Born Under a Million Shadows

by Andrea Busfield

  I noticed it was the gray patu Haji Khan had given her.

  “Well,” she began, “when Fawad’s friend Spandi died we went to the funeral in Khair Khana, as you know, and I saw Khalid there. It was the first time since the miscarriage, and, as you might expect, coupled with the occasion, it was quite an emotional moment. We didn’t speak at the funeral, it wouldn’t have been right, but he turned up at the house a little later and I spoke to him outside in his car. He was distraught, Hugo. If you could have seen him, it would have broken your heart. It was as if—”

  “Fawad!”

  My mother’s voice rang out like the crack of a bullet in the graying sky, and I slammed myself flat against the ground.

  “Fawad!” she shouted again. “Fawad!”

  Cursing my bad luck, I crawled farther into the shadow until I was clear and could get to my feet and walk around to the yard without being seen coming from the garden.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said when I emerged. “Come, I need to speak to you.”

  I wasn’t very happy about it, but I followed my mother into her room. It was clean and tidy, and the television stood silent for a change. I also thought she looked unusually nervous, as if she had done something wrong, which was normally my job in our life together.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “What do you mean ‘what’s happened?’ ” she asked back, seating herself on a cushion and holding out her arms for me to join her.

  “You look . . . weird,” I said.

  “Ho, that’s a nice thing to say to your mother, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the truth,” I protested.

  “Well, I suppose that’s okay then.”

  She laughed, and I noticed how pretty her eyes were looking that night, like beautiful green lights.

  “Okay, Fawad.” My mother leaned forward and took both my hands in her own. “I need to speak to you about something, and if you don’t like what you hear, then you just tell me and I promise I won’t mention it again. Not ever.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a coldness creep into my insides—the same coldness that must have crept into Georgie when she was about to tell Dr. Hugo that Haji Khan wanted to make her his wife, causing her to hold on tighter to her patu.

  “Wait a minute,” I added, an idea suddenly turning the shiver in my heart into something much nicer and warmer, “are you going to get married?”

  “What? How . . .”

  My mother pulled away, clearly shocked, and I felt immediately terrible for saying something she found so ugly to hear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “No, don’t be sorry, Fawad. I’m . . . I’m just surprised you asked, that’s all, because it’s sort of what I want to talk to you about.”

  She paused.

  I paused.

  In the silence, our eyes held, and I felt how strong our love for each other was.

  “Shir Ahmad has asked me to marry him,” she finally said, “and I want to know what you think about the idea and about him becoming your father. If you say no, that’s it, son. We’ll never discuss it again, and I won’t think any less of you. But you have to know he is a good man, Fawad, and I think he can offer us a real future. It’s a chance for us to live some kind of normal life, as a family, as an Afghan family, not a crazy mix of Afghan and foreign. I want to be settled. More important, I want you to be settled. But you are my son, and this marriage can only ever go ahead with your permission.”

  When my mother stopped talking, I felt the trembling in her fingers and I let go of them to get to my feet. Slowly, I walked over to the window, where I stood looking out for a time, shaking my head and rubbing at my eyes as if a great pain had suddenly invaded my body. I then sighed, loud and hard, and turned back to look at my mother.

  Her face had turned downward, and she was staring at the floor.

  “It’s okay, Fawad,” she whispered, “don’t worry. I’ll tell Shir Ahmad—”

  “Yes, Mother! Tell him yes!” I shouted, jumping over to her and grabbing her around the neck to plant a thousand sweet kisses on her face. “It’s about time!” I added, laughing hard because my mother had grabbed me by the waist and was tickling my stomach in punishment.

  26

  I’D NEVER HAD many secrets in my life, mainly because people don’t trust children with things that are important, so most of the time I just made them up. But now that I actually had a head full of the damn things, they didn’t seem half as much fun as they should have been. After thinking about it in bed, right up to the point when my eyes gave up and closed for the night, I decided the main problem with having a secret is that you’re not allowed to tell anyone about it. And when you can’t tell anyone about it, well, what’s the point in even having it?

