Born Under a Million Shadows (32 page)

“Fawad,” my mother said in a shivering voice, coming to a stop in front of the woman. “This—oh, son!—this is your sister, Mina.”

Well
, if anyone ever needed further proof of God’s great love and compassion, he only had to look at the beautiful face of my lost sister. After so much darkness she came into our lives like sunshine, and it showed that even though God sometimes took away, he also gave back.

Although I was amazed and feeling brilliant at the sight of Mina, for a full hour I was knocked dumb. My heart was so swollen with happiness, no words could find a way past it to come out of my mouth. For months I’d been wondering whether my sister would hear Georgie’s message on the radio, and when she never turned up I began to accept that she was probably dead, along with the rest of our family. But now I knew that every day she’d been getting taller and more beautiful in a house in Kunar.

Apparently, Georgie had known about Mina for a full two weeks but hadn’t told anyone because she had been trying to arrange a way to get her to Kabul to surprise both my mother and me. Really, I had to congratulate her on that because there was no way on God’s earth I could have kept
that
secret to myself.

Now that she was here, nothing else seemed to matter, and over a never-ending chain of cups of tea that James and May were mainly in charge of producing, as my mother had some serious mothering to catch up on, we all listened in amazement as she told us what had happened to her after she’d been stolen by the Taliban. It sounded absolutely frightening and,
even though I was still learning about life, I guessed she left out much of the story, because when she fell over her words or they stopped for a bit my mother would take her hand and pass on her strength to her.

Mina said that after being thrown into the truck with the rest of our village’s girls, she was taken west. In a gentle voice, she described how men with guns guarded them all through the journey so that they couldn’t escape. When one girl did jump off the back, having gone mental with fear, a Talib simply pointed his gun at her and shot her dead. “We were like sheep going to slaughter,” she said. “Nobody told us anything. We had no idea where we were going, and most of us assumed we would soon be killed . . . or worse than that.”

As Mina spoke, our mother bowed her head. I felt the water come to my eyes too. My sister waited for us to finish our sadness, and then kissed us before continuing.

For three whole days she and the friends she had known from the day she came into this world were trapped in the truck, forced to survive on scraps of bread and leftover food that was chucked into the back for them to eat whenever the Taliban stopped for a meal. Then at last, as they began to grow weak and sick and their clothes stank with their own dirt, they arrived in the province of Herat, where the men who had ripped them from the arms of their families dragged them from the back of the truck—beating the ones that were screaming into silence—and forced them to wash.

Once they were clean, the girls were taken to a room in a building in the middle of nowhere where they were made to stand in a line. Men began to arrive, to look at them and pinch their bodies. One by one the girls around Mina began to disappear, sold to men they didn’t know as new wives, or as future brides for their sons, or as slaves.

Mina awaited her turn, but when no man came to grab her by the arm and push her out the door she thought she
might have escaped because she was so much smaller than the rest. But it turned out that she had been bought the very night she had been forced onto the back of the truck and driven away from Paghman.

“When almost all of my friends had gone, a man came in. He looked like a Talib with his long beard and turban, but he told me not to be afraid and he held out his hand.”

Unable to do anything else, Mina followed him.

The man took her to a nearby Toyota pickup and told her to jump in the back among the sacks of rice and beans and cans of cooking oil he was transporting. He then got into the front seat and started driving back along the road Mina and her friends had just come down. The farther they traveled, the more Mina dared to believe that the man might be taking her home, because he hadn’t once touched her or moved to beat her; he’d even given her a kebab after stopping at a tea shop. But then, instead of going straight toward Kabul, they started moving south. When they finally stopped, in front of a big house in a small dusty village, Mina was told she was in Ghazni.

Grabbing a sack of rice from the pickup, the man nodded his head for Mina to follow him into the house. Inside, an older woman was waiting with her children. When she looked at Mina her face immediately clouded, but she didn’t say anything. The man then left Mina with his children, some of whom were older than she was, and took his wife away into another room. About thirty minutes later both of them returned, and whatever the man had said to his wife she seemed to accept it. Though she was never friendly to Mina, she never beat her either. However, she did make her work, and for the next four years my sister practically had a twig brush glued to her hand.

“Considering what could have happened, it wasn’t too bad, and they were decent enough people. And though I was
never happy in that house, after the first week I was never afraid in it either.”

Mina said the man who had bought her, for a price she had never been told, was called Abdur Rahim. His wife’s name was Hanifa. She was a strong woman and proud of her husband and her children. She ruled the house with the force of a king when her husband was away, which was quite a lot. During the first year she coped with Mina by treating her like “a stray dog”; she was fed and watered and given a corner of the kitchen to sleep in. She was also warned never to go upstairs into the family’s main living space—unless it was with a brush in her hand. Abdur Rahim’s children were quite nice to my sister. They would often come and talk with her, and even help her with her chores when she grew tired or ill. “They were a good family, so life was okay. It just wasn’t much of a life, that’s all.”

But then everything changed again.

