Born Under a Million Shadows (25 page)

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FTER MY OUTBURST,
Allah punished me with a night of almighty misery that brought every evil in the world to my house so it could move into my stomach and explode from my bum. “Rest,” that’s what Dr. Hugo had said, which as far as I was concerned absolutely, beyond one hundred percent, proved he didn’t know shit about shit—especially the shit that had been pouring from my hole like an open tap every fifteen minutes.

Luckily, my mother did. Having woken up to the sound of my groans and farts bouncing from the walls of the toilet for the hundred millionth time that night, she gave me a spoon of pomegranate dust washed down with a glass of warm milk and took me back to bed, finally rocking me to sleep with the soft sound of her singing.

“I love you, son,” was the last thing I remembered her saying.

We don’t have much in Afghanistan—apart from drugs, guns, and great scenery—but over the years we’ve learned how to get by without all the pretty colored pills and buzzing machinery the sick surround themselves with in the West.

If we feel dizzy, we have a glass of lemon juice, water, and sugar. If we have a sore throat, we stick our fists in our mouths three times in the morning to open up the channel to our stomach. And if we have the shits, we eat dried pomegranate skin. Of course, our self-doctoring is not always perfect. I recently read in a cartoon made by an NGO that putting fire ash on top of a wound might actually kill you rather than cure
you, and I knew that after taking my mother’s medicine I wouldn’t go near a toilet for at least three days. But by and large it works.

Like with the drug addicts and the mentals. When it gets too much for their families, they simply chain them up to a holy shrine for forty days so that God can sort out the problem. And, okay, it’s not brilliant for the junkies and the crazies because they only get to eat bread and drink green tea for more than a month and most days they get stoned by bored kids, but that also works. If it doesn’t, they die, and that must have been God’s plan for them all along. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been mental or addicted to drugs in the first place; they would have done well at school and become a lawyer, or something. Or, in Pir the Madman’s case, they would have grown up to be the king of fleas.

However, absolutely the best thing about being ill is that you don’t have to go to school the next day. It’s not that I didn’t like the lessons; they were easy enough, and I was still getting good marks for my handwriting. But if I had to make a choice between a warm bed and a wooden chair I share with a boy whose armpits smell of beans, the bed would win every time.

And if the front gate hadn’t kept banging open and shut, forcing me out of my dreams, I’m sure I would have slept right through until the middle of the following week and missed even more school. But I didn’t because the front gate kept banging open and shut. So eventually I got up to see just what the hell was going on.

Walking out into the sunshine that was annoyingly bright and trying to stab my eyes with its light, I followed the hum of grown-up talking. Rubbing at my face and scratching at the soft layer of fur now growing on my head, I wandered into the garden to find Georgie, James, and May sitting on a carpet
on the grass, sorting out plates and bread on a plastic mat, getting ready for lunch. With them were Dr. Hugo, Rachel, and a woman I’d never met before. Her hair was short and dark, and her face looked a little hairy.

“Don’t you people have jobs to go to?” I asked.

“Afghanistan can do without us for one early lunch,” replied May, waving me over to sit at her side.

“I suppose so.” I smiled. “Especially in James’s case.”

“Feeling better then, are we?” James replied, laughing along with the rest of them.

It felt good to be surrounded again by these white-faced people who seemed to like being surrounded by me.

“How we doing, little fella?”

Dr. Hugo leaned over to me, and as he did so I noticed Georgie touch his knee, which surprised not only me but also the doctor, judging by the quick movement of his head to look at her.

“Fine, thank you.”

“Fawad, this is Geraldine,” interrupted May, placing her hand on Geraldine’s knee.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Geraldine said back.

I looked over at James. I noticed he was touching Rachel’s knee.

Something was definitely going on.

Behind me I heard the gate open and shut again, and Shir Ahmad came in, just in time to help my mother carry glass plates of
mantu
and salad over to us.

“Salaam,” he greeted everyone.

