Born Under a Million Shadows

1

MY NAME IS Fawad, and my mother tells me I was born under the shadow of the Taliban.

Because she said no more, I imagined her stepping out of the sunshine and into the dark, crouching in a corner to protect the stomach that was hiding me, while a man with a stick watched over us, ready to beat me into the world.

But then I grew up, and I realized I wasn’t the only one born under this shadow. There was my cousin Jahid, for one, and the girl Jamilla—we all worked the foreigners on Chicken Street together—and there was also my best friend, Spandi. Before I knew him, Spandi’s face was eaten by sand flies, giving him the one-year sore that left a mark as big as a fist on his cheek. He didn’t care, though, and neither did we, and while the rest of us were at school he sold spand to fat Westerners, which is why, even though his name was Abdullah, we called him Spandi.

Yes, all of us were born during the time of the Taliban, but I only heard my mother talk of them as men making shadows, so I guess if she’d ever learned to write she might have been a poet. Instead, and as Allah willed it, she swept the floors of the rich for a handful of afs that she hid in her clothes and guarded through the night.

“There are thieves everywhere,” she would hiss, an angry whisper that tied the points of her eyebrows together.

And, of course, she was right. I was one of them.

At the time, none of us thought of it as stealing. As Jahid explained, because he knew about such things, “It’s the moral distribution of wealth.”

“Sharing money,” added Jamilla. “We have nothing, they have everything, but they are too greedy to help poor people like us, as it is written in the Holy Koran, so we must help them be good. In a way, they are paying for our help. They just don’t know that they’re doing it.”

Of course, not all the foreigners paid for our “help” with closed eyes. Some of them actually gave us money—sometimes happily, sometimes out of shame, sometimes just to make us go away, which doesn’t really work because one group is quickly replaced by another when dollars are walking the street. But it was fun. Born under a shadow or not, me, Jahid, Jamilla, and Spandi spent our days in the sun, distributing the wealth of those who’d come to help us.

“It’s called reconstruction,” Jahid informed us one day as we sat on the curb waiting for a 4 × 4 to jump on. “The foreigners are here because they bombed our country to kill the Taliban, and now they have to build it again. The World Parliament made the order.”

“But why did they want to kill the Taliban?”

“Because they were friends with the Arabs and their king Osama bin Laden had a house in Kabul where he made hundreds of children with his forty wives. America hated bin Laden, and they knew he was fucking his wives so hard he would one day have an army of thousands, maybe millions, so they blew up a palace in their own country and blamed it on him. Then they came to Afghanistan to kill him, his wives, his children, and all of his friends. It’s called politics, Fawad.”

Jahid was probably the most educated boy I’d ever known. He always read the newspapers we found thrown away in the street, and he was older than the rest of us, although how much older nobody knows. We don’t celebrate birthdays in Afghanistan; we only remember victories and death. Jahid was also the best thief I’d ever known. Some days he would come away with handfuls of dollars, taken from the pocket of some foreigner as us smaller kids annoyed them to the point of tears. But if I was born under a shadow, Jahid was surely born under the full gaze of the devil himself because the truth was he was incredibly ugly. His teeth were stumpy smudges of brown, and one of his eyes danced to its own tune, rolling in its socket like a marble in a box. He also had a leg so lazy that he had to force it into line with the other.

“He’s a dirty little thief,” my mother would say. But she rarely had a kind word to say about anyone in her sister’s family. “You keep away from him… filling your head with such nonsense.”

How my mother actually thought I could keep away from Jahid was anyone’s guess. But this is a common problem with adults: they ask for the impossible and then make your life a misery when you can’t obey them. The fact is I lived under the same roof as Jahid, along with his fat cow of a mother, his donkey of a father, and two more of their dirty-faced children, Wahid and Obaidullah.

“All boys,” my uncle would declare proudly.

“And all ugly,” my mother would mutter under her chador, giving me a wink as she did so because it was us against them and although we had nothing at least our eyes looked in the same direction.

Together, all seven of us shared four small rooms and a hole in the yard. Not easy, then, to keep away from cousin Jahid as my mother demanded. It was an order President Karzai would have had problems fulfilling. However, my mother was never one for explaining, so she never told me how I should keep my distance. In fact, for a while my mother was never one for talking full stop.

On very rare occasions she would look up from her sewing to talk about the house we had once owned in Paghman. I was born there, but we fled before the pictures had time to plant themselves in my head. So I found my memories with the words of my mother, watching her eyes grow wide with pride as she described painted rooms lined with thick cushions of the deepest red; curtains covering glass windows; a kitchen so clean you could eat your food from the floor; and a garden full of yellow roses.

“We weren’t rich like those in Wazir Akbar Khan, Fawad, but we were happy,” she would tell me. “Of course that was long before the Taliban came. Now look at us! We don’t even own a tree from which we can hang ourselves.”

I was no expert, but it was pretty clear my mother was depressed.

She never talked about the family we had lost, only the building that had once hidden us—and not very effectively as it turned out. However, sometimes at night I would hear her whisper my sister’s name. She would then reach for me, pulling me closer to her body. And that’s how I knew she loved me.

On those occasions, lying almost as one on the cushions we sat on during the day, I’d be burning to talk. I’d feel the words crowding in my head, waiting to spill from my mouth. I wanted to know everything; about my father, about my brothers, about Mina. I was desperate to know them, to have them come alive in the words of my mother. But she only whispered my sister’s name, and like a coward I kept quiet because I was afraid that if I spoke I would break the spell and she would roll away from me.

By daylight, my mother would be gone from my side, already awake and pulling on her burka. As she left the house she would bark a list of orders that always started with “Go to school” and ended with “Keep away from Jahid.”

In the main these were orders I tried to follow out of respect for my mother—in Afghanistan our mothers are worth more than all the gold that hides in the basement of the president’s palace—but it wasn’t easy. And though I knew she wouldn’t beat me if I disobeyed her, unlike Jahid’s father, who seemed to think he had a God-given right to hit me in the face on any day the sun came up, she would have that look in her eyes, a disappointed stare I suspected had been there from the day I crept out of the shadow.

I am only a boy, but I recognized our life was difficult. Of course, it had always been the same for me; I knew no different. But my mother, with her memories of deep-red cushions and yellow roses, was trapped by a past I had little knowledge of, so I spent most of my days on the outside of her prison, looking in. It had been like this for as long as I could clearly remember, yet I like to think she was happy once: laughing with my father by the clear waters of Qargha Lake, her green eyes—the eyes I inherited—smiling with love, her small hands, soft and clean, playing with the hem of a golden veil.

My mother was once very beautiful—that’s what my aunt told me in a surprising burst of talking. But then the shadow fell, and although she never said so, I guessed my mother blamed me. I was a reminder of a past that had dragged her into the flowerless hell that was her sister’s house, and from what I could tell, my mother hated her sister even more than she hated the Taliban.

“She’s just jealous!” my mother once screamed, loud enough for my aunt to hear in the next room. “She’s always been jealous—jealous of my ways, of the fact that I married an educated man, of our once happy life… and I long got over apologizing for it. If Allah blessed her with the face of a burst watermelon and a body to match, it is not my fault!”

“They’re women, they’re born that way,” Jahid told me one afternoon as we escaped once again from the screams and insults flying around the house to steal from the foreigners in the center of town. “They are never happier than when they are fighting with each other. When you are older you will understand more. Women are complicated, that’s what my father says.”

And maybe Jahid was right. But the argument that had just taken place had more to do with money than being women. My aunt wanted us to pay rent, but we could barely afford the clothes on our backs and the food in our bellies. The few afs my mother earned from cleaning houses along with the dollars I picked up in the street were all we had.

“Maybe if you gave a little more of your dollars to your mother she wouldn’t be so angry with my mother,” I suggested, which was obviously the wrong thing to suggest because Jahid punched me hard in the head.

“Look, you little bastard, my mother gave your mother a roof when you had no place to stay. Coming to our home begging like gypsy filth, forcing us to give up our room and put food in your idle fucking bellies. How do you think we felt? If we weren’t good Muslims, your mother would be pimping your ass to every fucking homo who passed by. In fact, you want to help? Go pimp your own fucking ass! Pretty boy like you should make enough afs to keep the women happy.”

“Yeah?” I spat back. “And maybe they’d pay just as much money to keep the donkey’s ass that’s your face away from them!”

And with that I ran off, leaving my cousin shouting curses about camels and cocks in my direction while dragging his dead leg in fury behind him.

That day I ran from Jahid until I thought my legs would die. By the time I reached Cinema Park I could barely breathe, and I realized I was crying—for my mother and for my cousin. I had been cruel. I knew that. I understood why he was saving his money, why he buried it under the wall when he thought no one was looking. He wanted a wife. “One day I will be married to the most beautiful woman in Afghanistan,” he always bragged. “You wait. You’ll see.” And that’s why he needed the money, because with a face like his he’d have to come up with a hell of a dowry to make that dream come true. It’s not even as if he could rely on the force of his personality to win over a wife. He had the foulest mouth I had ever heard, even more so than the National Police who cluttered the city’s roundabouts, barking curses and demanding bribes, even from crippled beggars. In fact, the only other thing that could have saved Jahid was school, where he’d shown an unlikely talent. He threw himself into his learning as only a boy with no friends can do. But then the torment and the beatings he took day after day finally drove him away, and he became increasingly hard.

My country can be a tough place to live in if you’re poor, but it’s even tougher if you’re poor and ugly. And now Jahid was like stone, a stone that knows he will never find a woman who will willingly marry him, but whose father might agree for the right price.

“Come on, Fawad, let’s go to Chicken Street.”

Through my tears I saw Jamilla standing before me, the sun throwing an angel’s light around her body. She was small, like me. And she was pretty.

Jamilla reached for my hand, and I dragged myself up from the ground to stand by her side, wiping my face dry on the sleeves of my clothes.

“Jahid,” I said by way of explanation.

Jamilla nodded. She didn’t talk much, but I guessed she would grow into that if Jahid was right about the ways of women.

Jamilla was my main rival on Chicken Street. She cleaned up with the foreign men, who melted under the gaze of her big brown eyes, while I cleaned up with the women, who fell in love with my big green eyes. We were a good team whose pickings pretty much depended on who was passing by, so if we found ourselves working on the same day we would split our money.

Fridays were the best, though. It was a holiday, there was no school, no work, and the foreigners would come, stepping out of their Land Cruisers to trawl Kabul’s tourist area for souvenirs of “war-torn” Afghanistan: jewelry boxes made of lapis lazuli; silver imported from Pakistan; guns and knives apparently dating back to the Anglo-Afghan wars; pakols, patus, blankets, carpets, wall hangings, bright-colored scarves, and blue burkas. Of course, if they walked twenty minutes into the heaving mess of Kabul’s river bazaar, they would find all these items for half the price, but the foreigners were either too scared or too lazy to make the journey—and too rich to care about the extra dollars that would feed most of our families for a week. Still, as Jahid noted, their laziness was good for business, and Chicken Street was their Mecca.

Along with the aid workers, now and again we would see white-faced soldiers hunched over the counters of stores selling silver, looking at rings and bracelets for the wives they’d left behind in their own countries. They were mainly tall men with big guns, metal jackets, and bowl-shaped helmets strapped to their heads. They came in groups of four or five, and one would always stand guard in the street as the others did their shopping, watching out for suicide bombers. “America good!” we would shout—a trick that always earned us a couple of dollars. Money in hand, we would then move away, farther down the street, just in case there were actually suicide bombers around.

Most of the other foreigners, though, were less interested in America, so we used different tactics to win their dollars, following them as they weaved their way from shop to shop and yelling out all the English we could remember. “Hello, mister! Hello, missus! How are you? I am your bodyguard! No, come this way, I find you good price.” And we would take their hands and drag them to a store where we could earn a few afs’ commission. Most of us were on the payroll of four or more shopkeepers, but only if we brought in customers. Therefore, if the foreigners didn’t bend to our thinking, we would follow them into stores, tutting and shaking our heads in pretend concern, but carefully out of sight of the owners. “No, missus, he is thief, very bad price. Come, I show you good price.” We would then lead them to the shops that paid us, telling the owners of the figure given by one of their rivals so that he could begin his bargaining at a lower but still profitable price.

Meanwhile, as the foreigners argued a few extra dollars away, the women who also worked the street but knew no English would descend, hovering in shop doorways to reach out with their dirty hands, grab at elbows, and cry into their burkas. They all come from the same family, but the foreigners don’t know this, and as woman after woman would come to break down in tears pleading for money for her sick, dying baby, this would usually be the point when it became too much for the Westerners and they would climb back into their cars, trying to avoid our eyes as their drivers sped them away from our poverty and back to their privileged lives.

However, as the Land Cruisers screeched out of Chicken Street and into the gridlocked traffic of Shahr-e Naw, Spandi would appear to tap his black fingers on their windows and hold out the bitter, smoking can of herbs that we call spand, the smell of which is so unbelievably foul it is said to chase away evil spirits. Without doubt this is the worst of all our jobs because the smoke gets in your hair and your eyes and your chest and you end up looking like death. But the money is pretty okay because even if the tourists aren’t superstitious it’s hard to ignore a boy at a car window whose scarred face is the color of ash.

On a good day on Chicken Street we didn’t need to hustle. The foreign women would happily hand over their bags as they struggled with headscarves they had yet to grow used to, and I would carry their shopping until they called it a day, sometimes earning five dollars for my trouble. Jamilla would smile prettily and get the same for carrying nothing.

“And what is your name?” the women would ask slowly. Pretty white faces with smiling red lips.

“Fawad,” I would tell them.

“Your English is very good. Do you go to school?”

“Yes. School. Every day. I like very much.”

And it was true, we all went to school—even the girls if their fathers let them—but the days were short and the holidays long with months off in the winter and summer when it became too cold or too hot to study. However, the English we learned came only from the street. It was easy to pick up, and the foreigners liked to teach us.

And even if Jahid was correct and they did come to bomb our country and rebuild it again, I quite liked the foreigners with their sweaty white faces and fat pockets—which was just as well really, because that day I returned to my aunt’s house to be told we were going to live with three of them.

2

IT DIDN’T TAKE us long to move out of my aunt’s house, possessing as we did only one blanket, a few clothes, and a copy of the Koran. We would have taken more, but my aunt seemed to think that the few pots and pans we’d gathered over the years now belonged to her.

Thankfully, my mother was in no mood to argue that day and simply spit at her sister’s feet before lowering her burka and dragging me out of the door.

“Good-bye, Jahid!” I shouted behind me.

“Bye, Fawad jan!”

I looked back, surprised by the affectionate “jan” added to my name, and just in time to see my cousin wipe something from his one good eye.

“Don’t forget us, you donkey cunt!”

It was a quick extra that earned him an equally quick blow to the ear from the fat fist of his mother.

It took us two whole hours to walk from Khair Khana on the edge of the city to Wazir Akbar Khan, the location of our new house, in which time I managed to get from my mother that we were to live with two women and one man. She said she only knew the name of one of the women, the one who had invited us; her name was Georgie. And apparently, she had been washing Georgie’s clothes for weeks.

I couldn’t believe she hadn’t mentioned this before.

“But why were you washing her clothes?” I asked.

“For money, what do you think?”

“Why doesn’t she wash her own clothes?”

“Foreigners don’t know how. They need machines to wash their clothes.”

“What kind of machines?”

“Washing machines.”

