Born Under a Million Shadows (16 page)

I
T WAS NIGHT
when the lights woke me, the time of night when you’re stuck between yesterday and today and everything’s so quiet and deaf with sleep there’s no sign of the morning coming to get you. It was the time of night that calls for a stretch and a smile.

And it was this time of night that Haji Khan chose to return home.

It started with the sound of metal on concrete as the gates were pulled open and three Land Cruisers with blacked-out windows roared into the driveway, spilling guards from the doors and Haji Khan from the front seat. As two men with guns pulled the gates shut behind him, another man jumped into the seat he’d abandoned and the cars facing the house now turned in circles on the grass to point at the exit instead.

Watching this dance of headlights from my window, I saw Haji Khan lead a group of men into the house. His face looked fierce, and I wondered whether he’d just found out that Ismerai had let Georgie and me come to stay.

I tiptoed toward the bedroom door and pulled it ajar, blinking at the sudden light that shone from the floor below. Rising from the ground, a mumble of voices came to my ears, low man sounds it took me a few seconds to catch properly. Then, above them all, I heard Haji Khan’s words filling the air like coming thunder.

I opened the door a little farther and leaned into the crack, which allowed me to see what was going on through the wooden pillars of the balcony. Haji Khan was now standing
by the door, with five men nearby holding quiet conversations with one another. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they looked pretty rich, dressed as they were in pressed
salwar kameez
with large, heavy watches hanging off their wrists.

Haji Khan was talking to the small man who had taken my bags upstairs when I arrived. The man nodded upward to the side of the house where Georgie was sleeping, just along the corridor from where I should have been sleeping, and Haji Khan’s gaze briefly followed the man’s head, causing me to catch my breath and fall a little farther into the darkness of my room.

If he didn’t know we were here before he arrived, he certainly did now.

After a few seconds, and when no sound of footsteps came to throw us out of our beds, I inched forward again.

Haji Khan was now sitting on one of the sofas, his
pakol
balanced on his knee and a cup of green tea in his hand. As he reached for the sugared almonds that had been placed on a table before him, a man approached holding a mobile phone. Haji Khan put it to his ear, and though he never shouted, his voice echoed loudly around the room, causing the other men to stop their conversations and eye one another from beneath bowed heads and heavy eyebrows.

“I don’t care how you do it, just do it,” Haji Khan ordered. “I want him out by the morning.”

He clicked the phone shut and handed it back to the man who had given it to him, and I wondered if this was the reason Haji Khan never called Georgie: he’d lost his phone and had to keep borrowing someone else’s.

In
the morning I went downstairs looking for breakfast and found the hall empty of the big men who had filled it the night
before and busy with three small ones armed with cleaning cloths and a vacuum cleaner. A boy a little older than me was playing
carambul
by himself on the platform floor close to the TV.

“Salaam,” I said, going over to join him. “I’m Fawad.”

The boy looked up from his game.

“Salaam,” he replied. “Ahmad.”

He then carried on playing, and with nothing else to do, I sat on a long cushion and watched him. He was very good, flicking the disks effortlessly into the holes opposite him. He also looked very clean, new even. But although his skin had the look of the rich about it—a soft creamy brown—his eyes held an old man’s stare within them.

We were the only children in the room, but the boy called Ahmad didn’t seem in a rush to talk, so I was glad when my breakfast arrived because it at least gave me something to do. I was also starving, which was strange, because I never usually had much of an appetite. “You eat like a bird,” my mother once remarked, and I immediately wondered how worms tasted.

After I’d finished my eggs and a cup of sweet tea, Ahmad knocked the
carambul
board in my direction and jerked his head upward, inviting me to play. As I shuffled toward him to take up the challenge, he set the pieces in place and let me go first.

“You came with Georgie, didn’t you?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I admitted, badly missing the cluster of disks I had to break. The boy waved as if he didn’t care and let me take the shot again, which I thought showed very good manners.

“I saw you last night,” he said as I carefully lined up my shot, “spying on my father.”

The disks clattered around the board as I hit them, and Ahmad reached for the large one to take his turn.

