‘He would have told us where he was going unless he knew we would disapprove,’ Hiroko said, putting the teacup down and busying herself removing the dead leaves from the potted plant in the kitchen window.
‘They want to be grown men as much as we want them to be little boys, but really they’re neither. Doesn’t that sound wise? You said it to me last year when Bilal took the car without permission. Listen, stop worrying. And stop attacking my plant. He’ll be back soon, and wherever he is he won’t do anything stupid. You’ve raised a good son.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Which is more than can be said for some people. Have you heard? About Iffat’s son getting divorced? Isn’t it terrible?’
‘Not for his wife, it isn’t,’ Hiroko said, and Qaisra threw back her head and laughed.
‘Only you would say that.’
For years Hiroko and Qaisra had taken turns being the worried parent, the consoling parent, and now, as always before, Hiroko felt considerably reassured as she said goodbye to her friend, whose final words were a reminder that Raza would never do anything of which his parents might seriously disapprove.
But as Hiroko was exiting the side gate she heard a voice say, ‘Mrs Ashraf!’ and Qaisra’s daughter Salma, one of her former students, followed her out into the street.
‘He’s gone somewhere near Peshawar,’ she said, speaking very low. ‘This Abdullah is some Afghan boy with a truck. Raza met him at the fish harbour a few months ago. He’s gone with him to one of those training camps. For mujahideen.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Hiroko said. ‘What does Raza want with training camps?’
‘I saw him yesterday when I was at the bus stop. We started talking. He told me. He said in two weeks at these camps they teach you as much as the Army will teach in cadet colleges in two years. He was making it sound like some kind of holiday.’
It wasn’t at the bus stop that he’d said any of this to her. They hadn’t spoken in months when he called her the previous night to say triumphantly, ‘Thank you for your advice. You were right. People like me better when I don’t tell them who I really am.’ He obviously had some secret he was itching to share, and she understood as soon as he started speaking that she was the only one in Raza Ashraf’s life to hear about Abdullah the Afghan who was going to vie with Raza Hazara to drive the last Soviet out of Afghanistan.
‘Am I supposed to be impressed by how good you are at lying to stupid Pathans?’ she’d said, when he got to the part where he convinced Abdullah to go to the training camp. It was this response that made him veer away from the truth into declaring that he was going to join Abdullah at the camp ‘for a couple of weeks or so’. She had been impressed then – and made it obvious by telling him to be careful and to call her from there, to which he’d said, ‘Maybe,’ and hung up. It had occurred to her that she should say something to someone – Bilal, her parents, Raza’s parents – but then they would ask why he had told her, of all people. And how would she answer that? So she told herself that he was inventing stories – just as he had invented that story about the man from New York who would convince a university in America to pay for his education.
Hiroko did not stay to ask why Raza had revealed his plans to Salma when the girl finished telling her everything Raza had said. Instead, she turned and set off instantly towards home, trying to run, convincingly scissoring her arms through the air but finding her legs had trouble understanding how to move at a pace brisker than a walk; Sajjad, setting off for work in his car, had slammed on the brakes to see his wife running in slow motion towards him as though in a parody of a scene from a movie in which a wife races home to tell her husband something terrible has happened to their son.
When she told him what Salma had said his first instinct was to laugh. The stories a boy told to try and impress a girl! And Salma was certainly the kind of girl a boy would want to impress. Older than Raza, but even so. He’d have to tell the boy off soundly when he came back from wherever he was, of course – unacceptable to worry Hiroko so much. But he felt vindicated – years ago he’d told Hiroko there was more than a touch of his brother Iqbal in Raza and this certainly proved him right. Hiroko had disagreed sharply, calling him an ungenerous father, refusing to accept that of all his brothers he loved Iqbal the most despite knowing him to be the most flawed of all the Ashrafs.
