Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  “It’s a good job,” he declared, sitting up straighter than I remembered him doing before. “It’s a good opportunity for me.”

  “I know,” I told him, genuinely pleased. “Congratulations, Jahid. I really mean it.”

  “Yeah.” Jahid nodded. “Yeah, thanks.” And he punched me on the arm again.

  Unfortunately, Jamilla hadn’t done so well since I’d been gone. I noticed an old bruise under her left eye, and she told me that one of the beggar women had elbowed her in the face during the usual crushes to get to a foreigner’s wallet.

  “It’s starting to change here,” she said. “It’s like the mafia now. You have to be part of their family, or you’re done for. I’m only here today because it’s Christmastime and there’s enough for everyone—and because Jahid and Spandi are here.”

  I looked carefully at Jamilla and saw for the first time the color of fun washed from her cheeks, like she was suddenly older and more tired. I decided to ask Pir Hederi to find a job for her at the store.

  “So, where is Spandi?” I asked.

  “At the other end of the street selling his cards,” Jamilla revealed. “He’s looking so much better now that your friend Haji Khan took away his can.”

  “Yeah, fuck me, Fawad,” Jahid joined in. “Haji Khan. You’re playing with the big boys now.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “Yeah . . . well, no, not personally, but I’ve heard of him. He’s a real Afghan hero!”

  “Not a drug dealer, then?”

  Jahid shrugged. “Show me a rich man in Afghanistan who isn’t mixed up in drugs. It doesn’t make him a bad man, does it? This ‘stop growing poppy’ shit is the West’s problem, not ours. It’s all their people who are injecting the stuff and catching AIDS off each other. We’re just trying to get by.”

  “So, how do you know Haji Khan is into drugs?” I asked Spandi as we walked back home from Chicken Street.

  “It’s just something I heard.”

  Spandi was counting his dollars as we walked, separating his money from Haji Khan’s and placing the notes in different pockets. He did look better, cleaner and younger. If only his face hadn’t been chewed away by the sand flies disease, he might even have been called handsome now.

  “My father has some contacts in the east, some truck drivers who bring diesel over the border. They spend quite a bit of time in Jalalabad, and I’ve heard them mention Haji Khan once or twice.”

  “And they say he’s a drug dealer?”

  “So they say, but it’s only a rumor. He’s never been arrested or anything.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Me?” Spandi shrugged. “I think it’s hard to arrest a man who’s fought for his country—and lost his family doing so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My father says Haji Khan used to be married to quite a woman, but the ISI killed her and their eldest daughter, shot them both as they lay in bed sleeping.”

  “No!” A twist of guilt pulled at my body as I pictured Haji Khan leaning over what was left of his wife and daughter, darkness and death drowning him in tears. “Why would they do that?”

  “He was fighting the Taliban, Fawad. It was probably a warning to him, but if that’s what they intended they fucked up badly because he fought like a madman after that. My father says some of his missions from Peshawar into Afghanistan were legendary because they were largely suicidal, but I guess Haji Khan didn’t care about dying after what happened. I don’t suppose he cared about anything.”

  I said good-bye to Spandi at the corner of the British Embassy in Wazir and popped by Pir Hederi’s shop to beg for a job for Jamilla. He told me he’d think about it, despite all women, no matter how young they are, being a curse to every Afghan man of sound mind, and I thanked him for his consideration, knowing full well he would help her, because otherwise he would have just said no.

  As I walked the long way home, past the large homes of NGO workers, ministers, and businessmen and the laughter-filled grounds of the Lebanese and Indian restaurants, I thought of Jamilla and how happy she would be when I told her about Pir Hederi’s job. And as I got closer to my house I thought of how utterly destroyed Haji Khan must have been when he returned to his own home to find his family asleep forever, their bodies wet with blood.

  His pain was real to me. I could almost taste it.

