Shauzia

by Deborah Ellis

  SEVEN

  ‘Empty your pockets.’ The guard at the police station pointed at the counter top. Shauzia looked around at the others in the room. They were all men, sitting behind big desks, drinking soft drinks and watching her while fans whirred overhead. No one moved to rescue her. She was the only child in the room, and she felt very, very small.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong!’ She had been insisting that ever since the police threw her in the van.

  ‘Empty your pockets!’ the guard insisted. ‘Empty them, or we will empty them for you.’

  With shaking hands, Shauzia took the few roupees she’d earned begging that day out of her pocket and put them on the counter.

  The guard unfolded her magazine picture of the lavender field. He looked at it, passed it around, then folded it back up.

  ‘You can keep this,’ he said. Then he noticed the string around her neck. ‘What are you wearing?’

  Shauzia pretended not to know what he was talking about, but it didn’t work. He reached out and pulled up her money pouch, taking it right off her neck. He opened it up and dumped the money on the counter in front of him.

  Shauzia stared at all her roupee notes, the ones she had worked so hard to earn, the ones that were going to take her to the sea.

  With a sweep of the guard’s hand, they disappeared into a drawer.

  ‘That’s mine!’ she shouted.

  ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘The money you took. It’s mine!’

  ‘What would a boy like you be doing with so much money? You must be a thief!’

  Shauzia tried to leap over the counter to get at her money, but the counter was too high, and the policemen were too big. They picked her up, and in the next instant, she found herself being tossed into a cell.

  She landed on something soft, then sprang right back to her feet. She grabbed hold of the cell bars and tried to squeeze through them.

  ‘You can’t keep my money!’ she yelled. ‘I earned it! It’s mine!’

  One of the guards banged his stick against the bars, inches from her clenched fists. Shauzia backed away.

  ‘Quiet down, or nobody gets any supper.’

  ‘I want my money!’ she yelled at the guard’s back as he walked away.

  ‘Stop yelling. You’ll only make them angry,’ a voice behind her said.

  Shauzia turned around. The cell was full of boys. Most looked a little older. Some were around her age or a little younger. They were sitting on the floor, staring up at her.

  ‘Well, they made me angry,’ Shauzia replied, kicking at the bars. ‘What do I care if they’re angry.’

  ‘Because they’ll take it out on all of us.’

  ‘So sit down and shut up, or we’ll shut you up.’

  Shauzia sank to the floor. The other boys had to shift around to make room for her.

  ‘I’m going to get my money back,’ she said quietly. She hugged her knees to stop trembling and scowled to keep from crying.

  ‘Do you have any proof they took your money?’ one boy asked.

  ‘Do you have proof you even had money?’ another asked.

  ‘I’ll get it back,’ she repeated. Some of the boys just laughed.

  They don’t know me, she thought. They laugh because they don’t know how determined I am.

  Shauzia’s panic and rage gave way to discomfort as the afternoon wore on. It was impossible to get comfortable in the cell. The air was hot and didn’t move. She longed to lie down or lean her back against something, or stretch her legs out in front of her. There were too many boys on the cement floor of the cell.

  Soon her legs were cramped and her back was sore.

  The cell stank of unwashed bodies and other foulness. Shauzia found it hard to breathe, and she wondered how the other boys were managing.

  Maybe they’ve been in here so long they’ve gotten used to it, she thought, just like I got used to the sheep.

  She hoped she wouldn’t be in the cell that long.

  For the first few hours, she jumped at every little noise that came from outside the cell – every time the phone rang in the outer office, every time one of the guards walked past.

  ‘Relax,’ one of the older boys said. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Once you’re in here, you’re in here forever,’ he replied. ‘I was only six years old when they locked me up. Look at me now – old enough to grow a beard soon.’ The other boys laughed.

  Shauzia thought they were probably just joking. The shepherds had joked like that. They made fun of how clumsy she was with chores, or laughed at how one sheep liked to butt her in the behind with his head.

