Born Under a Million Shadows (29 page)

“It’s all Haji Khan’s doing, and it’s all because of you,” Mulallah’s mother finished, reaching up with her hands to bring Georgie’s face toward her. She then kissed her sweetly on the forehead.

On
the way back to Jalalabad I was filled with talk about Haji Khan’s kindness, and in the mirror I saw Zalmai smile as I excitedly told him the story he must surely have known already.

Amazingly, though, Georgie stayed silent. I could see only the back of her head, but it seemed her eyes were reaching out across the fields ahead of us as if she were looking for something she had lost, and her lips were tied shut no matter how hard I tried to include her in my chatter.

Just as Haji Khan said it would be, when we finally arrived at his house in Jalalabad we found Ismerai waiting for us. By now the sun had dipped below the mountains, and the house was a ball of light in the dark. It was also very
quiet with only the three of us there, and the midget man we had seen before, flitting around serving us food and sweet tea.

After the excitement of the day and the hours of driving we had gone through, my eyes quickly became heavy with sleep. Of course, this may also have had something to do with the thick smoke of Ismerai’s special cigarettes. I leaned back on one of the cushions in the golden room to rest my eyes for a minute.

“Do you want to go to bed?” Georgie asked, breaking away from her conversation with Ismerai.

“In a minute,” I said, too comfy to move.

“Okay, in a minute then,” she replied, and pulled me forward to place my head on her knees.

I closed my eyes in warm happiness, feeling the softness of coming sleep while listening to the gentle hum of adult conversation. Georgie and Ismerai were talking about politics and the growing troubles in the south and the east.

“We live in difficult times,” Ismerai told her. “Personally, I’m at a loss as to what Karzai’s plan is. I can see the need for a strong central government, but this is Afghanistan—it’s not as simple as moving people around on a chessboard. You move the traditional authority out of an area, the men who share a culture and a history with their own people, and you create a vacuum. There are no longer any restraints; there is no longer any loyalty; there is only money.”

“Is Khalid’s position in jeopardy?” Georgie asked.

I heard Ismerai click his tongue to say no. “They can’t move Haji,” he said. “How could they? He doesn’t hold a government position; he’s his own man. But that’s not to say he’s not faced with a million problems of government.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you know he’s thrown his weight behind the governor’s poppy eradication plan, don’t you?”

“No,” Georgie admitted, “I didn’t know that.”

“Well he has. There will be no poppies planted on his land this year, and he’s pushing the strategy at the Shuras, trying to convince other landowners and elders to join, but it’s not easy. Haji’s trying to find the right path to travel down, for the good of everyone and for the good of Afghanistan, but it’s a path blocked by a many-headed enemy, Georgie. You’ve got the farmers who face the prospect of their yearly income being slashed by at least two-thirds, you’ve got the smugglers themselves, and you’ve got the insurgents looking at one of their main sources of money drying up.”

“What will they do?”

“What, besides try to kill him?”

“You’re not serious?”

Georgie moved sharply, but I pretended not to notice in case she packed me off to bed. But I felt the concern in the act, and I felt it in my own heart too.

“Well, no, maybe I’m being dramatic,” Ismerai soothed. “But these are not easy times for him, Georgie. You need to be aware of that.”

Despite the sadness in Ismerai’s voice, Georgie stayed silent. I guessed she must have been taking his words and turning them over in her head before she answered him. But when she did open her mouth, almost a full two minutes later, I nearly choked in my pretend sleep.

“Khalid has asked me to marry him,” she said.

25

Y
OU KNOW
, I really didn’t mean to say anything, absolutely nothing at all, and for hours I didn’t even say a word—which was a kind of torture if you stopped to think about all the questions that must have been shouting in my head demanding to be answered. But as the saying goes, “A tree doesn’t move unless there is wind,” and by the middle of the next morning I realized I might have to do a bit of blowing.

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

Georgie was sitting in the front seat of the car. As I was pretty intelligent for my age, and a master in the art of spying, I spoke in English so that Zalmai couldn’t understand.

“Like what?” she replied, turning in her seat to look at me.

“Like . . . stuff . . . ,” I replied, stealing a line I’d heard James use a million times before when he was trying not to say anything.

“Oh . . . stuff . . . ,” returned Georgie.

“Yes . . . stuff . . . ,” I kicked back.

Georgie yawned, leaned back in her seat, and pulled down the sunglasses from her head to cover her eyes.

“No, not really, Fawad. But if you hear of anything interesting, do wake me up, won’t you?”

Which basically translated as “Don’t stop a donkey that isn’t yours.”

I shook my head. She really was irritating sometimes.

Back
in Kabul, my desperation to talk broke out like fleas under my skin—itching, tiny-legged words that crawled up my nose, marched around my head, and rested in my mouth ready to jump out at the slightest opportunity. But there was no one to talk to!

Spandi would have been my first choice because he was my best friend and I knew he could keep a secret. As for Jamilla, well, there was just no way. She had already confessed to being a bit in love with Haji Khan, and on top of that she was a girl, which made trusting her pretty much impossible, especially when it came to subjects like marriage. And though Pir Hederi might have been an old man, he was worse than Jamilla when it came to this sort of thing. If I told him everything I knew, I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the day, as he tossed out the rotten fruit for the goats to feed on in the morning, he had Georgie and Haji Khan already joined and expecting their sixth baby.

So that evening I decided to have another go at Georgie.

