Born Under a Million Shadows (15 page)

It was my first proper trip out of Kabul—holidays not being that common among people who can hardly feed themselves—and the ever-changing views were more than amazing, but I was simply too upset to take any pleasure in them. The fact was, I felt truly sorry and deeply ashamed about what I’d done to Philippe, and I knew that his view of Afghan hospitality would have changed quite a lot now that one of us had stabbed him in the ass.

It was unforgivable, really.

May had told me the next day that Philippe had gone
to see the surgeons at the Italian Emergency Hospital in Shahr-e Naw, where they had sewed a row of stitches into the wound. He also had to have something called “a tetanus jab.”

James, on the other hand, had spent much of the day laughing.

When
we arrived in Jalalabad it was late afternoon, and we drove straight into the heart of the city, which, unlike the winter gray of Kabul, was still glowing yellow in dusty sunshine. There were more donkeys and carts crowding the streets than in the capital, and the place crawled with tiny
tuk-tuks
, Pakistani-style buggies painted blue and decorated with wildly colorful pictures of flowers and women’s eyes.

Beeping and pushing our way through the traffic, we eventually slipped into a side road, a beaten track leading to the front doors of about ten high-walled houses. Halfway down we stopped at Haji Khan’s place, a large white mansion set in a garden of green that could easily have been home to King Mohammad Zahir Shah, if he still had any money.

As our Land Cruiser pulled into the drive, we found Ismerai already waiting for us on the steps of the house. He was talking into a mobile phone that he clicked shut as we jumped out of our vehicle, and after greeting us with warm handshakes and big smiles he took us inside.

The sight that filled my eyes almost blinded me. Through two large wooden doors, outside of which waited a number of sandals, a massive hall appeared with eight white leather sofas facing one another in rows of four. Georgie sat on one of them and pulled off her boots. I’d kicked my own shoes away at the door, which was the proper thing to do, but Georgie’s boots were complicated. At the back of the hallway a giant staircase grew from the ground, going off in two directions to meet up again on the top floor. Upstairs, beyond a fence of
wooden balconies, I could see a number of doors leading to a number of rooms. A small man no bigger than a child grabbed our bags and disappeared up there. Back downstairs, to the left of the hallway was a raised floor glinting with a golden carpet and long lapis-blue cushions. Relaxing on them were four brown men in brown
pakols
and brown
patus
. They were watching a wide-screen television and seemed quite at home.

As we entered the house and made our way to the TV area, all the men stood up and offered their hands to Georgie in welcome. She obviously knew them, and they seemed happy to see her, gently scolding her for having stayed away too long. They then waved at her to sit down, offering her the position of honored guest on the cushion farthest from the door. I followed her to the end of the room and sat down nearby, but not too close because I wasn’t a baby and I wanted the men to see that.

As green tea arrived, joined by glass plates of green raisins, pistachios, almonds, and papered sweets, Ismerai came to sit with us. The other guests settled closer to the television, even though the sound had now gone.

Away from our house and the protection of its walls, Ismerai acted differently with Georgie, much more formally. I knew this was largely due to the other men being in the room. Despite all the years Georgie and Ismerai had been friends, they were friends in Afghanistan and therefore there were rules to follow, which mainly involved not being too friendly with women, foreign or not. The fact was, laughing and joking with women didn’t look good, it looked weak, and it was probably only one step away from finding pleasure in the bracelet-jangling swirls of Afghanistan’s dancing boys.

But although I wasn’t that surprised by Ismerai’s behavior—he was a Pashtun after all—I was a little amazed to see the change in Georgie. She was terrible for teasing Ismerai when he came to our house, but now she was quiet and respectful,
and she didn’t speak again with the other men unless they looked over to invite her into their conversation, which they didn’t really.

In our culture, a woman is usually permitted to sit only with the men she is related to. Georgie’s presence was tolerated only because she was a foreigner. If she hadn’t come from England, she’d have been hidden in the back of the house with the rest of the women.

