Mud City (9 page)

Barbara wrung the excess water out of the clothes and handed them to
Shauzia.

“Get the girls dressed,” she said, and then she went
downstairs. Shauzia heard her telling the other people to get out.

“Mommy! There’s a lady sleeping on my bed!” Jake
hollered, and soon the pregnant woman was out of the house, too.

Shauzia helped the little girls get dressed in the wet clothes, and she
ushered them out the gate.

“I’m sorry,” she said to them.

“That was fun,” one girl said. “We smell good
now.” Shauzia watched them walk down the lane, dragging their junk bags behind
them.

“Look at this mess,” Barbara said, picking up the toys and
dishes that littered the room.

“I’ll help,” Shauzia said, bending
down to pick up a plate.

Barbara put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve done enough.
Please go and sit in the garden.” There was no warmth in Barbara’s voice or
face.

Tom came home an hour later. Shauzia stayed outside, but she could still
hear their voices, rising and falling.

“No food left in the house! Things missing – toys, clothes.
Strangers in our beds!”

In a little while, Tom came out with the boys.

“We’re going to get pizza!” Jake said. “Can Jasper
and Shauzia come with us?”

“No, we’ll be right back,” Tom said, and they drove
away.

That evening, Shauzia finally got to taste pizza. She liked it very much,
but the atmosphere at the table was too tense for her to really enjoy it.

After supper, Shauzia washed the dishes. Barbara and Tom took the boys
upstairs to get them settled for the night. Shauzia heard another shriek, this one from
one of the boys.

A moment later, Tom called down the stairs. “Shauzia, could you come
up here?”

They were all in her room. A swarm of ants was moving
on her floor and under her bed.

“Why were you hiding food?”

“So I’d have something to eat when... ” She stopped
talking.

“When what?”

“When I didn’t have anything else to eat.”

“I’ll get the broom,” Tom said after an awkward silence.
He swept up the rotten, ant-infested food. Barbara washed the floor. Shauzia stood in a
corner, watching them and feeling small.

Breakfast was delayed the next morning while Tom went out to buy
groceries. It was the middle of the morning by the time they ate.

“We’d like to get you some new clothes,” Barbara said
when they were gathered around the table. “We’d like you to have something
new to take with you to the refugee camp.”

Shauzia put her glass of milk back on the table. She made her face say
nothing.

“It’s not that we haven’t enjoyed having you
here,” Barbara said, “but we need to just be together as a
family.”

“I went to see a friend of mine this morning who works for one of
the aid agencies,” Tom
said. “He told me about a
special orphans and widows’ section of one of the refugee camps. The woman who
runs it is used to taking in new children unexpectedly.”

“You’ll be able to go to school there,” Barbara said
cheerfully. “Tom’s friend says they even have a nurse’s training
program.”

“There are so many Afghan children like you,” Tom said.
“We can’t possibly take care of everyone.”

Shauzia straightened her back and raised her chin. She didn’t need
them to take care of her.

“The children love your dog,” Barbara said. “We’d
be happy to give him a home here with us. After all, what sort of life will he have in
the camp?”

Jasper moved closer to Shauzia and put his paws on her lap.

“Well,” said Barbara, stiffly. “Would you like girl
clothes or boy clothes?”

“Boy clothes, please,” Shauzia replied. She then proceeded to
eat everything in sight. Food was food. And she was still a long way from the sea.

She kept her arm around Jasper in the van
all the way
to the refugee camp. She could still smell the laundry soap on her clothes. In her lap
was a bag with a new boy’s shalwar kameez, some candies, a toy car with only two
wheels that Jake had given her and a small bar of the good-smelling soap.

Barbara and the boys stayed behind at their house while Tom drove Shauzia
back along the road that had first brought her to the city. Tom kept his eyes on the
traffic and did not speak to her.

I could push him out of the driver’s seat, she thought, picturing
Tom bouncing and rolling along the highway. She could take his place behind the wheel
and drive the van to the sea. How hard could it be to drive? There were a lot of bad
drivers in Peshawar. She’d just be one more.

