Mud City (7 page)

“Are you telling that same story again?” an older boy
complained. “How many times do we have to hear it? Our luck is as bad as
yours.”

In a lower voice, the boy beside Shauzia continued. “We are all
Afghans in this cell. The
Pakistan boys are kept somewhere else. Is
your family with you in Peshawar?”

Shauzia couldn’t answer. She was trying too hard not to cry.

She had suddenly realized that whenever the phone rang in the office, it
would not be for her. There was no one to pay off the police, no one even to know she
was there.

She imagined herself making scratches in the wall – endless
scratches that would take up the whole wall, blotting out all the other scratches.

How could she stay in this cramped space, with no way to run, no way to
get to the sea? She had been outside too long, moving as she pleased. The ceiling
pressed down on her. How could she stay here?

It was too unbearable to think about. She thought about Jasper instead.
Worrying about her dog was easier than worrying about herself.

“Is there a toilet?” she asked awhile later.

“Can’t you smell it?” A boy jerked his thumb to a
partitioned-off area at the back of the cell.

Shauzia stepped through boys as if she were stepping through a flower
garden. The partition
gave her a small amount of privacy, but the
toilet was just a stinking hole in the floor.

Sheep are cleaner, she thought, and she did not linger there.

A guard came by with a tray of metal cups of tea and a stack of nan.

“Here is your supper,” he said.

The boys dove at the food like the wild dogs Shauzia had seen in Kabul,
pushing each other to get to the bread. The guard laughed.

Shauzia ignored the food. The cell door was still being held open by the
guard. In an instant, she was on her feet and halfway out of the cell.

“Where do you think you’re going?” The guard grabbed
her.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Shauzia yelled, trying to pull
away. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Get back in there!” The guard shoved her into the cell. She
fell across the tea tray, spilling the cups that hadn’t been snatched up yet. The
cell door banged shut.

One of the boys punched her hard in her side. “That was my tea you
spilled,” he snarled, “and my buddy’s tea. You’ll have to give
us your tea from now on to make up for it.”

“I don’t have to give you anything,”
Shauzia snarled back.

“Keep it up,” the boy said. “You can’t hide from
me.”

Shauzia went back to her space on the floor. There was, of course, no
bread left, or tea.

“Here,” the boy beside her said. “I’ll share my
bread with you.” He tore his nan in half and held it out to her.

Shauzia knew that if she accepted his kindness, she would have to show
kindness in return, and that would make her look weak. So she shrugged away his
offering. She’d been hungry before. Right now, that was the least of her
worries.

The boy next to her made another notch in the wall with the edge of his
metal cup. The other boys were adding notches to their own groups of scratches.

“I’ll make one for you,” the boy said, putting a scratch
on a bare spot on the wall.

Shauzia looked at it once, then turned away.

The guard collected the tea cups, then turned off the overhead light.

“Pleasant dreams, boys,” he sneered.

The boys stretched out on the floor as best
they could
in the overcrowded cell. Shauzia did the same, then sat upright again as one of the boys
began a low rhythmic moaning.

“That’s just the Headbanger,” she was told. The moaning
boy rocked and banged his head into the wall over and over as he moaned.
“He’s all right when the lights are on, but he doesn’t like the dark.
He does this every night. You’ll get used to it.”

“Soon you’ll be like him,” another boy said, and several
boys laughed.

Shauzia watched the Headbanger for awhile, then lay down again. Fleas bit
her ankles and neck. She wrapped her blanket shawl around her to keep them from getting
at the rest of her, but was soon so hot that she had to take it off again.

The night went on forever. Some of the boys cried out in their sleep, and
the fleas kept biting.

Worry and fear would not let her escape into sleep. She tried to tell
herself that things would work out. The police would realize they had made a mistake,
and they would let her out in the morning.

But she didn’t really believe it. People disappeared
in Afghan prisons. Maybe it was the same in Pakistan.

It was awful being separated from Jasper, not having him around to protect
her, not being able to reach out and feel him breathing beside her.