  And I didn’t just have one; I had loads of them. So far, Haji Khan had asked Georgie to be his wife, but I couldn’t say anything because I was pretending to be asleep when I heard about it. Dr. Hugo had almost certainly been told something “formal and serious,” but I couldn’t ask him about it because I was spying when he got told. I couldn’t tell anyone about my mother’s news because after she told me she made me promise to keep quiet until she’d been to Khair Khana to visit her sister. I couldn’t even have a man-to-man talk with Shir Ahmad about his future prospects or where he imagined we might live because my mother was torturing him with silence. I hoped for her sake that he didn’t ask another woman in the meantime. Sometimes Afghan men just want to get married, and it’s not really important who says yes to them.

  In Afghanistan there are quite a few ways for men and women to get married: it can be arranged between, and inside, families; it can be a business deal or, as Mulallah nearly discovered, the payment of a debt; and there’s even a system called badal where families make a trade—one family gives their daughter to another so she can marry their son, and in return that family gives their daughter to them so their son can marry. This way nobody has to pay for anything. But although it’s cheap, it’s not the best system in the world because it can get very complicated, and in the end everybody has blood with everybody else and this makes their babies die.

  I think this is maybe what happened to Pir Hederi and his wife. He once told me they had never had a child that had lived over the age of two years, and this came down to the “bad blood” between them. Pir said that when their blood mixed, it turned to fire in the bodies of their babies, damaging their brains, until eventually it killed them.

  I felt a bit sorry for Pir when he told me about his dead children because I reckoned that given the chance he would have been a good father. You only had to look at the way he treated me and Jamilla, and the way he used to take care of Spandi.

  “You live, you lose, you die,” Pir grumbled one day as the radio spoke of another bomb that had come to eat away at some families in Kandahar. “Who in their right mind would bring a child into this world of ours?” It wouldn’t have been nice to remind Pir Hederi that he and his wife had in fact tried and failed to do just that, so I said nothing.

  Of course, Pir Hederi wasn’t the only man without a son; there was also Shir Ahmad. But at least he had his computer school to keep his thoughts busy. And maybe one day he would make a baby with my mother. Who knew? In fact, who knew anything for certain?

  The only sure thing in this life as far as I could see was that no one would ever be able to hold two watermelons in one hand.

  The following day after school, which had been as boring as a room full of women, I was surprised to find Haji Khan waiting in his Land Cruiser for me at the gate. I then realized it was a full week since we had buried Spandi and it was time for prayer.

  Even though it was another sad occasion, my face couldn’t help smiling, because Haji Khan had not only remembered my friend, and me, but also recently saved Mulallah from an old man with curled fingers; he’d helped her mother put the fat back on her bones; he wanted to marry Georgie instead of shame her as a girlfrie
nd; and whether he was a drug lord or not, he had this year decided not to be one.

  “Ready?” was all he said as he brought down the window to speak to me.

  “What about my bike?” I asked.

  Haji Khan mumbled something behind him, and the big man with the big gun who had traveled with us to Khair Khana the last time appeared. He picked up my bike and placed it carefully in the back of the Land Cruiser. Haji Khan then nodded at me to get in.

  Inside, I leaned forward to give him my hand.

  “How is everyone?” he asked.

  “Good,” I answered. “Georgie was very happy because of the help you gave Mulallah’s family.”

  “Was she?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. The family deserved a little luck.”

  I was going to make a joke about luck and Baba Gul’s cards, but then I remembered myself.

  “Haji Sahib?” I asked. “Why don’t you have as many bodyguards with you these days?”

  This was now the third time I’d seen Haji Khan with only one of his men instead of his usual army.

  “Because it is better this way,” he replied. And when he looked in the mirror and saw the next question arriving in my eyes, he added, “At some point, if you’re trying to convince people that the country is changing for the better, you’ve got to start believing it yourself—and even if you don’t, you’ve at least got to give the impression that you do.”

