Born Under a Million Shadows

by Andrea Busfield

  And so I took these pictures and sounds, and I stored them in my head so that I would always remember that there was more to Afghanistan and Afghans than war and killing.

  “When I was about your age one of my best friends died.”

  Haji Khan was driving and smoking. Beside him was a man with a gun that looked as terrifying as he did. I was sittings in the back, feeling small.

  I looked up at his words and caught him watching me in the rearview mirror. His eyes were dark as night, and his forehead was broken by lines above heavy black eyebrows. He looked both fearsome and kind, which should be impossible, and I remembered Georgie’s story about the time he had traveled to see her in a Shinwar village so many years ago.

  “How?” I asked. “How did your friend die?”

  “We were playing by the river in Surkhrud, a village just outside Jalalabad where the water runs red from the mountains. He fell in and drowned.”

  “It must have been a deep river.”

  “No, not really. I think he hit his head on some rocks when he slipped because, when I realized he wasn’t fooling around and I tried to pull him out, there was a deep cut on his head.”

  “You thought he was playing?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I did. Hey! Mother of a cow!”

  Haji Khan suddenly swerved the car to avoid a one-legged man riding a bicycle almost into our path. After sounding his horn and frowning at the cripple, who would soon lose the other leg if he wasn’t more careful, Haji Khan looked at me apologetically.

  “Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Best not tell Georgie I said that.”

  “Said what?” I asked.

  And he looked at me in the mirror again, smiling with his eyes.

  “So, how did you feel when your friend died?” I asked.

  “Not good.”

  “I don’t feel very good either,” I admitted.

  “You won’t right now,” Haji Khan replied with a shrug, “and maybe you never will. I still think of my friend even today.”

  “Ho . . . that’s a long time.”

  “Yes,” Haji Khan agreed. “Sometimes I think the dead have it easy. The difficult part is staying alive and, more than that, wanting to stay alive.”

  When we arrived back at the house, Haji Khan reached into the space between the two front seats of his Land Cruiser where a little drawer was hidden. He pulled out a book and passed it back to me. It was covered with the softest leather, like a baby’s skin, and inside were about a hundred handwritten poems in Pashto. When I flicked through the pages I saw the verses were all about love, each and every one of them.

  I looked at Haji Khan, not sure what to say.

  “It’s not for you.” He laughed, obviously picking up on the worry that had crept into my head. “It’s for Georgie. But maybe you can read these poems to her now and again because she’s been very lazy and hasn’t learned Pashto.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, relieved. “Did you write them?”

  “Me?” He laughed again. “No. A man from my village wrote them. He’s blessed with the gift. I am only blessed with the money to get him to write his words down on paper.”

  “But Georgie doesn’t understand one word of Pashto,” I reminded him.

  “No, she doesn’t. But she knows the sound of love, and she knows the word for love.”

  Mina. Love. My sister.

  “Also,” Haji Khan added, breaking into my thoughts, “will you tell her that I’ve prepared the house for her, ready for when she comes? Ismerai will be there.”

  “Where will you be?” I asked.

  “I’ll be . . . giving her time.”

  Back in the house, I couldn’t deliver Haji Khan’s message because Georgie was nowhere to be found. As it was still early, I guessed she was probably still in her office sorting out goats to comb. It came as no surprise to me that James was at home, however. As I fetched myself a glass of water, he jumped on me.

  “Psst! Fawad! Come here!”

  I sighed, heavily and dramatically so he would understand the full force of my tiredness.

  “I’m not playing any of your stupid games,” I told him. “And besides, I’m sure they’re against Islam.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” James asked, looking slightly hurt. “Twister, my dear fellow, is not against Islam. It is a competition involving skill and agility—that’s sort of like being good at moving—and great courage.”

  I looked at James and raised my eyebrows in the way May did when she knew he was talking rubbish.

  “Okay, okay,” he admitted, “it also allows you to touch ladies’ bottoms.”

  “See! I told you it was against Islam!”

  “Details, Fawad, only details. Now come with me, I want to show you something.”

  As ordered, I followed James into the living room and over to the table where May liked to do her work. On top of it sat a small box and some green and silver paper.

  “Right,” he said, “take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

  He passed me the box. I opened it and found a beautiful ring inside, a silver circle with a cover of gold on top that had been carefully marked with tiny scratched flowers.

  I looked at James, not sure what to say.

  “Don’t give me that look!” He laughed. “It’s for Rachel. I just wanted to see if you think she would like it before I wrapped it up.”

  “I’m sure she will. Are you getting married?” I asked, surprise making my voice climb high.

  “What? No! No, of course not,” James replied with even more surprise. “It’s for her birthday.”

  “Oh.”

  “Fuck! You don’t think that she’ll think that I’m proposing, do you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Oh, fuck!” whispered James, pulling at his hair, which could really have done with a wash. “Fuck! Fuck! Fucking fuck!”

