Born Under a Million Shadows (9 page)

“Not at the moment there aren’t; it’s winter.” She laughed.

“I know that,” I joined in, happy to have got the subject going at last. “But usually there are. Shinwar is famous for poppy.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Georgie agreed. “And your point is?”

“Nothing.” I shrugged. “I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Why? Because you think Khalid is involved in poppy?”

Georgie turned her head to look at me. To my gigantic relief she didn’t seem angry, but I still thought it best to ignore the question.

“Look,” she continued. “I know a lot of people think Khalid is involved in drugs because he’s a rich man, but he isn’t—isn’t involved in drugs, that is; of course he’s a rich man. Khalid hates drugs. He says they trap people in poverty, they damage the reputation of the country, and they pay for the insurgency that is threatening to wreck Afghanistan once again. He hates them, Fawad, absolutely hates them.”

“But how can you be sure he’s telling the truth?” I asked.

Georgie reached for the packet of cigarettes lying by her feet, removed one from the box, and lit it.

“Well, there are a number of reasons,” she explained, releasing a line of smoke through her lips. “I know he has several projects running in the east helping farmers find work away
from poppy growing, like providing them with fruit and olive trees and seeds for wheat and perfume flowers. But mainly I know he’s telling the truth because I trust him.”

Georgie looked away, sipped her coffee, and sucked heavily on her cigarette. I turned my face to my feet and watched from the corner of my eye as she slowly dragged a pale hand through her hair, stroking it away from her face. Against the near-black of her hair and the gray of the
patu
, her skin looked frosty white, and dark circles hung beneath her eyes.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“A little, yes,” she replied, a small smile thinning her lips.

I nodded. “I am too,” I said, which wasn’t true, but I didn’t want her to feel alone. Haji Khan had been gone a week, disappearing from our lives as suddenly as he had appeared, and I guessed she was missing him.

“I’ve known Khalid for three years,” Georgie stated, almost as if she had read my thoughts. “I would know if he was lying to me.”

“I didn’t say he was lying.”

“No. Well, not in so many words you didn’t, so, thank you.”

I shuffled my feet and let the softness of the
patu
cover them.

“But . . . how can you really be sure that he’s not?”

“How?” she asked, shrugging her shoulders in a very Afghan way that marked her out as nearly one of us. “Because I am.”

After a few seconds’ pause, during which a crease appeared in the middle of her eyebrows as if she was thinking hard, she added, “It’s like when a man, or a woman, says they love you. How can you be sure they aren’t just saying the words and they really mean it? Well, you look into their eyes. I mean really look, look hard, and you will feel it in your heart if they are telling you the truth. I love Khalid. He wouldn’t lie to me. Now”—Georgie breathed a small laugh that sounded empty,
like the sound of trying—“he may not be the best boyfriend in the world—he disappears on a whim, and sometimes he doesn’t call me for weeks, and no matter how hard I try to find him I can’t—but even so, I still know he loves me, and in the same way that I know that, I know he isn’t involved in poppies. There, does that set your mind at rest?”

Not really, I thought, but I nodded my head anyway. And inside I felt my heart hurt. I hadn’t heard Georgie’s excited chatter for several days now. She looked tired, the light had dimmed in her eyes, and I guessed Haji Khan had disappeared on something called “a whim” again, without bothering to call.

It probably wasn’t the right time to ask if he’d left on account of his drug business.

Maybe
Georgie was right and Haji Khan wasn’t smuggling drugs out of the country, but she was also a woman in love and she couldn’t be relied on to think straight. “Love makes fools of all of us,” Shir Ahmad once said as we watched my mother scamper across the street to visit Homeira. Considering love was also blind, I wondered why anyone would bother wasting so much energy chasing it. However, it was facts I needed right now, not poetry.

My first thought was to talk to James as he was a journalist and was bound to know who was doing what in the country, but my English, which was getting pretty good, wasn’t strong enough to deal with the subject, and James’s Dari had barely progressed beyond “salaam aleykum.” I didn’t feel I could talk to May, because we hadn’t really become friends and I got the impression that as well as not liking men she didn’t like boys much either—maybe because one day, if Allah willed it, we would grow up to become men. And Pir Hederi, although blind, was maybe not as wise as a blind man ought
to be. I guessed that he colored his stories to make up for the darkness he lived in.

