They explained they’d travelled by coach from Kabul to the city of Herat in western Afghanistan. From there, they had crossed the border into Iran, where they swapped coaches to travel here.
We didn’t really get into the details of why we’d all had to flee; I think there was an unspoken assumption that there must have been good reasons, otherwise why would we be there?
‘Have you eaten yet?’ Baryalai smiled at me warmly. There was something about him that made me feel safe.
I hadn’t eaten since Peshawar. I was starving.
‘We have some food. Come, eat.’ Mehran was already piling fried rice from a steel container on to a plate. The food looked reassuringly similar to Afghan food.
I had so many questions in my head: how long were we staying there? What was happening next? Just one passed my lips: ‘Where is my brother?’
‘Your brother?’
‘Hazrat. He should be here. Is he in a different room?’
Baryalai looked at me and frowned.
‘There are ten other Afghans. They are with different agents – we are the only ones belonging to Qubat. But none of them is called Hazrat.’
‘But they promised.’
‘“They” make a lot of promises, Gulwali.’
I went silent. I think they could see I was scared and depressed, so they suggested we go for a walk. I was surprised we were allowed to go out by ourselves, and I jumped at the chance.
We wandered through a nearby park eating watermelon. Finally, I was able to ask all the questions I needed, including one which had been perplexing me ever since I arrived at the hotel: ‘What is “Qubat”? Is it Farsi for “kebab”?’
They all roared with laughter.
‘What’s so funny?’
Mehran wiped tears from his eyes. ‘I thought I was stupid, but this kid is really dumb.’
Baryalai spoke next. ‘Gulwali, “Qubat” is the main agent from Kabul who we paid to get us here.’
‘But I didn’t pay anyone.’
‘No, but your family did. Qubat is a people-smuggler. A big guy. I think I met one of your uncles when I was there in Kabul. I heard him arranging for Qubat to take his two nephews.’
‘Is Qubat here? He’ll know where Hazrat is.’
‘No, Gulwali.’ Baryalai’s tone softened. ‘As I explained, he’s the big guy. He lives in Kabul. I only met him once. He has guys working for him over here. He organized it all, and he’s got our money. He’s got every rupee I ever had. That’s all I know.’
‘But what about Hazrat?’
Facing me, Baryalai put his hand on my shoulder and stooped slightly so that he was looking straight into my eyes. ‘Little man, I think they lied to you. You have to forget your brother for the time being. We’re your brothers now.’
I didn’t want to embarrass myself by crying in front of my new friends, so I bit hard on my lip.
But Baryalai had noticed. ‘Try not to cry. Your uncle paid for you both, so he’ll be somewhere on the same journey. I am sure you’ll meet him again soon.’
Chapter Five
Early the next evening, we left the temporary security of the hotel. We had a long coach journey ahead, driving to the city of Esfahan, then on to the Iranian capital, Tehran.
While I was reassured by my new travelling companions, I still felt very lost and scared. Every time I thought of home, my grandmother or my little brothers and sisters, I couldn’t stop my tears. And when I thought of Hazrat – taken God only knew where – I felt physically sick.
The hotel manager drove us to the coach station and bought us our tickets. The bus tickets had assigned seats; ours were the long back row.
Baryalai wasn’t happy. ‘This is dodgy. If the police come on board they will see us straight away. Get us a different seat.’
The manager looked exasperated. ‘It was full. These were the last seats.’
‘So we’ll take the next bus,’ insisted Baryalai.
‘It’s not for six hours. They are expecting you in Tehran tomorrow evening. If you delay, you’ll miss your pick-up.’
Baryalai still wasn’t pleased.
I didn’t want him to be sad, so I tried to reassure him: ‘It’s OK. We’ll manage.’ But as the coach left Mashhad for Tehran, I felt as if I was driving further and further away from everything I knew.
I was small enough to find some small measure of comfort on the vinyl seats of the bus. When not sleeping, I snacked from a packet of salted sunflower seeds and watched as Iran unfolded outside the window. It looked so clean and organized. Unlike back home, the roads were asphalted and smooth, and I loved how many of the modern-looking buildings were festooned with strings of coloured lights.
Every few hours the driver stopped to refuel, or for meals. We would pile out, grateful to stretch our legs and visit the bathroom. At some point during the night, I woke as the bus pulled into a larger terminus. Dozy and confused, I stumbled into the cool air. The depot was overflowing with tired travellers blinking away sleep. Their clothing and hats marked them out as decidedly Persian. There were few women around, but those who were tended to fall into two categories: the older ones wore full black robes that covered their heads and bodies but left their faces showing; the younger ones wore jeans and long tunics or belted coats, with brightly coloured scarves covering their hair.
Being the pious twelve-year-old that I was, I found it unsettling to see so many women outside without their faces covered. I was still thinking of my province, where women were rarely outside the home, and when they were, they wore the traditional blue burqa.
The depot was full of enterprising stall-owners, all selling their wares to hungry and thirsty travellers. Decorated stalls sold rows of tempting dates, mangoes, apricots and oranges; others displayed myriad different-coloured marzipan sweets and decorated little cakes, along with cans of Coke and cups of sweet black tea.
