Born Under a Million Shadows (19 page)

As the adults sat chatting, a line of men with large stomachs ballooning under their clothes drifted in and out of the house to slap Haji Jawid on the back and laugh together in
quiet corners of the room; but although the buzz of easy conversation filled the hall, it felt like we were all waiting for something. And when the metal gates screamed outside and the Land Cruisers roared into the drive to begin their dance on the grass, I realized what it was. Haji Khan.

As he swept into his house, everything went still, as if the very room was holding its breath. I watched as his brother got to his feet. The laziness instantly slipped from his smile, and his eyes moved nervously around him as he watched Haji Khan greet the guests who had arrived at the house to swap talk with Haji Jawid. After greeting Georgie with a formal handshake because of the number of men now in the room, Haji Khan turned to his brother and nodded his head toward a room across the hallway. Haji Jawid dropped his eyes in respect and allowed his brother to lead him away from the group. We all watched as the door closed behind them.

By the look on Haji Khan’s face, his brother wouldn’t be cracking any more jokes tonight.

13

T
HE DAY AFTER
Haji Khan’s brother turned up, Georgie and I left for Kabul, where the snow had arrived in giant flakes. On the streets there were more men carrying shovels than guns as everyone spent the day clearing flat rooftops to stop them from collapsing. It was always amazing to me how something so light it tickles your nose as it falls can grow into something so heavy it can bring the whole world crashing down upon your head. But I loved the winter—especially as I now had socks to wear thanks to the wages my mother was earning at Georgie’s house—and because everything looked so different from when I’d left it, all white and clean and new, it seemed like a million years since cholera hit my mother in the stomach and moved her to Homeira’s house.

And when I walked through the door of our home, I could have burst my insides open with happiness as I saw my mother run toward me to gather me into her arms and smother me in her huge love.

“I told your mother I was taking you to Jalalabad for a little holiday,” Georgie had explained as we weaved our way through the mountains back to Kabul. “She probably doesn’t need to know the full details of why we went . . .”

“Yes, quite right,” I’d agreed.

But when my mother wrapped me in her arms and I felt her heartbeat next to mine and she asked what I had been up to, I plain forgot.

“We went to Jalalabad because I needed a break after I stabbed a Frenchman in the ass,” I told her.

I saw the look of shock appear on my mother’s face, and I quickly moved to calm her.

“Oh it’s okay, don’t worry. I thought he was attacking May, but Georgie says they are really very good friends and it was only because he was really, really drunk that he was fighting on top of her, and although he needed stitches he didn’t call the police.”

Behind me I heard a groan, and I turned to see James doubled up and holding the top of his head with both hands.

After my outburst, my mother, Georgie, James, and May all disappeared into the main house to have what James later described as a “peace summit.” So, with nothing else to do, I walked to Pir Hederi’s, where I found him sitting in front of the cigarette counter by the
bukhari
with Jamilla snuggled up against the warm fur of Dog. She was holding a mobile phone.

“Ah, good, you’re back!” Pir shouted as I struggled to greet them while trying to stop Dog from sniffing at my boy’s place. “What do you think?” he added, grabbing a long piece of paper from behind the desk and unrolling it. “It’s a sign for the window. I had it made in Shahr-e Naw to bring in the foreigners.”

As Pir Hederi rolled out the plastic paper, big blue letters appeared in English. They read “Free Delivry Survice for foods stuffs. Call 0793 267 82224. We Also Sell Cak.”

“What’s ‘cak’?” I asked.

“Sweets, biscuits, you know. Eid is coming. I thought it might be a selling point.”

“Oh, you mean ‘cake.’ ”

“Cake, cak, what’s the difference?”

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“Good. Here, help me glue it to the window.”

Despite our sign offering free delivery and cak to the nation,
our new business plan got off to quite a slow start, and Jamilla and I spent most of the day looking at the mobile phone, which stubbornly refused to ring.

I was now properly beginning to understand why Georgie got so annoyed.

“We need to advertise,” Pir Hederi stated as we closed up early because the snow was trapping even our regular customers inside and we’d run out of wood for the
bukhari
. It seemed he was turning into quite the businessman now he had a phone in the shop.

“Advertise? Like on the television?” I asked, excited by the thought of TV men coming to film us.

“Not on the television. Who do you think I am? President Hamid Karzai? I’m not made of money, you know.”

“Then how?”

“Don’t worry, I have an idea,” he said with a wink, which looked pretty creepy coming from his milky eyes.

