Born Under a Million Shadows (12 page)

I started to cry. I didn’t mean to, but it was all too much, just really too damn much. Seeing her lying on the floor, her pretty face turned white, her clothes black and filthy. I couldn’t lose my mother like this, not her as well. I loved her too much. She was all I had left in the world.

“May!” Georgie shouted as we ran down the stairs. “May, we need you!”

Both May and James jumped out from their rooms, looking sleepy and worried. James had hold of a long piece of wood.

“It’s Mariya, she’s sick,” Georgie explained.

“Fuck. Okay, I’m coming,” May answered.

“Me too, I’ll just get some clothes on,” added James.

“No! You can’t see Mariya like this,” Georgie barked at him, turning abruptly to face him. “Get dressed and take care of Fawad.”

“I want to come with you,” I protested, but Georgie was already at the bottom of the stairs and heading outside.

Quickly running after her, I caught up in time to see her push open the door of our bathroom. She paused for a moment, taking in the twisted mess that was my mother’s body.

“Oh God, Mariya . . .”

“Georgie, please,” my mother begged, trying to lift herself
from the floor before falling back defeated. “Please, the boy, don’t let my boy see me like this.”

My mother was crying, and her body, which looked tiny as a doll’s in the half-light of the coming day, was shaking with retches and sobs. I held out my hands to her.

“Please, Mother, please stop . . .”

Georgie moved me back from the door and gently pushed me into the arms of James, who had by now come out of the main house. May was with him, and she carried a small black bag with her.

“Your mother will be fine, Fawad,” May said in English. “We’ll sort this out, don’t worry.”

May kissed me on the cheek and went to join Georgie, who by now had torn a strip of cloth from the bottom of her long sleeping shirt and was soaking it in cold water from the sink to wipe the sweat from my mother’s head.

For the next two hours, Georgie and May ran back and forth from our house to their own, fixing ways to keep my mother from slipping into death. They had taken my mother’s clothes, placed them in the metal trash can in the yard, and given James orders to burn them. They then sent him out for bottles of mineral water after finishing their own supplies. May had used them in the kitchen, mixing the clean water with salt and sugar, creating gallons and gallons of salty, sugary liquid, all for my mother to drink.

“Your mother needs a lot of water to replace all the fluid she has lost,” May explained, filling yet another glass.

“What’s the matter with her?” I asked, now mixing up the concoction myself after May had shown me how—half a spoon of salt and four spoons of sugar to every glass.

“I’m not sure, Fawad, but I guess she may have cholera. I’ve seen it once before in Badakhshan, and your mother’s symptoms seem to be very similar.”

“What’s chol . . . chol . . .”

“Cholera,” May repeated.

“What’s cholera?” I tried again, not liking the hardness of its sound in my mouth.

“It’s a disease caused by bacteria—germs,” explained May. “If I’m right, your mother will be fine, Fawad, but we need to rehydrate her and get her to a hospital as soon as possible. Georgie has called Massoud, and he’s on his way.”

“She’s not going to die, is she?”

“No, Fawad.” May bent down to take my face in her hands. “Your mother won’t die, I promise you that, but she is very, very sick and you have to be a strong little boy right now. Okay?”

“Okay.”

There
are a million and one things in this country that can kill you—people and weapons are just the tip of a very large mountain—and one of these things is cholera.

After my mother was laid on the backseat of Massoud’s car and driven to a German hospital in the west of the city with Georgie and May, James tried to take my mind off my worries in the only way he knew how—by filling my head with knowledge about the disease. He opened up his laptop computer, logged on to something called Wikipedia, and typed in the word
cholera
. A whole page of words in blue letters arrived, and James slowly read them.

The basic diagnosis was that cholera sounded awful, and I cursed my mother’s misfortune, asking Allah to visit a million illnesses on my aunt, who must surely have been the one to infect my mother, being as dirty as an outhouse herself. I knew they didn’t like each other, but to kill her with food was unforgivable.

According to Wikipedia, cholera was quite commonplace in countries like Afghanistan, and the symptoms included
terrible muscle and stomach cramps, vomiting, and fever. “At some stage,” read James, translating the words into a language I understood, “the watery shit of the sufferer turns almost clear with flecks of white, like rice. If it’s very bad a person’s skin can turn blue-black, the eyes become sunken, and their lips also turn blue.”

I remembered my mother’s face, and although it had lost its gentle brown color it hadn’t turned blue, which gave me some kind of hope. Of course, I hadn’t been able to examine her shit, though.

“In general,” continued James, “to save someone you have to make them drink as much water as they lose.”

That explained why May had given my mother enough fluid to drown a camel, and as I listened to James reading from the screen of his computer, I developed a newfound respect for the yellow-haired man hater, because May had basically saved my mother’s life. I owed her now.

8

“S
O, YOU’RE A
lesbian, are you?”

As I spoke, May choked on her coffee, breathing in as she spluttered and releasing milky brown liquid through her nose soon after.

It wasn’t a good look.

“Jeez, you’re not shy in coming forward, are you?”

She coughed out the question, then wiped her nose with the sleeve of her tunic. Her cheeks had burst pink, and I looked at her blankly.