  Amazingly, when foreigners visit this country, they can’t help but go on about its “breathtaking beauty” and how “noble and courageous” its people are, but this is the reality of Afghanistan: pain and death. There’s not one of us who hasn’t been touched by them in one way or another. From the Russians to the mujahideen to the Taliban, war has stolen our fathers and brothers; the leftovers of war continue to take our children; and the results of war have left us poor as beggars. So the foreigners can keep their talk of beautiful scenery and traditional goodness because all of us would swap it in a heartbeat for just one moment’s peace, and it’s high time the sorrow that came to plant itself in our soil just packed up and went away to terrorize someone else.

  When I got to the house, all the lights were on and I could see James and May through the back window fixing colored paper to the walls. A strong smell of alcohol was coming from the kitchen, and when I went in to investigate I found my mother there stirring a large pot of oranges and herbs swimming in hot red liquid. The radio was belting out a Hindi love song, and she was dancing as she worked.

  “Is that alcohol?” I demanded, startling my mother into a halt.

  “It’s only forbidden to drink it, Fawad, not stir it.”

  She started laughing, and I wondered whether she was suffering from its fumes, in the same way Spandi had been knocked senseless by the smoke of Ismerai’s cigarettes.

  “Fawad, my boy!” James came bounding into the kitchen. He had glitter in his hair. “Come, help!” he ordered.

  I followed him into the large living room, which was now a mess of tattered paper hanging from the walls and ceiling. A small plastic tree had been placed in the corner, and candles covered every spare space on the window ledges, tabletops, and cupboards. May was now sitting on the floor next to the wood-burning bukhari, keeping warm as she glued lines of paper together. She smiled when I came in, which confirmed what I already knew: everyone had gone mad.

  “Where is Georgie?” I asked James before he could get me involved.

  He pointed upstairs and brought the corners of his mouth down, pretending to look sad. I nodded and left the room. I needed to show her that I was on her side now. And Haji Khan’s.

  Although I’d never been to the top of the house before—well, not from the inside—I climbed the stairs and walked straight to Georgie’s door because my bearings were good and in my first few weeks I’d made a plan of the house in the notebook she’d given me.

  I knocked gently and waited.

  “Who is it?” she yelled from behind the closed door.

  “Fawad!” I yelled back.

  From inside the room I could hear some drawers being opened and closed again. Then, after a few seconds’ pause, the door opened, and Georgie stood there looking like she’d just woken up. Her hair was all over the place, she had no makeup on, and her sweater was on backward.

  “Fawad,” she said, flatly surprised to see me.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Georgie.”

  She shrugged and opened the door wider for me to come inside. As she did so, I saw a large photo of Haji Khan sitting on a table by her bed.

  I shook my head to tell her I wasn’t coming in. Carefully, I reached for her hand, which hung like a dead thing at her side, and told her, “Don’t worry, Georgie. He’ll call you.”

  I then turned and walked back downstairs to help James with his decorations.

  6

  THE BIRTHDAY OF Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) is called Mawlid al-Nabi, and we celebrate the day on the twelfth of the lunar month of Rabi al-Awwal, although the Shia celebrate it five days later
. During this day, rice is cooked, and milk and butter are collected. We then visit our neighbors to share what we have, even with those we don’t like. If we manage to find someone poorer than us, we share food with them as well. During the afternoon, the men and the older boys walk to the mosque to offer up prayers, while all the cars remain parked and the television and radio sets stand silent. As this is also the day the Prophet died, we neither laugh nor cry because we are happy that he came and sad that he went. Therefore we mostly spend the day just remembering him.

  What we don’t do, however, is drink alcohol from the moment we get up until the moment we fall into bed—or, in James’s case, on the stairs. And after attending my first celebration of Jesus’s birthday, I now understand why everybody needs two days off work to recover.

  Jesus—or, as we call him, Isa—is one of the most important prophets, but he is not the Son of God as the foreigners believe; he was one of His messengers. Although it is true that Isa performed many miracles with the permission of God, like raising the dead, creating a bird from clay, and talking as an infant, he did not die on a cross. Instead, he was raised up to God so that he could return to the earth one day to fight evil.