This sounded incredible to me, but my mother wouldn’t lie. Okay, she didn’t talk much, but when she did it was always the truth. I also knew that foreigners were a Godless people, so I had to assume that as well as going to Hell they hadn’t even been blessed with the common skills given to ordinary Afghans like us.

“Does she sew?”

“No.”

“Can she cook?”

“No.”

“Does she have a husband?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Mother laughed and dragged me into a hug as we walked. I looked up, but I couldn’t see her face through the screen of the burka, so I held her hand tighter, my ears burning at the thought of having made her smile.

This was fast turning into the best day of my life.

Although I had no real memories of what it had been like before my aunt’s house, I knew my mother was miserable after we moved from Paghman. Locked in one room with a thin carpet that offered no comfort from the cold scratches of the concrete floor, we lived, ate, and slept like tolerated prisoners under my aunt’s roof. The toilet was also a constant torment to my mother, smattered as it usually was by the missed aims of four careless boys and a man whose bowels were as loose as a slaughtered goat’s; and we were plagued with illness, from malaria in the summer to flu in the winter, as well as the worms and bugs that permanently lived in our stomachs. Yet we had to appear grateful because my aunt had taken us in on the night we lost everything.

Every year, people around us died from disease, rocket attacks, forgotten mines, the bites of animals large and small, and even hunger. And even if you did have food, that was no guarantee of coming out of the day alive. Mother cooked our meals on an old gas burner that sat in the corner of our room threatening to explode and knock the heads from our very necks. That’s what happened to Haji Mohammad’s wife three doors away. She was cooking chickpeas in the kitchen when the burner exploded into a ball of flames. It then shot from the floor like a rocket, taking her head clean off. It took him weeks to clear the blood and brains from the black remains of the kitchen. Even today, dents from bullet-propelled chickpeas scar the walls of the house, and Haji Mohammad won’t eat anything but salad, fruit, and naan. Anything, in fact, that doesn’t need cooking. Thanks be to Allah, though, because he’d been blessed with a second wife—and she was younger than the first.

“So, how did you get to know her?”

“Who?”

“The foreign woman, Georgie.”

“I found her.”

“What do you mean you found her? How did you find her?”

“Oh, Fawad! So many questions! I was knocking on doors looking for work, and she gave me some. After that she gave me some more, and then she invited us to come. Okay?”

“Okay.”

As we marched through the streets, dodging dog shit and potholes, and with my mother now refusing to give any more information as to how we came to be moving toward this sudden freedom, I tried to imagine the mysterious Georgie who had been found by my mother. I pictured a woman with long golden hair and an easy smile standing under a tree in Wazir Akbar Khan, looking lost with her arms full of the dirty clothes she had no idea how to wash. In my head she looked like the woman from Titanic. In reality, she looked more Afghan than I did.

Turning left, just before Massoud Circle, we crisscrossed three roads lined with concrete barriers protecting huge houses that peered over high walls with curls of barbed wire fixed on them. Men holding guns stood guard every ten paces, and they eyed us with lazy suspicion as we moved farther into the residential area of the rich. Eventually we came to a standstill in front of a large green metal gate. Another guard wearing a light blue shirt and black trousers came out of a wooden white hut positioned nearby and greeted my mother. He then opened the side door and shouted inside. As we stepped through, a woman came walking toward us with hair as long and dark as my mother’s. She wore a white shirt over blue jeans and looked quite beautiful.

“Salaam aleykum, Mariya!” the woman sang, clasping my mother’s hand as she did so.

“Waleykum salaam,” my mother replied.

“How are you? How is your health? Are you well? How was your trip? No problems?”

As my mother rattled off her replies, I stared at the woman I guessed to be Georgie, surprised to hear her speaking one of our languages and surprised to find that not only was she dressed like a man, she was also as tall as one.

“And this must be your handsome son, Fawad. How are you, Fawad? Welcome to your new home.”

I held out my hand, and Georgie shook it. Although I tried to speak, my mouth was a few steps behind my head and I couldn’t find the words to answer her.

“Ha! He is a little shy, I think. Please, come in, both of you.”

My mother walked farther into the yard, where she felt free to lift the burka back from her face. My first thought was that she looked afraid, which didn’t exactly set my mind at rest. But then I realized that, like me, she didn’t quite know what to say.

Silently, we followed Georgie to a small building sitting behind and to the right of the gate.

“This will be your place, Fawad. I hope you will be happy here.”

Georgie pointed to the building, waving at us to follow her in. So we did.

Inside there were two rooms separated by a small, clean toilet and shower area. As she opened the door to the first room I saw two beds with blankets sitting upon them. They were still in their plastic cases and looked new. In the other room there were three long cushions, a small table, an electric fan, and a television—a real live Samsung television! And it looked like it might even work! All my life I had dreamed of owning a TV, and I felt tears sticking sharp pins in the backs of my eyes at the very sight of it.

“Come,” Georgie said with a smile, “leave your things here and I’ll show you around.”

My first day in the new house was a blur of sights, smells, and sounds. There was our home and a bigger building where Georgie and her friends lived upstairs. There was a kitchen the size of the yard where my mother was told she would do much of her work, and a sitting room with another television (much bigger than ours), a music system, and a pool table. To the back of the house was a massive lawn framed with rosebushes. When I saw them parading their pretty colors in the sun my heart leaped at the thought of my mother once again being surrounded by such beauty.

But then I saw a man standing in the middle of this beauty with his chest as bare as that of Pir the Madman, who played with the dogs in Shahr-e Naw Park, and I began seriously to worry for my mother’s reputation. The man was holding a long stick in his hand, a bottle of beer in the other, and he had a cigarette balanced between his teeth. He had been using the stick to hit a small ball into a glass lying on the ground, and not doing very well by the looks of it.

“Hello, I’m James,” he shouted, looking up in time to catch us staring at him.

He wandered over to offer his hand to my mother, who, quite rightly, waved but didn’t accept it. Georgie said something sharp in what I recognized was English, and the man gave a small easy laugh before reaching for his shirt, which lay close by on the back of a white plastic chair.

“This is James,” explained Georgie. “He’s a journalist, so please forgive his manners.”

After James pulled on his clothes he walked back to us saying something I didn’t quite understand before reaching out with his right hand to mess up my hair. I shook my head, knocking him away, and threw him a look to warn that this kind of attention wasn’t appreciated, but then he rolled his hand into a fist, knocked me on the chin, and started laughing. Georgie spoke again, and James raised his arms in pretend surrender before putting his right hand to his heart and smiling at me. It was a true smile that made moon-shaped holes around his lips, and I accepted it with one of my own. I knew then that I liked the man James. He was tall and thin, and he had a dark beard. He could easily have passed for an Afghan if he managed to keep his clothes on.

Behind us I heard the gate open, and a woman came striding into the garden. She looked angry and slightly confused, but when Georgie spoke she smiled and waved.

“Our final house mate,” explained Georgie. “This is May; she’s an engineer.”

May greeted us with handshakes. She was short, with yellow hair escaping from a green headscarf. She had spots on her face, and she also looked nothing like the woman from Titanic. The man called James gave her his beer, and she seemed happy with this. And although I tried not to look, I could see that under her blue shirt she had the most enormous breasts I’d ever come across. I wondered whether James had seen them.

“We are all quite friendly here and very relaxed, so please treat this place as your home for as long as you need it,” said Georgie.

My mother then thanked her and led me back to our rooms—away from the foreigners who had invited us into their home and away from the sight of May’s chest.

Over the next few days, as my mother washed and cooked and basically did everything the foreigners seemed incapable of, I kept a careful eye on my new landlords. Although I was glad to be there, I had to protect my mother, and to do that I needed to know just who and what I was dealing with. My main concern was the naked journalist.

Thankfully, the layout of the place gave me the chance to observe pretty much everything, unseen. The passageway behind the house allowed me to watch the garden unnoticed; the big windows gave me a grand view of what was happening downstairs, when it was dark outside and the lights were on; and the high walls and balconies gave me a way in to some of the sights above. Now and again my mother would catch me spying on the foreigners and shake her head, but although her eyes looked puzzled they seemed fairly unconcerned. She’d also taken to laughing more—and mainly when one of the guards, Shir Ahmad, came from his hut to refill his teapot.

I made a mental note to investigate Shir Ahmad as soon as I’d finished with the foreigners.

With so much spying to do, for the first few weeks after we moved to Wazir Akbar Khan I kept away from Chicken Street, despite the almost unbearable ache to tell Jahid about our television, and fill Jamilla’s head with the sights and sounds of my new home. Instead, I would return from school, sit in the doorway of the kitchen, chat with my mother as she did her chores, and wait for Georgie, James, and May to come back from wherever they had been.

“How does Georgie know our Dari language?” I asked my mother as she peeled potatoes for that night’s dinner.

“From her friends, I think.”

“She has Afghan friends?”

“Apparently so. Pass me that pan, will you, Fawad?”

I reached for the metal container, tipped a dead fly out of it, and handed it over.

“So, have you seen these friends?” I asked, settling back onto the kitchen step.

“Once, yes.”

“Who are they?”

“Afghans.”

“I know that!”

My mother laughed, throwing the naked potatoes in the pan as she did so. “They are Pashtuns,” she finally offered. “From Jalalabad.”

“Oh, she’s got some taste then.”

“Yes.” My mother smiled before adding somewhat mysteriously, “Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

“They’re not… how should I put it? They’re not the kind of friends I might choose for you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re my boy and I love you. Now that’s enough, Fawad. Go and finish your homework.”

Dismissed, and left dangling once again by my mother’s riddles, I returned to my room to practice the multiplication tables we had been given at school that day. I guessed that in the same way I’d found out about the Taliban shadow, the reason Georgie had sort-of friends would become clear at some later stage of my life. However, I was glad they were Pashtun, like me. If they had been Hazaras, they would have cut off her breasts by now.

As we actually had water connected to the house, I no longer had to make the backbreaking trip to the nearest tap to fight with other kids and dirty dogs for a bucketful of liquid that lasted five minutes, and so after I completed my homework my only real job was to run to the baker’s each evening with a handful of afs to collect five hot fresh long breads.

Other than that, my life usually involved waiting for the foreigners.

Georgie was normally the first to arrive home, and quite often she would allow me to sit in the garden with her as she drank her coffee. Although my mother was always invited, she rarely came to join us. She had quickly made friends with a woman across the road who managed a house for the wife of one of the Ministry of Interior’s men. Her name was Homeira and she was pretty fat, so I guessed they paid her well. I was happy my mother had found a friend, so I felt no jealousy when she spent much of her time talking to her in our rooms or at the house of Homeira’s employer. In fact, I was more than happy; I was amazed. It was as if a hidden key had turned in my mother’s head, releasing a river of words that had been locked in there for years.

More amazing, however, was my mother’s willingness to let me stay in the house alone and to sit with the Westerners for as long as “they don’t become bored.” Perhaps she thought it would be good for my English, although James was hardly ever around, May always seemed to be crying, and Georgie and I usually spoke Dari together.

From these little conversations I learned that Georgie came from England, the same country as London. She’d been in Afghanistan for ages and came to live with James and May two years ago because they had become friends and James needed the rent money. She worked for an NGO and combed goats for a living, and because she knew the country and traveled a lot she had made loads of Afghan friends. In that way, and many more, she was different from most foreigners I had met, and I think I fell in love with her instantly. She was gentle and funny, and she seemed to like being with me. She was also very beautiful with thick almost-black hair and dark eyes. I hoped one day to marry her—once she had given up smoking and converted to the one true faith, of course.

The engineer, May, was usually the second one home and tended to disappear into her room as soon as her quick greetings were over. Georgie told me she came from America on a contract with one of the ministries and that she was “a little unhappy right now.” She didn’t explain further, and I didn’t ask more. I liked the mystery it gave to May’s tears.

As a rule, James was always the last one home, and at least twice a week he would return very late, bouncing off walls and singing to himself. The more I got to know him, the more I was convinced he was related to Pir the Madman.

“He works very hard,” Georgie explained, “and mainly with the ladies.”

Georgie laughed at that, and I wondered how these women got permission from their husbands to work so late with a man who freely showed his nipples to the world as if they were medals of war.

“What work does he do with them?” I asked, causing Georgie to laugh even louder. It was a good, strong sound, like thunder in summer.

“Fawad,” she finally said, “you’d best ask your mother that question.”

And that put a stop to that.

And because that’s always the way with adults—they shut you out just as things get interesting—I had no choice but to carry on with my own investigations, investigations my mother might call “snooping.”

Through much trying and failing, I found the best time to watch my new friends was at night, when the lights were on, it was dark outside, and everyone thought I was asleep. Luckily, my mother was a great help when it came to my nighttime spying, as she had chosen to sleep in the TV room, meaning I now had a bedroom to myself for the very first time, which gave me complete freedom to explore my surroundings and their strange Godless inhabitants.

Now and again, about an hour after I’d turned out my light, my mother would open the door to my room, which surprised me the first time because I was a breath away from leaving. But it was one of those warm surprises that make your toes tingle and your heart feel like it’s bleeding inside, because, thinking I was asleep, she kissed me softly on the cheek before returning to her own room, satisfied I was safely locked up in my dreams. Which of course I wasn’t. As a result of that first sweet surprise, I quickly learned to wait a good hour until after my mother’s visit before pulling on my shoes and allowing my adventures to begin.

Creeping along walls and crouching in bushes, I listened to magical, mysterious conversations that exploded with laughter as Georgie, James, and May spoke with other white-faced friends around the table in the garden. Of course, I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but this simply meant I now had a code I would have to learn to decipher.

Really, I felt like I’d been plucked from the flames of Hell and placed into Paradise. In those first few weeks I wasn’t simply Fawad from Paghman; I was Fawad the secret agent. In those days, Kabul was crawling with spies—British, Pakistani, French, Italian, Russian, Indian, and American men as big as giants who wore their beards long to try to look Afghan. My mission from the president was simple: to discover who in the house was working as a spy, and the identity of their masters.

As I crept and crawled my way through the heavy heat of those Kabul summer nights, I wrapped layers of dreams and heroic tales around my adventures, and I plotted escape routes and hatched complicated plans to avoid detection so that I might hand over my carefully gathered information to my comrades at the palace. I lived in a world of hazy future glories, picturing myself as a national hero thanks to all the good work I had carried out as a mere boy.

“He was so young!” the people would say as they listened to the story of my successes.

“Yes, but he was a true Afghan,” President Karzai would tell them, smiling widely because he was the man who had appointed me.

“So brave! So fearless!” they would marvel. “He must have had balls as big as Ahmad Shah Massoud’s.”

“Bigger!” the president would correct. “The boy was a Pashtun!”

In order to fulfill my mission, I kept a careful record of all the foreigners’ movements in a red notebook Georgie had given me to practice my writing. Because James was hardly ever there, and Georgie was too beautiful to work for the enemy, I decided to concentrate on May.

Once my mother had gone to sleep, I would sneak out of my room and shimmy up the wall of the “secret” passageway. From there I could see the door to May’s bedroom, on which was hung a long woolen jacket. On the far wall there was a wooden board with a collection of photographs pinned on it. I guessed they were of her family because the people caught in various poses all seemed to be short and yellow, but in my imagination they were part of a terror network supported by the pigs of Pakistan. The ISI, the country’s secret service, knew that the Afghan government would never suspect a Western woman from America of carrying out their evil plans. In that way they were as cunning as the devil himself. But they weren’t clever enough for Fawad—Afghanistan’s silent protector.

