Born Under a Million Shadows Page 8

  Coming to a halt at the entrance of Block 4, we found Spandi huddled in the doorway, apparently closing some sort of deal with a boy a little younger than him. When he saw us, he patted the boy’s shoulder and came to greet us with a shy shrug.

  “He’s working for me,” he explained, jerking his head in the direction of the boy. “I give him a handful of phone cards, and he gets to keep fifty cents for every one he sells.”

  “Ooh, look at the big businessman!” Jamilla laughed.

  “You’ve got to start somewhere.” Spandi smiled. “For every card he sells I get half a dollar and the rest goes to Haji Khan. This means that I not only make money from my own cards but also from those I don’t even sell. And I can get rid of more too. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe it; these things sell like hot bolani. I made fifty dollars last week.”

  “How do you know the boy won’t run off with the cards and keep the money for himself?” I asked, impressed but ever suspicious—as any right-thinking Afghan would be.

  “He’s my aunt’s son,” Spandi explained. “And besides, I told him Haji Khan would rip his head off if he turned us over.”

  By the time we arrived back at the house—me and Jamilla wheeling up to the gate on our horse of steel as Spandi ran beside us, a feat that was pretty impressive given how much spand he’d breathed in during his life—I realized we had visitors. This wasn’t some kind of psychic revelation or anything; the three armored Land Cruisers and the posse of guards cluttering our street gave it away.

  Kicking our shoes off, we pushed through the front door to find it embarrassingly obvious that not only was the house now in chaos but most of its occupants were out of control; James, Ismerai, and Haji Khan were lost in a cloud of hashish, shouting jokes about Kandaharis and donkeys over the noise of the stereo belting out the same songs I’d heard that morning; and May and Georgie were drunk in the kitchen, giggling uncontrollably as my mother carved into the giant chicken, looking increasingly distressed. Whereas a few hours ago the bird had been a raw slab of white pitted flesh, it was now burned black on the outside and colored pink in the middle. According to the women, this was not a good sign.

  “It probably needs another hour,” May suggested.

  “It doesn’t need another hour; it needs a bloody funeral!” Georgie replied.

  Turning her head in our direction, she welcomed Spandi and Jamilla to the house and wished them a happy Christmas.

  “Fawad, I’m so sorry,” she added, turning her attention to me. “I really wanted to give your mother the day off, but it’s quite clear that cooking isn’t my thing.”

  My mother laughed—a good, honest, deep chuckle the likes of which I’d never heard before. “I’m fairly sure Haji Khan isn’t that interested in your cooking skills,” she stated.

  “Mother!” I shouted, mortified by what she was so obviously suggesting, and in front of my friends too. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought she was drunk.

  Not that anyone else seemed to share my concern. Everyone was laughing at her joke, even May, whose Dari was passable and whose sense of humor had obviously been helped by the growing number of empty champagne bottles and beer cans cluttering the house.

  “Oh well,” Georgie exclaimed, sticking a large knife into the breast of the two-tone bird. “There’s nothing to be done. Khalid! You need to make a trip to Afghan Fried Chicken!”

  A few days before Christmas, Georgie had looked wretched—pale and unhappy and constantly attached to a mobile phone that never rang. Now her skin was glowing, her eyes were bright, and a smile that was almost stupid was stuck to her face.

  Throughout the afternoon and deep into the evening, Haji Khan was more often than not glued to her side, being funny and affectionate, and though I welcomed his return along with everyone else, I was amazed to see how just a few minutes’ tenderness was enough to make up for weeks of disinterest. It seemed a pretty good deal if you were the man in the relationship. Still, I’d been told that this was the way of love, that it was all-forgiving. And I guessed it must be true. You only have to look at our beloved Afghanistan, the country that’s brought us nothing but death and misery, yet we cry over her beauty and spin songs around her cruelty like lovesick teenagers. We forgive her anything, and I guess for Georgie, Haji Khan was her Afghanistan.