  Shauzia hadn’t minded. There wasn’t much else to laugh at. She concentrated now on not letting her fear show on her face. Anger was good. Fear was dangerous.

  ‘If your family can bring in some money, the police might let you go,’ the boy next to her said in a quiet voice. ‘You won’t be here forever. Don’t listen to them.’

  ‘What do I care? I’ve been in jail lots of times.’

  ‘You don’t look old enough to have done anything lots of times,’ an older boy said, and they laughed again.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked the boy next to her.

  He shifted around a little and pointed to a group of scratches on the wall.

  ‘These are my marks, one for every night.’ His was only one group of scratches. There were other groups, all over the walls.

  Shauzia counted the marks. He had been there almost three months. She didn’t let on that she could count.

  ‘I have no family,’ the boy said, looking ashamed. ‘Not here. They are back in Afghanistan. I came to earn money to get them out, but now I am in jail. The policeman asks me, ‘Where are your papers?’ I have no papers. My house was bombed. How could I have papers? So I just sit here.’

  ‘Are you telling that same story again?’ an older boy complained. ‘How many times do we have to hear it? Our luck is as bad as yours.’

  In a lower voice, the boy beside Shauzia continued. ‘We are all Afghans in this cell. The Pakistan boys are kept somewhere else. Is your family with you in Peshawar?’

  Shauzia couldn’t answer. She was trying too hard not to cry.

  She had suddenly realised that whenever the phone rang in the office, it would not be for her. There was no one to pay off the police, no one even to know she was there.

  She imagined herself making scratches in the wall – endless scratches that would take up the whole wall, blotting out all the other scratches.

  How could she stay in this cramped space, with no way to run, no way to get to the sea? She had been outside too long, moving as she pleased. The ceiling pressed down on her. How could she stay here?

  It was too unbearable to think about. She thought about Jasper instead. Worrying about her dog was easier than worrying about herself.

  ‘Is there a toilet?’ she asked awhile later.

  ‘Can’t you smell it?’ A boy jerked his thumb to a partitioned-off area at the back of the cell.

  Shauzia stepped through boys as if she were stepping through a flower garden. The partition gave her a small amount of privacy, but the toilet was just a stinking hole in the floor.

  Sheep are cleaner, she thought, and she did not linger there.

  A guard came by with a tray of metal cups of tea and a stack of nan.

  ‘Here is your supper,’ he said.

  The boys dove at the food like the wild dogs Shauzia had seen in Kabul, pushing each other to get to the bread. The guard laughed.

  Shauzia ignored the food. The cell door was still being held open by the guard. In an instant, she was on her feet and halfway out of the cell.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ The guard grabbed her.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Shauzia yelled, trying to pull away. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’

  ‘Get back in there!’ The guard shoved her into the cell. She fell ac
ross the tea tray, spilling the cups that hadn’t been snatched up yet. The cell door banged shut.

  One of the boys punched her hard in her side. ‘That was my tea you spilled,’ he snarled, ‘and my buddy’s tea. You’ll have to give us your tea from now on to make up for it.’

  ‘I don’t have to give you anything,’ Shauzia snarled back.

  ‘Keep it up,’ the boy said. ‘You can’t hide from me.’

  Shauzia went back to her space on the floor. There was, of course, no bread left, or tea.

  ‘Here,’ the boy beside her said. ‘I’ll share my bread with you.’ He tore his nan in half and held it out to her.

  Shauzia knew that if she accepted his kindness, she would have to show kindness in return, and that would make her look weak. So she shrugged away his offering. She’d been hungry before. Right now, that was the least of her worries.

  The boy next to her made another notch in the wall with the edge of his metal cup. The other boys were adding notches to their own groups of scratches.

  ‘I’ll make one for you,’ the boy said, putting a scratch on a bare spot on the wall.

  Shauzia looked at it once, then turned away.

