Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  “In answer to your question, yes, I am a lesbian,” May admitted.

  Her words were carefully spaced, and she eyed me warily. I nodded my head, thoughtfully, and returned to the notebook in front of me.

  “Why?” I asked some seconds later.

  May shook her head and blinked. “I don’t know why; I just am. It’s not something you decide; you just are, or you’re not. And from a very early age I knew I was.”

  “But how will you find a husband if you only love women?”

  “Fawad, I will never find a husband.”

  “You’re not that bad-looking.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  May looked shocked, and I felt a similar stab of surprise that she was shocked because I’d seen her look in the mirror James always checked himself in, the one that hung in the hallway and made your face look longer than it really was, so she must have known.

  “I mean, you’re not beautiful like Georgie,” I explained. “But not every man is as beautiful as Haji Khan.”

  “My looks aren’t really the issue, Fawad. The issue, the point,” she added quickly as I visibly struggled with another new word, “is I don’t want to find a husband.”

  “Then how will you ever have children if you don’t get married?”

  “You don’t have to have a husband to have children,” she stated, shaking her head.

  “May,” I replied gently, now shaking my own head, “I think you’re very clever and you know a lot of things, like how you knew how to save my mother’s life, but really, this is one of the most stupid things I have ever heard you, or anyone, say.”

  May laughed. It brought to her face a whisper of prettiness that was usually missing.

  “Things are very different in our culture, young man. In America I can adopt children—take unwanted babies and bring them to my home, where I can love them and raise them. So you see, having a husband is not that necessary.”

  “But every woman wants to get married,” I protested.

  “Do they now?” May paused slightly to wipe spilled coffee from the desktop before slowly admitting, “Well, maybe you’re right. Actually, Fawad, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was hoping to get married later this year, but sadly it didn’t work out.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” May leaned over the desk, and it caused her breasts to spread on the polished surface like broken cushions. They looked soft and wonderful. “You may remember when you first came here I was a little unhappy. Well, that was because the woman I loved had just told me she no longer wanted to marry me. She had found someone else in America, apparently. A man, as it turned out.”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “That’s okay,” said May.

  “No, I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t understand. You said you wanted to marry a woman. How is that even possible?”

  “Oh,” May replied with a smile, “actually it’s very possible. In some places in America men are free to marry men and women are free to marry women.” She rose from her seat to take her coffee cup to the kitchen and playfully pushed my head as she passed by. “That is one of the wonderful things about democracy,” she added, laughing. Then she left the room, leaving me speechless.

  I always knew the West was filled with crazy ideas, like scientists believing we all come from monkeys, but this was just incredible. I decided that as soon as I’d finished remembering the national anthem I’d write to President Karzai to warn him. There could be such a thing as too much democracy, and he should be made aware of that fact.

  At the German hospital, the doctors in white coats confirmed May’s suspicions that my mother had cholera. They also confirmed that she would be fine. Because of the special water my mother had drunk she hadn’t gone into shock, which I was told was the biggest danger she had faced. However, the doctors insisted that she stay overnight in order to recover from her ordeal.

  During that terrible twenty-four hours it was also agreed that when my mother came out she would go to live with Homeira and her family for a week in Qala-e Fatullah. Homeira’s employer, across the road from us, had also been kind, giving her the week off to look after my mother—although James said this had nothing to do with niceness and everything to do with not wanting to catch diseases from poor people.

  “My home is only a ten-minute drive away, so come and visit anytime,” Homeira told me when she came to pick up some of my mother’s clothes. “My children would love to meet you.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, although I was in no mood to make new friends and felt better staying with the friends I already had.

  Georgie said that at the hospital my mother had been very against the idea of leaving me behind—right up to the point where she fell asleep, exhausted. However, both Georgie and May said they would look after me, and they promised my mother that not only would they guarantee I washed, said my prayers, and did my school assignments, they would also keep an eye on James and ban him from the house if need be.

  I felt a bit sorry for James, who seemed genuinely hurt that no one thought he could be trusted to look after a boy, but if he hadn’t agreed to such supervision I was in no doubt that I would have been packed off to my aunt’s house—where I’m certain she would have tried to kill me too.

  So that afternoon, after my mother had been hospitalized and May had admitted to her own sickness, my bed was temporarily moved into James’s room and placed at a right angle to his.

  At first, the place was an absolute mess, filled as it was with piles of newspapers, dirty clothes, and books taking up every bit of space. A board similar to the one May had in her bedroom hung on the wall, now over my bed, but unlike May’s there were no family photographs pinned to it, just scraps of paper that seemed mostly to hold telephone numbers. A large knife was also stabbed into the board. I had seen James use it to clean the dirt from his nails.

  As Georgie and James struggled to fit my bed into the corner of his room, I tried to help by shoving the other one closer to the far wall. As I did so a magazine escaped from the tangled mass of bedclothes, falling to the floor and opening at the center. The pages showed a blond-haired woman with soapy bubbles covering huge naked breasts.