  Of course, love isn’t a disease suffered only by women; one look at Shir Ahmad told you that. He had been invited into the house along with our other guard, Abdul, to share food and drinks while Haji Khan’s men turned the house into a fortress. Shir was sitting diagonally across from my mother, and I could see it was difficult for him not to allow his eyes to keep wandering in her direction. For my mother’s part, she was coldly separate, hardly noticing his presence in the room beyond the first greeting. Even so, I noticed she was sitting with her back a little straighter than usual and she had stopped laughing with the other women. And when Ismerai and Haji Khan began reciting poetry, her cheeks colored a little.

  Our love of poetry is one of the craziest things about Afghans. Men will shoot someone in the head without a second thought, families will sell their daughters into marriage for a bucket of sand, and everyone will shit on the dead body of their enemy given half the chance; but at the sound of a well-written verse an Afghan man will become weak as a woman. When a poem ends he shakes his head and sits still for at least five minutes, staring far away, deep into the floor, as if seeing his own heart ripped open by the words, baring its shame and pain to the world.

  One of the most famous Pashtun poets was Rahman Baba, otherwise known as the Nightingale of Afghanistan. He is as famous and respected as ever an Afghan was, and though he’s been dead for more than three hundred years, people still remember him and hold ceremonies in his honor, and every school has at least one of his poems stuck to a wall. Legend says that he used to scratch his poems in the mud of the Bara River, which must have helped people love him more because he was poor like us.

  But the reason I think Afghans adore poetry so much is that it lets them believe in love and its power to change everything—like the way it transformed Georgie’s tears into smiles and Shir Ahmad’s blood into water.

  Not long ago, school sent me home with a poem to learn. Me and Spandi discussed it for a while, but even though we looked in every way to find a reason to love poetry as much as the men we knew, we decided it was rubbish and written by homos. We hated homos. We also hated poetry, especially poetry written by homos.

  Ismerai and Haji Khan, though, who seemed to know an awful lot of homo poetry for tough men, practically had the women fainting over their words as they took center stage at our Christmas party—and there was only my mother among them who spoke Pashto. But that’s the magic of our language: you could recite a poem about a rotting cat’s ass, and it would sound like warm honey.

  Of course the foreigners were also drunk, which probably helped, and they were feeling the heat of recent good fortune after licking their fingers clean from the grease of AFC’s fried chicken to accept the presents Haji Khan had brought for them. To James he had given a bottle of whiskey, which the journalist had been cradling in his arms ever since; May was now out of her blanket and wearing a deep-blue velvet kuchi dress; and Georgie was revealing a flash of gold around her neck and a flower-shaped ring on her finger. Surprisingly, given it wasn’t strictly our celebration, Haji Khan didn’t forget the Muslims in the house. He generously presented my mother with a fine red carpet for her room, handed over new boots to Shir Ahmad and Abdul, and gave envelopes of money to Jamilla, Spandi, and me, which was as horrible as it was exciting because, as all the adults mooned over one another, these packages burned holes in our pockets and all we could think of doing was escaping and finding out how much he’d given us.

  In the end, the party finished in a mess of broken adults as the clock struck ten: May bolted upstairs to vomit in the bathroom; James fell down, and asleep, on the stairs; and Georgie, Spandi, and Jamilla disappeared out the door with Ismerai and
Haji Khan. As my mother cleared up, and covered a very loud, snoring James with a blanket, I sneaked out into the yard to take a last look at my bike and count the dollars in my pocket. Haji Khan had placed one hundred dollars in ten-dollar bills in the envelope—more money than the National Police earn in one month! And even though I went to bed still no nearer to understanding the foreigners’ relationship with Jesus, I really hoped they would be around for his next birthday.