  The guard collected the tea cups, then turned off the overhead light.

  ‘Pleasant dreams, boys,’ he sneered.

  The boys stretched out on the floor as best they could in the overcrowded cell. Shauzia did the same, then sat upright again as one of the boys began a low rhythmic moaning.

  ‘That’s just the Headbanger,’ she was told. The moaning boy rocked and banged his head into the wall over and over as he moaned. ‘He’s all right when the lights are on, but he doesn’t like the dark. He does this every night. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Soon you’ll be like him,’ another boy said, and several boys laughed.

  Shauzia watched the Headbanger for awhile, then lay down again. Fleas bit her ankles and neck. She wrapped her blanket shawl around her to keep them from getting at the rest of her, but was soon so hot that she had to take it off again.

  The night went on forever. Some of the boys cried out in their sleep, and the fleas kept biting.

  Worry and fear would not let her escape into sleep. She tried to tell herself that things would work out. The police would realise they had made a mistake, and they would let her out in the morning.

  But she didn’t really believe it. People disappeared in Afghan prisons. Maybe it was the same in Pakistan.

  It was awful being separated from Jasper, not having him around to protect her, not being able to reach out and feel him breathing beside her.

  Would she go crazy in this terrible place? Would she lose her mind, locked away from the sun? She had seen crazy people in Afghanistan. The craziness took over more and more of their minds until there was nothing left of themselves – just craziness on two legs.

  She reached out a hand and put it gently on the chest of the boy sleeping next to her. She could feel his heart beating deep within him. She could feel his lungs take in air and breathe it out again.

  She closed her eyes and pretended he was Jasper. And finally, she slept.

  EIGHT

  Breakfast in prison was more bread and tea. Shauzia grabbed her share of bread and drank her cup of tea before the boy who had punched her could take it. But the tea made just a small dent in her thirst.

  ‘That was mine!’ the boy growled.

  ‘Wait awhile and I’ll piss it back to you,’ she said.

  The others laughed, and this time they were not laughing at Shauzia.

  The boy would have come at her, but just then a guard came to the cell door.

  ‘Get ready for the showers,’ he said.

  The other boys leapt to their feet.

  ‘The water is cold, and it will cool us off,’ a boy beside Shauzia said. ‘While we’re out, they’ll hose down the cell and the toilet. Everything will be better. You’ll see.’

  Shauzia was horrified. There would not be private showers. She could not expose herself as a girl to all these boys.

  She was so scared that she could barely think.

  The other boys pressed against the bars at the front of the cell, eager to be first into the showers. It was a chance to stretch their legs, and they yelled and pushed and hit out at each other in their excitement. Shauzia let them push her out of the way, until she was alone at the back of the cell. She pressed herself against the cement.

  Maybe if she pressed hard enough, she could push herself right through the wall.

  There was a bang on the bars as the guard used his stick to make the boys back up.

  ‘Boy who was brought in yesterday, step forward,’ the guard called out.

  ‘It was me!’ the other boys shouted. ‘I was brought in yesterday!’

  Through all of this, Shauzia heard another voice speaking in English, then switching to Dari.

  ‘No, it’s not any of these,’ the voice said. ‘Is there another boy in there? The one who was arrested at the Chief Burger?

  Shauzia leapt forward, shoving her way to the cell door. On the other side of the bars was one of the after-church-pizza Westerners, the father of the two little boys who liked Jasper so much.

  The man smiled down at her. ‘You have a very smart dog.’

  Shauzia leaned into the bars and motioned for him to crouch down so she could tell him something.

  ‘You have to get me out of here,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s shower day.’

  The man looked perplexed, so she pressed her face against the bars.

  ‘I’m a girl!’ she whispered.

  He looked at her closely, blinked once, then started talking to the guards. They moved away from the cell door. Shauzia couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could see the Western man take out his wallet and exchange arm-waving gestures with the guards while they talked. Her heart sank when she saw him put his wallet back in his pocket, then leapt when he took it out again. They argued some more. Then the man nodded, took some bills out of his wallet and handed them to the guards.