Unfortunately, though, May seemed to be going through some kind of trauma. Most of the time she just disappeared to her room. And if she wasn’t in her room, she would be shouting into her mobile phone. And if she wasn’t shouting into her phone, she would be downstairs picking at the food my mother had spent all day preparing for her, or even worse, she would be crying. Although it’s never good to see a woman cry, her face looked angry rather than sad, and I found it confusing. To be honest, I thought May was slightly mental, and by the end of the second week I decided to give up investigating her spying activity for the Pakistanis and dedicate my time to getting a look at her breasts.

Now, there was one small problem with this new mission. I could see only a third of May’s bedroom from the wall, and it wasn’t the third she undressed in. After thinking about this situation as I waited for my mother’s light to snap off, I realized my only option was to jump from the wall onto her balcony. This meant I would have to clear a gap roughly a meter wide and try not to think about the fall below.

After a fortnight of undercover operations I’d discovered that the buzz of the generator, which gave light to the house every second night when the city electricity took a holiday, easily hid any noise I made as I scrambled around, so with no fear of alerting May, even if I fell to my death, I climbed up the wall opposite the edge of her balcony and concentrated on the railings in front of me. Twelve bars across. I just had to jump and reach out for one of them.

Taking five deep breaths, I closed my eyes, offered a prayer to Allah, and pushed my feet from the wall with every bit of strength my legs had in them. Suddenly, almost as if I hadn’t yet decided to jump, I felt my head slamming against the railings, and by some miracle my hands had hold of two of the bars.

Dazed and not quite believing I was there, I took a moment to breathe the silence back into my thumping heart. Only one small kick, and I could swing my legs onto the edge, pull myself onto the balcony, and the secrets of May’s balloonlike figure would be mine. I’d get to see her breasts, possibly more. If I was really lucky, I might even see her—

“A-hem.”

A sound came to worry my ears. It was a sound like a cough, and it seemed to be coming from below.

“A-a-hem.”

There it was again.

Slowly, hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I looked down, a little to the right, and saw James standing there, shaking his head and wagging his finger at me. I looked back at the bright light coming from May’s bedroom, then back at James. He hadn’t gone anywhere, which would have been the polite thing to do. He was obviously waiting for me to make some kind of move.

“Salaam aleykum.” I smiled weakly.

I let go of the bars and fell to his feet, rolling myself into a tight ball as I landed to kill the blow of the soon-to-come assault. After a silence that lasted only seconds but seemed to last at least half of my short life, I heard another cough. I looked up to see James smiling. His eyes were shiny like glass, and he was swaying slightly. He then nodded his head in the direction of the garden and waved at me to follow.

I was in no hurry to go, but I decided it would be better to take a beating as far away from the front of the house—and as far away from the chance of my mother seeing my shame and adding her own style of torture afterward—as possible. So, holding my head high like a man, I followed James to the plastic chairs standing ghostlike in the gloom of the garden.

Without a word he invited me to sit next to him. He then reached down to his side, picked up a bottle of beer from a cardboard box, knocked its metal cap off on the edge of the table, and handed it to me.

It was obviously a trick, but I took it anyway.

James then reached for another bottle, opened it the same way, hit it against the one I held in my hand, and slurred something I didn’t understand. His breath smelled of old cheese.

Carefully I watched him, not daring to move, but he tipped his hand to his lips, showing that I should drink. So I did.

At first the beer tasted disgusting, bubbly and bitter like rotten Pepsi, but this was obviously my punishment and it was better than being beaten with a stick, so I took another sip, and then another, and another, and another.

In no time at all, I found my head had gone numb. A warmth, different from heat, breathed through my body, traveling up inside my veins to finish at my cheeks, making my eyes feel starry. Everything around me seemed to be muffled by an invisible blanket, and James was speaking in a language I didn’t understand. As I continued to drink, I began to talk to him too. I couldn’t help myself; the words were jumping from my mouth as if they were racing down a hill, rolling over and over one another. Neither of us knew what the other was saying, that much was still clear, but it didn’t seem to matter. It felt like the best conversation I’d ever had in my life. The fact is, James really seemed to understand me.

By the end of my second bottle I’d told him all about Jahid and Jamilla and my best friend, Spandi. I revealed the secrets of our wages, our trips around the city hanging off the back of trucks, how we once found Pir the Madman asleep in the park and put wet mud in his pants so he’d think he’d shit himself when he woke up.

As the night grew old and the edges of the world blurred, I confessed to spying on May. At the sound of her name, James wiggled his hands in front of his chest, waved his cigarette and beer in big circles, and laughed. I laughed as well, although I wasn’t sure why, and soon James was jumping up from his seat, slapping me on the back, crashing his bottle into mine, and rubbing my hair, which I didn’t seem to mind anymore.

But then, as quickly as it had started, it all stopped.

Like a street dog caught in headlights, James turned and froze, his hand raised above his head, still holding the bottle of beer. Everything around us seemed to grow still, even the air we were breathing, and I watched mesmerized as the ashy tip of his cigarette floated to the floor and a dark figure emerged in the distance in front of him. It looked something like Georgie.

She was staring at us, and she didn’t appear happy.

She was dressed only in a long black T-shirt, her legs were bare, and her dark hair whipped about her head like a mass of angry snakes. She looked more magical than normal, furious and amazing, and I thought my heart would break at the dark, angry beauty of her, but then maybe it was the shock of her arrival, I don’t know, or the sight of her naked legs, or the heavy thumping in my chest, or the sudden weight of a thousand camels that had come to drag at my head, but at that exact moment I leaned forward in my chair and threw up on my shoes.

3

THE DAY AFTER I covered my shoes in vomit was possibly the worst day of my life. Well, not the worst. But it was pretty damn bad.

My throat was sore, all dry and swollen; my stomach ached, feeling empty and rotten; my skin was damp and cold; my head had a million steel workers hammering inside it; and my mother had found me a job before noon, even though it was Friday and nobody was working—yet another example of the mysterious magic mothers carry out when their eyes burn with anger. From now on, for two hours after school I would have to play servant to Pir Hederi, a shopkeeper as old as the King’s Tomb whose sight had disappeared behind milky white curtains.

I was beyond annoyed.

“If you can’t behave, you’ll have to earn,” my mother stated matter-of-factly. “And from now on you stay away from James. Do you hear me?”

I groaned. It was just like Jahid all over again.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I whimpered.

“I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”

My mother was impossible. In fact, she was more impossible than all the warlords trying to run this country, and that was pretty much as impossible as you get. Thank God, then, that Georgie informed her only that I’d been drinking beer. If she knew I’d also been trying to sneak a look at May’s breasts before I fell to the ground and hit the bottle, I’m certain she would have packed me off to a madrassa, right there and then.

“Drinking alcohol is against Islam,” she reminded me. “Now you’ll have to pay for your sin in the fires of Hell. You’re probably not even ten years old, Fawad. At this rate you’ll be burning for eternity along with all the Godless foreigners!”

“I didn’t know it was beer!” I shouted back.

“There! That’s another ten years in Hell for lying, plus five more for shouting at your mother. I’d shut up now if I was you.”

“But—”

“But! But! No more buts! Get out of my sight before I change my mind and beat you!”

I shook my head slowly. It appeared Jahid was right. There was just no reasoning with women, especially when the woman was your mother.

I turned from the kitchen and shuffled toward the garden to escape the fury I didn’t feel I strictly deserved. I was a boy after all. What about James? He had made me commit the sin, and he was a man. Would he be forced to work for Hederi the Blind for a handful of afs I could just as easily find in the gutters of Chicken Street? No such luck. And this was the new democratic Afghanistan!

Further evidence of this great injustice appeared as I turned the corner to seek refuge in the garden and saw James, my great undoer, sitting hunched over his laptop wearing dark glasses. His forehead looked like a great weight was hanging above it, pressing deep lines into the skin below.

“Brilliant,” I mumbled, and turned back toward my room.

Defeated, I crawled into bed to sleep off the sickness that was crawling over my skin like body lice.

Pir Hederi’s shop was on the corner of Street 15, opposite a roundabout and close to the British Embassy. It was a messy place with cans spilling from shelves, boxes piled high on the floor, bleeding cloths, towels, and other cleaning stuff, and crates of fruit that had seen better days but still seemed to sell. During my first day on duty he told me that I’d been hired because he’d sacked his “bastard shit of a nephew” who used to place boxes and chairs in his path just to see him fall. He was also a thief, apparently.

“Don’t try anything on, son,” he warned me. “I may not have eyes no more, but I can still see.”

He pointed his gnarly hand at the doorway, where a dog as big as a small donkey stood guard, watching me as if I was that day’s dinner.

“What’s his name?” I asked, keeping a careful eye on the beast that threatened to eat me. He was as old and as ugly as his master, with gray stumps for ears, marking him out as a former fighter.

“Whose name?”

“The dog.”

“Dog.”

“Yes, the dog.”

“Dog. His name is Dog.”

“Oh.”

Despite his appearance, and obvious lack of imagination, I soon found out that Pir Hederi was actually quite funny. And from what I could tell, he didn’t need my help at all. If a man came in asking for shaving foam, Pir would move from his seat in front of the cigarette counter, shuffle over to the far right corner, reach out to the second shelf down, and come away with the correct can. If some no-good kids came in and tried to lift any of the stock, Dog would block their way out, growling and snarling, spit hanging from his teeth like slimy string and the hairs on his back standing to attention, until the would-be thieves pissed their pants and cried for their mothers. Pir would then charge them fifty afs for a safe exit.

No, he didn’t really need me, but I got the impression that Pir was a lonely old man looking for someone to talk to. So, the first week, I mainly poured him tea and sat on the Pepsi boxes eating dry chickpeas as he wandered through his thoughts and war memories.

“We lost a lot of good men that day,” he said one afternoon after recounting another tale about his time with the mujahideen. I nodded wisely, then grunted after remembering he couldn’t actually see me. There had been sixty of them that day, all Pashtuns, “all committed to the cause of freedom,” and they were armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. They’d just carried out a daring daylight attack on a Russian base north of Kunar. “Hundreds of enemy soldiers died in the assault,” said Pir, “caught unawares by the sheer daring of our raid and knocked senseless by a lifetime of vodka. We’d also battered them with rocket-propelled grenades and a wall of bullets fired by men with nothing to lose and everything to gain.” It was a famous victory for the mujahideen, he told me, a triumph that was spun into songs and sung around campfires for years to come. And as quickly as they had appeared, rising from nowhere to unleash hell on the Russians, they melted away again, “like ghosts drifting back into the landscape.”

But they hadn’t got away with the attack.

As the victorious mujahideen crossed the mountains of Nuristan, marching their way toward secret war camps dug into rock, they were swallowed up by a blizzard that ripped at their clothes and tore at their skin. In the roar of the wind they failed to hear the blades of the helicopter that came whooshing over their heads, dropping brilliant burning light upon their path. As they ran for their lives, the Russian air force tracked them every step of the way, on and on into the night, finally forcing them into a narrow gorge where they were ambushed by five hundred waiting Russian soldiers. The mujahideen didn’t stand a chance, but somehow they fought their way out of the valley to split and scatter under the cover of a leafless forest, throwing themselves into icy mountain rivers and burying themselves under a meter of snow.

“Yes, we lost a lot of good men that day,” said Pir with a sigh. “We also lost most of our toes…”

I looked at Pir’s cracked feet. All ten toes peeked out from the leather straps, carrying thick yellow nails.

“So, is that how you came to be blind then? From fighting in the jihad?”

“Mercy, no,” he grumbled. “I lost my sight the day I got married. I saw my wife for the first time, and she was that ugly my eyes closed down and refused to work again.”

Pir usually finished with me about five thirty in the evening. If I timed it just right, I’d hit the main road about the same time Georgie was being driven home, and I would hitch a ride with her back to the house. Like most foreigners, she had her own driver, Massoud, which I thought was pretty good considering she only combed goats for a living.

“They’re not just any old goats,” Georgie told me one day as I laughed about her being the richest goat herder in the whole of Afghanistan. “They’re cashmere goats.”

“So what? A goat’s a goat, born to be eaten or dragged around a field by buzkashi horsemen! What’s so special about some dumb cashmere goat?”

“The wool, sweetie. It’s very expensive. Women in the West will practically sell their souls for sweaters and shawls made out of cashmere. And luckily for your country, Afghanistan is home to some of the finest cashmere in the world.”

“So why aren’t all the goat herders rich then?”

“Well, most goat owners don’t realize the value of what they’ve got, so they let the cashmere drop off, or they shear it off with the rest of the wool and throw it away. You see, it’s the soft undercoat of the goat which is the good bit, and it needs to be combed out and separated. In its raw, unwashed state, this can sell for about twenty dollars per kilogram.”

“Ho, that’s not bad.”

“It’s not bad, but it’s also not that good.”

“No?”

“No. Not yet.” Georgie smiled and raised her eyebrows as if she was about to tell me some big secret. “Even if the farmers know about the special wool, they will only collect it. It’s then shipped off to Iran or Belgium or China, where it’s mixed with inferior wool and sometimes reimported, which is pure madness. Now, if we could set up the facilities to treat the wool in Afghanistan and make it as good as good can be, your goat herders would be very rich men indeed. Well, compared to what they are now anyway. It would also create more jobs and develop into a proper industry. And that’s why I’m here in your country, to help everyone do just that.”

Georgie leaned back into the seat of the car and seemed very pleased with herself.

Personally, as far as secrets went I thought this had to be the worst of the worst. However, I quite liked the idea of her teaching the poor goat herders how to become rich. Most people only come to Afghanistan to help themselves get rich, or richer.

“Will you take me one day?” I asked. “To see the goats?”

“Yes, of course I will, as long as your mother agrees.”

“I think it will be okay,” I said. “Unless you invite James, and then it might be a bit more complicated.”

Georgie laughed. “Yes, I think you’re right about that. He’s not exactly her favorite person at the moment, is he?”

No, he isn’t, I thought. Far from it.

Ever since that night, my mother had stopped talking to James. Sometimes she couldn’t even bring herself to look at him, which was a bit embarrassing because he’d taken to bringing her flowers every day as some kind of peace offering. Unfortunately for James, this small effort had also landed him in hot water with Shir Ahmad, and I was certain that if the guard wasn’t being paid three hundred dollars a month, he would have had James murdered.

I think Shir Ahmad had fallen in love with my mother at some point when I wasn’t looking, or maybe when I was looking at someone else. I guess this was because she was still very beautiful, and I felt a little sorry for him—as long as he didn’t try to touch her. For my mother’s part, she laughed at his jokes, fixed his tea, and cooked his food, but she seemed to prefer the company of Homeira across the road. So that left Shir Ahmad alone to take care of his hopeful heart—and to stare dangerously at James when he came home with yet another unwanted bunch of flowers.

In fact, the only person who was allowed and seemed to want to talk to James these days was May, who had stopped crying and started getting drunk. I didn’t know which was worse. Either way her face was still red and puffy.

“What’s happened to May?” I asked Georgie one day in the car.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s always laughing now.”

“Well, that’s better than crying, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. And I’m not sure James does either.”

Georgie smiled and turned to look at me. “Yes, she does seem to spend more time with him these days.”

“She wants to be his girlfriend,” I stated knowingly, only for Georgie to shake her head and laugh hard.

“I don’t think so, Fawad. She’s a… what do you call it in Dari? She’s a woman who likes other women more than she likes men.”