  As I lay in my room, I looked back on the day with all of its color and surprises—a day when the rich sat with the poor, the Godless with the believers, the foreigners with Afghans, the men with women, and the children with adults. It was how a perfect world might be if people didn’t keep strangling one another in rules and laws and fear. Were we really so different from one another? If you give a boy a bike, he is going to be happy whether he is a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. And if you love someone truly, it doesn’t matter if he or she is Afghan or British.

  But life isn’t straightforward, and just as sudden happiness can appear to brighten your day, sadness is usually only a heartbeat away. The day after Christmas my mother went to visit her sister, and my aunt repaid this kindness by trying to kill her.

  7

  IT WAS THICK dark in my bed when I heard a heavy thud come from the bathroom of our house. I listened hard, trying to work out the cause, but there was nothing more. Yet I must have sensed there was something wrong because I swung my legs out of the blanket’s warmth, put on my plastic slippers, and left my room.

  Standing outside the bathroom door, I could clearly hear the sound of retching, violent and frightening, followed by heavy, tearful groans.

  “Mother?” I knocked gently. “Mother? It’s me, Fawad.”

  I heard my mother trying to get to her feet, but a whimper came with the effort and she slid down again with another dull thud.

  “Mother, please!”

  I turned the handle. The door opened just enough for me to see her on the floor, slumped across the hole of our toilet, cradling her stomach. Her dress was clearly soiled, and the stench of vomit and diarrhea hit me like a wall.

  “No, Fawad!”

  Her voice was harsh and broken, and I closed the door quickly at the terrible sound of it, trapped by the need to save her and a son’s wish to protect his mother’s shame.

  “I’m going for help!” I cried, and ran into the main house to get Georgie.

  Without knocking, I ran into her room and dragged at the blankets that hid her.

  “Please, Georgie, please,” I begged, “it’s my mother! Get up!”

  The words left my mouth with a scream, and Georgie sat upright, quickly kicking away the covers. In two strides she reached the bedroom door and pulled on the long dressing gown that hung there.

  “What is it? What’s the matter with your mother?” she asked as she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out of the door.

  “I don’t know, but she’s very sick. Oh Georgie, I think she’s dying!”

  I started to cry. I didn’t mean to, but it was all too much, just really too damn much. Seeing her lying on the floor, her pretty face turned white, her clothes black and filthy. I couldn’t lose my mother like this, not her as well. I loved her too much. She was all I had left in the world.

  “May!” Georgie shouted as we ran down the stairs. “May, we need you!”

  Both May and James jumped out from their rooms, looking sleepy and worried. James had hold of a long piece of wood.

  “It’s Mariya, she’s sick,” Georgie explained.

  “Fuck. Okay, I’m coming,” May answered.

  “Me too, I’ll just get some clothes on,” added James.

  “No! You can’t see Mariya like this,” Georgie barked at him, turning abruptly to face him. “Get dressed and take care of Fawad.”

  “I want to come with you,” I protested, but Georgie was already at the bottom of the stairs and heading outside.

  Quickly running after her, I caught up in time to see her push open the door of our bathroom. She paused for a moment, taking in the twisted mess that was my mother’s body.

  “Oh God, Mariya . . .”

  “Georgie, please,” my mother begged, trying to lift herself from the floor before falling back defeated. “Please, the boy, don’t let my boy see me like this.”

  My mother was crying, and her body, which looked tiny as a doll’s in the half-light of the coming day, was shaking with retches and sobs. I held out my hands to her.

  “Please, Mother, please stop . . .”

  Georgie moved me back from the door and gently pushed me into the arms of James, who had by now come out of the main house. May was with him, and she carried a small black bag with her.

  “Your mother will be fine, Fawad,” May said in English. “We’ll sort this out, don’t worry.”

  May kissed me on the cheek and went to join Georgie, who by now had torn a strip of cloth from the bottom of her long sleeping shirt and was soaking it in cold water from the sink to wipe the sweat from my mother’s head.