But then – as Hiroko seized him by the back of his head, shocking him into thinking his wife was about to kiss him here, on the street, in public – everything in Raza’s behaviour which had mildly puzzled him the last few weeks coalesced into a single explanation. All the interest in Afghanistan! He’d bought a map of the country, asked Sajjad questions about the war there, paid close attention to every news item about it, though previously cricket had been the only current event that interested him. The truth didn’t just seem inescapable, it also seemed so obvious Sajjad marvelled at how it was possible he hadn’t realised earlier that his son had been making plans that delighted him in the way that only very foolish plans could delight a young man of Raza’s temperament.
Very gently, Sajjad disengaged his wife’s grip on his skull.
‘I’ll find him,’ he said.
‘How? He could be anywhere.’
Sajjad touched the mole on her cheek in a promise, and stepped back into his car.
‘I’m going to the fish harbour. Someone there must know this boy. I’ll find a way to call you from there. See if Salma knows anything else.’
Hiroko watched him drive away and then felt a hand on her arm.
‘That’s all I know,’ Salma said. ‘I’m sorry. I think I’m responsible for this.’
It was impossible to be angry with Salma when she revealed all she had said to Raza in the conversation about marriage. Impossible even to be angry at Qaisra, her dear friend, from whom Salma must have picked up those comments about Raza being ‘deformed’. All Hiroko could think was: the bomb. In the first years after Nagasaki she had dreams in which she awoke to find the tattoos gone from her skin, and knew the birds were inside her now, their beaks dripping venom into her bloodstream, their charred wings engulfing her organs.
But then her daughter died, and the dreams stopped. The birds had their prey.
They had returned though when she was pregnant with Raza – dreams angrier, more frightening than ever before, and she’d wake from them to feel a fluttering in her womb. But then Raza was born, ten-fingered and ten-toed, all limbs intact and functioning, and she had thought he’d been spared, the birds were done with her.
She had not imagined the birds could fly outwards and enter the mind of this girl, and from her mind enter Raza’s heart. She had never truly understood her son’s need for belonging, the anger with which he twisted away from comments about his foreign looks – in truth, she had thought that anger little more than an affectation in a boy so hungry to possess the languages of different tribes, different nations – but she knew intimately the stigma of being defined by the bomb. Hibakusha. It remained the most hated word in her vocabulary. And the most powerful. To escape the word she had boarded a ship to India. India! To enter the home of a couple she’d never met, a world of which she knew nothing.
She waved off Salma’s words, whatever they were – why didn’t the silly girl just stop talking – and walked down the street towards her home. He was her son. Her son. Like her, so intent on escape that nothing seemed impossible except staying put. She pushed open the door of her house, stepped into the vestibule and paused at the entry into the courtyard. The shadows of the neem tree fell exactly where she knew they would fall at this time of the morning; the emptied flowerbed surrounding the tree told her Sajjad had cleared away the remnants of the spring flowers and was preparing to plant zinnias – and so summer had truly begun. And the zinnias would bring butterflies. Somewhere during the course of the decades she had settled into this place, learnt to anticipate – not merely to react to – its lengthening days, its shifting shadows.
She walked swiftly across the baking court
yard into Raza’s room, and lay down with her head on his pillow. How often had Raza heard the story of his mother’s great adventure – from Tokyo to Bombay! Bombay to Delhi! She never told him what an act of desperation that voyage was, had always wanted to seem fearless, above all. Fearless and transmutable, able to slip from skin to skin, city to city. Why tell him of the momentum of a bomb blast that threw her into a world in which everything was unfamiliar, Nagasaki itself become more unknown than Delhi? Nothing in the world more unrecognisable than her father as he died. But she had always wanted Raza to know as little of all this as possible. So the story of Hiroko Ashraf’s youth was not the story of the bomb, but of the voyage after it.
‘Weren’t you scared?’ Raza had asked once of her arrival in India.
She’d smiled and said, ‘No,’ laughing at the look of wonder on her son’s face. It was true enough. She hadn’t been afraid. But only because she didn’t allow herself to think of anything beyond the next stage of the journey.
