Born Under a Million Shadows (20 page)

At the sight of my aunt, my mother started crying and immediately took her into her arms, which was a lot easier now she was half the size she used to be. Then my aunt started crying too, which set off May and Georgie, and pretty soon all four of the women were reaching for handkerchiefs hidden up the sleeves of their sweaters and coats while all the men, including James, coughed a bit and stood around looking embarrassed.

Apparently, my aunt had also been struck down with the cholera—and by the looks of it she had come off a lot worse than my mother.

In other ways, though, getting cholera was probably the best thing that could have happened to her because as well as sucking the fat from her body the disease had also sucked the ugliness out of her mind. The words that used to fall from her mouth to torment my mother were gone. Now my aunt was not only smaller but quieter than she used to be, and as she sat in my mother’s room holding her hand gently in the palm of her own, I felt a bit sorry for wishing death upon her.

“Fuck, it was awful,” Jahid explained. “Shit everywhere. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. You wouldn’t have thought one person could make so much shit.”

“Well, at least she survived. It’s a pretty bad thing to get over,” I replied, trying to block the image of my aunt shitting out half her body weight in the small house we all used to share.

“True,” replied Jahid. “Two of our neighbors died actually, two of the older men, Haji Rashid and Haji Habib.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, thinking of these two old men who had managed to survive the Russian occupation, the civil war, and the Taliban years only to die in their own shit.

Sometimes, even during Eid, it’s hard to understand God’s plan for us.

As
the lights of our festival began to fade and we readied ourselves for normal life again, the final and best surprise of all came.

Taking me by the hand, Georgie led me upstairs to her room, pressing her finger to her lips so I wouldn’t talk. We were obviously on some kind of secret mission, which was kind of exciting on its own. We positioned ourselves on the floor, and she reached for a small radio with a wind-up handle. As it whirred into action, she placed it in front of us.

The soft, low sound of a man speaking in Dari came to my ears; he was introducing phone calls from other Afghans and repeating a list of telephone numbers. The calls were all short and sometimes hard to hear over the crackle of a bad connection, but they all had one thing in common: the faceless voices were asking for lost family members and friends to get in touch.

It was all quite sad, and as I sat there I wondered why Georgie would want me to listen to such misery at the end of such a beautiful Eid. Then the man introduced another load of callers, and I heard Georgie’s voice come dancing into my ears. Her message simply said, “If anyone knows the whereabouts of Mina from Paghman, daughter of Mariya and brother to Fawad, please contact me. Your family is well and happy, and they would love to see you again.”

15

I
T WAS AGREED
that neither Georgie nor I should tell my mother about the radio show because we didn’t want to get her hopes up. As Georgie said, the chances of finding my sister were smaller than finding an honest man in government; but at least a tiny hole of light had now opened in our lives, and it shone twice a week on Radio Free Europe’s
In Search of the Lost
program.

In the meantime, as I secretly waited for Mina’s return, the world crawled its way through winter, forcing us indoors and turning our noses red. Like summer, winter brings great joy when it comes, but then—maybe because we celebrate it too much at the start—it goes on and on and on, outstaying its welcome until you spend every waking minute praying for it to end.

The freezing cold seemed to be good for Pir Hederi’s business, though. We were now getting up to five calls a day from houses wanting their shopping delivered. What it wasn’t so good for was my toes. After being soaked to the bone in the snow and warmed up again by the
bukhari
in the shop, I returned home one night to find them swollen and blue. I remembered Pir Hederi’s story about the doomed mujahideen in the mountains and cried myself to sleep worrying that I’d wake up and find ten rotten holes where my toes used to be. My mother went mental when she saw the state of them the next morning and immediately stomped around to Pir Hederi’s to warn him that she would visit a million curses on him unless he took proper care of me. The next day Pir
Hederi sent me off on my deliveries with two plastic bags tied to my feet. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, and handed me a chocolate bar to pay for my silence.

Back
at the house, the long gray of winter was also starting to creep into our lives. After a promising start, Haji Khan’s telephone calls had slowly drifted away with the sunshine, and Georgie was becoming increasingly angry, losing her temper every five minutes as she battled with the cigarettes and Haji Khan’s silence. James wasn’t really helping the situation because he was still smoking like a
bukhari
, but one evening he left the house with a rucksack slung over his shoulder and he explained that because he was really quite a good friend to Georgie he was choosing to spend the next few nights at Rachel’s place in Qala-e Fatullah, which I thought was nice of him. However, I wasn’t as stupid as he obviously thought I was. I guessed the real reason he had gone was that he had already made Rachel his girlfriend.

A few days after he moved out, James actually left Kabul altogether—to chase the sunshine and bombers in Kandahar for a couple of weeks, he said. It was sometimes easy to forget that James actually worked for a living. In fact I think he also forgot this quite a lot, until his newspaper rang to remind him.