  As a Muslim I respect the foreigners’ Jesus, and I like the fact that they celebrate his birthday even if they have got their facts muddled. However, it was hard to believe that for such a big day in their calendar I never once heard my friends mention Jesus’s name. Although James shouted “Christ” when he slipped on the stairs, I don’t think that strictly counts as remembering.

  At ten in the morning on the day called “Christmas,” Georgie came knocking at our door to insist that my mother and I move away from the television and come into the living room in her part of the house. She was dressed in loose patchwork green pyjamas, which I thought were more suitable than many of her normal clothes, and her hair was pulled up in a rough ponytail. Her cheeks were red.

  “Happy Christmas!” she loudly greeted us in English, hugging both me and my mother fondly.

  “Happy Christmas!” I shouted back as my mother gave a shy giggle and reached for a chador to cover her loose black hair so that we could dutifully follow Georgie into the house.

  As we shuffled through the door of the front room we were met by a wall of noise coming from the stereo, and we found James and May sitting on the floor close to the bukhari surrounded by half-opened presents. They waved at us to sit with them. James was wearing dirty jeans and a bright red sweater, and May was wrapped in a bed blanket. In front of them were cartons of orange juice and a bottle of champagne—a celebratory drink that James told me came from France. Georgie filled two slim glasses with juice for me and my mother and mixed her own with the fizzing liquid from the champagne bottle.

  “Happy Christmas!” James said, smiling and raising his glass. Everyone else did the same, so my mother and I followed suit, passing giggly looks to each other as we did so.

  “Oh, that’s gorgeous,” squealed May in the middle of our embarrassment, holding up a heavy necklace made of ragged chunks of deep-red stone.

  “I thought it would match your eyes,” James joked, causing May to jump forward and grab him in a headlock. As she wrestled him to the floor she accidentally showed a thigh of dimpled white flesh, and I quickly looked away, almost relieved I’d never got to see her breasts. Skin can be a frightening thing on the wrong body.

  “And this is for you, Mariya.”

  Georgie handed over a parcel wrapped in Sada-e Azadi newspaper. As my mother worked the package loose, slowly and carefully as if the paper itself was worth a month’s wages (which I knew it wasn’t because it was handed out free by international soldiers every two weeks), the most beautiful golden shawl appeared, woven with swirls of silver thread.

  “Thank you,” my mother said shyly in English. She removed her own worn chador and placed the sparkle of colors over her hair. I thought she looked amazing, like every imagined picture I’d ever formed in my head of the days when my father was here to praise her looks and help her walk life’s path. It’s sometimes easy to forget your mother’s beauty when surrounded by the exotic colors and smells of foreign women, but the fact remained she was incredibly beautiful, with olive-colored skin, deep-green eyes, and hair you could wrap yourself in. In another time and another place she could have been a famous actress or a singer.

  “And this is for you, Fawad . . .”

  Georgie stood up, took me by the hand, and led me to the kitchen. As we walked out of the room the others followed, including my mother, and a tickle of sickness played in my stomach at suddenly being the center of attention.

  Standing by the kitchen door, Georgie released my hand and nodded at me to go in. When I passed her I found myself looking at the pale, plucked ass of a massive chicken, staring me right in the face from the work surface. I turned to express my confused gratitude, thinking a dead bird might be something of an honor to receive on the Prophet Jesus’s birthday, but then I saw something else; something glinting promised freedom at me near a cupboard and leaning against the wall. It was a bicycle, a brand-new bicycle.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and though half of me wanted to run up and touch it and wheel it into the yard and cycle off to show all my friends, I didn’t dare think that this could be a gift for me. It was just too good to be true. But as I looked back at Georgie she nodded her head with such an exaggerated grin I knew it was mine.

  I owned my own bike!

  “Happy Christmas!” James shouted behind Georgie, raising his glass to his lips.

  “Yes, happy Christmas, Fawad,” repeated Georgie, and at her side I could see happy tears in my mother’s eyes.