My heart skipped a beat at this latest shock of information, and I felt the sticky prickle of sweat break out at the sides of my head.

“What do you mean likes?” I whispered, asking about May but thinking of my mother and her many visits across the road.

“Like husbands like wives… that kind of like,” Georgie explained with a wink, obviously mistaking my concern for surprise.

I nodded my head, as if I didn’t care and to show I was a man of the world, but her words bumped around my brain like a death sentence. Like husbands like wives… like husbands like wives… It was unreal. It was unbelievable. That didn’t mean just talking. That meant kissing and everything.

As the words slowly sank in and I pictured the full horror of my future playing out before my eyes, I realized I’d have to take drastic action, and quick.

I’d have to force my mother to marry Shir Ahmad.

“You’re a bit young to be looking for a woman, aren’t you?”

Pir Hederi turned his white eyes in my direction. We were sitting side by side, in front of the shop, enjoying the warm breeze that breathed the end of summer on our faces.

“It’s not for me,” I corrected, a bit disgusted at the thought.

“Who for, then?”

“Just someone—a man.”

Since the shock of discovering my mother might be a woman who likes other women, I’d been trying everything I could think of to make her fall in love with Shir Ahmad, but nothing seemed to be working.

The first thing I’d done was to convince James during the rare moments my mother left us alone in the house to hand over his flowers to the guard so that he might pass them on to her. Both men hesitated at first, not liking the idea of giving and receiving flowers from each other, but when I explained using a mixture of hand gestures and pieces of English that my mother might feel more comfortable getting gifts from a foreigner through an Afghan, they both agreed to try it. And although my mother now accepted the flowers, which she arranged in old coffee jars and placed around the windows, she didn’t seem to be moving any closer to accepting Shir Ahmad’s company beyond quick conversations during the handover of teapots and food plates.

My next tactic involved making Shir appear interesting. “Oh! That Shir! He’s a funny man!” I’d laugh, collapse, and shake my head with the hilarity of another made-up story or joke he’d never told, hoping to arouse my mother’s curiosity. “Here, listen to this!” I ordered one evening, coming to sit by my mother’s side as she washed one of Georgie’s white shirts in a bowl of soapy water. “One day, a mental fell asleep by the side of the road. He was wearing a brand-new pair of boots. A man walked up to him and decided to steal the snoring mental’s boots. Carefully, the thief removed them and put his old pair of shoes on the crazy man’s feet. Not long after, a car came up the road and stopped in front of the mental. The driver woke him and told him, ‘Move your feet out of the road so that I may pass by.’ The mental then looked at his feet and said, ‘Brother, pass by. These feet don’t belong to me!’ ” I slapped my thighs, threw my head back in laughter, and waited for my mother to join in. But she didn’t. She simply gave me a look and asked, “Have you been drinking beer again?” before returning her attention to Georgie’s wet, soapy shirts.

After the jokes failed to work, I slowly began to gather the threads of Shir Ahmad’s life, from the short conversations we shared as I left for and returned from school.

“He used to have a wife,” I told my mother after I had collected all the facts and pulled them into something that might show him to be more than a man who just stood at the door.

“Who did?”

“Shir Ahmad.”

Mother put down the knife she was using to saw up the fatty flesh of one of Afghanistan’s big-bottomed sheep.

“So?” she asked. “What happened to her?”

“It’s a sad story, Mother. A very sad story.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Fawad.”

She turned back to the raw meat and carried on hacking.

“Okay,” I hurried, worried that I’d lost her so early on in the tale, “but it is sad.”

I threw her a stern look to remind her that a good Muslim woman should have more sympathy.

“Shir told me that he was married very young to an even younger girl from his village and that he loved her very, very much. Every day he would bring her flowers.” I paused, watching my mother as I stressed the word flowers, but she didn’t even blink. “So, he brought her flowers every day, and he would sing to her every night as she prepared their dinner. They didn’t have much because Shir only had a small job learning how to file paperwork at the offices of the Department of Agriculture. He was educated, you see. He could read and write; that’s how he got the job with the department, where you have to know your numbers. Anyway, Shir and his wife were planning on having a big family. They wanted at least five sons and as many daughters, but when the first child came—he was a boy—he got stuck inside Shir’s wife. For two days the women of the village tried to pull the baby from her stomach, and their house became filled with her blood and all of Shir’s tears. For those two days he never left his wife’s side, staying instead to hold her hand and press cold, wet cloths onto her head. Then finally, in the early hours of the third day, the women pulled the baby from Shir’s wife’s stomach. The baby boy was already dead, and as the women pulled him free that little dead baby took the last of his mother’s breath away with him.”

As I finished the story, my mother paused to wipe some strands of her hair away from her face using the back of the hand that still held the knife.

“We have all known suffering,” she said quietly. “This is Afghanistan after all.”

As she turned back to the meat, my brain finally caught up with my mouth and I felt bad. I suddenly realized I’d reminded her of all those things she was trying so hard to forget. It was a stupid mistake to make, and I kicked myself on the way back to my room. Properly. However, after my story, which was more or less true, my mother smiled at Shir Ahmad a little more kindly whenever she saw him, which was great, but it was hardly the breakthrough I’d been waiting for. And she was still spending too much of her time with the woman working across the road.

I decided to seek advice.

“Money,” announced Pir Hederi as he cleaned his teeth with the frayed ends of a twig. “That’s the only thing women want or understand. Money, and maybe gold. They seem to like that too.”

I thought about this idea for a while, but couldn’t imagine Shir Ahmad had a lot of either. He was far too skinny. In Afghanistan, the wealthier a man is, the bigger his belly.

“I think he’s more poor than rich,” I confessed.

“He’s screwed then,” Pir grumbled, patting Dog on the head as he did so. Dog thumped his heavy tail on the floor, then got to his feet and walked over to my side, where he nuzzled his face in my hands. After I’d spent a few weeks working at the shop without trying to rob or further cripple his master, me and Dog got on just fine.

At that moment, Georgie’s 4 × 4 pulled up in front of us. She’d started passing by after work to see if I wanted a lift home, and though it was only a little thing it made my head grow fat with pride. Georgie opened her door but didn’t get out.

“Salaam aleykum, Pir Hederi. How are you? Are you well? How’s your health? Everything fine? Are you good?”

As Pir answered that he was okay, he was well, his health was strong, everything was fine, and he was good, I picked up my schoolbooks, stroked Dog good-bye, and jumped into the car.

“Don’t forget, Fawad!” Pir shouted after me. “Money and gold! Money and gold!” He started cackling the way old people do, then got to his feet and headed back into the shop, Dog padding after him.

“What was that about?” Georgie asked as I settled in beside her.

“Oh, nothing,” I lied. “He’s crazy.” Which was true.

“Fair enough. So how was school today?”

“Pretty good. Our teacher dropped dead from a heart attack.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No, really, it’s true. One minute he was standing in front of us writing Pashto spellings on the board the Americans gave us; the next he was on the ground, completely dead.”

“That’s awful, Fawad. Are you okay?” Georgie reached for my hand.

“Yes. It was quite interesting really. The teacher hit his head on a table when he fell, and there was blood coming out of a cut by the side of his ear. It made a small picture on the floor. It looked like a map of Afghanistan. Don’t you think that’s interesting? Have you ever seen anything like that?”

Georgie shook her head. Her hair was covered by a dark brown shawl that matched the color of her eyes, and I thought she looked more beautiful than ever. I realized then that if I was ever going to marry her I’d have to be very, very rich indeed, possibly the richest man in all of Afghanistan.

“Why do women like money so much?” I asked, turning to look out of the window to hide the red heat I felt breaking out on the tops of my cheeks.

“Who told you they do?” Georgie asked.

“Pir Hederi. He said women only like money or gold.”

“Oh, that’s what he was shouting about.” She smiled. “I think that despite his age Pir may still have a lot to learn about women.”

“Really?” I almost pleaded, hope coming once again for Shir Ahmad’s so-far doomed romance with my mother.

“Yes, really. Although money is useful, there are far more important things in life to wish for, like being healthy or finding true love.”

“Are you saying you could love someone who was poor?”

“Of course I could.” Georgie laughed, flicking her finished cigarette out of the car window.

“What, even a goat herder?”

“Well, maybe not a goat herder,” she confessed. “They tend to be a bit smelly. Like their goats. But really, money isn’t that big a deal. Maybe some women might be attracted to money, gold, and power, but many more will find a good character and personality—and a nice smell—far more important qualities to have in the men they choose to marry. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, it’s not important,” I lied again. “It’s just that I was thinking one day you might…”

As my thoughts gathered to speak the words I’d been hiding in my heart for so long, Georgie’s phone rang.

“Sorry, Fawad jan,” she said as she interrupted me to take the call.

“It’s okay,” I lied yet again.

“Hello?”

I heard a man’s voice on the other end of the line. Worse than that, I heard him use the word jan.

“Khalid!” Georgie shouted, her face lighting up in a way I’d never seen before. “Where are you? What? No, I’m nearly home. In fact we’re just turning into the road now. Hey! I see you!”

As Massoud pulled up, Georgie snapped her mobile phone shut and practically jumped out of the car before the wheels had stopped turning. I leaned forward in my seat to find out who she was running to.

In front of the house I could see three large Land Cruisers surrounded by fifteen or more armed guards. Two of the guards stood on the opposite side of the road facing the house, more stood in front of and behind the vehicles, and the rest were gathered around a tall man dressed in a sky blue salwar kameez. He wore a gray waistcoat that matched the color of his pakol.

I thought he was about to either be arrested or start a one-man war.

As Georgie walked up to him, quick and easy as a cat, his face creased into a large, friendly smile. He took her hand and covered it with both of his own before leading her into the house. Our house.

I quickly grabbed my books and mumbled my good-byes to Massoud, disturbed that I might be missing something and upset because Georgie hadn’t even looked back to make sure I was following her. At the sight of this man she’d forgotten all about me, and I suddenly felt small and childish. Even the army of guards surrounding our house ignored me as I walked past them, talking among themselves and lighting up cigarettes now their boss had gone. It was as if I was so small I didn’t even exist. I was a nobody, a tiny little nobody that nobody cared about and nobody saw, which is great if you’re a spy, but I wasn’t a spy, not really. I was just a boy in love with a woman called Georgie.

I entered the yard and saw that the man still had hold of her hand. I felt daggers hit my heart and an anger creep into my stomach. The man seemed to be apologizing for something.

“You have to take more care of me,” I heard Georgie tell him.

“I will. I promise. Just forgive me,” he replied.

His voice was deep and low, and it suited his face, which was strong and framed by thick dark hair, a trim black beard, and heavy eyebrows. He looked like an Afghan film star, and I hated him for it.

Slamming the gate behind me, I broke up their embrace, and Georgie held her now-free hands out to introduce me. The man was called Haji Khalid Khan, and I realized from her actions and in spite of her words that she was in love with a man who was not only very rich but also powerful enough to have a lot of enemies, judging by the number of bodyguards now swarming around our house.

4

AUTUMN IS MY favorite season in Kabul. After the burning heat of summer, the air relaxes, allowing a cool wind to travel through the city, carrying the smell of wood fires and smoking kebabs on its back. The night comes early, swallowing up the day before it’s barely begun, and a million gas burners and single lightbulbs shine from stores built out of old shipping containers that snake through the city, making it glow like a massive wedding party.

I know most people think of spring as the season of new beginnings, when women chase the winter dirt from their homes, when the plants come out of hiding and the animals give birth to their babies, but for me autumn is the season that whispers fresh promise.

Coming as it did during the holy time of Ramazan, when the adults step closer to Allah through fasting and prayers, it was autumn when the Taliban finally gave up control of Afghanistan. One November night they simply fled from the capital in pickups and stolen cars as the soldiers of the Northern Alliance rumbled in from the Shomali Plain to take Kabul without a fight. At the gate of the city where the hill dips to an easy slope, I watched from Spandi’s house as thousands of men dressed in uniforms and salwar kameez gathered in groups, leaning lazily on the tanks and jeeps that had brought them there, their guns slung casually over their shoulders. It was like a huge picnic rather than a war as local men came out of their homes to offer what food and water they had to the new conquerors of Afghanistan.

As me, Spandi, and Jahid sat watching at the window—a five-minute walk from where the soldiers were eating, smoking, and laughing—we all confessed to being mightily disappointed at the lack of fighting. For weeks the Taliban had been spitting insults and threats across the radio, vowing to fight the Northern Alliance and their infidel backers to the very last man. But when the time came to stand, the Taliban ran away like frightened dogs, leaving only the Arabs and Pakistanis to carry out their suicidal ideas of war.

“We should go down and welcome them,” Jahid suggested as we watched the swarm of figures silhouetted by the headlights of their vehicles.

“Good idea,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“Not so fast, gentlemen,” Spandi ordered, his face a lighter shade of gray than it is today. “You can’t know a man’s real intentions in only one night.”

I looked at Spandi with something close to wonder. It was the wisest thing I’d ever heard anyone say.

Smiling shyly, he added, “My father told me that.”

“Your father should be working for the Genius Ministry!” I laughed, because Spandi’s father was one hundred percent right.

My mother told me that when the Taliban originally came marching from the south to lay claim to Kabul, they were welcomed like saviors. The capital had become a city of rubble after the Russians left because the victorious mujahideen had turned on one another, fighting like dogs over a piece of meat—and Kabul was that piece of meat. In the chaos and confusion of civil war, crime was everywhere; shops were made to pay special taxes, homes were taken, people were murdered, and their daughters were raped. But when the Taliban came, it all stopped. Order was brought, and the people were grateful. However, as Spandi’s father said, you cannot know a man’s real intentions in only one night, and over the years the Taliban showed their true colors. They stopped women from working, they wouldn’t let girls go to school, they roamed the streets beating people with sticks, they jailed men with short beards, they banned kite flying and music, they chopped off hands, they crushed people under walls, and they shot people in the football stadium. They had freed Afghanistan from war, but they locked up our people in a religion we no longer recognized. And it was only the warm winds of autumn that finally blew them away.

“The Taliban were bastards all right,” declared Pir Hederi as I sorted through the crates of fruit and moldering vegetables to see what could be saved for the morning. “Thick as cow shit as well. Most of them were small men from small villages who’d never been taught to read and write. Hell, even their leaders were illiterate.”

“Can you read and write?” I asked, scraping the mold off one potato and putting it in the “for sale” box.

“No, Fawad, I’m blind.”

“Oh yeah, sorry about that.”

“Blame the wife.”

“So how did they get to rule Afghanistan then,” I asked, “if they were so stupid?”

“Through fear,” mumbled Pir as he picked the dry dust from the inside of his nose. “Your mother was right: when they first arrived everybody more or less loved them. The country was being bombed to hell by warlords who worked only to fill their own pockets, and the people were scared and tired of being scared. Suddenly this group of fighters emerged from Kandahar promising order, preaching Islam, and hanging child rapists. Who wouldn’t welcome them?”

“Welcome who?” Spandi asked, arriving out of the dark, his can hanging smokeless and hooked on the waistband of his jeans.

“The Taliban,” I answered.

“Oh, those bastards.”

Pir started cackling. “Exactly, son. Come, take the weight off your feet.”

Spandi pulled up a crate and kicked off his shoes. He had become a regular visitor to the shop after finding me throwing rubbish into a ditch at the end of the street a few weeks back. He had been walking to Old Makroyan at the time, the sprawl of flats he and his father had moved to after the fall of the Taliban. In their golden days the blocks of Old Makroyan were the pride of the city, but now they were no more than slum dwellings, a new hole for Kabul’s lost to fall into. But they were closer to the city than Khair Khana, which made it easier to find work.