Throughout the month of February, May also spent more than a few evenings away from the house, even though she didn’t smoke. I later learned this was because she was visiting Philippe. When I was told this, I wondered whether the Frenchman was staying away from our house because he was scared of me or scared of coming face-to-face with my mother.

So that left pretty much only my mother and me to take care of Georgie’s sadness.

“Haji Khan is probably stuck in the mountains,” I said to
Georgie one evening as we both ate with her in the big house to stop her from feeling lonely.

Georgie smiled, but I caught the look she swapped with my mother and it didn’t match.

When James finally returned to the house he didn’t do much to brighten anyone’s mood as he filled our heads with talk of rocket attacks and fighting in the south.

“The insurgency is starting to gain momentum,” he told Georgie as she made herself a sandwich in the kitchen, and though I didn’t know what
momentum
meant, I didn’t think it sounded good. “By the way, Georgie, a second on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” he added, which again I didn’t understand.

“Oh fuck off, James,” snapped Georgie, which I understood perfectly well.

Two
weeks after James returned to tell us about the troubles he had seen, a massive bomb blew five people to smithereens and wounded thirty-two more in Kandahar city, which added some power to Pir Hederi’s opinion that the country was “once again going to shit.”

“But why are the Taliban bombing Afghans?” I asked as I read the story out loud from the
Kabul Times
.

“Because they’re all bloody Pakistanis,” Pir Hederi replied, which I knew wasn’t true because, for one, they were led by Mullah Omar, and though he had only one eye he was still an Afghan.

“They’re not all from Pakistan,” I corrected.

“Okay, maybe not,” Pir accepted with a grumble, “but the bastard suicide bombers are. Afghans don’t go blowing themselves up. It’s not the way we do things here. This is something brought in from the outside. In my time we fought because
we wanted to see victory, not to watch our legs fly past our bloody ears.”

“It’s
a combination of things—a lot of little things coming together all at once,” James explained as we walked home together after he had come to the shop to buy some cigarettes for himself and a package of biscuits, a Twix chocolate bar, and some Happy Cow cheese for Georgie. “First of all, the coalition—those are the Western troops, Fawad—never finished off either the Taliban or al-Qaeda in 2001, giving them the chance to disappear for a while and regroup, to come back together again. Then, the reconstruction that was promised has been slow to make an impact—to be seen—especially in places where it is more dangerous, like in the south and east. And then there is growing resentment—anger—about the government. The Pashtuns think there are too many members of the Northern Alliance in top jobs, the Northern Alliance feel they have been sidelined—had power taken away from them—even though they credit themselves—give themselves a pat on the back—for winning the war. Then there is the corruption problem, with money talking loudest in government departments, offices, and on the streets with all the
bakhsheesh
-taking policemen. When you add it all up, people are bound—are sure—to get pissed off. Then along comes the new Taliban, and the fighting starts again and people begin to question—ask—where all the security and promises went until pretty much everyone is spoiling—everyone is ready—for war again.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I admitted.

“No, it doesn’t especially, does it?”

James flicked his cigarette into the thawing alley of waste and rubbish that lined the road back to our house.

“Why doesn’t President Karzai fix it and stop all the corruption, and then the people will be happy with him?”

“I guess it’s not that easy, Fawad. He has so many powerful men here and abroad to keep happy, and he needs support from all of them if he is going to make your country peaceful again.”

“Then why don’t the army and the Western soldiers just go and kill the Taliban properly?”

“Well, that’s not so easy either. They keep bloody hiding!”

With that, James swooped down, grabbed me by the legs, and raised me to the sky on his shoulders, catching me by surprise and nearly losing me down his back as he stood up again.

“Come on, Fawad! Maybe we should go to the south and fight jihad against the bad guys!”

“Yeah!” I laughed. “Let’s go and kick Mullah Omar in the ass!”

“Why don’t you stab him there instead? That’s usually your modus operandi, isn’t it?”

Although I didn’t quite get the words, I understood James’s meaning and I laughed out loud because for once my attack on Philippe seemed quite funny. Then together we galloped toward the house, just like the Afghan warriors from my country’s past, except I was on the shoulders of an Englishman instead of trying to kill him.

As we ran to the gate, Shir Ahmad saw us coming and saluted as he opened the metal side door, swinging it wide as we rushed inside. James came to a stop with a stamp of his feet and a lip-splitting neigh.

“James?”

Georgie’s voice rang out from behind the door.

“James?”

“God, she’s impatient for her biscuits, isn’t she?” James laughed. “Coming, dear!”

But before he could get to the door it opened in front of us and Georgie fell into our path, holding her stomach. There was blood on her skirt, and it covered her hands where she’d touched it.

“James?” she cried, holding her hands out to him.

“Oh Jesus, darling. Jesus. No.”