Mud City (3 page)

Resisting the urge to yell “Goodbye!” in Mrs. Weera’s
ear, Shauzia quietly left the hut with Jasper right behind her.

They passed the hut used for embroidery training, and the one used to
teach older women how to read. They doubled as sleeping huts for some of the
families.

Shauzia went into the food storage hut. There wasn’t much there, but
she took the few pieces of nan left over from the day’s meals and wrapped some
cold cooked rice in a bit of cloth. She put the food and a small plastic bottle for
water in her shoulder bag.

Back out in the courtyard, she looked around the compound one last time.
Everything
was quiet except for the sound of Mrs. Weera’s
snoring and, farther away, the sound of someone crying outside the Widows’
Compound.

There was no reason to stay. The camp was dark. Shauzia began to regret
her decision to go off in the middle of the night. But before she could talk herself out
of it, she turned and walked through the compound door and continued on her journey to
the sea.

There was a loud honk from behind. Shauzia jumped out of the way, and a
huge truck roared past her. The exhaust fumes made her cough.

Jasper stuck close to her legs – so close that she was finding it
difficult to walk. She could feel him trembling.

“It’s all right, Jasper,” she said, patting him, but she
was feeling pretty shaky herself.

It had been dark when they walked away from the refugee camp, and they had
kept walking right through dawn. Now the day was in full swing, and the closer they came
to the nearest city, Peshawar, the crazier the traffic became.

The highway was clogged with every type of vehicle. There were buses so
full that men clung to the outsides, and little three-wheeled cars that looked like toys
zooming in and out of traffic. They were all brightly painted, with
many colors and designs. There were white vans and taxicabs and regular cars. It
seemed to Shauzia that they were all honking their horns at the same time.

They shared the road with motorcycles that had whole families piled on
them, and bicycles loaded down with parcels. There were carts pulled by horses, donkeys,
buffalo and even a camel. Shauzia watched an old man use all his strength to pedal a
bicycle loaded down with lumber. The bike teetered and weaved and was almost run into by
a passing bus.

It was too much. Shauzia took Jasper to a shady spot under a tree. They
sat and watched the traffic speed by while they caught their breath.

“I wonder if we made a mistake coming here.” Shauzia said.
“I didn’t think it would be so noisy. I didn’t think it would be
so… confusing.” She scratched Jasper behind one of his ears, more for her
comfort than for his.

“Maybe we should even have stayed with the sheep,” she said.
“At least the air was easier to breathe, and not so hot. Besides, the sea is such
a long way away. What if we never make it? We’ll be stuck here.”

Jasper nudged her hand so she would keep
scratching.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” she asked him. He wagged
his tail and licked her face.

Shauzia took the photo of the lavender field out of her pocket and looked
at it for what was probably the millionth time.

“This is where I’m going,” she said, more to herself
than to Jasper. “And to get there, first I have to be here.”

She put the picture back in her pocket, stood up and took a deep breath
full of gasoline fumes.

“Let’s go,” she said to Jasper. Then she grinned.
“I’ll pretend to be a mighty warrior, like that Ghengis Khan who conquered
Afghanistan. I’ll invade this puny city. Nothing stands in my way!” She
swaggered back to the highway in what she imagined was a Ghengis Khan strut, got honked
at again and resumed her journey along the side of the road. She went back to being just
Shauzia, but at least she was moving forward.

“I remember trucks and cars from Kabul,” she told Jasper,
keeping her hand on his head to reassure him. He was still trembling. “All
you’ve known is sheep. Don’t worry. You’ll get
used to this.”

Jasper wasn’t so sure. He darted away at the sound of every horn or
loud rumble. Shauzia was afraid he would get confused and run into the traffic instead
of away from it. When she spied a length of blue binding twine on the ground, she picked
it up, tied part of it around Jasper’s neck and used the rest as a leash.

“It’s for your own good,” she said. “Just until
you’re not scared anymore.”

Jasper scratched twice at the rope. Then he licked Shauzia’s cheek,
and they started to walk again.