“So, where was I?” Pir asked, magically picking out a can of Pepsi, which he handed to Spandi.

“The people were welcoming the Taliban because they killed child rapists and talked about Islam,” I reminded him.

“Oh yes, Islam.” He sighed, nodding his head thoughtfully. “Of course, it was a very strict interpretation of sharia law that they preached, and it brought back public executions and floggings. Kites were also banned, as were televisions and music. You couldn’t even clap your hands at sporting events anymore—not that I’ve ever been able to see who was winning anyway. At one point they even put a stop to New Year celebrations. In fact the only thing we were permitted to do was walk to the park and sniff at the flowers. Damn homosexuals. But really it was the women who had it worse than anyone else.”

“I know,” Spandi interrupted. “My father knew a woman who had all of her fingers cut off by the religious police just because she’d colored her nails.”

“See!” Pir shouted. “That’s exactly what they were like!”

“But why did they do it?” I asked, unable to understand why anyone should cut off the fingers of someone’s mother just for the sake of some paint.

“They said it was to protect women’s honor. In reality it was because they were out-and-out bastards. Why do you think anyone who was anyone tried to escape to Pakistan?”

“The Pakistanis are all bastards too,” mumbled Spandi.

“Right again, son,” Pir agreed. “But at least they offered people some standard of living. Despite the promises, this place went to shit under the Taliban. There was hardly enough food, minimal clean water, and even fewer jobs. The government was a shambles, and the whole damn machine began to grind to a halt. Then, what do you know? When food prices soared and conditions sank so low we could no longer see the sun, or feel it in my case, the Taliban’s planning minister, a man called Qari Din Mohammad, told the world we didn’t need international help because ‘we Muslims believe God the Almighty will feed everybody one way or another.’ Bullshit! God had enough on His plate trying to keep us alive.”

God, Afghanistan, and the Taliban were complicated subjects when put together, and difficult to make sense of, especially when you were only a boy, because the bottom line was this: a good Muslim should never question the ways of the Almighty. A good Muslim would trust in God to provide, no matter what, and even if He didn’t provide, a good Muslim would trust that the hunger, death, fighting, and disease that came to visit his door were all part of God’s plan. And given that knowledge, the Taliban planning minister must have been right and his regime must also have been part of God’s plan for Afghanistan. And that’s quite an argument when you’re taking over a country.

Taliban basically means “religious students,” so it must have been easy to convince ordinary Muslims living in the countryside, who couldn’t read and write, that the orders they gave came straight from the pages of the Koran. If it says in the Holy Koran that girls should not go to school, who was a farmer to question the Word of God? Of course, my mother said the Holy Koran doesn’t say any such thing, although how she knows this, being illiterate herself, I’m not sure, but she seems pretty confident. However, when a Talib tells a man with no schooling that it is written just so, how can he argue against such knowledge and learning, and therefore against God Himself? He has to accept it. And that’s why the best weapon the Afghan people have against the Taliban or any other terrible power that may choose to put itself in Afghanistan is education. At least that’s what Ismerai told me.

Ismerai was the latest newest person in my life, and he was Haji Khalid Khan’s uncle.

“When you can read and write and discover facts for yourself, it is far easier to see God’s truth,” he explained as he leaned back on the blanket that had been laid on the grass of our garden, sucking deeply from his hands, which were wrapped around an Afghan cigarette. “Education is the key to Afghanistan’s successful future, Fawad, because it fights ignorance and intolerance and brings the blessing of opportunity. When a man has knowledge he has power—the power to make informed decisions; the power to distinguish truth from lies; and the power to shape his own destiny in accordance with God’s will. He is stronger than the ignorant man, who can do nothing but blindly accept the supposed learning of another. And speaking of the blind…” Ismerai paused to force a huge smoke ring from his mouth. “I’d advise your friend Pir Hederi to be a little more careful when speaking about the Taliban in the future. Any man can shave off his beard and swap his turban, but it doesn’t mean he is a changed man.” Taking another pull on his cigarette, he added mysteriously, “We are not alone.”

I nodded slowly, letting the words take shape in my head so that I’d remember them. “Okay, I’ll tell Pir Hederi,” I promised, because I looked up to Ismerai and I trusted what he had to say. He also smoked drugs, and though my mother disapproved, I thought it made him funny and interesting.

Ismerai and Haji Khalid Khan often visited the house together because, apparently, Georgie was friends with the whole family. She told me she knew his brothers and cousins and even his children, so I realized it was little wonder she’d never found time to learn how to wash her clothes. She was too busy collecting Afghans.

Since the day Haji Khalid Khan had come into my world, with his army of bodyguards and two-hand embraces, my relationship with Georgie had been, at best, polite. We would talk now and again, but I preferred to keep my distance, and Georgie didn’t push it. We were growing apart, and though it was all my doing, I couldn’t help myself. I felt betrayed. I felt like she’d let me down. Led me on and let me down.

I think Georgie realized I was upset because when she came to pick me up from Pir Hederi’s I would make up some excuse or tell her I was busy rather than accept a lift home—and I wouldn’t let her hold my hand anymore. “I’m not a child!” I’d shouted at her the last time she’d reached for me, and I knew I’d hurt her feelings because she said very quietly, “Fawad, I have never, ever treated you like a child.”

“You told my mother I’d been drinking beer!” I sharply reminded her.

“Okay, apart from that time,” she agreed, then walked off, leaving me feeling angry and horrid because it wasn’t really her fault and the blame lay completely in my own head.

“She’s a good woman, you know,” Ismerai scolded me as we sat in the garden passing another hour together as Haji Khalid Khan took Georgie inside to do God knows what with her.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” I snapped.

“No,” he admitted, “but your actions talk for you, and it’s not a nice way to behave to someone who’s a guest in our country and, even more than that, a friend.”

And of course he was right. I was jealous without having the right to be jealous. I should have been pleased to see Georgie happy. But it was hard, and I was annoyed by the smile that played on her face now. I hated the fact that she drank her coffee with Haji Khalid Khan in the late afternoon when it used to be me, and I was wild with anger that at least twice a week she would stay away from the house and I knew she was with him.

“Your time will come, child,” Ismerai said, “but it won’t be with Georgie.”

And I realized he’d looked deep into my heart and knew everything.

Despite the hurt that covered my insides like a bad bruise slowly going yellow, it was hard not to like Haji Khalid Khan.

“He’s a charmer,” my mother admitted as we talked about Georgie’s friendship. “He could talk the birds from the trees, that man.”

“Shir Ahmad talks to the dogs in the street,” I offered.

“It’s not quite the same thing,” she replied.

“What do you mean, then?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Fawad, because if I’m not mistaken you’ve got the same gift—although right now you only seem capable of talking the hind legs off a donkey. But it’ll come, son. It’ll come.”

And my mother went back to her chores, leaving me to think about my future talent and my current, previously unknown, ability to cripple donkeys.

However, it wasn’t Haji Khalid Khan’s way with words that slowly ate away at my anger, although he was funny and strangely gentle in his manners for such a big man. No, my feelings began to slide on the Friday when Spandi came for lunch. It was Georgie’s idea to invite him, and I guessed it was mainly for my benefit.

All of us—me, my mother, Georgie, James, May, Ismerai, Spandi, and Haji Khalid Khan—were drinking green tea outside in the garden. Although a cold wind bit at our fingers, we were enjoying the last of the autumn days before another winter closed in and locked us indoors. On a deep-red blanket we sat cross-legged, forming a ragged circle as the adults fired happy stories into the air. Georgie and Haji Khalid Khan acted as translators, which marked them out as different from the rest of us, somehow more worldly and knowledgeable, and brought them together as a couple. Nobody seemed to question this other than me, so I tried to hide my annoyance whenever Georgie rested her hand on Haji Khalid Khan’s knee or softly stroked his shoulder as she got to her feet to refill our cups.

For it wasn’t just Georgie whose mood changed with the appearance of Haji Khalid Khan; everyone seemed to be different around this elegant man, who dressed like a king and smelled of expensive perfume. His visits dragged everyone away from their different lives, uniting us in shared jokes and happy moments like a family. It wasn’t a daily thing, of course, but while Haji Khalid Khan was in Kabul everyone at the house gathered at least once a week, twice if there was a reason to, such as Spandi’s invitation to lunch.

That afternoon, after a great spread of sheep kebabs, curried chicken, Kabuli pilau, and warm naan—all of which had appeared with Haji Khalid Khan and Ismerai—we relaxed into the evening, drinking from cups steaming with the green tea my mother had prepared. Although she sat a little back from us, on one of the plastic chairs, my mother was as much a part of the group as any of us on the blanket, listening and laughing to the stories batting from one person to another.

James, who was sharing a cushion with May, and an Afghan cigarette with Ismerai, was taking charge of most of the conversation as he had recently returned from Bamiyan. He said he had seen the huge holes that once housed two giant Buddhas and told us some international companies were now looking at ways to recapture the thousands of years of history that had been blown away by the Taliban.

“Among other things they were talking about was a laser show,” he informed us, “the idea being to re-create the Buddhas in 3-D light where they used to stand. A pretty neat idea, but they’d need a bloody big generator.” He laughed.

“I think it’s a ridiculous waste of money,” commented May, wrinkling the top of her nose. “People can hardly feed themselves, yet they want to spend millions on a fancy light show.”

“But if this ‘fancy light show’ brings in tourists, it would create jobs and bring in money and therefore allow people to feed themselves,” argued James, who always saw the good in everything, even May.

“Tourism!” she replied. “I don’t think Afghanistan’s quite ready for that yet. In fact, wasn’t the tourism minister murdered by pilgrims on their way to hajj?”

“That was a few years ago,” Georgie reminded her.

“And you think the situation is any better now?” May almost shouted. “The Taliban are back, the south has gone to crap, corruption is at an all-time high, and the government’s influence barely stretches outside Kabul.”

“The Taliban are back?” I asked Georgie, startled at the bit of news I had clearly understood.

I sat next to her, and she gently touched my hand. For the first time in a long while I didn’t move away.

“Not really, Fawad,” she reassured me. “But yes, they are fighting with government and international troops in some areas. It’s nothing to get worried about.”

“But why have they come back?”

Georgie looked at Haji Khalid Khan, who leaned in my direction.

“They never really went away,” he said. “Some of them hid out in the mountains bordering Pakistan; others simply hid out in their own towns and villages.”

“Don’t worry too much about the Taliban,” Ismerai joined in. “They’re not the major concern right now. Afghanistan’s main problem is outside interference. People are playing games in our country, and it’s making it increasingly hard to tell friend from foe these days.”

“What kind of games?” I asked. “Who’s playing them?”

Georgie shot Haji Khalid Khan another look she obviously hoped I wouldn’t see, and he clapped his hands together.

“Enough, now,” he ordered in a soft growl created by years of smoking. “These are questions for politicians, not honest, everyday folk like us.”

Ismerai laughed. “True enough, Haji Sahib. Which reminds me of a joke. Georgie, you translate for our foreign guests. Haji might not want to make fun of his friends.”

“Do politicians have friends?” she asked, and those of us who spoke Dari all laughed.

“A busload of politicians was traveling down the road,” Ismerai began. “Suddenly the bus veered off the road and hit a tree near a village. A farmer who was working on his land nearby came over. When he saw the politicians and the wreckage of the bus, he grabbed his shovel and buried all the politicians. Some days later, a police inspector passed by, and he saw the bus that had crashed into the tree. The policeman asked the farmer, who was working on his land as usual, when the accident had taken place. The farmer replied that the accident had taken place a few days earlier. The policeman then asked him about the identity of the travelers, and the farmer replied that ‘all the passengers were politicians’ and that he had buried them all. The policeman asked whether any of them had survived the crash. The farmer smiled and answered, ‘Maybe. Some of them told me they were alive, but we both know politicians lie a lot.’ ”

As Ismerai ended, we all applauded the joke; however, it was Spandi who laughed the longest and loudest. He was practically doubled up, and I wondered whether this was from sitting so close to Ismerai’s burning cigarette. As my friend tried to take back control of his body, tears sprang from his eyes, forcing him to wipe them away with the back of his hand, which left black smudges on his face.

Suddenly, Haji Khalid Khan stopped to look at him, dark and serious.

“You sell spand, I take it?” he asked flatly.

“Yes, Haji, I do,” Spandi replied, his shoulders relaxing from the fit that had just passed over him.

“That’s hard work, boy,” Ismerai admitted, sucking again on his sweet-smelling cigarette before handing it over to Haji Khalid Khan, who took it and nodded.

The big man then leaned over to his uncle and whispered something in his ear. Ismerai smiled, got to his feet, and walked out of the garden and through the gate without another word. None of us asked where he was going because in Afghanistan you don’t ask. In the company of men, a boy is merely expected to sit, watch, and learn. There are many rules in our country, but the rule of not asking is learned pretty quickly.

About thirty minutes later, after James and even May had shared their own jokes with us—some of which I found hard to find funny because they didn’t mention mentals or donkeys—Ismerai came back with a long chain of cards. They were held together by plastic wrapping and advertised companies like Roshan, AWCC, and Areeba. Haji Khalid Khan handed over the chain and a small bag to Spandi. Inside were dozens of the cards that people bought in order to make calls on their mobile phones. They each had a special number that you had to scratch from the back and then dial into your phone. This was big business in Afghanistan because even if you didn’t own the clothes on your back you sure as hell owned a phone.

“These are for you,” Haji Khalid Khan informed my friend. “From now on, you sell these cards, and for every card you sell you get to keep one dollar. The rest belongs to me. Okay?”

Spandi looked at the cards lying in the bag beside him, his red eyes wide and amazed, and nodded his head.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“My pleasure, son,” replied Haji Khalid Khan, and Georgie placed her hand gently on his knee and smiled. In fact all of us smiled, and I saw in that one act something of the man she had fallen in love with, because giving Spandi the means to work away from his can was probably the greatest kindness I’d ever witnessed, but never thought of. If I had, maybe I could have convinced Georgie to find Spandi a different job, something away from the poison smoke that clogged his lungs and stung his eyes. But it was Haji Khalid Khan who looked through the black and saw the boy. He had thrown him a second chance, and I felt ashamed of myself for having ignored what was so obvious. Even so, I also felt some small pride in having been the one to introduce Spandi to his new boss.

And that’s when I felt my anger start to slip away from me.

A little after eight, when all the adults had gone their separate ways—James and May to one of Kabul’s many bars, my mother to her room to watch the latest episode of a hysterical Indian soap opera on Tolo TV, and Georgie to Haji Khalid Khan’s house with Ismerai—Spandi and I walked to the dump that wafted bad smells and disease across Massoud Circle. Without a word, I watched him unhook the can from the waist of his trousers, give it one last look, then throw it as far into the heap as his thin arms could manage. As we stood side by side, our eyes followed the can as it bounced off the top of an old gas bottle before disappearing into the fleshy mess of rotten food and waste.

I glanced over at Spandi and saw his lips move with no sound. Suddenly, he turned to me and asked, “You know who your girlfriend’s boyfriend is, don’t you?”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” I laughed, pushing him hard in the stomach, the spell of the ceremony now broken.

“Whatever you say,” Spandi said, pushing me back. “Your friend’s boyfriend, then.”