  The guards unlocked the cell door, reached in through the throng of boys and pulled Shauzia out. She looked back at the boys in the cell, then wished she hadn’t. Even the bully looked small and lost with his face behind bars.

  The Westerner took her by the arm and led her toward the police station exit.

  ‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘They have my money!’

  He kept shepherding her through the station. ‘Your money is gone. It never existed,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s just get out of here before they change their minds.’

  Shauzia’s anger bounced around inside her, with no way to get out. But she forgot about it as soon as she walked out of the police station compound, and a large, furry creature threw itself at her so hard she almost fell over.

  ‘Jasper!’

  He licked her face all over, and she would have happily sat on the pavement for hours hugging him, if the man hadn’t bustled them both into his van.

  Shauzia and Jasper stuck their heads out the window and let the breeze rush past them as the van wove in and out of the crazy Peshawar traffic. The fresh air felt wonderful, even filled with heat and exhaust fumes.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the man asked.

  ‘My girl name is Shauzia. My boy name is Shafiq,’ Shauzia said, pulling her head in. She laughed at the way Jasper looked, fur flying back from his face.

  ‘My name is Tom.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  He handed her a plastic bottle of water, and she drank deeply while he told her.

  ‘It was your dog,’ he said. ‘When we got to the Chief Burger for our pizza yesterday, Jasper practically threw himself at us. We asked around and found out what had happened. I’m sorry it took so long, but it took all this time to find you and persuade the police to let you go.’

  ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘Barbara, my wife, made me promise to bring you home if I was able to get you out of jail. She’ll be delighted that you�
�re a girl. Why are you pretending to be a boy?’

  ‘I just felt like it,’ she lied, keeping her privacy out of habit more than a distrust of Tom.

  ‘Is your family still back in Afghanistan?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re dead,’ she lied again, then stuck her head back out the window. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ridden in such a fast-moving vehicle.

  If I had one of these, she thought, I could be at the sea in no time.

  They turned into University Town, a neighborhood of big trees, high walls and flowered shrubs spilling their blossoms into the street. The noise of the traffic on Jamrud Road was left behind as the van made several turns, finally stopping before a high metal gate in a wall.

  Tom got out, unlocked and opened the gate, then drove the van through.

  Shauzia and Jasper stepped out of the van into a whole new world.

  ‘Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!’ The two small boys rushed along the front porch and ran through the garden to hug their father. Behind them, wiping her hands on a dishcloth, came their mother, Barbara. She put her hands on Shauzia’s shoulders.

  ‘So Tom was able to get you out! Welcome to our home.’

  Shauzia looked up into Barbara’s face. Her smile was warm. Shauzia couldn’t remember anyone smiling at her like that before, except Parvana.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ Barbara said. ‘We have lots of food in the house to feed a hungry boy.’

  ‘The hungry boy is a hungry girl,’ Tom said, swinging his small giggling son in a circle.

  Barbara looked down at Shauzia. ‘A girl! Oh, how wonderful! I’ll have some company in this house full of boys. Come inside. We’ll get you cleaned up and fed, and you can tell us all about yourself.’

  Shauzia’s eyes almost burned from the bright colours of all the flowers in the courtyard garden. Birds were singing in the trees. The rest of Peshawar, beyond the high walls, might not even have existed.

  Her eyes grew wide when Barbara drew her into the house. The entranceway alone was bigger than the room she had shared with her whole family back in Kabul.

  ‘Tom is an engineer,’ Barbara said as she took Shauzia from room to room. ‘He builds bridges, mostly in the northern part of Pakistan. We’re here on a two-year contract. Our families thought we were nuts to come, especially with the children, but we like a bit of adventure. We’re from Toledo, in the United States. There’s not much adventure there.’