“There are so many Afghans here, it looks like Kabul,” she
said. Even the market looked like Kabul’s market, with fruit piled high on outdoor
platforms and skinned goats hanging on hooks. Butchers fanned newspapers over them to
keep the flies away.

Two things were different, though. One was that although some women wore
the burqa, others had their faces showing, and no one beat them for it.

The other thing that was different was that
all the
buildings were intact. No bombs had fallen here. Shauzia had lived among bomb rubble all
her life. It felt strange not to see any.

“There must be lots of ways to make money here.” Shauzia
doubted Jasper could hear her in the noise of the crowd, but she spoke to him anyway,
just to have someone to talk to.

All around her, boys her age and younger were working. She saw them in
auto repair shops, pounding metal at a blacksmith’s, selling oranges off a cart
and carrying trays of tea. She saw boys hanging off the sides of buses. They hopped off
and urged in customers, taking their money, then climbed back onto the railing as the
bus pulled away from the curb. She passed a construction site and saw small boys covered
in dirt, leading donkeys loaded down with bricks.

Languages swirled around her. She recognized the Afghan languages –
Pashtu, Dari and Uzbek – and she heard others, too, that she thought must be the
Pakistani languages.

The crowd got thicker, and Shauzia kept a good grip on Jasper’s
leash.

A foul-smelling, slow-moving river divided the two sides of the market.
Shauzia saw shops that sold jewelry and canned goods. She saw a
shop
that sold nothing but burqas, lined up on the walls, hanging like blue ghosts.
Everywhere there were people selling goods off trays and karachis.

Shauzia walked around the market looking at all the shops and trying to
imagine herself working in them. When she was too tired to walk anymore, she found a
place on the ground in a bit of shade from a building and leaned back against the wall.
Jasper sat beside her. She took out her plastic bottle, drank some water and poured some
in her hand for Jasper. They shared a piece of the bread she’d brought with them
from the camp. Then they each drank more water, to wash down the bread.

It was good to eat and drink. Shauzia felt completely worn out. She closed
her eyes to rest.

“This is my spot.”

Shauzia opened her eyes. Standing in front of her was a woman covered by a
burqa.

“This is my spot,” the woman said again. “I come here
every day.”

“I’m just sitting,” Shauzia said.

“Sit somewhere else.”

Too tired to argue, Shauzia and Jasper got to their feet.

The woman took their place. “Help me,” she
begged to a passerby, who ignored her. “Just one or two roupees?” she called
to another.

“Do you make much money that way?” Shauzia asked.

“Maybe ten roupees a day.”

“Is that a lot?”

“It’s enough to keep my children hungry.”

“Maybe if you lifted your burqa so people could see who you are...
” Shauzia suggested.

“What do you know?” the woman replied angrily. “I keep
my face covered when I beg so that no one can see my shame. I was an office manager in
Afghanistan. I’ve graduated from university. And now look at me! No, don’t
look at me! Go away!”

Shauzia stood there for a moment feeling awkward that she’d hurt the
woman’s feelings, and angry that the woman had made her get up just when she had
gotten comfortable. Finally, since she didn’t know what to do with either her
awkwardness or her anger, she just walked away, and Jasper went with her.

The woman had scared her. If someone who had been to university was
reduced to begging, what hope did Shauzia have?

She knelt down beside Jasper and pretended to fuss
with his leash. She kept her head low so no one could see her crying.

“I don’t like it here,” she whispered. Jasper licked at
her tears. Shauzia hugged him close. Then she stood up and kept walking.

There were a lot of beggars in the market. Some were women, covered and
uncovered. Some were sick people with twisted limbs. Others were children her age.
People walked past the beggars’ outstretched hands as if they were invisible.

“The people they’re begging from look as poor as they
are,” Shauzia said. She turned away. It was all too awful to watch.

They walked through the market again.

I’ve got to ask someone for a job, she thought, but each time she
got close to approaching a shopkeeper, she felt too shy to do it.

“You can’t possibly manage on your own,” Mrs. Weera had
said. Shauzia remembered how everyone had laughed.

She took a deep breath and headed to the nearest shop, a bookstall.

“Give me a job!” she demanded of the man behind the stack of
books.