And I would have done it too if Dr. Hugo hadn’t beaten me to her.

After a delicious meal of
Kabuli pilau
, cooked by the expert fingers of my mother, I was heading to the garden, where I knew Georgie sat reading a book in the fading sun, when the doorbell rang and the gate opened to let in the doctor.

Even before I knew Haji Khan was making a proper fight for Georgie, I was having trouble being in Dr. Hugo’s company because he was so nice, and it was obvious that he liked Georgie a lot because his eyes hardly ever left her face when they were together. But “nice” and “like” weren’t that much competition for an Afghan man in love, and I guessed the only thing stopping Haji Khan and Georgie getting back
together was Georgie. And even though Haji Khan’s ways had killed Georgie’s baby, we had just found out that he recently saved a whole family, which, if you looked at it like a game of
buzkashi
, gave him a few more goals than the other team.

So, unable to face Dr. Hugo without my eyes giving away the fact that I thought he had lost the war, I shrank into the shadow of the wall just as his messy head of hair appeared in the yard. Hugging its edges, I crept around the house to the “secret passageway” at the back that led to the garden. There I took up my position, as I’d done so many times before, sitting down on my heels to peep through the rosebushes that once again were bringing their brilliant colors to the world.

As Dr. Hugo walked over to Georgie, she put down her book and smiled, lifting her head to offer him her cheek rather than her lips. Dr. Hugo hesitated, but took it.

“Thanks for coming,” I heard Georgie say.

“Thanks for coming? That sounds very formal,” replied Dr. Hugo, trying to laugh.

“Yes, sorry, I . . . it’s just that . . .” She sighed. “I think we need to talk.”

“Okay, now this sounds not only formal but serious.”

“Yes, it is. At least I think it is; maybe you will think differently. I don’t know. I’m not sure how you might feel about it, to be honest with you.”

“Well, why don’t you try me?” Dr. Hugo replied, and I could hear a tightness stretching his voice.

The doctor took a seat and moved it so it was directly opposite Georgie, rather than at her side. It made them look as though they were at a job interview. As I sat there spying on Dr. Hugo’s embarrassment, I felt a bit sorry for him, although I was pleased he was moving things along because Georgie was starting to lose her thoughts in her apologies and I was dying to hear the good stuff.

“Okay, now, Hugo, please let me finish before you say anything.”

“Okay.”

“Good.” Georgie sighed again and sat forward in her chair, pulling the
patu
around her even though the weather was warm and she couldn’t have been in the slightest bit cold.

I noticed it was the gray
patu
Haji Khan had given her.

“Well,” she began, “when Fawad’s friend Spandi died we went to the funeral in Khair Khana, as you know, and I saw Khalid there. It was the first time since the miscarriage, and, as you might expect, coupled with the occasion, it was quite an emotional moment. We didn’t speak at the funeral, it wouldn’t have been right, but he turned up at the house a little later and I spoke to him outside in his car. He was distraught, Hugo. If you could have seen him, it would have broken your heart. It was as if—”

“Fawad!”

My mother’s voice rang out like the crack of a bullet in the graying sky, and I slammed myself flat against the ground.

“Fawad!” she shouted again. “Fawad!”

Cursing my bad luck, I crawled farther into the shadow until I was clear and could get to my feet and walk around to the yard without being seen coming from the garden.

“Oh, there you are,” she said when I emerged. “Come, I need to speak to you.”

I wasn’t very happy about it, but I followed my mother into her room. It was clean and tidy, and the television stood silent for a change. I also thought she looked unusually nervous, as if she had done something wrong, which was normally my job in our life together.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“What do you mean ‘what’s happened?’ ” she asked back, seating herself on a cushion and holding out her arms for me to join her.

“You look . . . weird,” I said.

“Ho, that’s a nice thing to say to your mother, isn’t it?”

“It’s the truth,” I protested.

“Well, I suppose that’s okay then.”

She laughed, and I noticed how pretty her eyes were looking that night, like beautiful green lights.

“Okay, Fawad.” My mother leaned forward and took both my hands in her own. “I need to speak to you about something, and if you don’t like what you hear, then you just tell me and I promise I won’t mention it again. Not ever.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a coldness creep into my insides—the same coldness that must have crept into Georgie when she was about to tell Dr. Hugo that Haji Khan wanted to make her his wife, causing her to hold on tighter to her
patu
.

“Wait a minute,” I added, an idea suddenly turning the shiver in my heart into something much nicer and warmer, “are you going to get married?”

“What? How . . .”

My mother pulled away, clearly shocked, and I felt immediately terrible for saying something she found so ugly to hear.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I was just thinking out loud.”

“No, don’t be sorry, Fawad. I’m . . . I’m just surprised you asked, that’s all, because it’s sort of what I want to talk to you about.”

She paused.

I paused.

In the silence, our eyes held, and I felt how strong our love for each other was.

“Shir Ahmad has asked me to marry him,” she finally said, “and I want to know what you think about the idea and about him becoming your father. If you say no, that’s it, son. We’ll never discuss it again, and I won’t think any less of you. But you have to know he is a good man, Fawad, and I think he
can offer us a real future. It’s a chance for us to live some kind of normal life, as a family, as an Afghan family, not a crazy mix of Afghan and foreign. I want to be settled. More important, I want you to be settled. But you are my son, and this marriage can only ever go ahead with your permission.”