I was entranced, and started walking between the rows. I was so busy, in fact, looking at the mouthwatering wares, that I lost all track of time – I came to with a sudden realization: the driver had told us to be no more than ten minutes.
I ran back to where the coach was and opened the door with a puff of relief. Only to see an unfamiliar driver.
Panicking, I stepped back and looked left and right. There was row upon row of identical-looking coaches. Where was mine?
My heart was pounding. My passport was on the bus, along with most of my money. I ran up and down the rows of coaches searching for mine, but they all looked the same.
My face was becoming hot and tearful; I pushed people out of the way.
‘Hey, kid, watch what you’re doing.’
I glared back though teary eyes. ‘I’ve got to find my bus,’ I said, forcing my way through a gap in the crowd. Blind panic was setting in. What if they’d gone without me? Surely the others wouldn’t let that happen?
My tears were flowing so much now I could hardly see; my heart was pounding so hard I thought my chest would explode. Where was I? What town were we in?
I realized I didn’t even know that.
I had no idea how to survive in a foreign country. I was just a little boy. How could this be happening to me? Where would I go? What would I do?
I let out an angry sob. ‘Morya. I want my morya.’ In my panic, I continued to run, shoving my way past the back of the next bus. And straight into a familiar form.
‘Gulwali. Where the hell have you been?’ Mehran looked truly furious.
‘I got lost. I’m sorry. I thought you’d gone.’
‘We nearly did. The driver wanted to leave. Come on, we have to get back on now.’
As I slumped into my seat, I could barely look the others in the eye.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Baryalai.
I couldn’t show them weakness. ‘Yes. Fine.’
‘Make s
ure you stick close to us in future.’
I tried to rest as the bus roared through the night, and eventually sank into a fitful sleep.
When I next opened my eyes, I thought my journey to freedom might be over before it had begun: an Iranian soldier was sitting right next to me. Had we been arrested?
I opened my mouth to speak, but Baryalai quickly spoke for me. He was talking in Dari, the Afghan language very close to the soldier’s Farsi. It meant that it was obvious we were Afghans, but at least he and the soldier could converse easily.
‘Good morning, Gulwali.’ His eyes implored mine not to say anything.
I couldn’t quite work out what was going on. The solider was chatting to my friends casually, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. If he’d come to arrest us, why hadn’t he already done it?
I sat as quiet as a mouse, not daring to say a word.
As they conversed, however, I realized the soldier wasn’t there to harm us. It turned out that he’d just finished his duties and was on his way home to see his parents, just a bus passenger like us. He asked us polite questions about how we were finding Iran and did we like the scenery. He seemed very proud of his country. I guess he just assumed we were on holiday, or working there. It’s not unusual to see Afghans in Iran; many Afghans go there for business or to find work in the Iranian construction boom.
As nice as he was, though, I was still very relieved when he got off the bus.
Later on in the morning, we stopped again for breakfast, pulling into a service station. There were a couple of assorted restaurants and a small mosque. This time I made sure to stay with the others.
At the ablutions area, a row of benches and taps was surrounded by men preparing themselves for prayer. Ablution is the ritual Muslims do before prayer, which involves washing the hands, arms, face and feet. We joined them as the azzan – the Islamic call to prayer – stirred my soul. Even as a small child, it was the most wonderful sound in the world to me, filling me with a sense of peace.
I had been taught from a young age to fear the Shia as apostates – yet the azzan, the ablution…everything seemed to be the same as my own rituals. As we went inside the mosque to pray, I realized that we also said the same prayers. The only real difference I noticed was that when I prayed, I placed my hands in front of me; they had their hands by their sides. They also prayed out loud, whereas I was used to worshipping silently. But, apart from that, everything seemed normal.
As I looked around me, I did not see heretics or disbelievers, as I had been led to believe Shias were. All I saw were faithful men.
We arrived in Tehran early that evening, after a full night and day on the road. Compared to cities like Peshawar and Kabul, it was a hugely modern and clean place. There were endless concrete suburbs. The traffic was bumper to bumper, with yellow taxis everywhere. Diesel fumes made the air chokingly thick.
The moment we stepped off the coach was chaos. The terminus was massive, and as we descended the bus steps, taxi drivers were grabbing at our sleeves.
‘Taxi.’
‘Come with me.’
‘This way, sirs.’
It was so bewildering. We’d been told someone would be there to meet us but we had no idea what they looked like or who they were. Fortunately, we did have a phone number.
We managed to break away from the taxi touts and find a public pay phone.
‘I’m here. Outside the station. Come out.’ The man’s voice rang out in clear Farsi.
We walked into the street but still had no way of recognizing the man. It was up to him to work out who we were. It clearly took him a while because we were standing there nervously for twenty minutes before he found us.
A young man in jeans and a sports jacket approached us. ‘Salaam. Are you Qubat’s guys?’
We nodded.
He apologized for being late, explaining there had been delays on the metro. I had no idea what a metro was.
‘Let’s walk along the street. The taxis here are too expensive.’