Would she go crazy in this terrible place? Would she lose her mind, locked
away from the sun? She had seen crazy people in Afghanistan. The craziness took over
more and more of their minds until there was nothing left of themselves – just
craziness on two legs.

She reached out a hand and put it gently on the chest of the boy sleeping
next to her. She could feel his heart beating deep within him. She could feel his lungs
take in air and breathe it out again.

She closed her eyes and pretended he was Jasper. And finally, she
slept.

Breakfast in prison was more bread and tea. Shauzia grabbed her share of
bread and drank her cup of tea before the boy who had punched her could take it. But the
tea made just a small dent in her thirst.

“That was mine!” the boy growled.

“Wait awhile and I’ll piss it back to you,” she
said.

The others laughed, and this time they were not laughing at Shauzia.

The boy would have come at her, but just then a guard came to the cell
door.

“Get ready for the showers,” he said.

The other boys leapt to their feet.

“The water is cold, and it will cool us off,” a boy beside
Shauzia said. “While we’re out, they’ll hose down the cell and the
toilet. Everything will be better. You’ll see.”

Shauzia was horrified. There would not be
private
showers. She could not expose herself as a girl to all these boys.

She was so scared that she could barely think.

The other boys pressed against the bars at the front of the cell, eager to
be first into the showers. It was a chance to stretch their legs, and they yelled and
pushed and hit out at each other in their excitement. Shauzia let them push her out of
the way, until she was alone at the back of the cell. She pressed herself against the
cement.

Maybe if she pressed hard enough, she could push herself right through the
wall.

There was a bang on the bars as the guard used his stick to make the boys
back up.

“Boy who was brought in yesterday, step forward,” the guard
called out.

“It was me!” the other boys shouted. “I was brought in
yesterday!”

Through all of this, Shauzia heard another voice speaking in English, then
switching to Dari.

“No, it’s not any of these,” the voice said. “Is
there another boy in there? The one who was arrested at the Chief Burger?

Shauzia leapt forward, shoving her way to the cell
door. On the other side of the bars was one of the after-church-pizza Westerners, the
father of the two little boys who liked Jasper so much.

The man smiled down at her. “You have a very smart dog.”

Shauzia leaned into the bars and motioned for him to crouch down so she
could tell him something.

“You have to get me out of here,” she pleaded.
“It’s shower day.”

The man looked perplexed, so she pressed her face against the bars.

“I’m a girl!” she whispered.

He looked at her closely, blinked once, then started talking to the
guards. They moved away from the cell door. Shauzia couldn’t hear what they were
saying, but she could see the Western man take out his wallet and exchange arm-waving
gestures with the guards while they talked. Her heart sank when she saw him put his
wallet back in his pocket, then leapt when he took it out again. They argued some more.
Then the man nodded, took some bills out of his wallet and handed them to the
guards.

The guards unlocked the cell door, reached in through
the throng of boys and pulled Shauzia out. She looked back at the boys in the cell, then
wished she hadn’t. Even the bully looked small and lost with his face behind
bars.

The Westerner took her by the arm and led her toward the police station
exit.

“Wait!” she cried. “They have my money!”

He kept shepherding her through the station. “Your money is gone. It
never existed,” he said quietly. “Let’s just get out of here before
they change their minds.”

Shauzia’s anger bounced around inside her, with no way to get out.
But she forgot about it as soon as she walked out of the police station compound, and a
large, furry creature threw itself at her so hard she almost fell over.

“Jasper!”

He licked her face all over, and she would have happily sat on the
pavement for hours hugging him, if the man hadn’t bustled them both into his
van.

Shauzia and Jasper stuck their heads out the window and let the breeze
rush past them as the van wove in and out of the crazy Peshawar
traffic. The fresh air felt wonderful, even filled with heat and exhaust fumes.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

“My girl name is Shauzia. My boy name is Shafiq,” Shauzia
said, pulling her head in. She laughed at the way Jasper looked, fur flying back from
his face.

“My name is Tom.”