One day, Abdur Rahim called Mina to his side and told her it was time for her to leave. He said he was sorry, and he looked genuinely upset. He then told her that he had made a promise to himself to protect her in some small way so that he could compensate her for the sadness he had visited on her life—it turned out that Abdur Rahim had been in our house the night the five Taliban knocked down our door. “He told me he had seen you, Mother, fighting so hard for all of your children, and then when he turned to walk away he had been trapped by the wide eyes of a small boy and he became consumed by guilt and shame. That must have been you, Fawad. Abdur Rahim told me that it was because of the look in your eyes, the complete fear and horror of the night mirrored in them, that he decided to buy me. He felt the dishonor of what they had all done that night hanging around his neck, and he needed to save me in order to save himself. And because of that his wife agreed to shelter me also.”

Apparently, his wife’s willingness to help her husband lasted only as long as Mina was a girl. When she began to show signs of becoming a woman, Hanifa demanded she go. Abdur Rahim protested that he thought of Mina as a daughter, but his wife was convinced that over time he would think that way less and less. As her shape changed and she grew into her beauty, there was no blood link to stop him from taking her as a second wife.

Reluctantly, Abdur Rahim agreed to Hanifa’s demands. However, he told Mina that he had found her a good man to live with, and even though he would be her husband rather than her guardian, he would not beat her because he was a true Muslim.

Although Mina appreciated the old man’s thoughtfulness, and the fact that he had done no harm to her over the years, she said she still could not find it in herself to forget or forgive the wrong he had done in the first place, so after he told her she was going she simply collected her small bundle of clothes and without a word or a gesture, apart from a nod to his wife, Hanifa, she walked out the door and never looked back.

Outside, her new husband was already waiting to pick her up. He was younger than Abdur Rahim by a good ten years, and one of his arms was smaller than the other as a result of a disease he had caught as a child. Without a word he collected Mina’s things with his one good arm and put them in his Toyota Corolla. He then drove her eastward until they arrived in Kunar.

Although the journey was long, the only thing Mina learned on the way was that her husband’s name was Hazrat Hussein and the Taliban were no longer in power in Af ghani stan, and hadn’t been for the past two years. “Although I was pleased to hear the Taliban had been defeated, I was also angry that, as far as I could see, nothing had changed. The Talib
who had bought me was still in his big house and I was still the prisoner they had first made of me.”

When Mina arrived in Kunar, she was taken to a small house, and, as she’d half expected, there was already another woman in it. In fact there were two more. The older woman was Hazrat’s mother, and she was as sour as the milk from a poisoned goat. The other woman was Hazrat’s wife. Her name was Rana. She was tiny and very ill, and she had been unable to give her husband any children. After taking one look at the pitiful creature she would have to call sister, Mina knew what was expected of her.

She didn’t disappoint. A year later she handed Hazrat a son. They named him Daud. “Hazrat was delighted, and really he was, and is, a very good father to our son. And thanks to our son, my life is filled with some measure of joy now.” More amazingly, Hazrat’s mother melted like butter whenever she held her grandson, which softened her heavy-handed ways around the house. Even Rana gained strength and happiness with the arrival of Daud.

Even though life had forced the two of them together, Rana and Mina quickly became one as they united against their shared husband’s mother, and because my sister saw the pain in Rana’s eyes that came from her body, she did everything she possibly could to make life easier for her new sister.

It was because of my sister’s kindness that when Rana was listening to the radio one day, as Mina was busy cooking in the kitchen, and she heard Georgie’s message, she immediately told her about it. “I couldn’t believe it could be true. I was certain you had all been killed because I remember seeing the houses burning in the night as we drove away from Paghman, and I remember clearly the hate that had been painted on the faces of those men who took us. Then all of a sudden I get this message that you didn’t die after all, that you were still looking for me, even after all these years.”

For days after hearing Georgie’s message Mina bounced from joy to grief as she thought of us and then the miles between us that could have been a million as far as she was concerned, because she didn’t even dare to think that her husband would agree to her coming to Kabul.

But my sister hadn’t reckoned on the might of Rana. Day after day Hazrat’s first wife begged her husband to be merciful, and she cried real tears as she told him how happy this one act of kindness would make her—“she who had known nothing but the love of a good man and the anguish of an empty womb and failing health,” Mina whispered. “She was amazing. I owe her so much.”

Sadly, Rana died a month back from the illness that had been eating her insides. Wanting to honor the last wish of his dead wife, because he really was a good man just like Abdur Rahim said, Hazrat Hussein contacted the number Rana had written on a piece of paper and spoke to Georgie.

28

A
FTER MINA CAME
back from Kunar, and back into our lives, she stayed the night with my mother, sleeping in her room.

I wanted to stay with them because I didn’t want to leave my sister after just finding her again. It was all so strange and confusing. Mina was different. I recognized her, but at the same time I didn’t. In my dreams, when I had prayed so hard for her to come back, I always imagined her as a little girl. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was a woman.

“You are so grown up!” Mina told me, pulling me to her because I was sitting by her side, not sure what to do. “I can hardly believe it! My little brother now a little man, all quiet and serious.”