“If you are referring to Haji Khalid Khan, then yes, I do know who he is.”

“Who?” Spandi challenged.

“He’s a businessman from Jalalabad. He imports diesel and ghee oil from Pakistan and Toyota car parts from Japan.”

“Of course he does.” Spandi laughed, slapping me on the back. “For God’s sake, Fawad! It’s Haji Khan! The Haji Khan—the scourge of the Taliban, the son of one of Afghanistan’s most famous mujahideen, and now one of the country’s biggest drug dealers. He’s Haji Khan, Fawad! I recognized him the moment I saw him. And he’s drinking tea at your house and sleeping with your girlfriend!”

5

AFGHANISTAN IS FAMOUS for two things: fighting and growing poppies. And despite the best efforts of the international community to put a stop to both, we seem to be better than ever at these two occupations.

After the Taliban fled in 2001, the air was filled with talk about “democracy,” and within a couple of years everyone had the right to vote; women were allowed in Parliament; laws were written to protect the innocent; girls were allowed back in school; and all the wrongs done by our past leaders were apparently put right. But in the middle of all the excitement, everyone seemed to forget that Afghanistan already had a set of rules, a justice system going back thousands of years that was as much a part of our lives as the Hindu Kush mountains, and even though it was generally agreed that “democracy” was a good thing, the fact remained that if a man committed murder, then he was going to get it. Some blood feuds have gone on for generations in Afghanistan, with families carrying out so many killings nobody knows who started them anymore.

And even though the government has ordered everyone to give up their weapons for the greater good of the country, no one seems to be in a hurry to do so because things change so fast here. Therefore, the big men in the north and the west still fight over territory and power; army commanders in the east continue to shoot at Pakistanis who creep onto our soil uninvited; the Taliban fight goes on in the south against Afghans and foreigners; and in the streets the adults beat boys, the boys beat smaller boys, and everyone beats donkeys and dogs.

Meanwhile, the opium crops continue to grow, and grow, and grow, and the newspapers say that this year there was a record harvest, making Afghanistan the biggest opium producer in the world. Although my mother says everyone should work to be the best at something, I don’t think she has this in mind when she says it. I think she means math or religious studies.

And though I don’t know much, I do know that fighting is bad because people die, they lose body parts, and it makes the women cry; and I know it’s wrong to grow poppies because the West says it is and therefore so does President Karzai. So I don’t think I’m being childish or selfish when I say that Haji Khalid Khan, or Haji Khan as I now know him to be, is probably not the right man for an Englishwoman in Kabul who combs goats for a living, having, as he does, a history of violence and opium money in his pocket.

Although how I should convince Georgie of this is anyone’s guess. As my mother once said, and as Pir Hederi found to his cost, love is blind.

“Doesn’t Haji Khan come from Shinwar, not Jalalabad?” I asked Georgie as she drank her coffee on the steps of the house. It was cold now, and she was wrapped in a soft gray patu, a parting gift from her lover before he left for the east.

“Yes, he does,” she admitted. “But he has a house in Jalalabad and tends to spend most of his time there. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing,” I mumbled, wrapping my arms around my body and coming to sit by her side.

“Here, get under this.” Georgie shuffled closer, placing the patu around my back and over my shoulder. It carried the heat of her body and the smell of her perfume. “Better?”

“Yes, thanks. It’s cold, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed, and I bit at my bottom lip, not sure where to begin, and even less sure about whether Georgie would take the patu away once I did begin.

“What’s the matter?” she finally asked after we’d sat there in silence for the best part of a minute. “You look serious.”

“Do I? Well, yes, maybe I am,” I admitted. “It’s just that, well, I heard that there are a lot of poppy crops in Shinwar.”

“Not at the moment there aren’t; it’s winter.” She laughed.

“I know that,” I joined in, happy to have got the subject going at last. “But usually there are. Shinwar is famous for poppy.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Georgie agreed. “And your point is?”

“Nothing.” I shrugged. “I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Why? Because you think Khalid is involved in poppy?”

Georgie turned her head to look at me. To my gigantic relief she didn’t seem angry, but I still thought it best to ignore the question.

“Look,” she continued. “I know a lot of people think Khalid is involved in drugs because he’s a rich man, but he isn’t—isn’t involved in drugs, that is; of course he’s a rich man. Khalid hates drugs. He says they trap people in poverty, they damage the reputation of the country, and they pay for the insurgency that is threatening to wreck Afghanistan once again. He hates them, Fawad, absolutely hates them.”

“But how can you be sure he’s telling the truth?” I asked.

Georgie reached for the packet of cigarettes lying by her feet, removed one from the box, and lit it.

“Well, there are a number of reasons,” she explained, releasing a line of smoke through her lips. “I know he has several projects running in the east helping farmers find work away from poppy growing, like providing them with fruit and olive trees and seeds for wheat and perfume flowers. But mainly I know he’s telling the truth because I trust him.”

Georgie looked away, sipped her coffee, and sucked heavily on her cigarette. I turned my face to my feet and watched from the corner of my eye as she slowly dragged a pale hand through her hair, stroking it away from her face. Against the near-black of her hair and the gray of the patu, her skin looked frosty white, and dark circles hung beneath her eyes.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“A little, yes,” she replied, a small smile thinning her lips.

I nodded. “I am too,” I said, which wasn’t true, but I didn’t want her to feel alone. Haji Khan had been gone a week, disappearing from our lives as suddenly as he had appeared, and I guessed she was missing him.

“I’ve known Khalid for three years,” Georgie stated, almost as if she had read my thoughts. “I would know if he was lying to me.”

“I didn’t say he was lying.”

“No. Well, not in so many words you didn’t, so, thank you.”

I shuffled my feet and let the softness of the patu cover them.

“But… how can you really be sure that he’s not?”

“How?” she asked, shrugging her shoulders in a very Afghan way that marked her out as nearly one of us. “Because I am.”

After a few seconds’ pause, during which a crease appeared in the middle of her eyebrows as if she was thinking hard, she added, “It’s like when a man, or a woman, says they love you. How can you be sure they aren’t just saying the words and they really mean it? Well, you look into their eyes. I mean really look, look hard, and you will feel it in your heart if they are telling you the truth. I love Khalid. He wouldn’t lie to me. Now”—Georgie breathed a small laugh that sounded empty, like the sound of trying—“he may not be the best boyfriend in the world—he disappears on a whim, and sometimes he doesn’t call me for weeks, and no matter how hard I try to find him I can’t—but even so, I still know he loves me, and in the same way that I know that, I know he isn’t involved in poppies. There, does that set your mind at rest?”

Not really, I thought, but I nodded my head anyway. And inside I felt my heart hurt. I hadn’t heard Georgie’s excited chatter for several days now. She looked tired, the light had dimmed in her eyes, and I guessed Haji Khan had disappeared on something called “a whim” again, without bothering to call.

It probably wasn’t the right time to ask if he’d left on account of his drug business.

Maybe Georgie was right and Haji Khan wasn’t smuggling drugs out of the country, but she was also a woman in love and she couldn’t be relied on to think straight. “Love makes fools of all of us,” Shir Ahmad once said as we watched my mother scamper across the street to visit Homeira. Considering love was also blind, I wondered why anyone would bother wasting so much energy chasing it. However, it was facts I needed right now, not poetry.

My first thought was to talk to James as he was a journalist and was bound to know who was doing what in the country, but my English, which was getting pretty good, wasn’t strong enough to deal with the subject, and James’s Dari had barely progressed beyond “salaam aleykum.” I didn’t feel I could talk to May, because we hadn’t really become friends and I got the impression that as well as not liking men she didn’t like boys much either—maybe because one day, if Allah willed it, we would grow up to become men. And Pir Hederi, although blind, was maybe not as wise as a blind man ought to be. I guessed that he colored his stories to make up for the darkness he lived in.

I decided to speak to Spandi. After all, he was the one who first suggested Haji Khan was a drug lord, and he must have got his information from somewhere. So, for the first time in over four months I left Wazir Akbar Khan and crossed the city to return to Chicken Street.

There is something quite wonderful about Chicken Street, but I’m not sure what it is. I’ve never been able to put my finger on it. Perhaps it’s the noise and confusion of the place that breathe life into me—the playful demands of shopkeepers battling for attention over the irritated beeps of drivers; the mass of people that clog the road along with the cars and pushcarts; the explosions of anger as vehicles ignore the one-way system; the chatter of kids terrorizing the tourists; the smell of kebabs wafting in from Cinema Park—or simply the great, glorious mess of it all that makes this small corner of Kabul come alive like a massive wriggling beast.

If Parliament is the brains of the capital—God help us—then Chicken Street is its heart.

However, there’s one thing that’s even better than Chicken Street, and that’s Chicken Street during the run-up to Christmas, the time when the foreigners celebrate the birthday of their prophet, Jesus. For three weeks something almost holy comes over the place. Money exchanges hands more freely; beggars get their share of crumpled afs before they even have time to mention their sick, dying baby; shops glow bright in the early darkness; bags of shopping hang in the arms of people thinking about their families; angry outbursts are quickly softened by happy smiles; and laughter bounces from pavements and doorways as the swarm hides from sudden snowstorms or tries to pick its way across the deep lines of rubbish on either side of the road. This is Chicken Street at its most heavenly, and it felt good to be back. It was like coming home.

“Fawad!”

Jamilla came running up to me, grabbing me in a huge embrace that in a few years’ time she would no longer be able to do without ending up in the prison for wayward girls. Her face was pinched red by the cold, and her eyes shone bright.

“Where have you been? We’ve missed you!”

“I’ve missed you too,” I shouted back over the clash of noises filling the air, a racket of shouting, beeping, and growling generators.

And it was true, I had missed her. Okay, my thoughts had been kept busy with the events of my new life and the unexpected problems that came with it, but a true Afghan never forgets his past. That’s what makes us so good at holding grudges.

“I’ve so much to tell you, Jamilla!”

“I know some of it.” She smiled. “Spandi has been keeping me informed. Apparently you work for a blind man now; that’s why you have deserted us!”

“I haven’t deserted you,” I protested, “I’ve just been busy!”

“I know, Fawad, relax, I’m just joking with you. I’m happy for you, really I am.”

Jamilla took my hand and weaved me through the legs of the adults, taking me to the archway leading to a small shopping court where we used to gather to swap stories, information, and scraps of food.

“Fawad, you dirty little bastard!”

As we ducked into the alcove, Jahid rose from a crouch and came over to embrace me.

“I’ve got a television!” I told him.

“Fuck off, you liar!”

“No, it’s true! And there’s a girl in my house with breasts as big as the dome on top of Abdul Rahman Mosque!”

“No way!” he screamed, slapping his forehead. “There’s no justice in this world. Here I am, fully equipped to show the ladies a good time, and Allah in all his wisdom brings the best tits in the city to a fucking homosexual like you!”

Jahid punched me in the arm, but it was a playful punch and so we wrestled for a bit, falling into the display of scarves coloring the walls around us as we did so and earning us a not-so-playful slap around the head from the seller.

It felt fantastic to be back, tasting the fun and the violence of the street. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it and everyone in it—even Jahid.

As we moved farther into the courtyard, away from the scarf seller, to sit on dirty steps leading to a closed trinket shop, Jahid told me that his mother seemed depressed now that we’d gone and she no longer had anyone to shout with. He also revealed he would be getting out of Chicken Street soon: his father had called in a favor from someone who owed him one, and they’d found Jahid a job in the municipality offices, on account of his reading and writing. They were going to train him to do something useful, they said—once he’d mastered the art of tea making.

“It’s a good job,” he declared, sitting up straighter than I remembered him doing before. “It’s a good opportunity for me.”

“I know,” I told him, genuinely pleased. “Congratulations, Jahid. I really mean it.”

“Yeah.” Jahid nodded. “Yeah, thanks.” And he punched me on the arm again.

Unfortunately, Jamilla hadn’t done so well since I’d been gone. I noticed an old bruise under her left eye, and she told me that one of the beggar women had elbowed her in the face during the usual crushes to get to a foreigner’s wallet.

“It’s starting to change here,” she said. “It’s like the mafia now. You have to be part of their family, or you’re done for. I’m only here today because it’s Christmastime and there’s enough for everyone—and because Jahid and Spandi are here.”

I looked carefully at Jamilla and saw for the first time the color of fun washed from her cheeks, like she was suddenly older and more tired. I decided to ask Pir Hederi to find a job for her at the store.

“So, where is Spandi?” I asked.

“At the other end of the street selling his cards,” Jamilla revealed. “He’s looking so much better now that your friend Haji Khan took away his can.”

“Yeah, fuck me, Fawad,” Jahid joined in. “Haji Khan. You’re playing with the big boys now.”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Yeah… well, no, not personally, but I’ve heard of him. He’s a real Afghan hero!”

“Not a drug dealer, then?”

Jahid shrugged. “Show me a rich man in Afghanistan who isn’t mixed up in drugs. It doesn’t make him a bad man, does it? This ‘stop growing poppy’ shit is the West’s problem, not ours. It’s all their people who are injecting the stuff and catching AIDS off each other. We’re just trying to get by.”

“So, how do you know Haji Khan is into drugs?” I asked Spandi as we walked back home from Chicken Street.

“It’s just something I heard.”

Spandi was counting his dollars as we walked, separating his money from Haji Khan’s and placing the notes in different pockets. He did look better, cleaner and younger. If only his face hadn’t been chewed away by the sand flies disease, he might even have been called handsome now.

“My father has some contacts in the east, some truck drivers who bring diesel over the border. They spend quite a bit of time in Jalalabad, and I’ve heard them mention Haji Khan once or twice.”

“And they say he’s a drug dealer?”

“So they say, but it’s only a rumor. He’s never been arrested or anything.”

“And what do you think?”

“Me?” Spandi shrugged. “I think it’s hard to arrest a man who’s fought for his country—and lost his family doing so.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father says Haji Khan used to be married to quite a woman, but the ISI killed her and their eldest daughter, shot them both as they lay in bed sleeping.”

“No!” A twist of guilt pulled at my body as I pictured Haji Khan leaning over what was left of his wife and daughter, darkness and death drowning him in tears. “Why would they do that?”

“He was fighting the Taliban, Fawad. It was probably a warning to him, but if that’s what they intended they fucked up badly because he fought like a madman after that. My father says some of his missions from Peshawar into Afghanistan were legendary because they were largely suicidal, but I guess Haji Khan didn’t care about dying after what happened. I don’t suppose he cared about anything.”

I said good-bye to Spandi at the corner of the British Embassy in Wazir and popped by Pir Hederi’s shop to beg for a job for Jamilla. He told me he’d think about it, despite all women, no matter how young they are, being a curse to every Afghan man of sound mind, and I thanked him for his consideration, knowing full well he would help her, because otherwise he would have just said no.

As I walked the long way home, past the large homes of NGO workers, ministers, and businessmen and the laughter-filled grounds of the Lebanese and Indian restaurants, I thought of Jamilla and how happy she would be when I told her about Pir Hederi’s job. And as I got closer to my house I thought of how utterly destroyed Haji Khan must have been when he returned to his own home to find his family asleep forever, their bodies wet with blood.

His pain was real to me. I could almost taste it.