  Georgie and James looked at the magazine as if someone had just tossed a grenade into the room. For at least three seconds they stood in stunned silence, first looking at the naked woman, then at each other, then at me, then back at the magazine. I stooped to pick it up, but this seemed to knock the sense back into both of them, and as Georgie ordered “No!” James quickly swooped, beating me to it and snatching away the flapping pages, which he tucked into the belt of his trousers, under his sweater.

  “Research, Fawad, research,” he explained.

  “For all the work you do with the ladies?” I asked, remembering Georgie’s words and suddenly fitting them into place.

  Most afternoons, after Georgie had finished with her job and Pir Hederi had finished with me, we would drive to Homeira’s house to spend an hour or so with my mother. The first visit we made was awkward and shy, but because I was relieved to see her alive I cried when she reached out to hold me, and because she was my mother she matched my tears with her own.

  Although my mother looked better than the last time I’d seen her, and a lot cleaner, her face still shone pale and she looked fragile compared to her friend, who was as fat as Ibrar the Baker from Flower Street. However, despite my natural suspicion of anyone fat, which I think came from living with my aunt for so long, I liked Homeira. She was large and funny and smiled easily, in the way most people do when their stomachs are full. I was also mesmerized by her hands, which appeared to be holding prisoner a large number of rings—like small hills of flesh laying siege to valleys of gold on her fingers. There was no way they could possibly be removed, so I guessed they’d have to stay there until the day she died or until someone cut off her fingers—maybe the Taliban, if they came back.

  Homeira’s husband was also quite fascinating in his fatness. If
I squinted, closing my eyes half shut as if I was looking into the sun, I could clearly see the shape of his thin face battling to come out of the folds. It was like watching a man drowning in skin.

  Not surprisingly, Homeira and her husband had made six plump children together—a collection of bellies waddling around the house on pudgy legs. They were friendly kids who shared their toys easily, and I was massively comforted to see my mother surrounded by such a large family, living in a house that was busy and alive and full of cheerful conversation. I was also relieved to know she’d be in no danger of starving.

  What was surprising, however, was the discovery that Georgie and I weren’t my mother’s only visitors. Twice in five days I caught Shir Ahmad leaving the house, shyly waving at me as we passed each other on the street.

  I guessed we’d soon have to have a talk, man to man.

  But even though I was happy to see my mother being looked after for once in her life, I found it really difficult to be without her. I didn’t say anything because May had told me to be strong, so after my first tears at seeing her alive I didn’t cry again. But the truth was, she was my mother and I missed her so much that I now had a constant ache pounding at my insides. In all my years I had never been without my mother. When I went to bed at night, I placed her chador and her smell over my pillow, praying to Allah that she missed me just as much as I missed her and that she wouldn’t decide to stay with Homeira’s happy fat family.

  As I struggled to get used to this new loneliness, I also sensed the same feeling in Georgie. The day after Christmas, Haji Khan had left for Dubai, telling her he had to sort out “some business” and promising to call. As usual Georgie spent the following days without him, holding her mobile phone and waiting for him to keep his promise.

  Therefore, because God always provides, we now clung to each other’s company in the new-winter evenings, tied together because we were one and the same.

  And it wasn’t only me and Georgie who missed the presence of my mother and Haji Khan; both James and May were also struggling to cope. Our family, which was made up of the motherless, husbandless, and, in two cases, wifeless, was dining pretty much every night on something called noodles—stringy lines of pasta that came from a package and were flavored with powdered water. It was okay at first, but after four nights I knew this wasn’t what our teachers would call a “well-balanced diet.”

  Therefore it came as a blessed relief when Georgie informed me we would be hosting a party at our house to celebrate New Year’s Eve—the foreigners’ one, not mine. As you would expect in a place recently visited by near-death, when we sat on the long cushions in the front room to discuss the matter, everyone agreed it should be a quiet affair. As we went through the options it was almost as if we were holding a mini Shura, a council of elders—without all the beards, of course—and it made me feel impossibly grown-up. Georgie explained she’d prefer something quiet because she “wasn’t feeling up to a big one”; May revealed she “hated half the fuckers left here over the holidays anyway”; and James went along with the plan simply because he was outnumbered by the women—and, I think, trying to prove he could be a responsible adult. “Yes, quite right,” he muttered. “We’ve got the boy to think about.” Therefore with no one up for “a big one,” it was agreed that one guest each would be invited by those that could be bothered and the food would be ordered in from the Lebanese restaurant down the road.

  The evening of New Year’s Eve, we placed a large board over the pool table and decorated it with candles. May and Georgie also brought six chairs from their offices, which they carried home in the back of a Toyota pickup Massoud had borrowed from his brother.

  As Georgie lit the eight candles on our new “table” and James mixed a bowl of alcohol that he called “punch,” the first of our guests arrived. His name was Philippe, and he was a friend of May’s. He was thin as a pencil with tufts of beard that didn’t connect and struggled to cover his sharp face. He was dressed in the Afghan salwar kameez and wore a pakol. When he entered the house, James rolled his eyes.

