Born Under a Million Shadows (26 page)

A
FTER SPANDI’S FATHER
found him at the hospital, he brought him back to Khair Khana, to sleep forever next to his mother.

That was a good thing, I knew that, and I was happy for him, because he used to tell me how much he missed his mother when he saw me with mine.

So, yes, I was glad he wouldn’t be alone.

Really, I was.

But then, in the other part of my head, I wasn’t glad, because Spandi was my best friend and now he was gone and somehow, while he was sleeping, I had to carry on with my life, awake and alone.

I couldn’t even think how that would be possible.

From this day on there would be an empty hole in our lives, a hole to add to all the other holes this world had punched into our stomachs, and the more I thought about it, and the more I thought of the place where my friend should be but would never be again, the more I thought I could feel my body collapsing in on itself.

I was being eaten by holes.

I wanted to be strong—strong for him and for his father and for Jamilla, who was almost crazy with grief—but I couldn’t find the energy anymore. It was all too much. It was all so wrong. And I could hardly breathe through my tears.

Spandi was gone.

Yesterday he was here, talking about love and swinging
his cards behind him; now he was being carried to the mosque on the shoulders of his father and three other men.

On top of all that, the damn sun was shining, laughing there, up in the sky, when it should have been crying with the rest of us.

It wasn’t right. But nothing was right, and I couldn’t think how it could ever be right again.

A suicide bomber did it, that’s what James had said, another suicide bomber driving his hate into a convoy of foreign and Afghan soldiers.

According to James, the explosion had trapped an American man inside his burning armored Land Cruiser, and he died in the fire.

So he killed one of them. Well done, him.

Of course, to kill that one soldier, the suicide bomber had also murdered seven Afghans. Then the soldiers, seeing that they were under attack, had shot even more innocent people in their panic to escape.

“The picture is very confused as to who did what,” James had explained. “An investigation has been launched by the Ministry of Interior and ISAF, and at this stage it seems that all they know is that some troops opened fire thinking it was an ambush. Who started firing first is unclear. Afghan or international, nobody knows.”

I’d nodded as James spoke, thanking him for the information, but I didn’t really care. To me they were just details. The only thing that was clear as far as I was concerned was the surprise I saw in Spandi’s eyes as a bullet hit him in the chest. Now he was lying in the yard of our old mosque, and all I could do was watch the shapes of men through my tears and the pale curtains that surrounded him.

In whispered prayers, Spandi’s family were performing the Qusl-e Maiet, washing his tiny body so that he would be
clean to enter Paradise. Their shadows then wrapped him gently in the white cotton of the
kafan
from head to toe. Once they’d finished, the curtains parted and Spandi was brought out, his face and everything he once was now hidden from us. His father, who seemed to have aged about a hundred years and was walking like an old crippled man, placed Spandi on the stretcher lying on the ground so that the mullah could say the Namaz-e Maiet over him, the prayer that would send him on his way to the next life. After that, Spandi was raised high on the shoulders of those who loved him and carried to the graveyard.

Many people had come to say good-bye, and the sad crowd of faces parted and then closed in behind Spandi and his family. All of us were there: me, Jamilla, Jahid, my mother, Shir Ahmad, Georgie, May, my aunt, her family, and James leading Pir Hederi.

And ahead of all of us, walking with the men of Spandi’s village, were Haji Khan and Ismerai. How they heard about Spandi’s death I didn’t know, but bad news tends to travel fast in Afghanistan.

It was at the mosque, before we walked to the graveyard with its tattered flags of fallen mujahideen and rows of stony hills hiding other dead people, that Haji Khan and Georgie saw each other for the first time since their baby died. I watched their eyes meet, but they didn’t move forward to touch with their hands, and the space between them added to my sadness because I saw how hard it was for both of them. For a second an idea passed through my mind in the color of red, and I felt the need to shout at them, to grab their hands and force them together, asking them to forget everything that had happened because it was today that was important and tomorrow it could all be too late to fix anything. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. My throat was full of tears, and there was a hole chewing at my insides. And above all of these reasons I
realized I just couldn’t be bothered. They were old enough to look after themselves.

When we arrived at the graveyard, the women and the foreigners stayed back a little as the men fell in behind the mullah. The holy man then called Spandi’s father forward and asked him to place his son in the grave that had already been dug for him.

My heart nearly broke in two as I watched. As Spandi’s father stumbled forward I began to understand for the first time how heavy death was—like a million walls falling on top of you. Although more than half of my family had gone the same way, it had never seemed real; it was more like a TV show that had just stopped playing, or a picture gone blank. But this was different. This was an end, a horrible stop to everything, and I could hardly bear it.

With tears wetting his face, Spandi’s father took the white bundle that used to be my friend into his arms and gently carried him downward, into the earth, placing him on the left side of his body in the small hole where he would lie forever. As he let go, he bent low and repeated into his ear the words of the Koran being spoken by the mullah above them both. Then, reaching up, he took the flat stones waiting there and placed them over Spandi’s body, locking him into his grave. I could see it was taking every bit of strength he had to do it because each time he lowered a stone his hand hung over his son’s body, trembling, and he had to force it down.