  For the next two hours, Georgie and May ran back and forth from our house to their own, fixing ways to keep my mother from slipping into death. They had taken my mother’s clothes, placed them in the metal trash can in the yard, and given James orders to burn them. They then sent him out for bottles of mineral water after finishing their own supplies. May had used them in the kitchen, mixing the clean water with salt and sugar, creating gallons and gallons of salty, sugary liquid, all for my mother to drink.

  “Your mother needs a lot of water to replace all the fluid she has lost,” May explained, filling yet another glass.

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked, now mixing up the concoction myself after May had shown me how—half a spoon of salt and four spoons of sugar to every glass.

  “I’m not sure, Fawad, but I guess she may have cholera. I’ve seen it once before in Badakhshan, and your mother’s symptoms seem to be very similar.”

  “What’s chol . . . chol . . .”

  “Cholera,” May repeated.

  “What’s cholera?” I tried again, not liking the hardness of its sound in my mouth.

  “It’s a disease caused by bacteria—germs,” explained May. “If I’m right, your mother will be fine, Fawad, but we need to rehydrate her and get her to a hospital as soon as possible. Georgie has called Massoud, and he’s on his way.”

  “She’s not going to die, is she?”

  “No, Fawad.” May bent down to take my face in her hands. “Your mother won’t die, I promise you that, but she is very, very sick and you have to be a strong little boy right now. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  There are a million and one things in this country that can kill you—people and weapons are just the tip of a very large mountain—and one of these things is cholera.

  After my mother was laid on the backseat of Massoud’s car and driven to a German hospital in the west of the city with Georgie and May, James tried to take my mind off my worries in the only way he knew how—by filling my head with knowledge about the disease. He opened up his laptop computer, logged on to something called Wikipedia, and typed in the word cholera. A whole page of words in blue letters arrived, and James slowly read them.

  The basic diagnosis was that cholera sounded awful, and I cursed my mother’s misfortune, asking Allah to visit a million illnesses on my aunt, who must surely have been the one to infect my mother, being as dirty as an outhouse herself. I knew they didn’t like each other, but to kill her with food was unforgivable.

  According to Wikipedia, cholera was quite commonplace in countries like Afghanistan, and the symptoms included terrible muscle and stomach cramps, vomiting, and fever. “At some stage,” read James, translating the words into a language I understood, “the watery shit of the sufferer turns almost clear with flecks of white, like rice. If it’s very bad a person’s skin can turn blue-black, the eyes become sunken, and their lips also turn blue.”

  I remembered my mothe
r’s face, and although it had lost its gentle brown color it hadn’t turned blue, which gave me some kind of hope. Of course, I hadn’t been able to examine her shit, though.

  “In general,” continued James, “to save someone you have to make them drink as much water as they lose.”

  That explained why May had given my mother enough fluid to drown a camel, and as I listened to James reading from the screen of his computer, I developed a newfound respect for the yellow-haired man hater, because May had basically saved my mother’s life. I owed her now.

  8

  “SO, YOU’RE A lesbian, are you?”

  As I spoke, May choked on her coffee, breathing in as she spluttered and releasing milky brown liquid through her nose soon after.

  It wasn’t a good look.

  “Jeez, you’re not shy in coming forward, are you?”

  She coughed out the question, then wiped her nose with the sleeve of her tunic. Her cheeks had burst pink, and I looked at her blankly.

  “I mean to say, you’re not afraid to speak about what’s on your mind,” she explained, seeing my confusion through the small tears that had collected in the lines hanging around her eyes.

  I shrugged. “If I don’t ask, how am I going to learn?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” snorted May, “you’ve got a point.”

  She shuffled the papers she’d been reading at the desk by the front window, then carefully placed them in a pile before moving in her seat to give me her full attention. I was sitting on the floor trying to place the words of the new national anthem in my head—one of the tasks we had been set at school before it closed for the winter. As it was as long as the Koran, this was no easy task.