  When we returned from Spandi’s prayers, Haji Khan dropped me off at Pir Hederi’s shop because I was already late for work. As soon as I set foot in the door I could see the old man was up to one of his schemes, and by the grin on his face it was going to involve me.

  “We’re going into the food business!” he told me as I came to sit on a crate of Pepsi beside him. “That’s the future, Fawad—Pir Hederi’s Take-out Service.”

  “Don’t people already take out food from the shop?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, in a way they do . . . but I’m talking snack food, that sort of thing. It was your friend James who gave me the idea.”

  I groaned in reply. James was almost as crazy as Pir Hederi with his get-rich-quick schemes. Lately, after talking to someone, the journalist had become convinced that one of the mountains in the Hindu Kush had a secret door leading to a cave filled with treasure, so he spent all of his time looking through old papers from the Mines Department and learning how to rock climb with the help of the Internet. My guess was that if there was treasure hiding in Afghanistan’s mountains, it would probably be on sale in a Pakistani market by now, along with all the rest of our old stuff.

  “So, what’s the idea?”

  “Well, your friend James came in here looking for this thing called ‘sandwich.’ Apparently, that’s bread filled with something.”

  “I do know what a sandwich is.”

  “Good! Then we’re halfway there! Apparently all the foreigners are crazy for these things. So I’ve been trying some out.”

  Pir pulled out a tray from underneath the counter. It was piled high with folded-over pieces of naan bread.

  “What happened to the ones at the end?” I asked, picking up one of Pir’s homemade “sandwiches.”

  “Let me see.” Pir reached out, and I placed the ragged piece of naan in his hand. “Oh right,” he said. “Dog must have got to that. Anyway, have a taste and tell me what you think.”

  “I’m not eating that one,” I said, pushing Pir’s hand away.

  “Don’t be so gay,” he replied, taking a bite—and quickly spitting it out again. “Allah wept. No wonder the old boy didn’t finish it off. Write it down, Fawad: onion and mango don’t mix.”

  “Onion and mango?”

  “Why not? James said the more exotic a sandwich is, the better.”

  “He was messing with your head!” I said, although in truth I’d seen him eating banana in bread before, which I didn’t think would be the choice of most normal people.

  “Okay,” Pir continued, never one for giving up, “try the ones on the tray. Jamilla made most of them before she went to school.”

  Because I was hungry, and because this was my job—such as it was—I did as he ordered. Fifteen minutes later we had two lists. Cheese and tomato, peanut butter, cucumber and mutton, strawberry jam, yogurt and kebab, egg and chicken—they all worked. Lettuce and cream, mashed-up apple, honey and onion, honey and cheese, mustard and egg, and boiled carrots definitely didn’t.

  Pir clapped his hands, waking Dog, who was asleep on the step of the shop.

  “We’ll get the wife to cook up more of this stuff tonight, and Jamilla can do the sandwiching tomorrow, and when you return from school you can go out and sell them.”

  “I thought you said this was a take-out Service!”

  “Ah yes, I did, didn’t I? Okay, you take out half of what we’ve made at lunchtime, and when you’ve sold them you can come back for any I’ve got left.”

  “Great . . .”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t mean . . . oh, forget it.” I couldn’t really see any point in arguing with the old man because it was quite clear he had made up his mind. “You do know I’m in mourning, don’t you?”

  People are always dying in Afghanistan. That’s just the way it goes. And maybe because people are always dying, the ones who are left alive don’t spend that much time thinking about the ones who are dead. They just get on with things. And even though I knew Pir Hederi liked Spandi a lot—I’d even seen his white eyes lose tears at the burial—he was now getting on with things. More to the point, he was making me get on with his things.