Haji Khan was in Shinwar, Ismerai told us. “The signal doesn’t work well in the mountains.” He apologized to Georgie with a shy smile, looking at her silent mobile phone as he did so.

Georgie shrugged as if she didn’t care, and I almost believed her. “I’m just grateful you invited us over,” she replied, “especially at such short notice.”

As she spoke I suddenly realized she must have called Ismerai that morning when I wasn’t listening, and the knowledge of it made my cheeks burn with added shame because now everyone must know what I’d done, even my friends living half a world away in Jalalabad.

Therefore, when our dinner was laid out for us and Ismerai joked that the household help had “better keep the knives away from the boy,” I didn’t laugh.

“So,
do you want to talk about it?”

Georgie stopped to light a cigarette after beating me for the fifth time at
carambul
, a wooden board game imported from India where two players fight with their fingers, flicking bright-colored disks into four holes drilled into the corners. She was impossibly good at it for a girl.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully, sensing that Georgie was looking for reasons for my behavior. “Maybe.”

“Sometimes it helps to talk about things, especially difficult
things,” Georgie pushed gently, fiddling as she did so with a box of matches showing the Khyber Pass on the front. “It’s a way of chasing the bad spirits out from your head.”

“I guess,” I said, even though I was certain the devils that lived there were too strong for the magic of talk. “Okay. I’ll try.”

Long
before I was born my mother was married to my father, and together they made Bilal. He was my oldest brother. Three years later, when the Russians packed up to begin their long journey home, rolling out of Afghanistan in the tanks they had brought with them, my parents celebrated by bringing Mina into the family. In Pashto, her name means “love.” Some years after that Yosef, my other brother, arrived, and then finally, after all of them had taken up most of the space in our house, I was born.

This was my family, as complete and happy as it would ever be.

Then, one by one, like leaves falling from a tree, they began to die.

First to go was Yosef, who stopped eating the day after he was bitten by a dog. I was a baby, so he was lost to us before I could remember him, but my mother says I’m a little like him and that Allah took him away because He needed more sunshine in Paradise.

A year after Yosef died, my father also left us. He was a teacher, but he laid down his schoolbooks and picked up a gun to fight alongside the soldiers of the Northern Alliance with a group of other men from our village. Mother says his heart became furious as his eyes watched the Taliban change our ways, and because he was a man of honor and courage he felt it was his duty to stop them, being as he was a son of Afghanistan. Unfortunately for my father, it turned out that
he was better suited to schooling than fighting, and he died in a battle near Mazar-e Sharif in the north of the country.

That left my mother a widow, a widow with a baby and two young children. But because of her tears she clung to our home, as it still held the smell of my father and the ghostly laughter of my brother, even though everyone said she would be better off living with her sister.

Of course, this being Afghanistan, things then went from bad to worse than bad.

Sometime after my father died, and at the time when my head began to save the pictures of my life, the Taliban came to Paghman. By now I was no longer a baby—I was walking and talking—and I heard the fear in my mother’s voice when one night she shook me awake to pull me into her arms and carry me from my bed to the corner of the kitchen where my sister and brother were waiting. I remember it clearly now: my mother was trembling through her clothes, and outside I could hear the sound of heavy trucks filling the street with the noise of their engines.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Please, Fawad, please be quiet,” my mother begged. She was crying, and, outside, shouts and screams invaded the stillness of the night as the light coming in through our window burned the color of flames.

As we hid in the corner, the sound of panic and pain grew closer, steadily creeping upon us, looking to find us. All this time my mother whispered to Allah under her breath, quick and quiet as she rocked on her legs, holding on to all three of her children. Her prayer was broken by a sharp intake of breath as the door cracked open at the front of our house and the barks of men we didn’t know began to fill our home.