  I self-consciously walked over to “my bike,” my eyes spinning at the very sight of it. It was amazing; it was fantastic; it was shiny as new money, red as blood—and, on closer inspection, fitted with five gears.

  “Thank you, Georgie,” I stammered. “Thank you. Thank you so very, very much.”

  “My pleasure, Fawad. It’s a gift from all of us—even May,” she added with a wink.

  “Give us a feel then.” Pir Hederi moved out of his seat to run his hands over the handlebars, humming, cooing, and nodding his head in appreciation as he did so. “That’s a fine machine, Fawad, congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, moving the bike away from Dog as he sniffed around the wheels and positioned himself to celebrate its arrival by pissing all over it. “So, I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “Careful, lad,” Pir rasped. “Thinking’s one of the most dangerous pastimes a man can have in Afghanistan!”

  “Yeah, yeah. Listen. I’ve been thinking that now I’ve got a bike we can set up some kind of delivery service. You know, take orders and stuff, and then I can take the food or whatever to the customers’ houses.”

  “A delivery service, eh?” Pir shrugged, wrapping the idea around his head and licking the possibilities of the proposal along his dry lips. “With all these foreigners around here it might just work, you know.”

  “Of course,” I added, a little more quietly, “that would mean I might not be around the shop so much and . . . well, you might need . . .”

  “A little extra help?” Pir finished for me. “Such as a little slip of a girl you might know?”

  “As I told you, Jamilla can read and she can write, and if people start calling up she can take orders for you. She can also make tea and clean the place up a bit and—”

  “Okay,” Pir said, stopping me short with a wave of his hand, “she can come.”

  “Brilliant!”

  “On one condition: you give me a go on that bicycle.”

  “But you’re blind!” I protested.

  “Good!” He laughed. “I won’t see the danger coming!”

  For thirty minutes I had to deal with the sight of Pir Hederi threatening to wreck my new bicycle as he bumbled up and down the road supported by the local shoe-shine boy and a money exchanger from across the road, all the while accompanied by the claps
and cheers of a small crowd and the confused, excited barks of Dog. Only when he was finally upended by a particularly vicious pothole did he give up, laughing like a mental and wiping the sweat and grit from his forehead.

  I tried to laugh with the rest of the crowd, but to be honest, I was annoyed.

  I lifted my bike off the road and checked it for damage. There was a slight scratch on the main frame that angered my eyes, but I guessed it was a small price to pay to stop Jamilla from getting beaten up by gypsies. And when I raced into Chicken Street twenty minutes later, the smile that appeared on her face when I told her the news was worth a dozen scratches.

  “You’re joking me!” she screamed as I grandly revealed I’d found her a job at Pir Hederi’s shop.

  “No, it’s true. The money’s not great, not like the riches here, but at least in Wazir you’ll be away from the gypsies.”

  “You’re my hero, Fawad!”

  Jamilla flung her arms around me and planted a kiss on my cheek, which I thought was kind of wrong, but not too bad. Saying that, at some point in the future I knew I would have to make it clear that we weren’t now engaged or anything.

  You have to be careful with girls.

  With Jamilla on the seat of my bike, we hurried toward Old Makroyan to pick up Spandi. Georgie had ordered me to bring my friends back to the house for Christmas lunch, and I wanted them to arrive before the foreigners got too drunk. When I’d left they were finishing off a second bottle of champagne, and there was another one waiting in the fridge.

  After fifteen minutes of hard pedaling, through Shahr-e Naw, over the Jalalabad roundabout, across the bridge spanning Kabul’s muddy river, and narrowly avoiding death a million times under the wheels of yellow Corolla taxis, we bumped our way into the broken lanes separating a dozen blocks of battered flats. The air was thick with chatter, and from most of the trees that were still standing after escaping another winter as firewood hung a mess of old ropes tied to balconies that paraded wet blankets, salwar kameez, bright-colored T-shirts, and dresses grown stiff in the cold.