“I saw you across the hall,” he continued as he casually
flicked a blue piece into the far right hole. “My bedroom is opposite the one you’re staying in.”

“And your dad is?”

“Haji Khalid Khan. Who else?”

I looked up, surprised. Although I knew Haji Khan had children by his dead wife, I was a little shocked to find one of them sitting opposite me because Georgie had told me they stayed with his sister.

“I thought you lived somewhere else,” I said.

“I do. I sleep at my aunt’s place usually, but the noise is a nightmare. Too many women in the house, that’s the problem. Here, your turn.”

I took the disk and managed to slide one of my whites close to a hole.

“Not bad,” Ahmad said. “Of course, you seriously need to practice.”

“I only started playing yesterday.”

“Yes, and you seriously need to practice.”

Ahmad laughed, and as he did so I saw some of Haji Khan in his face.

“Your father seemed a bit angry last night,” I mentioned, watching Ahmad steadily demolish the board in front of me.

“Ha! He was pissed all right.”

“Is it because of us?”

“Who?” Ahmad looked up from the game, genuinely puzzled.

“Me and Georgie,” I explained. “Is he angry because we turned up uninvited?”

“No, of course not.” Ahmad shook his head. “Georgie has always been welcome here. This is her home, that’s what my father says.”

“Oh.”

“No, if you must know, he’s pissed about some family business, but it’ll soon be sorted because it always is.”

About
three hours after I’d finished my breakfast, and about two hours after Ahmad had disappeared back to the house full of women in one of his father’s Land Cruisers, Georgie appeared downstairs looking fed up. “Come on, Fawad, it’s time to see a man about some goats,” she said, and we grabbed our boots, jumped into another of Haji Khan’s cars, and roared out of Jalalabad.

It was a beautiful day with brilliant skies that carried none of the dust and car-fog hanging above Kabul, and an Indian love song played from a cassette. As well as me and Georgie there was a driver and a guard with a gun placed between his legs in the front seat. He didn’t belong to us, so I guessed he must belong to Haji Khan.

Driving out of the city toward Pakistan, we passed a large portrait of the martyr Haji Abdul Qadir, the former vice president who was murdered eight months after the Taliban fled. Jalalabad had been his home, and I thought the people must have really loved him to place his picture there.

Climbing out of the city, we drove higher, through a mud village and on to a large flat space of brown before dipping back into green, passing rows of olives trees, and into a tunnel of giant trees that seemed to be leaning over the road in an effort to hug their friends on the other side. As we came to another village, we turned right off the main road, through a small bazaar and onto a rough track taking us to Shinwar. This was where we would find a man and his goats, apparently.

As we drove farther into the countryside, we passed scores and scores of old poppy fields. I’d recently seen photographs of them printed in one of the Kabul newspapers Pir Hederi had me read to him. The poppies shone bright and pretty from the pages, and I remember thinking at the time that if they
tasted as good as they looked it was no wonder people became addicted.

As we passed an old man with a donkey laden with twigs, Georgie rolled down her window, and after saying her hellos and asking after his family, she asked where we could find a man called Baba Gul Rahman. The old man lifted his hand and revealed that we could find him at the hut over the next field under the hill. “If he still has a hut,” he grumbled. Georgie said thank you, looked at me, and shrugged, and then we all set off toward the hill over the next field to see if Baba Gul still had his hut.

When we arrived at the foot of the hill we were relieved to find Baba Gul’s hut was still standing, but annoyingly for us there was no Baba Gul in it. One of the children we assumed to be his went running off to the next village in search of him.

Sitting on the grass, watching a herd of goats eating and playing, we passed the time drinking tea given to us by a girl who was about my age or a little older. She was Baba Gul’s oldest daughter, revealed Georgie, who had met her before. Her name was Mulallah, and she had the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen.

“How are you doing?” Georgie asked as she came to sit with us. “Your goats look well.”

“Yes, the goats are good,” she replied, roughly wiping the hair from her face and frowning.

“Something wrong, Mulallah?”