  A little after the sound of evening prayers had floated across the sky and my mother had skipped across the road to see Homeira “about something,” Georgie came home with Dr. Hugo following behind her. This gave me something of a problem. I really liked the doctor—he was gentle and kind, and he closed the holes in children whose legs had been blown off by land mines—but I was a bit mixed-up as to who I liked best, him or Haji Khan. Dr. Hugo saved Afghans, but Haji Khan was Afghan. Either way, I didn’t think I should give Georgie the book filled with poems right there in front of him, and as I knew I couldn’t hide my heart from my eyes, or even keep my mouth shut, I stayed in my room.

  Within ten minutes Georgie came to find me.

  “Why are you hiding in here?” she asked after I shouted permission for her to come in when she knocked at my door.

  “I’m getting some rest,” I lied.

  “Really? Had a busy day, did we?”

  And of course I couldn’t stop the truth from slipping out.

  “Yes, it was quite busy actually. Haji Khan came for me, and we went in his car to Khair Khana with a man with a gun to pray for Spandi. Then he brought me home and told me about his best friend who died after hitting his head in the red river when he was a boy, and then he gave me a book and he said I should read it to you sometimes because you’re lazy.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  I reached for the book hiding under my pillow and gave it to her. Georgie gently took it in her hands, stroking the skin of it with her long white fingers before opening it carefully.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and I nodded.

  “He also told me that the house was ready for you and that Ismerai would be there.”

  Georgie nodded. “That’s kind,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you were going to Jalalabad.”

  “I’ve some work to do there. I’ll be leaving tomorrow because I need to speak to Baba Gul about his goats again.” Georgie looked a little sad. “Hey! Shall we ask your mother if you can come with me?”

  I thought about it for
a second and, because I didn’t really feel like traveling and I felt I should concentrate on Spandi a little more, I was going to say no, but then I remembered Salman Khan and I turned left instead of right.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Great!” Georgie smiled and moved back toward the door, holding the book Haji Khan had made for her in one of her hands and hanging the other in the air for me to grab. “Now come with me,” she ordered. “I think something interesting is about to happen.”

  In the front room of the big house a mat had been set on the floor and food had been brought in from Taverne du Liban and placed on paper plates in front of May, her hairy friend Geraldine, Dr. Hugo, James, and Rachel, who must have sneaked in when I wasn’t looking, which kind of proved that I wasn’t feeling myself yet.

  James looked like death.

  “Hello, Rachel, happy birthday!” I said.

  “Hello, Fawad, thank you very much. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, okay, not too bad,” I replied.

  “Good,” she said in her special singsong voice. “Sometimes we all just need a little time.”

  Because it was Rachel’s birthday I swallowed the “tut” rising in my throat and smiled. I then went to sit next to her as she had moved over to make room for me. It was quite lucky, really, because James was opposite us and it gave me a fantastic view of his face. His skin was whiter than paper.

  As ever, the food from the Lebanese restaurant disappeared down our throats faster than a boy born before his father. However, James hardly touched a thing, and as we washed down our meal with fizzing Pepsi—laughing because it made Geraldine do the loudest burp I’d ever heard come out of a woman’s mouth—the journalist got quieter and quieter until his face nearly turned green and I thought he was going to vomit.

  “Present time!” shouted Georgie, with a wink at James.

  “Yes, yes,” agreed James, who didn’t sound like he wanted to agree at all.

  When Rachel clapped her hands and squealed like a girl, he pulled back, as though he’d just been bitten.

  I was finding it quite funny.

  Georgie was the first to hand over her present, a beautiful green scarf that really looked pretty on Rachel. Next, Dr. Hugo gave her a little plastic case that held bandages, some needles, some ointment, and other things that might be useful in an emergency but were hardly the stuff of dreams. After Dr. Hugo, May presented Rachel with a framed photo of some buzkashi players from Mazar-e Sharif, saying it was from her “and Geri.”

  “And, erm, here’s a little something from me,” said James finally. “Many happy returns.”

  He didn’t sound too convincing, and his arm looked weak as jelly as he held out the little box covered with sparkling green and silver. Not that Rachel seemed to notice.

  “Oooh,” she said, tearing open the package and carefully opening the box.

  As the silver and gold shone in her eyes, everyone stopped talking and held their breath. Rachel slowly picked up the ring and turned it in her fingers.

  “It’s beautiful, James,” she said quietly. “And I’m so honored, really I am. It’s such a wonderful thing to do. But . . . really . . . I’m sorry . . . there’s absolutely no way I can marry you.”

  James groaned. “I was afraid this might happen,” he said. “It’s just a ring, Rachel, I didn’t mean—”

  He stopped midsentence because everyone was laughing at him, Rachel the hardest of all.

  “I know, James!” she said. “I’m joking! Georgie told me about your little panic attack!”

  James groaned again and slapped his forehead, which brought some of the color running back to his face.

  “But the ring really is beautiful,” Rachel told him. “Thank you. I’ll treasure it always.”

  “My pleasure—I think.”

  James grinned as he leaned across the floor mat to give her a kiss.

  “Hey,” he said as he moved back to his place, “what do you mean you wouldn’t marry me?”

  Rachel giggled. “Look at you! You’re a mess, darling, a big scruffy—and most of the time drunken—mess. How could I ever take you home to meet my parents?”

  “Now hang on—”

  “And besides, your surname is Allcock!”

