Mud City

by Deborah Ellis

  She would go back to looking for proper jobs tomorrow, she decided, but for today, she just wanted to stay with other children.

  Jasper, with his superb dog nose, was good at sniffing out things to eat in the garbage, but Shauzia didn’t do too badly, either. Along with the paper and bits of wood from a broken crate, she found an empty spice jar and a cracker box – with some crackers still in it!

  “Hey! I found some food!” she exclaimed.

  In the next second, she was flat on her back in the trash.

  “All food comes to me,” Zahir said, holding the box of cracker bits high in the air.

  But Shauzia was hungry, and she was tired of being bullied. She sprang up without thinking and threw herself at the boy. They rolled in the trash, trying to hit each other. Jasper jumped around them, barking. The other children picked the spilled cracker bits off the ground and ate them.

  Shauzia and Zahir ran out of fight before there was a clear winner. They sat in the trash, brushed themselves off and glared at each other.

  “Don’t try taking anything away from me again,” Shauzia snarled.

  “Just remember who’s boss here,” Zahir snarled back.

  Since the crackers were gone anyway, they called a truce and went back to sorting through the junk pile.

  Late in the afternoon, one of the smaller boys found a length of string. He tied it to the handle of a plastic shopping bag and ran through the dump along the wasteland beside the railway tracks. The bag fluttered behind him like a bird, high above the garbage and the people making their homes in the dirt.

  To Shauzia, it looked beautiful.

  The sun was hanging low in the sky when Looli put her tiny arms around Jasper’s neck and gave him a hug.

  “We have to go now,” she said.

  Shauzia watched the little girl take her brother’s hand as he slung her junk bag and his own over his shoulder, and the two of them walked away.

  The other boys shouldered their junk bags and started walking in another direction.

  “Are you coming? Zahir called back. “Or do you have some important job to go to?”

  The other boys laughed. Shauzia thought about being offended, but decided not to be. She looked at Jasper, shrugged and jogged to catch up to the boys.

  For the first part of the evening, they roamed around Peshawar like a pack of animals, tossing odd bits of junk into their bags. “Give us money!” they yelled at everyone they met, laughing when the people looked scared and ran away. Shauzia hung back a little, not yelling, but still very glad to have the company.

  By nightfall they had reached a large modern hotel. It was so beautiful, it took Shauzia’s breath away.

  “Is that a palace?” she asked. She and the boys were scrunched down among some bushes. Across the street a huge white building gleamed in the spotlights. Cars drove slowly up a long driveway lined with large round flower pots overflowing with color. A man in a splendid uniform guarded the double set of doors at the front.

  “It’s a hotel,” Zahir said. “Don’t you know what a hotel is?”

  “Of course I do,” Shauzia lied. There hadn’t been such places in Afghanistan. “What are we doing here?” The gravel she was kneeling on pressed into her flesh.

  “See the light in the hall?” Zahir pointed to a long, low building that jutted out the side of the hotel. “That means there’s a big party tonight.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  Zahir sighed at her stupidity.

  “We’re here for the leftovers. Aren’t you hungry?”

  Leaving their junk bags hidden among the trees, they scurried around to the back of the hotel. Shauzia heard metal and glass banging and water running. She smelled cooking smells from the open door of the kitchen. Her stomach lurched with hunger.

  In a little while, the kitchen staff brought bins out through the back door. They carried the bins over to the back fence and piled rocks on top of them.

  “Why are they doing that?” Shauzia asked.

  “To keep us out of them. But we’re smarter than they are.”

  The kitchen workers went back inside. Shauzia and the boys crept over to the bins. Shauzia limped a bit, her leg sore from kneeling on the pebbles. Jasper was right in the middle of the children, but he was clever enough to keep quiet.

  The boys silently lifted the rocks off the lids of the trash bins. Shauzia helped. They gently tipped over the bins. Then they tore through the party leftovers, tossing aside the balled-up paper napkins and other garbage to get to the cold rice and chicken bones with bits of meat sticking to them.

  Shauzia stripped the meat from the bones for Jasper, since chicken bones were bad for him. His nose found him lots of other things to eat, too.

  She could not stuff food in her mouth fast enough. Chunks of mutton gristle, bits of ground-meat patties, potatoes slick with spiced oil – she shoveled it all into her mouth, eating with one hand while the other spread out the trash, searching for more food. When a cigarette butt got mixed up with a handful of rice and spinach, she separated it from the food with her teeth, spat it out and kept on eating.

  All around her was the sound of hungry boys chewing.

  “Hey! Get away from there, or we’ll call the police!”

  The kitchen workers yelled at the children from the back door.

  Shauzia started to leave, but the other kids shouted right back. They heaved bones and other garbage at the workers. Jasper barked, and trash flew through the air. Shauzia picked up a handful of old food and joined in. She laughed as the kitchen workers raised their hands to protect themselves from the flying leftovers.

  It felt great to be shouting and throwing. Shauzia couldn’t remember when she had last yelled like that. She couldn’t raise her voice when she was a shepherd because it would have scared the stupid sheep. She couldn’t yell in Kabul because it would have been foolish to draw attention to herself – she didn’t need the Taliban looking closely enough at her to be able to tell she was a girl.

