about Georgie’s friendship. “He could talk the birds from the trees, that man.”

  “Shir Ahmad talks to the dogs in the street,” I offered.

  “It’s not quite the same thing,” she replied.

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, Fawad, because if I’m not mistaken you’ve got the same gift—although right now you only seem capable of talking the hind legs off a donkey. But it’ll come, son. It’ll come.”

  And my mother went back to her chores, leaving me to think about my future talent and my current, previously unknown, ability to cripple donkeys.

  However, it wasn’t Haji Khalid Khan’s way with words that slowly ate away at my anger, although he was funny and strangely gentle in his manners for such a big man. No, my feelings began to slide on the Friday when Spandi came for lunch. It was Georgie’s idea to invite him, and I guessed it was mainly for my benefit.

  All of us—me, my mother, Georgie, James, May, Ismerai, Spandi, and Haji Khalid Khan—were drinking green tea outside in the garden. Although a cold wind bit at our fingers, we were enjoying the last of the autumn days before another winter closed in and locked us indoors. On a deep-red blanket we sat cross-legged, forming a ragged circle as the adults fired happy stories into the air. Georgie and Haji Khalid Khan acted as translators, which marked them out as different from the rest of us, somehow more worldly and knowledgeable, and brought them together as a couple. Nobody seemed to question this other than me, so I tried to hide my annoyance whenever Georgie rested her hand on Haji Khalid Khan’s knee or softly stroked his shoulder as she got to her feet to refill our cups.

  For it wasn’t just Georgie whose mood changed with the appearance of Haji Khalid Khan; everyone seemed to be different around this elegant man, who dressed like a king and smelled of expensive perfume. His visits dragged everyone away from their different lives, uniting us in shared jokes and happy moments like a family. It wasn’t a daily thing, of course, but while Haji Khalid Khan was in Kabul everyone at the house gathered at least once a week, twice if there was a reason to, such as Spandi’s invitation to lunch.

  That afternoon, after a great spread of sheep kebabs, curried chicken, Kabuli pilau, and warm naan—all of which had appeared with Haji Khalid Khan and Ismerai—we relaxed into the evening, drinking from cups steaming with the green tea my mother had prepared. Although she sat a little back from us, on one of the plastic chairs, my mother was as much a part of the group as any of us on the blanket, listening and laughing to the stories batting from one person to another.

  James, who was sharing a cushion with May, and an Afghan cigarette with Ismerai, was taking charge of most of the conversation as he had recently returned from Bamiyan. He said he had seen the huge holes that once housed two giant Buddhas and told us some international companies were now looking at ways to recapture the thousands of years of history that had been blown away by the Taliban.

  “Among other things they were talking about was a laser show,” he informed us, “the idea being to re-create the Buddhas in 3-D light where they used to stand. A pretty neat idea, but they’d need a bloody big generator.” He laughed.

  “I think it’s a ridiculous waste of money,” commented May, wrinkling the top of her nose. “People can hardly feed themselves, yet they want to spend millions on a fancy light show.”

  “But if this ‘fancy light show’ brings in tourists, it would create jobs and bring in money and therefore allow people to feed themselves,” argued James, who always saw the good in everything, even May.

  “Tourism!” she replied. “I don’t think Afghanistan’s quite ready for that yet. In fact, wasn’t the tourism minister murdered by pilgrims on their way to hajj?”

  “That was a few years ago,” Georgie reminded her.

  “And you think the situation is any better now?” May almost shouted. “The Taliban are back, the south has gone to crap, corruption is at an all-time high, and the government’s influence barely stretches outside Kabul.”

  “The Taliban are back?” I asked Georgie, startled at the bit of news I had clearly understood.

  I sat next to her, and she gently touched my hand. For the first time in a long while I didn’t move away.

  “Not really, Fawad,” she reassured me. “But yes, they are fighting with government and international troops i
n some areas. It’s nothing to get worried about.”

  “But why have they come back?”

  Georgie looked at Haji Khalid Khan, who leaned in my direction.

  “They never really went away,” he said. “Some of them hid out in the mountains bordering Pakistan; others simply hid out in their own towns and villages.”

  “Don’t worry too much about the Taliban,” Ismerai joined in. “They’re not the major concern right now. Afghanistan’s main problem is outside interference. People are playing games in our country, and it’s making it increasingly hard to tell friend from foe these days.”

  “What kind of games?” I asked. “Who’s playing them?”

  Georgie shot Haji Khalid Khan another look she obviously hoped I wouldn’t see, and he clapped his hands together.

  “Enough, now,” he ordered in a soft growl created by years of smoking. “These are questions for politicians, not honest, everyday folk like us.”

  Ismerai laughed. “True enough, Haji Sahib. Which reminds me of a joke. Georgie, you translate for our foreign guests. Haji might not want to make fun of his friends.”

  “Do politicians have friends?” she asked, and those of us who spoke Dari all laughed.

  “A busload of politicians was traveling down the road,” Ismerai began. “Suddenly the bus veered off the road and hit a tree near a village. A farmer who was working on his land nearby came over. When he saw the politicians and the wreckage of the bus, he grabbed his shovel and buried all the politicians. Some days later, a police inspector passed by, and he saw the bus that had crashed into the tree. The policeman asked the farmer, who was working on his land as usual, when the accident had taken place. The farmer replied that the accident had taken place a few days earlier. The policeman then asked him about the identity of the travelers, and the farmer replied that ‘all the passengers were politicians’ and that he had buried them all. The policeman asked whether any of them had survived the crash. The farmer smiled and answered, ‘Maybe. Some of them told me they were alive, but we both know politicians lie a lot.’ ”