Amazingly, when foreigners visit this country, they can’t help but go on about its “breathtaking beauty” and how “noble and courageous” its people are, but this is the reality of Afghanistan: pain and death. There’s not one of us who hasn’t been touched by them in one way or another. From the Russians to the mujahideen to the Taliban, war has stolen our fathers and brothers; the leftovers of war continue to take our children; and the results of war have left us poor as beggars. So the foreigners can keep their talk of beautiful scenery and traditional goodness because all of us would swap it in a heartbeat for just one moment’s peace, and it’s high time the sorrow that came to plant itself in our soil just packed up and went away to terrorize someone else.

When I got to the house, all the lights were on and I could see James and May through the back window fixing colored paper to the walls. A strong smell of alcohol was coming from the kitchen, and when I went in to investigate I found my mother there stirring a large pot of oranges and herbs swimming in hot red liquid. The radio was belting out a Hindi love song, and she was dancing as she worked.

“Is that alcohol?” I demanded, startling my mother into a halt.

“It’s only forbidden to drink it, Fawad, not stir it.”

She started laughing, and I wondered whether she was suffering from its fumes, in the same way Spandi had been knocked senseless by the smoke of Ismerai’s cigarettes.

“Fawad, my boy!” James came bounding into the kitchen. He had glitter in his hair. “Come, help!” he ordered.

I followed him into the large living room, which was now a mess of tattered paper hanging from the walls and ceiling. A small plastic tree had been placed in the corner, and candles covered every spare space on the window ledges, tabletops, and cupboards. May was now sitting on the floor next to the wood-burning bukhari, keeping warm as she glued lines of paper together. She smiled when I came in, which confirmed what I already knew: everyone had gone mad.

“Where is Georgie?” I asked James before he could get me involved.

He pointed upstairs and brought the corners of his mouth down, pretending to look sad. I nodded and left the room. I needed to show her that I was on her side now. And Haji Khan’s.

Although I’d never been to the top of the house before—well, not from the inside—I climbed the stairs and walked straight to Georgie’s door because my bearings were good and in my first few weeks I’d made a plan of the house in the notebook she’d given me.

I knocked gently and waited.

“Who is it?” she yelled from behind the closed door.

“Fawad!” I yelled back.

From inside the room I could hear some drawers being opened and closed again. Then, after a few seconds’ pause, the door opened, and Georgie stood there looking like she’d just woken up. Her hair was all over the place, she had no makeup on, and her sweater was on backward.

“Fawad,” she said, flatly surprised to see me.

“Sorry to disturb you, Georgie.”

She shrugged and opened the door wider for me to come inside. As she did so, I saw a large photo of Haji Khan sitting on a table by her bed.

I shook my head to tell her I wasn’t coming in. Carefully, I reached for her hand, which hung like a dead thing at her side, and told her, “Don’t worry, Georgie. He’ll call you.”

I then turned and walked back downstairs to help James with his decorations.

6

THE BIRTHDAY OF Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) is called Mawlid al-Nabi, and we celebrate the day on the twelfth of the lunar month of Rabi al-Awwal, although the Shia celebrate it five days later. During this day, rice is cooked, and milk and butter are collected. We then visit our neighbors to share what we have, even with those we don’t like. If we manage to find someone poorer than us, we share food with them as well. During the afternoon, the men and the older boys walk to the mosque to offer up prayers, while all the cars remain parked and the television and radio sets stand silent. As this is also the day the Prophet died, we neither laugh nor cry because we are happy that he came and sad that he went. Therefore we mostly spend the day just remembering him.

What we don’t do, however, is drink alcohol from the moment we get up until the moment we fall into bed—or, in James’s case, on the stairs. And after attending my first celebration of Jesus’s birthday, I now understand why everybody needs two days off work to recover.

Jesus—or, as we call him, Isa—is one of the most important prophets, but he is not the Son of God as the foreigners believe; he was one of His messengers. Although it is true that Isa performed many miracles with the permission of God, like raising the dead, creating a bird from clay, and talking as an infant, he did not die on a cross. Instead, he was raised up to God so that he could return to the earth one day to fight evil.

As a Muslim I respect the foreigners’ Jesus, and I like the fact that they celebrate his birthday even if they have got their facts muddled. However, it was hard to believe that for such a big day in their calendar I never once heard my friends mention Jesus’s name. Although James shouted “Christ” when he slipped on the stairs, I don’t think that strictly counts as remembering.

At ten in the morning on the day called “Christmas,” Georgie came knocking at our door to insist that my mother and I move away from the television and come into the living room in her part of the house. She was dressed in loose patchwork green pyjamas, which I thought were more suitable than many of her normal clothes, and her hair was pulled up in a rough ponytail. Her cheeks were red.

“Happy Christmas!” she loudly greeted us in English, hugging both me and my mother fondly.

“Happy Christmas!” I shouted back as my mother gave a shy giggle and reached for a chador to cover her loose black hair so that we could dutifully follow Georgie into the house.

As we shuffled through the door of the front room we were met by a wall of noise coming from the stereo, and we found James and May sitting on the floor close to the bukhari surrounded by half-opened presents. They waved at us to sit with them. James was wearing dirty jeans and a bright red sweater, and May was wrapped in a bed blanket. In front of them were cartons of orange juice and a bottle of champagne—a celebratory drink that James told me came from France. Georgie filled two slim glasses with juice for me and my mother and mixed her own with the fizzing liquid from the champagne bottle.

“Happy Christmas!” James said, smiling and raising his glass. Everyone else did the same, so my mother and I followed suit, passing giggly looks to each other as we did so.

“Oh, that’s gorgeous,” squealed May in the middle of our embarrassment, holding up a heavy necklace made of ragged chunks of deep-red stone.

“I thought it would match your eyes,” James joked, causing May to jump forward and grab him in a headlock. As she wrestled him to the floor she accidentally showed a thigh of dimpled white flesh, and I quickly looked away, almost relieved I’d never got to see her breasts. Skin can be a frightening thing on the wrong body.

“And this is for you, Mariya.”

Georgie handed over a parcel wrapped in Sada-e Azadi newspaper. As my mother worked the package loose, slowly and carefully as if the paper itself was worth a month’s wages (which I knew it wasn’t because it was handed out free by international soldiers every two weeks), the most beautiful golden shawl appeared, woven with swirls of silver thread.

“Thank you,” my mother said shyly in English. She removed her own worn chador and placed the sparkle of colors over her hair. I thought she looked amazing, like every imagined picture I’d ever formed in my head of the days when my father was here to praise her looks and help her walk life’s path. It’s sometimes easy to forget your mother’s beauty when surrounded by the exotic colors and smells of foreign women, but the fact remained she was incredibly beautiful, with olive-colored skin, deep-green eyes, and hair you could wrap yourself in. In another time and another place she could have been a famous actress or a singer.

“And this is for you, Fawad…”

Georgie stood up, took me by the hand, and led me to the kitchen. As we walked out of the room the others followed, including my mother, and a tickle of sickness played in my stomach at suddenly being the center of attention.

Standing by the kitchen door, Georgie released my hand and nodded at me to go in. When I passed her I found myself looking at the pale, plucked ass of a massive chicken, staring me right in the face from the work surface. I turned to express my confused gratitude, thinking a dead bird might be something of an honor to receive on the Prophet Jesus’s birthday, but then I saw something else; something glinting promised freedom at me near a cupboard and leaning against the wall. It was a bicycle, a brand-new bicycle.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, and though half of me wanted to run up and touch it and wheel it into the yard and cycle off to show all my friends, I didn’t dare think that this could be a gift for me. It was just too good to be true. But as I looked back at Georgie she nodded her head with such an exaggerated grin I knew it was mine.

I owned my own bike!

“Happy Christmas!” James shouted behind Georgie, raising his glass to his lips.

“Yes, happy Christmas, Fawad,” repeated Georgie, and at her side I could see happy tears in my mother’s eyes.

I self-consciously walked over to “my bike,” my eyes spinning at the very sight of it. It was amazing; it was fantastic; it was shiny as new money, red as blood—and, on closer inspection, fitted with five gears.

“Thank you, Georgie,” I stammered. “Thank you. Thank you so very, very much.”

“My pleasure, Fawad. It’s a gift from all of us—even May,” she added with a wink.

“Give us a feel then.” Pir Hederi moved out of his seat to run his hands over the handlebars, humming, cooing, and nodding his head in appreciation as he did so. “That’s a fine machine, Fawad, congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I replied, moving the bike away from Dog as he sniffed around the wheels and positioned himself to celebrate its arrival by pissing all over it. “So, I’ve been thinking…”

“Careful, lad,” Pir rasped. “Thinking’s one of the most dangerous pastimes a man can have in Afghanistan!”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen. I’ve been thinking that now I’ve got a bike we can set up some kind of delivery service. You know, take orders and stuff, and then I can take the food or whatever to the customers’ houses.”

“A delivery service, eh?” Pir shrugged, wrapping the idea around his head and licking the possibilities of the proposal along his dry lips. “With all these foreigners around here it might just work, you know.”

“Of course,” I added, a little more quietly, “that would mean I might not be around the shop so much and… well, you might need…”

“A little extra help?” Pir finished for me. “Such as a little slip of a girl you might know?”

“As I told you, Jamilla can read and she can write, and if people start calling up she can take orders for you. She can also make tea and clean the place up a bit and—”

“Okay,” Pir said, stopping me short with a wave of his hand, “she can come.”

“Brilliant!”

“On one condition: you give me a go on that bicycle.”

“But you’re blind!” I protested.

“Good!” He laughed. “I won’t see the danger coming!”

For thirty minutes I had to deal with the sight of Pir Hederi threatening to wreck my new bicycle as he bumbled up and down the road supported by the local shoe-shine boy and a money exchanger from across the road, all the while accompanied by the claps and cheers of a small crowd and the confused, excited barks of Dog. Only when he was finally upended by a particularly vicious pothole did he give up, laughing like a mental and wiping the sweat and grit from his forehead.

I tried to laugh with the rest of the crowd, but to be honest, I was annoyed.

I lifted my bike off the road and checked it for damage. There was a slight scratch on the main frame that angered my eyes, but I guessed it was a small price to pay to stop Jamilla from getting beaten up by gypsies. And when I raced into Chicken Street twenty minutes later, the smile that appeared on her face when I told her the news was worth a dozen scratches.

“You’re joking me!” she screamed as I grandly revealed I’d found her a job at Pir Hederi’s shop.

“No, it’s true. The money’s not great, not like the riches here, but at least in Wazir you’ll be away from the gypsies.”

“You’re my hero, Fawad!”

Jamilla flung her arms around me and planted a kiss on my cheek, which I thought was kind of wrong, but not too bad. Saying that, at some point in the future I knew I would have to make it clear that we weren’t now engaged or anything.

You have to be careful with girls.

With Jamilla on the seat of my bike, we hurried toward Old Makroyan to pick up Spandi. Georgie had ordered me to bring my friends back to the house for Christmas lunch, and I wanted them to arrive before the foreigners got too drunk. When I’d left they were finishing off a second bottle of champagne, and there was another one waiting in the fridge.

After fifteen minutes of hard pedaling, through Shahr-e Naw, over the Jalalabad roundabout, across the bridge spanning Kabul’s muddy river, and narrowly avoiding death a million times under the wheels of yellow Corolla taxis, we bumped our way into the broken lanes separating a dozen blocks of battered flats. The air was thick with chatter, and from most of the trees that were still standing after escaping another winter as firewood hung a mess of old ropes tied to balconies that paraded wet blankets, salwar kameez, bright-colored T-shirts, and dresses grown stiff in the cold.

Coming to a halt at the entrance of Block 4, we found Spandi huddled in the doorway, apparently closing some sort of deal with a boy a little younger than him. When he saw us, he patted the boy’s shoulder and came to greet us with a shy shrug.

“He’s working for me,” he explained, jerking his head in the direction of the boy. “I give him a handful of phone cards, and he gets to keep fifty cents for every one he sells.”

“Ooh, look at the big businessman!” Jamilla laughed.

“You’ve got to start somewhere.” Spandi smiled. “For every card he sells I get half a dollar and the rest goes to Haji Khan. This means that I not only make money from my own cards but also from those I don’t even sell. And I can get rid of more too. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe it; these things sell like hot bolani. I made fifty dollars last week.”

“How do you know the boy won’t run off with the cards and keep the money for himself?” I asked, impressed but ever suspicious—as any right-thinking Afghan would be.

“He’s my aunt’s son,” Spandi explained. “And besides, I told him Haji Khan would rip his head off if he turned us over.”

By the time we arrived back at the house—me and Jamilla wheeling up to the gate on our horse of steel as Spandi ran beside us, a feat that was pretty impressive given how much spand he’d breathed in during his life—I realized we had visitors. This wasn’t some kind of psychic revelation or anything; the three armored Land Cruisers and the posse of guards cluttering our street gave it away.

Kicking our shoes off, we pushed through the front door to find it embarrassingly obvious that not only was the house now in chaos but most of its occupants were out of control; James, Ismerai, and Haji Khan were lost in a cloud of hashish, shouting jokes about Kandaharis and donkeys over the noise of the stereo belting out the same songs I’d heard that morning; and May and Georgie were drunk in the kitchen, giggling uncontrollably as my mother carved into the giant chicken, looking increasingly distressed. Whereas a few hours ago the bird had been a raw slab of white pitted flesh, it was now burned black on the outside and colored pink in the middle. According to the women, this was not a good sign.

“It probably needs another hour,” May suggested.

“It doesn’t need another hour; it needs a bloody funeral!” Georgie replied.

Turning her head in our direction, she welcomed Spandi and Jamilla to the house and wished them a happy Christmas.

“Fawad, I’m so sorry,” she added, turning her attention to me. “I really wanted to give your mother the day off, but it’s quite clear that cooking isn’t my thing.”

My mother laughed—a good, honest, deep chuckle the likes of which I’d never heard before. “I’m fairly sure Haji Khan isn’t that interested in your cooking skills,” she stated.

“Mother!” I shouted, mortified by what she was so obviously suggesting, and in front of my friends too. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought she was drunk.

Not that anyone else seemed to share my concern. Everyone was laughing at her joke, even May, whose Dari was passable and whose sense of humor had obviously been helped by the growing number of empty champagne bottles and beer cans cluttering the house.

“Oh well,” Georgie exclaimed, sticking a large knife into the breast of the two-tone bird. “There’s nothing to be done. Khalid! You need to make a trip to Afghan Fried Chicken!”

A few days before Christmas, Georgie had looked wretched—pale and unhappy and constantly attached to a mobile phone that never rang. Now her skin was glowing, her eyes were bright, and a smile that was almost stupid was stuck to her face.

Throughout the afternoon and deep into the evening, Haji Khan was more often than not glued to her side, being funny and affectionate, and though I welcomed his return along with everyone else, I was amazed to see how just a few minutes’ tenderness was enough to make up for weeks of disinterest. It seemed a pretty good deal if you were the man in the relationship. Still, I’d been told that this was the way of love, that it was all-forgiving. And I guessed it must be true. You only have to look at our beloved Afghanistan, the country that’s brought us nothing but death and misery, yet we cry over her beauty and spin songs around her cruelty like lovesick teenagers. We forgive her anything, and I guess for Georgie, Haji Khan was her Afghanistan.

Of course, love isn’t a disease suffered only by women; one look at Shir Ahmad told you that. He had been invited into the house along with our other guard, Abdul, to share food and drinks while Haji Khan’s men turned the house into a fortress. Shir was sitting diagonally across from my mother, and I could see it was difficult for him not to allow his eyes to keep wandering in her direction. For my mother’s part, she was coldly separate, hardly noticing his presence in the room beyond the first greeting. Even so, I noticed she was sitting with her back a little straighter than usual and she had stopped laughing with the other women. And when Ismerai and Haji Khan began reciting poetry, her cheeks colored a little.