Eventually, a man who I think was Spandi’s uncle on his father’s side moved forward and helped him back up into the light, where the rest of us stood waiting for him. The man then held him tight, his fingers pinching at the arms of his
salwar kameez
, trying to keep him standing because his legs had become weak with tears. Then, one by one, the people passed by Spandi’s father to approach the grave and place three or four shovels of dirt on the stones.

As the long line of men stepped forward, a flash of blue caught the corner of my eye, and I moved my head to get a better look. I was shocked to see Pir the Madman staring straight back at me. His eyes were filled with tears, and as they met with my own my sight blurred and his face quickly lost its shape.

It had never even entered my head that a madman might miss a boy, and I was suddenly ashamed of all the things we had done to him over our lifetimes because it was now clear that his heart was as good as any man’s here.

I wiped my eyes in time to see Pir move forward to take the shovel from another man so he could place three little hills of dirt over Spandi. As he did so, I caught the confusion in Haji Khan’s face as he turned to look at Georgie. Her own eyes had also clouded in surprise at the man in front of them whose feet were cracked and black, whose hair was a ball of filth, and whose body was covered in a fabulous blue suede coat that had obviously been made for a lady.

23

A
FTER SPANDI DIED
, I think I went a little crazy because my mind refused to stay still. Even when I tried with all my power to concentrate and hold it down, it carried on moving. One minute I was sadder than sad, the next I was as angry as a bee-stung bull, and the next my body was so numb I wondered whether it was God’s way of making the hurt go away, like a rat chewing at the fingers of a leper.

I’d always been terrified of the stories Jahid had told me about leprosy—about how the lepers’ noses would disappear overnight because of all the animals feasting on their faces—but now it didn’t seem too bad, disappearing little by little in your sleep. When I mentioned this to Pir Hederi the day after we buried Spandi, I could see he didn’t get it.

“I think you’d best stay at home for a few days,” was all he said.

As Jamilla’s tears had also kept her away from the shop, I agreed.

Weirdly, all the grown-ups in the house where I lived seemed to think it would be better if I kept busy, so they were forever pestering me to do this and that until eventually, when they pulled out a game called Twister and began to tie themselves in knots on the floor, I had to tell them, “No. Just, no.” And I walked away to get some peace.

Back in my room I tried to escape in a book Shir Ahmad had given me about all the famous people in the world, with names like Einstein, Nightingale, Pasteur, Picasso, Tolstoy,
Joan of Arc, Socrates, and Columbus. According to the pages I’d read, they’d all done pretty amazing things with math and medicine, fighting and traveling, and even just thinking. Unfortunately, the book also revealed that they were all dead, which did little to keep my mind off Spandi.

“It will take time, sugar,” explained May when I found her in the kitchen.

I nodded.

“Time, Fawad, that’s all you need,” confirmed James, looking up from his laptop when I saw him in the garden.

I nodded again.

“Everything seems better in time,” agreed Georgie when she passed me on the steps on her way to work.

“How much time?” I asked.

“Oh, I guess it depends on the individual, but seeing as Spandi was such a special friend I imagine it may take a bit of time.”

So that was clear: I only needed time, and I probably needed a bit of it.

I realized then that it was only my mother who fully understood what I was going through because she said absolutely nothing. She just pulled me into her arms when I came to sit in her room, and she left me alone when I didn’t.

The
afternoon we buried Spandi we’d all returned to our home to drink tea in the garden, apart from Georgie, who disappeared out of the gate to sit with Haji Khan in his Land Cruiser. He had turned up shortly after us and had sent Abdul to bring her outside.

Normally I would have been dying to know what they were talking about, but my interest had gone and I wasn’t sure I would be able to find it again. In fact, I couldn’t help thinking that despite their height, adults were just plain unbelievably
stupid: men were blowing up other men; soldiers were shooting at children; men were ignoring women they loved; the women who loved them were pretending they didn’t; and when I read the newspapers to Pir Hederi, everyone they talked about seemed to be far more interested in rules and arguments and taking sides than the actual business of living.

The Indian actor Salman Khan, who’s not quite as famous as Jamilla’s future husband Shahrukh Khan, once said in a magazine I found dumped near Shahr-e Naw Park that people should “go straight and turn right” in life. I thought about this for a while, and I ended up thinking he was wrong. But because Salman Khan was a famous actor and I was just a boy whom some people knew from Chicken Street, I tried it out. Walking straight up the main Shahr-e Naw road, I turned right into Lane 3. Going straight and turning right again, I found myself in Kooch-e Qusab, the street of butchers. Going straight and turning right for a third time, I came to Lane 2. Finally, after going straight and turning right yet again, I arrived at the main Shahr-e Naw road, right back where I started. That’s when I knew that no matter what Salman Khan had to say, and no matter how many men he had killed and how many women he had made fall in love with him, sometimes in life you just have to turn left.

The third day after we buried Spandi, Haji Khan returned to our house. However, this time he sent Abdul inside not for Georgie but for me.

“I thought we might go together to Spandi’s house,” he said, standing in the street, watched by one of his guards.