  But she could yell here, and she did, and she had a wonderful time.

  The men disappeared for a moment, then came back waving frying pans and pot lids. Shauzia saw security guards heading their way, too, their guns drawn.

  The children scattered, and they were away from the area before the grown-ups could reach them. When things were quiet again, they retrieved their bags of junk and went looking for a place to sleep.

  Shauzia stayed with the boys that night. They slept, huddled together, in a smelly stairwell. Jasper was their watchdog, and he kept them safe.

  Six

  Shauzia stood in the aisle of the rich people’s grocery store. She ran her finger lightly along the rows of beautiful packages. The pictures on them promised good things inside. Cakes, biscuits with chocolate on top, meat, cheese – food more wonderful than she had ever seen before.

  And there was so much of it! Who could possibly mind if she took a few packages for herself and her dog? They had so many!

  Her mouth filled with saliva as her fingers curled around a tin with a picture of a fish on the outside. It could so easily move from the shelf to her bag.

  “You again!”

  A strong hand gripped her shoulder like a claw. She released the tin of fish and was pushed through the shop.

  “This is the fourth time today I’ve had to kick you out. If you come in here again, I will call the police.”

  The store clerk shoved Shauzia out the door with such force that she hit the pavement at the same moment that the ferocious Peshawar heat hit her. The store had been so lovely and cool, like being surrounded by snow.

  She picked herself up off the ground, too angry to pay much attention to the raw skin on her hands and ankles. She stood as close as she dared to the door of the fancy store. At least she could catch a blast of refreshing coldness when the rich people went in and out.

  Jasper was stretched out in the bit of shade at the side of the store. He was so hot he had barely managed to growl when
she was tossed out.

  Shauzia couldn’t stand in the shade because she would be out of the way of the people she wanted to beg from.

  “Spare any roupees?” she asked a man coming out of the shop. He walked right by her outstretched hand. The woman who came out a short time after handed her a rumpled tworoupee note. That made six roupees Shauzia had made all day.

  “I hate this,” she said to Jasper. “I hate having to be nice to these people who aren’t nice to me. I hate having to ask them for anything. The next person who comes by, I’m going to grab their money and run. If they won’t give it to me, I’ll just take it.”

  Jasper rolled his eyes, unimpressed. He had heard this speech before.

  Inside the store, Shauzia had felt dizzy at the sight of all the pretty packages of food lined up on the shelves. The people who shopped there had to have a lot of money. Surely people with a lot of money wouldn’t mind giving her a bit of it.

  But rich people weren’t any more generous than poor people.

  She asked people for a job as well as for money, but no one had a job for her. She would rather be working than begging. Begging made her feel small.

  A man and a woman in Western clothes got out of a white van with their two small boys and crossed the parking lot, heading for the grocery store. Shauzia saw them and held out her hand.

  “Look at the dog!” The two boys ran over to Jasper. In an instant he was on his feet, wagging his tail.

  “Careful, boys. You don’t know this dog,” the man said.

  Shauzia recognized the language they spoke as English, and she dredged up the English words she knew from when she had studied it in school.

  “His name is Jasper,” she said.

  The man and woman tried to get their sons into the store.

  “I need work,” Shauzia said. She held out her hand for money, in case they preferred to give her that.

  “You speak English very well,” the woman said slowly. Then she put a ten-roupee note in Shauzia’s hand. “Come, boys, let’s go inside.”

  That’s more like it, Shauzia thought, putting the money in her pocket. When the family came out again, the little boys headed straight for Jasper.

  “Can we take him home with us, Mommy?” one of the boys asked.

  “He belongs to this boy,” the woman said. The boy stuck out his lower lip and held Jasper so tightly that Jasper had to shake the boy away.

  The man gave Shauzia another ten-roupee note. “Buy some food for your dog, too,” he said. Then the family piled back into the van and drove away.

  Shauzia and Jasper stayed outside the grocery store for the rest of the day, but they earned only a few more roupees. She bought some meat patties to share with Jasper, and some nan. Then she went to meet the other boys.

  They were using the old Christian cemetery as a camping place. It was shady and cool during the day, and the weeds were soft to sleep on at night. The gravestones all seemed to mark the graves of British soldiers who had died killing Indians. Shauzia didn’t know which war that was. She didn’t suppose it mattered.

  “How did you do today?” Zahir asked. Shauzia held up the bundle of nan. She didn’t say how much money she’d made.

  One of the boys had some oranges he’d stolen off an old man’s karachi. They ate together. Zahir commanded extra food from some of the children, but he didn’t bother Shauzia.

  “Hello, can I join you?” A small boy, his blue junk bag at his feet, stood on the other side of the graveyard fence.

  “Sure. Come on over.” Zahir went over to him.

  Shauzia knew what was coming.

  “Swing your bag up first,” Zahir suggested. “It will be easier for you to climb over.”