And now her son was proving himself her son, and nothing could keep her from seeing everything that might happen next, and next, and next.
She lay with her arms around his pillow until she drifted to sleep. In her dream, Raza was speaking to an Afghan boy but the boy, although an Afghan boy, was also her ex-student, Joseph, the kamikaze pilot. ‘Maybe I won’t join the Air Force,’ Joseph, who was also the Afghan boy, said. Raza sneered. ‘Scared, little boy?’ Joseph stood up taller, unfurling his black wings, and when he opened his mouth desiccated cherry blossom cascaded out, blank eting the dry soil of Afghanistan.
24
The camp was more than an hour’s drive from wherever they were before, on a mountain plateau which could only be reached via a dirt road that snaked from Pakistan into Afghanistan and back again. The single point of entry made it easy to guard against such inconveniences as occurred at the camp where Abdullah’s eldest brother had trained – a group of tribesmen taking a short cut stumbled upon the camp, which had to be moved to a new location the next day.
The driver of the jeep – a man whose face was all beard and nose – pointed in the direction of a narrow path winding along the mountain and said one of the Arab training camps was along there. He spat out the word ‘Arab’ as if it were a curse.
‘But don’t worry,’ he said, turning to Raza with a smile that was unexpectedly boyish. ‘Where we’re going, it’s all Pashtun. You might be treated a little roughly at first – there are men in there who aren’t happy about a Hazara entering our camp. But don’t worry – you’re an Afghan and a Muslim and a friend of Abdullah’s. You’ll earn their trust.’ He cuffed Abdullah, who smiled in return, and Raza understood only then that this was Abdullah’s brother.
Raza heard the camp before he saw it. At first he thought he was listening to the sea – he recalled illustrated geography books with pictures of fossilised fishbones discovered on icy summits – but then the roaring got louder and became gunfire.
‘How are you supposed to keep this location secret?’ he yelled above the noise.
Abdullah’s brother Ismail shrugged.
‘The echoes make it impossible to know where it’s coming from.’ He parked the jeep and pointed to a winding pathway. ‘Follow that down. I’ll be back later.’ He reached into the back seat, picked up two grey-brown pieces of cloth and tossed one each at Abdullah and Raza. ‘That’s half your essential supply. The other half – your guns – they’ll give you when you get there.’
‘What’s this for?’ Raza said to Abdullah as the jeep reversed at great speed down the track. He held the square of cloth by a corner and it unfolded into a rectangle the height of a tall man.
‘For everything,’ Abdullah replied. ‘Don’t Hazaras have pattusis?’ He walked towards the mountain path, a rapid motion of his hand urging Raza along. ‘It’s your blanket to sleep under, your shawl to keep you warm, your camouflage in the mountains and desert, your stretcher when you’re wounded, your blindfold to tie over the eyes of the untrustworthy, your tourniquet, your prayer mat. If you’re killed in battle you’ll be buried in your bloodied pattusi – the mujahideen don’t need their bodies washed and purified before burial. We are already guaranteed heaven.’ He smiled at Raza over his shoulder. ‘But heaven will wait for us. No need to rush towards it, brother, so don’t step so close to the edge of the path.’
Raza hopped back and pressed himself against the mountain. He hadn’t realised how close he had strayed to the edge of the path in his intent perusal of the scene on the plateau below – the cluster of tents, the unexpected livestock, the men with light shining from their bodies. The creatures of this planet are part angel, he found himself thinking, before a closer view revealed each one of the men carried a Kalashnikov which reflected the sun’s rays.
By the time they reached the plateau – as hot and still as an oven – Raza thought he might faint. It was not just the exertion of mountain-walking and the intensity of the sun which made his lips turn white and set his brain rotating. How could a man escape such a place? Even if he climbed back up the path undetected, where would he go from there? What had he been thinking? He had been so buoyed by months of living a lie that he thought he could control everything, and suddenly his own stupidity and arrogance was breathing hot on his face. He sat down – collapsed, really – on a rock, paying little attention to the men who came to welcome Abdullah and look questioningly at him.