I decided to speak to Spandi. After all, he was the one who first suggested Haji Khan was a drug lord, and he must have got his information from somewhere. So, for the first time in over four months I left Wazir Akbar Khan and crossed the city to return to Chicken Street.

There
is something quite wonderful about Chicken Street, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ve never been able to put my finger on it. Perhaps it’s the noise and confusion of the place that breathe life into me—the playful demands of shopkeepers battling for attention over the irritated beeps of drivers; the mass of people that clog the road along with the cars and pushcarts; the explosions of anger as vehicles ignore the one-way system; the chatter of kids terrorizing the tourists; the smell of kebabs wafting in from Cinema Park—or simply the great, glorious mess of it all that makes this small corner of Kabul come alive like a massive wriggling beast.

If Parliament is the brains of the capital—God help us—then Chicken Street is its heart.

However, there’s one thing that’s even better than Chicken Street, and that’s Chicken Street during the run-up to Christmas, the time when the foreigners celebrate the birthday of their prophet, Jesus. For three weeks something almost holy comes over the place. Money exchanges hands more freely; beggars get their share of crumpled afs before they even have time to mention their sick, dying baby; shops glow bright in the early darkness; bags of shopping hang in the arms of people thinking about their families; angry outbursts are quickly softened by happy smiles; and laughter bounces from pavements and doorways as the swarm hides from sudden snowstorms or tries to pick its way across the deep lines of
rubbish on either side of the road. This is Chicken Street at its most heavenly, and it felt good to be back. It was like coming home.

“Fawad!”

Jamilla came running up to me, grabbing me in a huge embrace that in a few years’ time she would no longer be able to do without ending up in the prison for wayward girls. Her face was pinched red by the cold, and her eyes shone bright.

“Where have you been? We’ve missed you!”

“I’ve missed you too,” I shouted back over the clash of noises filling the air, a racket of shouting, beeping, and growling generators.

And it was true, I had missed her. Okay, my thoughts had been kept busy with the events of my new life and the unexpected problems that came with it, but a true Afghan never forgets his past. That’s what makes us so good at holding grudges.

“I’ve so much to tell you, Jamilla!”

“I know some of it.” She smiled. “Spandi has been keeping me informed. Apparently you work for a blind man now; that’s why you have deserted us!”

“I haven’t deserted you,” I protested, “I’ve just been busy!”

“I know, Fawad, relax, I’m just joking with you. I’m happy for you, really I am.”

Jamilla took my hand and weaved me through the legs of the adults, taking me to the archway leading to a small shopping court where we used to gather to swap stories, information, and scraps of food.

“Fawad, you dirty little bastard!”

As we ducked into the alcove, Jahid rose from a crouch and came over to embrace me.

“I’ve got a television!” I told him.

“Fuck off, you liar!”

“No, it’s true! And there’s a girl in my house with breasts as big as the dome on top of Abdul Rahman Mosque!”

“No way!” he screamed, slapping his forehead. “There’s no justice in this world. Here I am, fully equipped to show the ladies a good time, and Allah in all his wisdom brings the best tits in the city to a fucking homosexual like you!”

Jahid punched me in the arm, but it was a playful punch and so we wrestled for a bit, falling into the display of scarves coloring the walls around us as we did so and earning us a not-so-playful slap around the head from the seller.

It felt fantastic to be back, tasting the fun and the violence of the street. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it and everyone in it—even Jahid.

As we moved farther into the courtyard, away from the scarf seller, to sit on dirty steps leading to a closed trinket shop, Jahid told me that his mother seemed depressed now that we’d gone and she no longer had anyone to shout with. He also revealed he would be getting out of Chicken Street soon: his father had called in a favor from someone who owed him one, and they’d found Jahid a job in the municipality offices, on account of his reading and writing. They were going to train him to do something useful, they said—once he’d mastered the art of tea making.

“It’s a good job,” he declared, sitting up straighter than I remembered him doing before. “It’s a good opportunity for me.”

“I know,” I told him, genuinely pleased. “Congratulations, Jahid. I really mean it.”