“I mean to say, you’re not afraid to speak about what’s on your mind,” she explained, seeing my confusion through the small tears that had collected in the lines hanging around her eyes.

I shrugged. “If I don’t ask, how am I going to learn?” I asked.

“Yeah,” snorted May, “you’ve got a point.”

She shuffled the papers she’d been reading at the desk by the front window, then carefully placed them in a pile before moving in her seat to give me her full attention. I was sitting on the floor trying to place the words of the new national anthem in my head—one of the tasks we had been set at school before it closed for the winter. As it was as long as the Koran, this was no easy task.

“In answer to your question, yes, I am a lesbian,” May admitted.

Her words were carefully spaced, and she eyed me warily.
I nodded my head, thoughtfully, and returned to the notebook in front of me.

“Why?” I asked some seconds later.

May shook her head and blinked. “I don’t know why; I just am. It’s not something you decide; you just are, or you’re not. And from a very early age I knew I was.”

“But how will you find a husband if you only love women?”

“Fawad, I will never find a husband.”

“You’re not that bad-looking.”

“I beg your pardon?”

May looked shocked, and I felt a similar stab of surprise that she was shocked because I’d seen her look in the mirror James always checked himself in, the one that hung in the hallway and made your face look longer than it really was, so she must have known.

“I mean, you’re not beautiful like Georgie,” I explained. “But not every man is as beautiful as Haji Khan.”

“My looks aren’t really the issue, Fawad. The issue, the point,” she added quickly as I visibly struggled with another new word, “is I don’t
want
to find a husband.”

“Then how will you ever have children if you don’t get married?”

“You don’t have to have a husband to have children,” she stated, shaking her head.

“May,” I replied gently, now shaking my own head, “I think you’re very clever and you know a lot of things, like how you knew how to save my mother’s life, but really, this is one of the most stupid things I have ever heard you, or anyone, say.”

May laughed. It brought to her face a whisper of prettiness that was usually missing.

“Things are very different in our culture, young man. In
America I can adopt children—take unwanted babies and bring them to my home, where I can love them and raise them. So you see, having a husband is not that necessary.”

“But every woman wants to get married,” I protested.

“Do they now?” May paused slightly to wipe spilled coffee from the desktop before slowly admitting, “Well, maybe you’re right. Actually, Fawad, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was hoping to get married later this year, but sadly it didn’t work out.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” May leaned over the desk, and it caused her breasts to spread on the polished surface like broken cushions. They looked soft and wonderful. “You may remember when you first came here I was a little unhappy. Well, that was because the woman I loved had just told me she no longer wanted to marry me. She had found someone else in America, apparently. A man, as it turned out.”

“I’m sorry . . .”

“That’s okay,” said May.

“No, I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t understand. You said you wanted to marry a
woman
. How is that even possible?”

“Oh,” May replied with a smile, “actually it’s very possible. In some places in America men are free to marry men and women are free to marry women.” She rose from her seat to take her coffee cup to the kitchen and playfully pushed my head as she passed by. “That is one of the wonderful things about democracy,” she added, laughing. Then she left the room, leaving me speechless.

I always knew the West was filled with crazy ideas, like scientists believing we all come from monkeys, but this was just incredible. I decided that as soon as I’d finished remembering the national anthem I’d write to President Karzai to warn him. There could be such a thing as too much democracy, and he should be made aware of that fact.

At
the German hospital, the doctors in white coats confirmed May’s suspicions that my mother had cholera. They also confirmed that she would be fine. Because of the special water my mother had drunk she hadn’t gone into shock, which I was told was the biggest danger she had faced. However, the doctors insisted that she stay overnight in order to recover from her ordeal.

During that terrible twenty-four hours it was also agreed that when my mother came out she would go to live with Homeira and her family for a week in Qala-e Fatullah. Homeira’s employer, across the road from us, had also been kind, giving her the week off to look after my mother—although James said this had nothing to do with niceness and everything to do with not wanting to catch diseases from poor people.

“My home is only a ten-minute drive away, so come and visit anytime,” Homeira told me when she came to pick up some of my mother’s clothes. “My children would love to meet you.”

“Okay,” I agreed, although I was in no mood to make new friends and felt better staying with the friends I already had.

Georgie said that at the hospital my mother had been very against the idea of leaving me behind—right up to the point where she fell asleep, exhausted. However, both Georgie and May said they would look after me, and they promised my mother that not only would they guarantee I washed, said my prayers, and did my school assignments, they would also keep an eye on James and ban him from the house if need be.

I felt a bit sorry for James, who seemed genuinely hurt that no one thought he could be trusted to look after a boy,
but if he hadn’t agreed to such supervision I was in no doubt that I would have been packed off to my aunt’s house—where I’m certain she would have tried to kill me too.

So that afternoon, after my mother had been hospitalized and May had admitted to her own sickness, my bed was temporarily moved into James’s room and placed at a right angle to his.

At first, the place was an absolute mess, filled as it was with piles of newspapers, dirty clothes, and books taking up every bit of space. A board similar to the one May had in her bedroom hung on the wall, now over my bed, but unlike May’s there were no family photographs pinned to it, just scraps of paper that seemed mostly to hold telephone numbers. A large knife was also stabbed into the board. I had seen James use it to clean the dirt from his nails.