The next day I found out what Pir Hederi’s great idea was as he placed two wooden boards connected with string over my shoulders. On the front he had written in paint “Free Delivry” and our phone number; on the back it read “We Sell Cak.”

“Are you joking me?” I asked.

“Do you see me laughing?” he answered before practically shoving me out the door to walk the freezing streets of Wazir Akbar Khan.

As I trudged through the snow I had to accept that this was probably the most humiliating experience of my life. My cheeks burned even hotter than the time when Jahid told Jamilla I’d pissed my pants after we’d had a competition to see who could drink the most water without going to the toilet. With every tenth step I took, another guard would appear from inside his hut to make some crack about my new costume and whether I might also be hired as a table, and the
whole shameful experience wasn’t helped in the slightest by James, who passed me on the way back from wherever he had been and started laughing so hard he nearly wet his own pants.

“Well, at least you won’t be contravening any codes of the Advertising Standards Authority,” he shouted as I carried on walking.

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, and wandered off in the opposite direction toward the part of Wazir where the only Westerners trawling the streets were the ones looking for Chinese whores.

Thankfully, the next day I was unexpectedly relieved of my new job as Pir Hederi turned up grumbling that he’d had “a devil of a night.”

“It was past midnight, and the mobile phone wouldn’t stop ringing,” he moaned. “Every time I answered it there was some damn foreigner on the other end asking for ‘cak.’ I switched it off in the end.”

“I think I know why,” I offered, coming over to sit by Jamilla close to the warmth of the fire. “James told me last night that when you read the sign out loud it sounds like the English word
cack.”

“And what does that mean?” Pir Hederi asked, wiping at his nose with a dirty handkerchief.

“It means we sell shit,” I replied.

14

S
EVENTY DAYS AFTER
the end of Ramazan, a couple of weeks after the foreigners’ New Year, and the day after the pilgrims return from hajj, coloring the roads in cars decorated with glittering tinsel and flowers, Afghanistan celebrates Eid-e Qorban. This is one of our favorite festivals, and Muslims celebrate it in memory of Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son for Allah. For three days our country of tears and war becomes a place of fun, beauty, and full bellies, with everyone dressing in their finest clothes and those who can afford it slaughtering their best sheep, cows, or goats as a symbol of Ibrahim’s sacrifice. As it is written in the Koran, a large portion of the meat is given to the poor while the rest is served up for the family meal, to which friends and other relatives are invited.

And even though Eid is always brilliant, this year was better than I ever remembered it being because it brought an armful of surprises into our lives that made the celebration come and go quicker than usual.

First of all, Georgie announced she had given up smoking.

“A New Year’s resolution,” she explained.

“Bit late, isn’t it?” remarked James.

“I had to get used to the idea,” Georgie snapped back, hitting him on the head with the empty pen she was now spending her days sucking on.

Personally, I didn’t care whether her “resolution” was late or not. I took it as a sign from God that my prayers were working
and that Georgie was finally moving in the right direction and away from the flames of Hell that were waiting to eat her.

The next surprise was the fat-bottomed sheep that suddenly turned up in our yard, along with a local butcher to perform the halal act of slaughter. As we all gathered to watch him pronounce the name of God and slit the animal’s throat, May turned her back on the river of blood that quickly turned the snow red.

“Christ, it’s enough to make you vegetarian,” she muttered.

“I thought all you lesbians were anyway,” James joked, earning himself a kick in the shins.

It appeared that in the West, if you were annoyed by just about anything you simply beat the nearest man to you.

My next happy surprise was Haji Khan’s phone call to Georgie, which sent her running up to her room. She emerged thirty minutes later with the stupid grin covering her face that she seemed to save especially for these occasions.

Then Rachel arrived at the house looking fresh and pretty and bringing a similar stupid look to James’s face.

That afternoon Massoud also turned up, and I went with him to take cuts of freshly hacked meat to the homes of Jamilla and Spandi, whose families filled my hands with sugared almonds and papered sweets to take back to the foreigners.

One of the biggest surprises came on the second day of Eid when my aunt arrived at our house with her husband, my cousin Jahid, and their two other kids trailing behind. Although it is expected that Muslims should use the festival to visit their relations, I wasn’t sure this applied to relatives you had recently tried to kill. So, naturally, I was shocked when my mother’s family turned up out of the blue, though this was nothing compared to the shock of seeing my aunt again because it looked like someone had stuck a pin in her
skin, letting all the air out and leaving her a shriveled copy of her old self.