“Yeah.” Jahid nodded. “Yeah, thanks.” And he punched me on the arm again.

Unfortunately, Jamilla hadn’t done so well since I’d been gone. I noticed an old bruise under her left eye, and she told me that one of the beggar women had elbowed her in the face during the usual crushes to get to a foreigner’s wallet.

“It’s starting to change here,” she said. “It’s like the mafia now. You have to be part of their family, or you’re done for. I’m only here today because it’s Christmastime and there’s enough for everyone—and because Jahid and Spandi are here.”

I looked carefully at Jamilla and saw for the first time the color of fun washed from her cheeks, like she was suddenly older and more tired. I decided to ask Pir Hederi to find a job for her at the store.

“So, where is Spandi?” I asked.

“At the other end of the street selling his cards,” Jamilla revealed. “He’s looking so much better now that your friend Haji Khan took away his can.”

“Yeah, fuck me, Fawad,” Jahid joined in. “Haji Khan. You’re playing with the big boys now.”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Yeah . . . well, no, not personally, but I’ve heard of him. He’s a real Afghan hero!”

“Not a drug dealer, then?”

Jahid shrugged. “Show me a rich man in Afghanistan who isn’t mixed up in drugs. It doesn’t make him a bad man, does it? This ‘stop growing poppy’ shit is the West’s problem, not ours. It’s all their people who are injecting the stuff and catching AIDS off each other. We’re just trying to get by.”

“So,
how do you know Haji Khan is into drugs?” I asked Spandi as we walked back home from Chicken Street.

“It’s just something I heard.”

Spandi was counting his dollars as we walked, separating his money from Haji Khan’s and placing the notes in different pockets. He did look better, cleaner and younger. If only his face hadn’t been chewed away by the sand flies disease, he might even have been called handsome now.

“My father has some contacts in the east, some truck drivers who bring diesel over the border. They spend quite a bit of time in Jalalabad, and I’ve heard them mention Haji Khan once or twice.”

“And they say he’s a drug dealer?”

“So they say, but it’s only a rumor. He’s never been arrested or anything.”

“And what do you think?”

“Me?” Spandi shrugged. “I think it’s hard to arrest a man who’s fought for his country—and lost his family doing so.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father says Haji Khan used to be married to quite a woman, but the ISI killed her and their eldest daughter, shot them both as they lay in bed sleeping.”

“No!” A twist of guilt pulled at my body as I pictured Haji Khan leaning over what was left of his wife and daughter, darkness and death drowning him in tears. “Why would they do that?”

“He was fighting the Taliban, Fawad. It was probably a warning to him, but if that’s what they intended they fucked up badly because he fought like a madman after that. My father says some of his missions from Peshawar into Afghanistan were legendary because they were largely suicidal, but I guess Haji Khan didn’t care about dying after what happened. I don’t suppose he cared about anything.”

I said good-bye to Spandi at the corner of the British Embassy in Wazir and popped by Pir Hederi’s shop to beg for a job for Jamilla. He told me he’d think about it, despite all women, no matter how young they are, being a curse to every Afghan man of sound mind, and I thanked him for his consideration, knowing full well he would help her, because otherwise he would have just said no.

As I walked the long way home, past the large homes of
NGO workers, ministers, and businessmen and the laughter-filled grounds of the Lebanese and Indian restaurants, I thought of Jamilla and how happy she would be when I told her about Pir Hederi’s job. And as I got closer to my house I thought of how utterly destroyed Haji Khan must have been when he returned to his own home to find his family asleep forever, their bodies wet with blood.

His pain was real to me. I could almost taste it.

Amazingly, when foreigners visit this country, they can’t help but go on about its “breathtaking beauty” and how “noble and courageous” its people are, but this is the reality of Afghanistan: pain and death. There’s not one of us who hasn’t been touched by them in one way or another. From the Russians to the mujahideen to the Taliban, war has stolen our fathers and brothers; the leftovers of war continue to take our children; and the results of war have left us poor as beggars. So the foreigners can keep their talk of beautiful scenery and traditional goodness because all of us would swap it in a heartbeat for just one moment’s peace, and it’s high time the sorrow that came to plant itself in our soil just packed up and went away to terrorize someone else.