  “That’s a very noble old English name, I think you’ll find.”

  “That may be so, James, but I can’t go through the rest of my life being known as Mrs. Allcock!”

  And everyone burst out laughing, apart from James, who looked disappointed, and me, because I thought Rachel would make a lovely Mrs. Allcock. Judging by the small shadows now crossing James’s face, I think he did too.

  24

  AS WE WOUND our way around the gray mountains down to the blue of Surobi and into the flatness of green that took us to Jalalabad, it struck me that this was a journey that usually followed some kind of disaster in my life—first it was James’s knife in the Frenchman’s ass, and now it was Spandi’s death—and I couldn’t help wondering what catastrophe might pour soil on my head if I ever came this way again. Would my mother have died? Would Jamilla have been sold for a night of hashish? Would I have woken up one day to find a rat running around Kabul with my nose in its stomach?

  The more I thought about it, the more it spoiled the journey, to be honest. I was also sweating in the backseat like a fat man wrapped in a patu because the air-conditioning was broken. Even though Jalalabad was only a few hours away from Kabul, the sun was about one hundred times stronger, and the heat of it filled my mouth in the closed space of the Land Cruiser that had come to pick us up before lunch.

  Georgie did little to make the journey any more fun as she sat in the front seat talking to her office most of the time, because the mobile phone reception kept disappearing halfway through her conversations.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked me eventually, snapping her phone shut as we came to a stop in front of the Durunta tunnel. Two giant trucks were trapped inside facing each other, unable to pass and unable to go backward because of all the other cars, taxis, and Land Cruisers that had arrived to block them in.

  “I’m starving actually,” I replied.

  That morning I’d eaten only a little bread and honey because eggs were now off the menu thanks to a report my mother had heard on the news. Apparently we were all about to die from bird flu, so anything that had anything to do with chickens was now officially banned from the house.

  “Good, let’s get out then,” Georgie said.

  We left the car with the driver because we knew it wouldn’t be going anywhere fast and jumped into the chaos of the street. Around us, the air was thick with bad-tempered shouting and angry car horns as a group of policemen tried to sort out the mess. As usual, everyone was pretty much ignoring them, even getting out of their vehicles to bark their own orders, while other cars tried to overtake and squeeze past one another, hoping somehow to force their way into the tunnel.

  I imagined that if I was a bird looking down from the sky, the road might look like it was covered by a giant blanket of metal.

  Weaving our way past rattling engines, we reached one of the fish restaurants lining the road. Outside, a man stood in front of a metal bowl that was spitting oil. He waved us inside, away from the smell of burning fat and heavy car fumes.

  We walked past him, through a small room where a group of men sat on the floor tearing apart bits of fish with their bread or picking bones as thin as needles from their mouths. We nodded at them, they nodded back, and we walked out through a door at the back of the restaurant.

  In front of us, Durunta’s blue-green lake shone its colors before a jagged line of brown mountains. It was incredibly beautiful. And it would have been incredibly peaceful too if the air hadn’t been filled with the sound of men insulting one another’s mothers.

  A small, thin man with a small, thin mustache and no beard waved us into another small room balanced on the edge of the lake. Inside there was a massive window, and the man got to work with a cloth, shooing away a clo
ud of flies that buzzed around in circles before landing back in their original positions.

  We sat down on bright red cushions dotted with greasy fingerprints, and Georgie ordered two cans of Pepsi, a plate of naan bread, and some fish.

  I looked out of the window that didn’t have any glass in it and saw a tiny boat covered in pretty colored ribbons playing out on the water. Below us I also saw a small boy, about my age, scrambling up the hill from the lake. The top half of his body was naked, and his trouser bottoms, patchy with wet, had been rolled up.

  “Well, at least the food is fresh,” Georgie commented, because the boy was holding a plastic bowl filled with flapping bony lake fish.

  “Yes, that’s one thing,” I agreed, falling back onto the dirty cushions. “So, why do you need to see Baba Gul again?”

  “I need to finalize some details,” Georgie replied. “The organization I work for just received a load of money, and we’ve got a great opportunity to really move this cashmere project forward.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, we’ve been trying to get businesspeople to invest, and an Italian company has shown an interest in buying into a factory here. That would bring a lot of jobs, Fawad. It would also create a demand for cashmere, giving hundreds of thousands of farmers an extra source of income. I want Baba Gul and his family to be a part of that. Besides, I thought it would give you a chance to say hi to your girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend!” I protested, hitting Georgie with a fly swatter that had been left on the floor.

  “But you know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “Oh, shut up, Georgie!”

  “Oh, shut up, Fawad!”

  Smiling, we both began to pick at the bony fish that had arrived on paper plates. And as I ate I thought of Mulallah running through the fields with her red scarf streaming from her neck like the tail of a firework, and I wondered whether Georgie was right and whether Mulallah would become my girlfriend.

  After lunch we didn’t stop at Haji Khan’s house; we kept on driving right through Jalalabad, beeping nonstop at the people, cars, and tuk-tuks racing like ants around the yellow streets, on past the picture of Haji Abdul Qadir and into the tunnel of trees until we came to the turn that took us to Shinwar.