“Salaam,” everyone said back, and James edged himself closer to Rachel so he could join us on the carpet.

I watched my mother carefully as she came over to join us, lightly lowering herself to sit by Georgie’s side, her covered
knees far enough away from Shir’s hands to stop me from having to make a scene.

Yep, something was definitely going on.

“It’s
the spring,” explained Pir Hederi, “also known as the mating season.”

“Oh please . . . ,” I protested.

“Just telling it like it is, son.”

I looked at Pir, slightly disturbed by the picture he had just painted in my head, and even more disturbed by the orange glow of his beard, which he had freshly hennaed. Why men did this to themselves was a mystery to me, and right now I had enough mysteries on my mind without him adding to them.

After lunch had broken up and everyone had let go of everyone else’s legs to return to their jobs, my mother had agreed that some fresh air would do me good, so I’d gone to the shop to pass some time with Jamilla before she went to afternoon school, and to ask the old man about the ways of adults.

I knew it was a mistake almost as soon as I felt the words fly from my mouth.

“Yes,” he said, “sounds like the adults are getting frisky.”

“Frisky?”

“Yes. It’s the effect of another glorious Afghan spring: the sun is bright, the skin grows warm, and the blood heats up after winter. And when the blood heats up it rushes straight to the heart, causing everyone to make a damn fool of himself.”

“Isn’t that called love?” asked Jamilla, who was trying to clean what was left of Dog’s teeth with the wooden brush Pir Hederi used for his own. He’d have gone mental if he could have seen her.

“Some call it love, some call it madness, little one.”

“Who calls what madness?”

Spandi walked into the shop swinging his chain of plastic cards behind him. He had been spending a lot of time with us lately, which had made Pir Hederi remark the other day that the place was looking more like an orphanage than a place of business.

“Love,” answered the old man. “The stuff of poets, teenage girls, Indian dancers, and overpaid Westerners.”

“Haven’t you ever been in love?” Jamilla asked him.

“Never had time,” he replied. “I was too busy—”

“Fighting in the jihad!” we all finished with him.

“It’s true!” he barked. “Besides, it’s hard to fall in love when all the women are covered from head to toe and you end up marrying your own cousin.”

Despite
Pir’s crazy old-man ways, and despite the fact that he’d chosen to look like a can of Fanta, there was always something a little real to his words.

Take the other Friday. My mother had dragged me along to her sister’s house as they were now talking again. When we got there we were shocked to discover my aunt had another baby growing inside her belly. As she hadn’t grown any more beautiful since the last one, I guess my uncle must have been feeling the power of spring in his blood when he made it.

“It’s too disgusting for words,” Jahid had spat when I congratulated him on getting another brother soon. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

I didn’t blame him. I felt genuinely sorry for him too because sex was usually the only thing Jahid wanted to think about.

“It must be awful never to know love,” Jamilla remarked as Spandi and I walked her to school.

“I guess,” I said.

“I guess,” agreed Spandi.

“Do you think we’ll marry for love?” she asked, which was a bit of a shocker.

“Who? Me and you?”

“Not me and you.” She laughed. “All of us.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

“I hope so,” admitted Spandi, and we all fell quiet, because in each of our hearts that’s all any of us wanted, if we were honest about it.

The trouble is, in Afghanistan marriage is all about deals. Your father, or in my case mother, arranges the match, sometimes even before you’re born, and you just have to do it—usually to a member of your own family, so I wasn’t sure who I would be married off to, what with all my cousins being boys. But Spandi had girl cousins, so he might end up with one of them, and Jamilla, well, that was a different story. As she got older, the danger grew of her father selling her to someone for drugs. I didn’t like to think about that too much because she was my friend and she was a good girl, so I really hoped she could marry for love because I knew that’s what filled her dreams at night and it’s also what kept the darkness in her life from covering her completely.

“Okay, I’ll have to love you and leave you,” Spandi said with a wink as we turned the corner at Massoud Circle. “I’m going to hang around here for a while and try and sell some cards to the Americans.”