The girl shrugged. “This is Afghanistan, Khanum Georgie. Sometimes, life is not so easy. You know this better than us.”

Georgie nodded, but I saw the questions sitting in her eyes.

As I didn’t know what to say, I kept my mouth shut.

“My father’s playing at the cards again,” the girl finally explained as we sat there in silence. “And when he loses we pay for it. It must be Allah’s punishment for the sin he’s committing.
I mean, just look where we’re living now.” The girl waved her hands at the hut, which was more of a tent really, a flimsy house of wood covered in plastic sheeting bearing the initials of something called UNICEF.

As the girl spoke, her mother approached. She was a tiny woman with a face that could have been carved out of the mountains behind us. She greeted Georgie affectionately but didn’t hang around. After nodding her head at her daughter, they both left to round up the goats, but as she turned away I caught the look on her face, and it was one of deep shame. I understood then that the lifelong humiliation she had suffered at the hands of her husband had been the cause of the ugly lines cut into her skin. And now that the girl was speaking of the family’s dishonor to virtual strangers, there wasn’t any use in pretending life was anything different.

Sometimes, when you possess nothing at all, the only thing you can do is hang on to your dignity. But even simple words can take that away from you if you’re not careful.

“Was
Haji Khan happy to see you?” I asked Georgie as we continued to await Baba Gul’s arrival.

“He was tired, but yes, I think so,” she answered, fiddling with the frayed ends of her jeans as we sat on the grass.

“You
think
so?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t
know
?”

“Well . . .” Georgie breathed in deeply and then out again. “No, I don’t really.”

I shook my head in disbelief. As far as lovers’ reunions went, this didn’t really sound up there with Laila and Majnun.

Theirs was a story Jamilla had told me one day in Chicken Street after her mother had told it to her one night to take
the sting out of her father’s fists. In the legend, Laila was a beautiful girl born to a rich family. Of course, when she grew up her family wanted her to marry a rich man, but instead she fell in love with Majnun, a very poor man. When everyone found out, there was hell to pay, and Laila and Majnun were banned from seeing each other ever again. Laila’s parents then forced her to marry a man of great wealth, and he took her away from the area. But even though she had a beautiful home, her love for Majnun stayed strong, and one day when she couldn’t stand being apart from him any longer, she killed herself. When Majnun heard of Laila’s death he went mad-crazy with grief, and in the end he died on her grave.

In no part of the story did I hear that Majnun was a little tired and might or might not have been happy to see Laila.

“Were you pleased to see him, then?” I asked.

“Fawad, I’m always pleased to see Khalid, but life is complicated, you know.”

“No, I don’t know actually. I’m only a boy; I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

Georgie smiled.

“Sorry, Fawad, sometimes I forget your age because you’re so wonderfully grown-up! But you’re right, there are complications in life you won’t know about just yet. So, yes, I was happy to see him, of course I was, but then we argued a little and there were a lot of hot words said, and that doesn’t really make me very happy at all.”

“What did you argue about?”

“I don’t know really . . . the usual. We never used to fight like this, not back when we first met. In those days everything used to be quite lovely. But things change, don’t they?”

“Yes, I guess they do,” I replied. Then, bowing my head to look at her from the side of my eyes, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it? I mean, sometimes it helps to talk. It chases the bad spirits out from your head.”

“Well, that serves me right, doesn’t it.” Georgie laughed, recognizing her own words from the day before. “Okay. I’ll try.

“When I first met Haji Khalid Khan I was working on your country’s first ever elections. It was an exciting time, a moment of real hope and opportunity, and walking into all this crazy expectation came the most beautiful man I had ever set eyes upon. Up to that point I’d never believed in love at first sight, and it’s not something you can easily explain, but it’s a state of the mind and heart that makes your body feel alive and makes each morning that comes worth waking up for.

“So there we were, me and a group of other internationals and a team of Afghans who had arrived in Shinwar to prepare for the elections. In those days Shinwar was said to be a pretty dangerous place, filled with hiding Taliban and bloodthirsty bandits, so Khalid offered our party a place to stay and also his protection.