She didn’t do it, though. She didn’t push Tom out onto the
highway, and she was still in the van when it passed through the main gates of the
refugee camp and into its maze of mud-walled streets.

“You’ll be fine here,” Tom said after stopping the van
in front of the entrance to the Widows’ Compound. “There are lots of other
children here, and I’m told that the woman in charge will
be happy to have you.”

Shauzia and Jasper got out of the van.

“Would you like me to go in with you?” Tom asked.

Shauzia shook her head. It was right to thank Tom, so she said thank you,
and she meant it.

But as she watched his van drive away, she couldn’t help thinking
that all he’d done was take her out of one prison and put her into another.

“Shauzia’s back!” Children streamed out of the compound
and threw their arms around her and Jasper. Jasper kissed everyone hello, and wagged his
tail so fast it was almost a blur.

Shauzia was surrounded by the stinky camp smell again. She could no longer
smell the laundry soap on her clothes, and the flowery scent had already left her
skin.

She opened the bag and gave away the candies, the car and the shalwar
kameez. She kept the little bar of soap.

She’d use it to give Jasper a bath.

When they got to the sea.

Rows and rows of purple flowers, fields and fields of them. Sun shining
down out of a brilliant blue sky. A place where nothing bad ever happened.

Deep creases lined the picture. It had been folded up in Shauzia’s
pocket for a long time. The edges were frayed.

“I don’t understand, Jasper,” Shauzia said. They were
sitting by a wall in the shade. “I used to be able to look at this picture and
imagine myself there, sitting among the flowers. It was so clear in my head. It looked
like a magical place. Now it just looks like a picture torn out of a magazine.”
She showed it to Jasper. He didn’t even raise his head. He’d seen it way too
often.

“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded. “Maybe I
should forget it. It will take ages to earn the money, and I just don’t know if I
can face trying to do it again. The thought of
starting over is
awful. Besides, what’s so great about a field of purple flowers? It’s
probably full of thorns. And snakes.”

She started to tear up the paper. Jasper raised his head and growled low
in his throat. So she folded the picture back up instead and put it back in her
pocket.

She stared at the mud wall across the alley.

“I can’t stay here, though. I can’t look at these walls
for the rest of my life.”

She lay down on the ground so that her head was close to Jasper’s.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said quietly. “I still want to get
to France. I still want to get to the sea. But I just don’t want to be alone
anymore. What do I do about that?”

Jasper kissed her nose. It was no answer, but she felt better.

No one said anything to Shauzia about her time away. Mrs. Weera must have
asked them not to. The little kids hugged her and said they’d missed her, the same
way they hugged and said they’d missed Jasper, but no one asked her what had
happened and why she was back.

At first she wished someone would, especially
one of
the boys her age. She felt like fighting someone.

As the days went by, though, the anger drained out of her. She spent most
of her time following patches of shade around the compound.

Mrs. Weera was being as annoying as always, but in an entirely new
way.

She did not give her any more little jobs.

“You’ll be wanting to leave again soon to get to the sea,
dear,” she said when Shauzia picked up some empty water jugs to get filled at the
United Nations water pump outside the compound. “Save your strength for
that.”

Mrs. Weera took the jugs from Shauzia’s hands and called a boy over
to fetch the water.

That was two weeks ago. Lazing around while others did all the work was
fun for awhile, but now Shauzia was so bored she could hardly stand it.

“Are you still here?” Mrs. Weera asked, striding by Shauzia on
her way to another part of the compound. “I thought you’d be long gone by
now. An active girl like you must be getting awfully bored just sitting around.”
She
kept walking with those quick, giant steps of hers.

Shauzia leapt to her feet. She wanted to yell something, but she
couldn’t think of anything to say, so she kicked the wall of the hut instead.
Hurting her foot made her angrier, and what made it even worse was that there were two
boys nearby who watched the whole thing.

They were playing soccer, using a small rock as a ball, and they paused in
their game long enough to laugh at her.