  Despite my strongest prayers the night before, when I returned to the shop the next day after school I found him waiting for me at the door. He had a metal tray in his hand loaded with his “sandwiches.” Rather rudely, I thought, he hardly gave me the chance to wheel my bike inside before he was pushing me out of the door.

  “We’ve got no time to lose,” he shouted, trying to keep Dog’s face away from the food with his free hand, “lunchtime is nearly over. Get yourself over to the Pakistani Embassy. There’s always a massive line of people outside, and they’ll be starving, I bet.”

  “I’m starving,” I told him.

  “Oh.” Pir paused to think about how this piece of news might affect his plan to take over the take-out world before telling me, “Okay, you can eat on the way.” He passed me the tray. “Only one,” he warned as I walked out the door, “and make sure it’s egg. They’re already starting to smell like hell.”

  I walked across the main road, past Wazir’s mosque and the small row of shops selling airline tickets to places in the world I’d never even heard of and would probably never get to see, and turned right, onto the street with the Pakistani Embassy. Pir Hederi was correct: there were tons of people lining up against the wall, all hoping to get visas. Looking at them, I wondered what it was that made so many people want to go to a place they pretty much blamed for everything. But I guessed anywhere was better than nowhere when you had nothing.

  Of course, when you had nothing you weren’t going to waste the money you didn’t have on sandwiches.

  “How much?” One man laughed when I told him the price of two hundred afs that Pir Hederi had set. “I could buy a damn sheep for that.”

  “Yeah, but you couldn’t get it slaughtered, sliced, and placed between bread for the same price,” I countered, quickly dodging the back of his hand.

  “I’ll give you ten afs,” another man said.

  “That’s very kind of you,” I replied, “but you’ll still have to pay for a sandwich.”

  As I began to draw quite a crowd—mainly those who wanted something for nothing—a policeman came over and told me to move along. I was causing a disturbance, apparently. And, apparently, he could arrest me for that. As I was too young to spend the rest of my life in prison for a tray of sandwiches nobody wanted to buy, I did as I was told and walked off toward the barricaded openings of the American camps nearby.<
br />
  I sat down by the side of the road to wait for passing soldiers and told myself that after nearly losing my freedom I deserved more than one crappy naan bread filled with egg turning green. I opened up a few of the newspaper-wrapped parcels and settled for cucumber and mutton. Although the bread was getting hard around the edges, I had to admit the sandwich tasted pretty good.

  “Hey, little fella!”

  I looked up into the glaring sun and kind of saw the blacked-out face of Dr. Hugo.

  “Hey, Dr. Hugo! Do you want a sandwich?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  He picked the top sandwich from the pile and opened it up.

  “Peanut butter,” I said. “Nice choice. That will be two hundred afs, please.”

  Dr. Hugo smiled and came to sit by my side.

  “No, I’m serious,” I said.

  “Oh.” He dipped into his pocket and pulled out five dollars. “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  For a while we sat there saying nothing because our mouths were too busy trying to chew Pir’s sandwiches. As I had a head start on the doctor, I finished first.

  “So, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  Dr. Hugo swallowed hard and coughed a bit. “I was seeing the Americans about some medical supplies—nothing that interesting.”

  “Oh.”

  He continued eating. Then he stopped chewing, pushing his mouthful into a cheek in order to speak.

  “Look, Fawad, I’ve been meaning to ask you something . . .”

  “Okay.”

  I hoped to God it wasn’t another damn secret coming my way.

  “Well . . .” Dr Hugo looked a bit embarrassed, and as he searched for the words and gulped down his sandwich he put a hand through his hair, leaving in it a smudge of peanut butter. “Do you know where Haji Khalid Khan has his house in Kabul?”

  I looked at the doctor, trying to work out in his eyes what he was up to as I nodded my head slowly.

  “Good. That’s excellent news. That really is. Now, can you possibly take me there?”

  I picked up another sandwich and bit into it. Tomato, onion, cucumber, and honey—not a combination I remembered being on the list Pir and I put together. It tasted like rat vomit.