She was quickly ordered out of that shop, and away
from the four other shops she went to.

The day slipped away. The market stayed open after dark, but the bare
lightbulbs hanging here and there from poles and wires created weird, frightening
shadows in the streets. Shauzia and Jasper squeezed themselves into an alcove between
shops. She could tell from the smell that they were sharing the space with decomposing
fruit and other garbage, but at least they were out of the way of people, cars and
shadows.

She leaned against the wall, missed Mrs. Weera’s snoring, and fell
asleep sitting up.

Shauzia woke to a gray predawn morning, her head pillowed on a pile of
rotting cabbage. Jasper was already awake, chewing on something he had found in the
garbage.

She got up and they went to a water tap she’d seen in the market.
She threw water on her face, and she and Jasper had long drinks. The water filled up her
belly – for awhile.

She spent the day looking for work. Many of the shopkeepers told her she
was too dirty to
work in their shops. Others already had all the
help they needed.

The sun was starting to go down when she passed a butcher shop, almost
empty of meat, full of dirt and dried blood.

“Your shop needs cleaning,” she said to the butcher, who was
sitting on a stool just inside the doorway and drinking a cup of tea. “I could
clean it.”

The butcher swallowed a mouthful of tea, looked her up and down and said,
“This is a man’s job. You’re a small boy. Go away.”

Shauzia didn’t budge. “I can clean your shop,” she said
again. She put her hands on her hips and stared right at him. She was hungry and tired
and not in the mood for nonsense.

The man drank some more tea and swirled it around in his mouth before
swallowing it.

“That’s a fine dog,” he said finally, nodding at Jasper.
“He looks hungry.”

Of course he’s hungry, Shauzia thought. So am I.

“Wait.” The butcher disappeared into the shop and came out
again with chunks of meat on a piece of newspaper.

“That’s good meat,” the butcher said, rubbing
Jasper’s ears while he gulped down the meat. “Good meat
for a good dog.” He stood up. “Be here early in the morning. I’ll give
you half a day’s work cleaning the shop. You do a good job, and I’ll pay
you. You do a bad job, and I’ll toss you out.” He disappeared into the shop,
but appeared again a moment later. “You can bring your dog,” he said, before
disappearing for good.

“Thank you,” Shauzia called after him. She knelt down and
threw her arms around Jasper.

“I have a job!” She felt like singing.

She had to have something to eat. As soon as Jasper was finished with the
meat, they went to the bread bakery, which was starting to close up.

“If you let me have a piece of bread tonight, I’ll pay you for
it tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll have a job in the morning.”

The baker picked up a loaf of nan from a small stack and tossed it at
Shauzia. She wasn’t expecting it, and it landed in the dirt. She quickly picked it
up.

“How much do I pay you tomorrow?”

“Go away, beggar. I’ve given you food, so go away.”

Shauzia’s face burned with shame. She
wasn’t a beggar.

She opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind. She might
need free bread again.

She shared the bread with Jasper. Then they both had a drink of water at
the tap. The food felt good in her stomach.

The marketplace was quiet. All the stalls were shut down. Shauzia saw
people sleeping in the shadows and doorways.

She and Jasper went back to the butcher shop. It, too, was closed. They
settled down in the doorway.

“This way, I’ll be sure to be on time for work in the
morning,” she said. The doorway smelled funny, but she was so tired that she fell
right asleep.

Shauzia woke to the sound of the butcher unlocking the iron grill over
his shop.

“Your dog will get too hot out here,” he said. “Bring
him through to the back. There’s a pan on the shelf. Give him some
water.”

Shauzia and Jasper followed the butcher through the shop to a small cement
yard in the back. There was just enough room under an awning for Jasper to stretch out
in the shade.

Shauzia found the pan, filled it with water and took it out to Jasper.

“Wait here for me,” she said. “If I do a good job, maybe
he’ll give me more meat for you, or at least some bones for you to
chew.”

“Clean the shop,” the butcher said. He showed her where the
bucket, brushes and cleaning solution were kept. “I’m going to go out to
have my breakfast now. I’ll be back soon to check on you.”