“Okay,” Jamilla said. “Maybe catch you after school.”

“More than likely,” replied Spandi.

“See you later.”

I waved and carried on with Jamilla because I had nothing to sell and nothing else to do.

“If you could marry anyone, who would you marry?”

“Jamilla!” I groaned. “I’m not one of your girlfriends!”

“Come on, you must have thought about it,” she continued in her best whiny girl voice.

“No way, it’s too disgusting!” I lied.

But even as I spoke, pictures of Georgie came running into my mind, followed by Mulallah and then Jamilla, which was worrying.

“I’d marry Shahrukh Khan.”

“The actor?”

“Yes, the actor. He is so good-looking. I watched
Asoka
on television last night. It was very romantic! Shahrukh Khan plays a prince who falls in love with a beautiful princess called Kaurwaki. But then he thinks she is dead, and he becomes a vicious conqueror because his heart died with her. In the end he marries another woman, who is lovely, but not as lovely as Kaurwaki.”

“A vicious conqueror? Yeah, right. He’s probably gay.”

“He is not!” shrieked Jamilla.

“He’s an actor,” I teased. “He’s nothing more than a very well-paid dancing boy.”

“Take that back!” Jamilla screamed again. “Take it back or—”

“Or you’ll what?”

As Jamilla pushed me into a cart loaded with oranges, a bang as loud as anything I’d ever heard exploded in the air around us, slamming us both to the ground. Beneath our hands and knees the earth trembled with pain as our ears thumped with the shock of it and our hearts burst in knowing fear.

Almost immediately, the smell of burning skin filled the air, even as the world stayed silent. I looked backward, back toward Massoud Circle, where the twisted mess of a Land Cruiser and a Toyota Corolla was being eaten by flames; back to the place where we had stood only seconds before; back to where we’d left Spandi.

Spandi!

My eyes raced over the red-hot flames licking the sky like lizard tongues, past the black and bloody faces of people I didn’t know, around the mess of skin and bone mashed on the ground, over soldiers shocked and still, until I found him, standing far away from me but close enough to touch because my eyes were now concentrating on him, reaching for him, pulling him in.

He was standing near the wreckage of the Corolla. A small boy caught in a gigantic nightmare. Around him the air was dark with smoke, and I watched pieces of metal and black-red body parts float to the ground like feathers as our eyes met and our lives came to a stop. There was no sound I could hear, just the beating of our two hearts connected by our eyes.

Spandi was alive, and I felt my love for him race through my veins, thumping its message inside my body, from my heart to my ears, in heavy thuds. He was my brother, he was as close to family as it got, and I stared that message into his head with all my strength and power as the screaming started.

Beside me I felt Jamilla jump to her feet, and under the noise of the bomb and its killing I heard her whisper his name.

“Spandi . . .”

Together we ran toward him—just as the bullets began to crack through the air. There was no time to be frightened because there was no time to think—and that’s all fear really is: the worst thoughts you can ever imagine coming real inside your head—so we continued to run, side by side, making the world blur as we passed it, forcing ourselves into the hell before us that was trying to swallow our friend.

Then, far away, I heard the shouts start, Afghan and foreign. It was the terrible sound of scared, angry men roaring their hate and fear into the air as people ran from them or dropped to the ground, hit by invisible bullets. Yet still we
ran, and all the time I kept my eyes on Spandi, begging him to stay alive, to keep with me, not to be afraid, because we were coming for him, and I felt him take my words and hold on to them. We were getting so close to him it was almost true.

But then those eyes, those eyes I had known almost my whole life, those eyes that were as much a part of me as they were of him, were snatched away as his head suddenly snapped back. I saw a hole open in his chest, spitting blood onto his shirt as he fell to the ground like a broken toy.

“No!” screamed Jamilla, racing to save him as my legs slowed in pain and shock and the deepest blackness. “No! Please, no! He’s only a boy!”

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