It wasn’t a big house, and it didn’t take long for them to discover us—five black shadows jumping on our huddle to snatch my sister’s arm away from our mother and shout their
hate into our faces. As my mother leaped to her feet, one of the Taliban soldiers threw her to the floor, slamming his boot onto her head to keep her in place. My brother Bilal, who had the heart of a lion, immediately sprang from the ground, raining blows on the man’s back and kicking at his legs. Another of the men then grabbed my brother as if he were a toy. He smashed his fist into Bilal’s face and threw him across the kitchen, his head bouncing off the corner of a cupboard.

As my brother slipped to the floor, no longer awake and no longer able to help us, my mother screamed into the Talib’s boot and pushed with all her power to reach her eldest child. As she threw herself at Bilal, the man who had hurt her came on her again and pulled her back to the ground. But this time it wasn’t the boot he laid on top of her; it was his body. I saw his hands ripping at her clothes while, from somewhere behind us, the smell of burning began to fill our noses.

“Run, Fawad, run!” she shouted.

The man hit my mother in the face, but as he did so another shadow came running into the room. His black eyes caught me first, and he stared at me for a moment that seemed to last forever. When I remember it now, I think I saw sadness written there. Releasing me from his gaze, he turned toward the man on top of my mother and pulled him from her, shouting something angry and hard.

“Run, Fawad!” my mother shouted again.

Because I was scared and I didn’t know what to do, and because my brother was asleep, and because one of the men had my sister’s arm, and because my mother had told me to, I did. I ran as fast as I could from the back of the house and found a place in the bushes near our home.

Crouching low into the prickles, I watched the whole world catch fire. As the houses of my neighbors spat out flames, the screams of fear filling my ears gradually turned into howls of
mourning as the men dressed in black ripped apart our lives, beating the old people with sticks and stealing the young from their arms. In the orange light of that night I watched those men drag my terrified sister onto the back of a truck, along with twenty other girls from our village, and drive her away.

As the engines faded into the distance and the air died around us, leaving only the sound of fire and tears, I saw my mother come from the house, carrying my brother over her shoulder. Her face was pale, and blood poured from a cut by her mouth.

“Fawad?” she shouted. “Fawad?”

I stood up, and she saw me. The light of relief flickered in her eyes before she fell to her knees and opened her mouth to let go of a scream that would have frozen the blood of the devil himself.

With
our house now a broken shell of black and our neighbors just as broken, my mother, Bilal, and I walked from our home in Paghman to arrive at the place of my aunt. I remember nothing of the journey, so I guess I must have slept, my mother carrying me for most of it. I also can’t remember any discussion once we got to my aunt’s house, but I can clearly see the look in my mother’s eyes. It was one of death, and the blankness that went with it was mirrored in the eyes of Bilal.

All I knew for certain was that my mother had been hurt by the Taliban; my sister, who was only eleven or twelve years old, had been taken by the Taliban; and my brother was now lost to the Afghan obsession with revenge.

After waking from his sleep, Bilal had been greeted by the battered face of our mother and the hole in our family that used to be filled by our sister. Giant tears of anger came falling from his eyes, spilling onto the dirt that used to be our garden. Because Bilal had become the man of the house
after my father was killed, he made himself crazy with thoughts that he should have done more to protect us. But he was only a boy—a boy up against an army of black turbaned devils. There was nothing more he could have done for any of us. Even so, for the next few weeks Bilal covered himself in silence, hardly able to speak through his own shame and dishonor, until one day his place simply stood empty. My only living brother had left our aunt’s house to join the Northern Alliance.

He was fourteen years old at the time, an age when he should have been moving closer to God, as he was now old enough to deliver his prayers at the mosque and fast with the adults at the time of Ramazan. Instead, he gave himself up to war and revenge, and we never saw him again.

Once the Americans had bombed the Taliban out of our lives, I wondered whether Bilal would return, but when the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul he still stayed away. Though neither my mother nor I said anything, we both knew he was dead.

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