As we followed him, I looked around and marvelled at the city. The roads were lined with beautiful flowerbeds, all different colours. There was a lot of noise and traffic still, but the city seemed so calm and ordered. Most consumer goods in Afghanistan come from Iran so I had had an idea it was a developed place, but the reality was something else. Our capital city of Kabul was once a famous tourist destination known for its gardens and parks, but the years of conflict had damaged it terribly. Although still very beautiful in its own way, these days open sewers run down the sides of pot-holed roads, and rubbish piles up in the rivers. To me, Tehran was the epitome of what a capital city should look like.
We then got into a taxi, which took us through winding backstreets to our destination, a small musafir khanna, a traveller’s guest house, located above the top of a hardware store in a busy bazaar.
There were a few Afghans already there. And it was clear they weren’t happy with the guest-house owner, even though he was also Afghan.
‘We were supposed to leave Tehran two days ago, but this guy is forcing us to stay here,’ complained a large, chubby man who introduced himself as Shah. He was from central Afghanistan, home of the Hazara people. The Hazara make up about 10 per cent of the Afghan population, but throughout history they have been treated as second-class citizens and had their lands taken away, in part because they are Shia. Back then, all I really knew about the Hazara was that they opposed the Taliban ideology, something that at the tender age of twelve I couldn’t understand anyone wanting to do. Shah was sharing a room with Faizal, a younger man from Balochistan in Pakistan.
As we ate dinner, they told us more of their stories. Shah couldn’t believe we’d flown into Iran legally. He’d walked. ‘I didn’t think I’d live to see Tehran. We left Afghanistan at Nimroz and trekked for so long into a city called Zahedan. The damned Iranians shot at us. I saw a child fall and die right in front of me. His brother was screaming. We were running like scared chickens.’
Hearing this made me think my experience on the plane hadn’t been so bad after all.
Faizal – a journalist – had also faced great danger crossing on foot from Pakistan into Iran. He was clearly very disturbed. ‘You don’t understand what’s happening to my people. The military are disappearing us. I found my cousin’s body with wire round his neck. He was only nineteen. I left my whole family, my two kids behind. I don’t know when I will see them again.’
The situation at the musafir khanna was really unsettling: the owner told us he was Qubat’s business partner in Iran, but then started yelling at us. ‘Qubat was supposed to send enough to get you to Turkey. But where is the money? Where is it?’
None of us had any idea what he was talking about.
‘I’m not buying your tickets out of my own pocket. You don’t go anywhere till I get paid. It’s bad enough you all have hungry mouths to feed.’ The manager pointed at Shah. ‘This fat Hazara has cost me too much money already. I should throw him on the street.’
Shah threw his hands in the air and rolled his eyes, before saying an old Hazara expression: ‘Hazara also have God.’
I liked Shah – even when he was angry he was still funny.
That night I lay on a lumpy, metal-framed bed watching cockroaches scuttling around on the dirty walls. This place, which stank of boiled meat and stale cigarette smoke, couldn’t have been more different from the smart, clean hotel in Mashhad. For a long time I stared at the ceiling waiting for sleep to come.
Even though the people around me were being nice, they were still strangers. I ached for my family. All I wanted to do was get back on the coach and find a way home.
But my mother’s words, ‘Don’t come back’, echoed through my head.
Chapter Six
‘I. am. not. giving. you. my. passport.’
Mehran looked so angry I thought he wa
s going to hit the guy.
‘None of us are handing them over,’ Baryalai chimed in.
Qubat’s guy, the guest-house manager, had come into our room to tell us his money had finally arrived and that we were to take a bus on to the city of Tabriz that night. But he’d demanded that we hand him our passports.
‘If the police catch you with your passports then it will go badly for all of us. Better to turn them over to me, then there’s no evidence for the police.’
‘Maybe you want to sell them and leave us here to rot?’ Mehran was becoming hysterical, yelling at the top of his voice.
‘Shut up, you foolish boy. Do you want people in the street to hear us? It’s for your own good.’
‘NO.’
But the guest-house manager was getting irritated by our refusal now. ‘You were supposed to be here for a few hours, but you stay for days – and now you try to tell me how to do my job. Don’t you think I have done this hundreds of times before?’
Baryalai wasn’t buying it. ‘I bet you’ve tricked men like us a hundred times before.’
‘A thousand times,’ muttered Shah.
‘Fine.’ The manager finally snapped. ‘Don’t give them to me. Stay here in Tehran and rot. No passport, no ticket. No Europe. Your choice.’
This threat scared me more than anything, and I found the courage to speak. ‘What guarantees do we have that we’ll be safe?’
‘Shut up, boy – don’t speak of things you know nothing about.’ Faizal shouted me down.
‘Leave Gulwali alone.’ Baryalai clearly didn’t like Faizal.
‘The boy is blind to everything except his little crush.’
The manager saw his opportunity to reason with us. ‘The boy can see enough to know I am right. The only guarantee I can make you is that you don’t go anywhere until you give me those documents. But you know what? Perhaps I will turn you over to the police – you have cost me too much money already.’
The Lightless Sky Page 6