He wanted his parents. He wanted his bed, and the familiarity of the streets in which he’d grown up. For no reason he could explain, he wanted a mango.
One of the men prodded him with his foot.
‘Practising blending in with the scenery, my rock?’ he said in a tone that was not unkind, just amused.
Raza looked up at the man’s green eyes, which were examining him with interest, and all the stories he’d heard in his Muhajir neighbourhood about the proclivities of Afghan men for delicate-featured boys rushed back at him and immobilised him further.
‘Doesn’t he speak Pashto?’ the man said, turning to Abdullah.
Abdullah slapped the back of Raza’s head.
‘Pashto is the only Afghan language he’ll speak.’ He related the tale of Raza Hazara and the vow he had made to put a warrior’s mission between himself and his mother tongue. Raza, listening, tried to remember how to become the Hazara – he pictured himself raising a Kalashnikov to his shoulder, but in the midst of these men for whom a Kalashnikov was something familiar enough to be casual with he saw his own posturing for what it was.
Abdullah bent down, a hand gripping Raza’s shoulder.
‘If you cry, I’ll kill you,’ he whispered.
Raza looked up at Abdullah, at the green-eyed man, at the mountains and the sky. Everything was shifting. He pressed his hands against the ground, felt sharp-edged stones cut into his skin as he propelled his body into a prone position, head pillowed against the rock on which he’d been sitting. His vision grew white at the edges and only the quickness of his breath kept him from throwing up. He had never known anything like this heat, this terror.
The voices around him were coming and going, staccato. Perhaps he wasn’t here but in his room at home where the ceiling fan whirred and then juddered on each of its rotations, the juddering breaking up the flow of sounds that came in from the courtyard, causing approximately every third syllable of his parents’ conversation to be lost.
Warm water splashed on his face and his eyes flickered open to see the green-eyed man pouring something out of a bottle into his palm and gently tilting his hand so the water slipped from it towards Raza. Abdullah kicked him again and the green-eyed man said something that Raza didn’t understand because the ceiling fan was on again. And everything was slipping from his vision except those green eyes.
Uncle Harry, Raza thought, and then the green eyes closed and there was only darkness.
When he regained consciousness, he found he’d been moved; his pattusi was a pillow and the mountain itself a provider of shade.
There was a bottle of water next to him and he drank greedily, propped up on one elbow, before lying down and falling asleep, every emotion pushed to the side by exhaustion; his body finally registered the toll of days of sleeping in the cramped cab of the truck or on a bed of Kalashnikovs in the container portion, woken up by sharp braking or breakneck turns before he could reach the point of dreaming.
Later, much later, there was a sandal knocking against his ribs. Abdullah seemed to have decided that the only way to separate himself from the shame of this fainting creature was to treat Raza as though he were an animal.
Raza was awoken by the first kick but kept his eyes closed. When the second kick landed, his hand grabbed Abdullah’s foot and, twisting it, knocked the younger boy to the ground. Abdullah scrambled to his feet, but it was too late by then – three mujahideen sitting near by, chewing their niswaar and entering a pleasant intoxication, were already laughing at him.
‘Your friend has given you a bonus lesson for the day,’ one of the men said. ‘Never assume a man is incapable of striking back simply because his eyes are closed.’
Abdullah walked away without responding, and now it was something other than exhaustion that made Raza curl himself up and retreat into the safety of sleep again.
The next time, it was the green-eyed man who woke him up, shaking him by the shoulders and pointing towards the setting sun. Raza sat up, not understanding.
‘You’ve slept through two prayer times already,’ the man said. ‘Come, stand up. You may not be a Pashtun, but you’re still a man. Enough of this.’
Raza clambered to his feet, which was not easy to do with all the heaviness that seemed to weigh on each limb and on his heart. He watched the man pick up a fistful of dirt and rub it over his hands and arms before scrubbing his face with it. Camouflage, Raza thought.
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