“How did you find me?”

He handed her a plastic bottle of water, and she drank deeply while he
told her.

“It was your dog,” he said. “When we got to the Chief
Burger for our pizza yesterday, Jasper practically threw himself at us. We asked around
and found out what had happened. I’m sorry it took so long, but it took all this
time to find you and persuade the police to let you go.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Barbara, my wife, made me promise to bring you home if I was able
to get you out of jail. She’ll be delighted that you’re a girl. Why are you
pretending to be a boy?”

“I just felt like it,” she lied, keeping her privacy out of
habit more than a distrust of Tom.

“Is your family still back in Afghanistan?” he asked.

“They’re dead,” she lied again, then
stuck her head back out the window. She couldn’t remember the last time she had
ridden in such a fast-moving vehicle.

If I had one of these, she thought, I could be at the sea in no time.

They turned into University Town, a neighborhood of big trees, high walls
and flowered shrubs spilling their blossoms into the street. The noise of the traffic on
Jamrud Road was left behind as the van made several turns, finally stopping before a
high metal gate in a wall.

Tom got out, unlocked and opened the gate, then drove the van through.

Shauzia and Jasper stepped out of the van into a whole new world.

“Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” The two small boys
rushed along the front porch and ran through the garden to hug their father. Behind
them, wiping her hands on a dishcloth, came their mother, Barbara. She put her hands on
Shauzia’s shoulders.

“So Tom was able to get you out! Welcome to our home.”

Shauzia looked up into Barbara’s face. Her
smile
was warm. Shauzia couldn’t remember anyone smiling at her like that before, except
Parvana.

“You must be hungry,” Barbara said. “We have lots of
food in the house to feed a hungry boy.”

“The hungry boy is a hungry girl,” Tom said, swinging his
small giggling son in a circle.

Barbara looked down at Shauzia. “A girl! Oh, how wonderful!
I’ll have some company in this house full of boys. Come inside. We’ll get
you cleaned up and fed, and you can tell us all about yourself.”

Shauzia’s eyes almost burned from the bright colors of all the
flowers in the courtyard garden. Birds were singing in the trees. The rest of Peshawar,
beyond the high walls, might not even have existed.

Her eyes grew wide when Barbara drew her into the house. The entranceway
alone was bigger than the room she had shared with her whole family back in Kabul.

“Tom is an engineer,” Barbara said as she took Shauzia from
room to room. “He builds bridges, mostly in the northern part of Pakistan.
We’re here on a two-year contract.
Our families thought we
were nuts to come, especially with the children, but we like a bit of adventure.
We’re from Toledo, in the United States. There’s not much adventure
there.”

Shauzia was glad of Barbara’s chatter. She felt shy amid so much
wealth. The house had a living room with big windows that looked out onto the garden.
The chairs looked soft, and there were lots of cushions in pretty colors. A television
set was showing cartoon characters singing a bouncy English song. Toys littered the
floor.

“Here is our dining room,” Barbara said as they passed through
a room with a long wooden table surrounded by chairs. Shauzia looked at all the dishes
stacked in a glass-windowed cupboard. “And this is our kitchen.”

They walked into a large sunny room, the source of the good smells Shauzia
had been sniffing since she had walked into the house. Tins of food and fancy boxes of
cookies and crackers were stacked neatly on shelves. A bowl overflowed with fruit.

Shauzia just wanted to look at everything and smell the good smells, but
Barbara kept her moving.

They went upstairs, where there were more
rooms and
more toys on the floor. Children’s clothes were scattered everywhere.

“Please excuse the mess,” Barbara said, as Shauzia stepped
over a toy truck. “I’m trying to teach the boys to clean up after
themselves, but they simply refuse to cooperate.” Then she showed Shauzia a lovely
blue room with a pattern of little flowers on the wall. There was a Western toilet,
gleaming taps and a shower stall with a blue curtain.

My family lived like this once, Shauzia thought, a long, long time ago,
before the bombs started falling. The memory of it seemed like another person’s
life, not her own.