  “He’s only been in Afghanistan two months, and he’s French,” he whispered to me as I giggled at the man’s too-short trousers and badly rolled hat.

  Philippe ignored the comment, as well as James, and came over to shake my hand.

  “Salaam aleykum. How you are? What the name is it you are having?” He spoke to me in Dari.

  “I speak English,” I told him, in English.

  James laughed out loud, although I wasn’t making a joke. I was trying to be helpful, as the man was a guest in our house. “That’s my boy!” he shouted, then grabbed me in a headlock as May led her friend into the living room, spitting the word kids behind her.

  About twenty minutes later our next guest turned up, a friend of James’s who—it came as no surprise to anyone—was a woman. Unlike the Frenchman, who’d brought nothing to the party, she carried with her a bottle of wine and a tin of chocolate biscuits, which she handed over to Georgie. Her name was Rachel, and she came from a place called Ireland. She may have been pretty, but it was hard to tell because for some reason she had hidden her face under a mask of makeup that would have put an Afghan bride to shame.

  “You look, erm, stunning,” James said as he greeted her, kissing her on the cheek, which left his beard shining with glitter.

  “Really?” Rachel asked. “I was having a dreadful time of it before I came out. The electricity went off, and the generator ran out of fuel. I had to use candlelight! Can you believe it?”

  “Yes,” admitted May, coming into the kitchen to refill Philippe’s already empty glass with more punch.

  Rachel giggled but sounded scared. “You know, I just wanted to make some sort of effort—look a bit festive and all that?”

  “Well, you look divine,” James assured her.

  “She looks like Ziggy freakin’ Stardust,” May muttered under her breath.

  “Ziggy who?” I whispered to Georgie.

  “Shhh,” she said, passing me an orange juice. “May’s just being mean.”

  For the foreigners’ New Year’s Eve I had been declared Georgie’s guest of honor, although as I also lived in the house she could just as easily have been mine, and as the night wore on it became increasingly obvious that we were the only two people who actually appeared to get on with everyone.

  Everything began fairly well thanks to the food from Taverne du Liban, which was a great success. Within an hour we had demolished all the fatoush, the tabbouleh, eight small pastries filled with potato and spinach, a plate of meat patties that came with yogurt, side dishes of hummus, twelve skewers of chicken and lamb kebabs, as well as a small mountain of fluffy white pita breads. By the end of it all I was fit to burst and imagined this must be how Homeira’s family ate every night.

  Philippe and Rachel, however, didn’t eat half as much as those of us who lived in the house, though they probably hadn’t been living on watery noodles for the best part of a week. The Frenchman made excuses for his lack of appetite, saying he had a stomach upset. I didn’t believe him. He hadn’t run to the toilet even once during the meal, so I decided it had more to do with his mouth being busy with all the free alcohol my friends had provided, and the fact that he never shut up.

  Rachel also spent much of the evening picking at her food, but I sensed this was because she was nervous, as she kept playing with her hair. I also noticed that her eyes grew big as saucers every time she looked at James. I liked her because of that, and I really hoped James liked her too. Her makeup looked a lot prettier in the candlelight of the room rather than the bright, generator-made light of the kitchen, and her voice sounded soft like summer rain whenever she spoke, which wasn’t often because the Frenchman was pretty much holding us hostage with talk about himself.

  As Philippe went on and on and on, I saw James getting more and more irritated. It was easy to tell when he was annoyed because he’d constantly grab the back of his neck as if some pain needed to be rubbed away, and
he’d flick the ash of his cigarette with sharp, quick taps of his first finger.

  “I mean, it’s just so impossible to get anything done quickly here,” said Phillipe. “These people are so lazy.”

  “Like Fawad, you mean?” James asked, cocking his head and raising his left eyebrow, which made him look surprised, and also a little dangerous.

  “Well, no, he is obviously just a boy.”

  “Oh. His mother then, the woman who works for us sixteen hours a day? Or perhaps the guards who protect our lives for a month’s wages that wouldn’t even pay for the fancy dress you’re wearing?”

  “That’s enough, James,” May warned him quietly.

  James took the comment with an angry look, then ignored her.

  “Or perhaps you mean the bread guys who work from dawn to dusk in the blistering heat of their baking houses, or the shoe-shine boys who stand on our corner every day hoping to make a few afs, or the metal welders with their scarred skin and scorched eyes, or—”

  “That’s enough, I said!” May hit the table with her fist, causing us all to jump, Rachel most of all.

  “Well,” James said, lifting his voice and arms in surrender, “maybe when Philippe has been here for longer than eight weeks he might just be in a position to talk about another nation’s defects.”

  As James finished we all sat in embarrassed silence, even me, because although he had been sticking up for Afghans like me he had been rude to a guest, and in our culture that was as bad as calling someone’s mother a whore, or, worse still, using her as one.

  “I’ve been here ten weeks actually,” Philippe eventually said.

  As we all looked at him, not sure if he was making a joke or not, Georgie started laughing, then slowly the rest of us joined in, even James, who nodded his head and lifted his glass to knock it against the Frenchman’s.