  The small boy swung his junk bag up into Zahir’s waiting arms. Zahir waited until the boy was almost at the top of the fence, then pushed him hard back onto the sidewalk. The boy tried a few more times before he realized that his junk was gone, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Shauzia didn’t join in the scramble for the stolen junk, but she didn’t do anything to help the boy, either. She wasn’t afraid to fight Zahir, but the last thing she needed was someone depending on her, expecting things from her. She would never get to the sea that way.

  “I look after myself. He can do the same,” she whispered to Jasper as they settled down among the crosses and tombstones and went to sleep.

  Each morning, Shauzia would leave the graveyard, sometimes taking Jasper but usually leaving him in the shade with a pan of water poured from a tap outside the old church nearby. She would walk to the Saddar Bazaar or hitch a ride to other parts of the city to look for work.

  Moving around Peshawar so much, she quickly got to know the city. She knew in which neighborhoods she’d most likely find work, which shops gave food away to beggars at the end of the day, and which rich hotels had garbage bins that could be broken into. She learned where there were outdoor water taps, where she could wash a bit and get something to drink. She learned which parks she could nap in during the heat of the day, and which parks had guards who would kick her out before she even got comfortable.

  If she was lucky, she worked. If not, she begged. Bit by bit, she kept adding to the roupees in her money pouch.

  “We’re getting closer to the sea,” she told Jasper one evening when they were alone in the graveyard. She showed him the bundle of money. He sniffed at it and wagged his tail. She put the money back in the pouch and hid it under her shirt before any of the boys could return and see it.

  “We don’t know these boys,” Shauzia told Jasper. “All we know is that they’re hungry, and you can’t trust hungry people. If they knew I had money, they’d steal it from me, just the way I’d steal from them. Well, probably I would.”

  Boys drifted in and out of the group. Shauzia didn’t always learn their names. No one ever said much about themselves. Some things were too hard to talk about

  “Can you spare any roupees?”

  By now, Shauzia could ask that question in Dari, Pashtu, Urdu, the Pakistani language and English.

  “As much as I hate begging, it’s worth coming here every Sunday,” she told Jasper.

  “Here” was the Chief Burger restaurant on Jamrud Road, near University Town, where most of the foreigners lived. People who wanted food stood out on the street and called their food orders through the windows. After they placed their order, they had nothing to do but watch Jasper do his tricks.

  The man who ran the burger stand liked Jasper. He gave him water and bits of ground meat. “I’ll make the burgers smaller today. If the customers notice, it will be too late. I’ll already have their money!”

  Shauzia was happy that her dog was eating. She would have liked some meat herself, but she didn’t ask, and it was never offered.

  She didn’t know whether it was the church, or the pizza, or Jasper’s tricks, but she always made a lot of money on Sundays. Sometimes she made more than she did when she was working.

  There were many regular customers at the Chief Burger. Shauzia remembered them from week to week, and they remembered her – or, at least, they remembered Jasper, since that was who they greeted first.

  Shauzia always hoped they would give her a piece of pizza along with their roupees, but they never did. Not even the people she saw often, like the couple in the white van that she had first met outside the grocery store. Their two little boys cried when they had to stop playing with Jasper and go home.

  “Spare any roupees?” she called out.

  “Would you like some money?” a man asked, coming up beside her.

  Adults ask such stupid questions, Shauzia thought.

  “Yes, I need money,” she replied politely, holding out her hand. “I am also looking for work.”

  The man handed her a hundred-roupee note.

  Shauzia thought her eyes would fall out of her head. She had never held such a beautiful thing before.

  “Come with me,” the man said. “I will give you a job and then
I will give you even more money.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Shauzia. “I will work very hard for you. Come on, Jasper.” She bent down to pick up Jasper’s leash.

  “Leave the dog,” the man said. He took hold of Shauzia’s arm.

  Jasper growled.

  Shauzia tried to bend down to reassure him, but the man tightened his grip and began to pull her along the sidewalk toward his car.

  “Wait!” she said. “Just let me see to my dog.”

  The man did not stop. He held her more tightly.

  “You’re hurting me!” Shauzia cried. Jasper, hearing the panic in her voice, started to bark at the man. But he kept pulling at Shauzia.

  “No!” She tried to pull away. “I don’t want to go with you!”

  A crowd began to gather. The crowd attracted the police.

  “What’s happening here?” a policeman asked.

  “This boy stole from me, one hundred roupees,” the man said.

  “I didn’t steal! He gave me the money!” Shauzia yelled. “He tried to put me in his car, but I didn’t want to go.”

  “Search him,” the man said. “You will find my hundred-roupee note in his pocket.”

  Shauzia didn’t want them searching her and taking the rest of her money. She took the bill out of her pocket and held it out to the man.

  “Take it back.”

  One of the policemen took it.

  “Evidence,” he said.

  Then they grabbed hold of her. Jasper barked madly and threw himself at the policemen.

  Shauzia screamed and tried to fight back, but the police were bigger, and they threw her into the back of their van.

  She looked out of the tiny window of the back door of the van in time to see one of the policemen kick Jasper hard. Then the van pulled away, and she could see nothing more.

  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.