“What are you looking at?” Shauzia yelled at them. “And
why are you wasting time with games when there is work to be done around here? See those
empty water jugs over there? Go and get them filled. Do what I tell you!”

With each word Shauzia came closer and closer to the boys, until she was
yelling right in their faces. She paused to take a breath and they ran off, grabbing the
empty jugs on their way to the UN pump.

“That was fun!” Shauzia said to Jasper. She looked around the
camp with new eyes. “Mrs. Weera thinks she’s so good at running things, but
there’s a lot around here that’s not being
done
properly. Anything she can do, I can do ten times better. Come on.”

She started out, then realized Jasper hadn’t moved. He was sitting
on his haunches and watching her.

She bent down and scratched his ears. “Don’t look at me like
that. We are going to the sea. We are going to France, and we’ll send Mrs. Weera a
letter telling her how happy we are to be away from her. But we’ll go when I say,
not when Mrs. Weera says we should go. And I just don’t feel like going right
now.”

Shauzia threw herself into activity. Instead of taking orders from Mrs.
Weera, she thought up projects on her own.

She organized scrounging parties with the older children. They would go to
other parts of the camp and pick up stray boards or bits of pipe and anything else they
could find lying around that might be useful.

She started an arithmetic class for the little kids, using stones to teach
them how to form their numbers.

“One day you will be working,” she told
them. “If you don’t know how to count, you won’t know if your
boss is cheating you.”

She fetched the compound’s ration of flour and cooking oil from the
warehouse and took her turn carrying containers of water from the UN pump. She stayed
out of Mrs. Weera’s way, and Mrs. Weera left her alone.

She even made a friend. Farzana was a few years younger than Shauzia, and
she was new in the compound. She had been living in another part of the camp with her
aunt. Mrs. Weera brought her to the Widows’ Compound when her aunt died and there
was no one else to take care of her.

“She wasn’t really my aunt,” Farzana told Shauzia.
“I had a real aunt, but she died. I get passed from person to person. I’m
glad to be here, because there are so many people. I won’t have to move again when
somebody dies.”

Farzana and Shauzia often went together when Shauzia had errands to do
outside the compound. She liked having a friend again. It was almost like having Parvana
back.

Everything in the camp was on the verge of falling apart, including many
people. Every day
they saw men and women sitting against the walls
that lined the streets, staring into space. Others talked to themselves. Many looked so
sad, Shauzia wondered if they would ever be able to smile again.

I have to get out of here, she thought. I don’t want to end up like
them.

The clay streets and walls held onto the summer heat.

“I feel like a loaf of nan baking in the oven,” Farzana said
one particularly hot afternoon.

The air wasn’t moving. They sat in the coolest spot they could find,
as far away from the others as possible, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. If they
wanted privacy, they had to put up with the stink of the open sewers. If they wanted
less stink, they had to put up with more people.

The babies fussed in the heat, and many of the children had sore bellies.
The compound was always filled with the sound of crying and whining.

“The sea will be cool,” Shauzia said without thinking.

“What’s the sea?” Farzana asked.

“The Arabian Sea, by the city of
Karachi,” Shauzia said. “It flows into the Indian Ocean.”

“What’s an ocean?” Farzana asked.

Shauzia was stunned. “An ocean is, well, it’s water, a lot of
water, in one place.”

Farzana was quiet for a moment. “There is an ocean in this camp.
I’ll take you there this evening, after the day cools down. It’s in the part
of the camp where I used to live with my aunt.”

They fell asleep in the shade. If Mrs. Weera was yelling out orders
anywhere in the camp, they blissfully didn’t hear her

“Here’s our ocean,” Farzana said later that day. They
were standing by a square cement pond, maybe thirty paces long on each side. It was full
of water. It was also full of garbage, green scum and sewage. Clouds of mosquitoes and
other bugs hovered over it.

Shauzia watched a woman dip a bucket into the slimy mess and haul some
water away.

“That’s not an ocean,” Shauzia said. “An ocean is
water as far as a person can see. It’s deep and blue and smells good, and
I’m going to go there.”