Our love of poetry is one of the craziest things about Afghans. Men will shoot someone in the head without a second thought, families will sell their daughters into marriage for a bucket of sand, and everyone will shit on the dead body of their enemy given half the chance; but at the sound of a well-written verse an Afghan man will become weak as a woman. When a poem ends he shakes his head and sits still for at least five minutes, staring far away, deep into the floor, as if seeing his own heart ripped open by the words, baring its shame and pain to the world.

One of the most famous Pashtun poets was Rahman Baba, otherwise known as the Nightingale of Afghanistan. He is as famous and respected as ever an Afghan was, and though he’s been dead for more than three hundred years, people still remember him and hold ceremonies in his honor, and every school has at least one of his poems stuck to a wall. Legend says that he used to scratch his poems in the mud of the Bara River, which must have helped people love him more because he was poor like us.

But the reason I think Afghans adore poetry so much is that it lets them believe in love and its power to change everything—like the way it transformed Georgie’s tears into smiles and Shir Ahmad’s blood into water.

Not long ago, school sent me home with a poem to learn. Me and Spandi discussed it for a while, but even though we looked in every way to find a reason to love poetry as much as the men we knew, we decided it was rubbish and written by homos. We hated homos. We also hated poetry, especially poetry written by homos.

Ismerai and Haji Khan, though, who seemed to know an awful lot of homo poetry for tough men, practically had the women fainting over their words as they took center stage at our Christmas party—and there was only my mother among them who spoke Pashto. But that’s the magic of our language: you could recite a poem about a rotting cat’s ass, and it would sound like warm honey.

Of course the foreigners were also drunk, which probably helped, and they were feeling the heat of recent good fortune after licking their fingers clean from the grease of AFC’s fried chicken to accept the presents Haji Khan had brought for them. To James he had given a bottle of whiskey, which the journalist had been cradling in his arms ever since; May was now out of her blanket and wearing a deep-blue velvet kuchi dress; and Georgie was revealing a flash of gold around her neck and a flower-shaped ring on her finger. Surprisingly, given it wasn’t strictly our celebration, Haji Khan didn’t forget the Muslims in the house. He generously presented my mother with a fine red carpet for her room, handed over new boots to Shir Ahmad and Abdul, and gave envelopes of money to Jamilla, Spandi, and me, which was as horrible as it was exciting because, as all the adults mooned over one another, these packages burned holes in our pockets and all we could think of doing was escaping and finding out how much he’d given us.

In the end, the party finished in a mess of broken adults as the clock struck ten: May bolted upstairs to vomit in the bathroom; James fell down, and asleep, on the stairs; and Georgie, Spandi, and Jamilla disappeared out the door with Ismerai and Haji Khan. As my mother cleared up, and covered a very loud, snoring James with a blanket, I sneaked out into the yard to take a last look at my bike and count the dollars in my pocket. Haji Khan had placed one hundred dollars in ten-dollar bills in the envelope—more money than the National Police earn in one month! And even though I went to bed still no nearer to understanding the foreigners’ relationship with Jesus, I really hoped they would be around for his next birthday.

As I lay in my room, I looked back on the day with all of its color and surprises—a day when the rich sat with the poor, the Godless with the believers, the foreigners with Afghans, the men with women, and the children with adults. It was how a perfect world might be if people didn’t keep strangling one another in rules and laws and fear. Were we really so different from one another? If you give a boy a bike, he is going to be happy whether he is a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. And if you love someone truly, it doesn’t matter if he or she is Afghan or British.

But life isn’t straightforward, and just as sudden happiness can appear to brighten your day, sadness is usually only a heartbeat away. The day after Christmas my mother went to visit her sister, and my aunt repaid this kindness by trying to kill her.

7

IT WAS THICK dark in my bed when I heard a heavy thud come from the bathroom of our house. I listened hard, trying to work out the cause, but there was nothing more. Yet I must have sensed there was something wrong because I swung my legs out of the blanket’s warmth, put on my plastic slippers, and left my room.

Standing outside the bathroom door, I could clearly hear the sound of retching, violent and frightening, followed by heavy, tearful groans.

“Mother?” I knocked gently. “Mother? It’s me, Fawad.”

I heard my mother trying to get to her feet, but a whimper came with the effort and she slid down again with another dull thud.

“Mother, please!”

I turned the handle. The door opened just enough for me to see her on the floor, slumped across the hole of our toilet, cradling her stomach. Her dress was clearly soiled, and the stench of vomit and diarrhea hit me like a wall.

“No, Fawad!”

Her voice was harsh and broken, and I closed the door quickly at the terrible sound of it, trapped by the need to save her and a son’s wish to protect his mother’s shame.

“I’m going for help!” I cried, and ran into the main house to get Georgie.

Without knocking, I ran into her room and dragged at the blankets that hid her.

“Please, Georgie, please,” I begged, “it’s my mother! Get up!”

The words left my mouth with a scream, and Georgie sat upright, quickly kicking away the covers. In two strides she reached the bedroom door and pulled on the long dressing gown that hung there.

“What is it? What’s the matter with your mother?” she asked as she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out of the door.

“I don’t know, but she’s very sick. Oh Georgie, I think she’s dying!”

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

“SO, 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.

As Georgie and James struggled to fit my bed into the corner of his room, I tried to help by shoving the other one closer to the far wall. As I did so a magazine escaped from the tangled mass of bedclothes, falling to the floor and opening at the center. The pages showed a blond-haired woman with soapy bubbles covering huge naked breasts.

Georgie and James looked at the magazine as if someone had just tossed a grenade into the room. For at least three seconds they stood in stunned silence, first looking at the naked woman, then at each other, then at me, then back at the magazine. I stooped to pick it up, but this seemed to knock the sense back into both of them, and as Georgie ordered “No!” James quickly swooped, beating me to it and snatching away the flapping pages, which he tucked into the belt of his trousers, under his sweater.

“Research, Fawad, research,” he explained.

“For all the work you do with the ladies?” I asked, remembering Georgie’s words and suddenly fitting them into place.

Most afternoons, after Georgie had finished with her job and Pir Hederi had finished with me, we would drive to Homeira’s house to spend an hour or so with my mother. The first visit we made was awkward and shy, but because I was relieved to see her alive I cried when she reached out to hold me, and because she was my mother she matched my tears with her own.

Although my mother looked better than the last time I’d seen her, and a lot cleaner, her face still shone pale and she looked fragile compared to her friend, who was as fat as Ibrar the Baker from Flower Street. However, despite my natural suspicion of anyone fat, which I think came from living with my aunt for so long, I liked Homeira. She was large and funny and smiled easily, in the way most people do when their stomachs are full. I was also mesmerized by her hands, which appeared to be holding prisoner a large number of rings—like small hills of flesh laying siege to valleys of gold on her fingers. There was no way they could possibly be removed, so I guessed they’d have to stay there until the day she died or until someone cut off her fingers—maybe the Taliban, if they came back.

Homeira’s husband was also quite fascinating in his fatness. If I squinted, closing my eyes half shut as if I was looking into the sun, I could clearly see the shape of his thin face battling to come out of the folds. It was like watching a man drowning in skin.

Not surprisingly, Homeira and her husband had made six plump children together—a collection of bellies waddling around the house on pudgy legs. They were friendly kids who shared their toys easily, and I was massively comforted to see my mother surrounded by such a large family, living in a house that was busy and alive and full of cheerful conversation. I was also relieved to know she’d be in no danger of starving.

What was surprising, however, was the discovery that Georgie and I weren’t my mother’s only visitors. Twice in five days I caught Shir Ahmad leaving the house, shyly waving at me as we passed each other on the street.

I guessed we’d soon have to have a talk, man to man.

But even though I was happy to see my mother being looked after for once in her life, I found it really difficult to be without her. I didn’t say anything because May had told me to be strong, so after my first tears at seeing her alive I didn’t cry again. But the truth was, she was my mother and I missed her so much that I now had a constant ache pounding at my insides. In all my years I had never been without my mother. When I went to bed at night, I placed her chador and her smell over my pillow, praying to Allah that she missed me just as much as I missed her and that she wouldn’t decide to stay with Homeira’s happy fat family.

As I struggled to get used to this new loneliness, I also sensed the same feeling in Georgie. The day after Christmas, Haji Khan had left for Dubai, telling her he had to sort out “some business” and promising to call. As usual Georgie spent the following days without him, holding her mobile phone and waiting for him to keep his promise.

Therefore, because God always provides, we now clung to each other’s company in the new-winter evenings, tied together because we were one and the same.

And it wasn’t only me and Georgie who missed the presence of my mother and Haji Khan; both James and May were also struggling to cope. Our family, which was made up of the motherless, husbandless, and, in two cases, wifeless, was dining pretty much every night on something called noodles—stringy lines of pasta that came from a package and were flavored with powdered water. It was okay at first, but after four nights I knew this wasn’t what our teachers would call a “well-balanced diet.”

Therefore it came as a blessed relief when Georgie informed me we would be hosting a party at our house to celebrate New Year’s Eve—the foreigners’ one, not mine. As you would expect in a place recently visited by near-death, when we sat on the long cushions in the front room to discuss the matter, everyone agreed it should be a quiet affair. As we went through the options it was almost as if we were holding a mini Shura, a council of elders—without all the beards, of course—and it made me feel impossibly grown-up. Georgie explained she’d prefer something quiet because she “wasn’t feeling up to a big one”; May revealed she “hated half the fuckers left here over the holidays anyway”; and James went along with the plan simply because he was outnumbered by the women—and, I think, trying to prove he could be a responsible adult. “Yes, quite right,” he muttered. “We’ve got the boy to think about.” Therefore with no one up for “a big one,” it was agreed that one guest each would be invited by those that could be bothered and the food would be ordered in from the Lebanese restaurant down the road.

The evening of New Year’s Eve, we placed a large board over the pool table and decorated it with candles. May and Georgie also brought six chairs from their offices, which they carried home in the back of a Toyota pickup Massoud had borrowed from his brother.

As Georgie lit the eight candles on our new “table” and James mixed a bowl of alcohol that he called “punch,” the first of our guests arrived. His name was Philippe, and he was a friend of May’s. He was thin as a pencil with tufts of beard that didn’t connect and struggled to cover his sharp face. He was dressed in the Afghan salwar kameez and wore a pakol. When he entered the house, James rolled his eyes.

“He’s only been in Afghanistan two months, and he’s French,” he whispered to me as I giggled at the man’s too-short trousers and badly rolled hat.

Philippe ignored the comment, as well as James, and came over to shake my hand.

“Salaam aleykum. How you are? What the name is it you are having?” He spoke to me in Dari.

“I speak English,” I told him, in English.

James laughed out loud, although I wasn’t making a joke. I was trying to be helpful, as the man was a guest in our house. “That’s my boy!” he shouted, then grabbed me in a headlock as May led her friend into the living room, spitting the word kids behind her.

About twenty minutes later our next guest turned up, a friend of James’s who—it came as no surprise to anyone—was a woman. Unlike the Frenchman, who’d brought nothing to the party, she carried with her a bottle of wine and a tin of chocolate biscuits, which she handed over to Georgie. Her name was Rachel, and she came from a place called Ireland. She may have been pretty, but it was hard to tell because for some reason she had hidden her face under a mask of makeup that would have put an Afghan bride to shame.

“You look, erm, stunning,” James said as he greeted her, kissing her on the cheek, which left his beard shining with glitter.

“Really?” Rachel asked. “I was having a dreadful time of it before I came out. The electricity went off, and the generator ran out of fuel. I had to use candlelight! Can you believe it?”

“Yes,” admitted May, coming into the kitchen to refill Philippe’s already empty glass with more punch.

Rachel giggled but sounded scared. “You know, I just wanted to make some sort of effort—look a bit festive and all that?”

“Well, you look divine,” James assured her.

“She looks like Ziggy freakin’ Stardust,” May muttered under her breath.

“Ziggy who?” I whispered to Georgie.

“Shhh,” she said, passing me an orange juice. “May’s just being mean.”

For the foreigners’ New Year’s Eve I had been declared Georgie’s guest of honor, although as I also lived in the house she could just as easily have been mine, and as the night wore on it became increasingly obvious that we were the only two people who actually appeared to get on with everyone.

Everything began fairly well thanks to the food from Taverne du Liban, which was a great success. Within an hour we had demolished all the fatoush, the tabbouleh, eight small pastries filled with potato and spinach, a plate of meat patties that came with yogurt, side dishes of hummus, twelve skewers of chicken and lamb kebabs, as well as a small mountain of fluffy white pita breads. By the end of it all I was fit to burst and imagined this must be how Homeira’s family ate every night.

Philippe and Rachel, however, didn’t eat half as much as those of us who lived in the house, though they probably hadn’t been living on watery noodles for the best part of a week. The Frenchman made excuses for his lack of appetite, saying he had a stomach upset. I didn’t believe him. He hadn’t run to the toilet even once during the meal, so I decided it had more to do with his mouth being busy with all the free alcohol my friends had provided, and the fact that he never shut up.

Rachel also spent much of the evening picking at her food, but I sensed this was because she was nervous, as she kept playing with her hair. I also noticed that her eyes grew big as saucers every time she looked at James. I liked her because of that, and I really hoped James liked her too. Her makeup looked a lot prettier in the candlelight of the room rather than the bright, generator-made light of the kitchen, and her voice sounded soft like summer rain whenever she spoke, which wasn’t often because the Frenchman was pretty much holding us hostage with talk about himself.

As Philippe went on and on and on, I saw James getting more and more irritated. It was easy to tell when he was annoyed because he’d constantly grab the back of his neck as if some pain needed to be rubbed away, and he’d flick the ash of his cigarette with sharp, quick taps of his first finger.

“I mean, it’s just so impossible to get anything done quickly here,” said Phillipe. “These people are so lazy.”

“Like Fawad, you mean?” James asked, cocking his head and raising his left eyebrow, which made him look surprised, and also a little dangerous.

“Well, no, he is obviously just a boy.”

“Oh. His mother then, the woman who works for us sixteen hours a day? Or perhaps the guards who protect our lives for a month’s wages that wouldn’t even pay for the fancy dress you’re wearing?”

“That’s enough, James,” May warned him quietly.

James took the comment with an angry look, then ignored her.

“Or perhaps you mean the bread guys who work from dawn to dusk in the blistering heat of their baking houses, or the shoe-shine boys who stand on our corner every day hoping to make a few afs, or the metal welders with their scarred skin and scorched eyes, or—”

“That’s enough, I said!” May hit the table with her fist, causing us all to jump, Rachel most of all.

“Well,” James said, lifting his voice and arms in surrender, “maybe when Philippe has been here for longer than eight weeks he might just be in a position to talk about another nation’s defects.”

As James finished we all sat in embarrassed silence, even me, because although he had been sticking up for Afghans like me he had been rude to a guest, and in our culture that was as bad as calling someone’s mother a whore, or, worse still, using her as one.

“I’ve been here ten weeks actually,” Philippe eventually said.

As we all looked at him, not sure if he was making a joke or not, Georgie started laughing, then slowly the rest of us joined in, even James, who nodded his head and lifted his glass to knock it against the Frenchman’s.

After finishing our meal, and after Philippe had pretty much drunk his own body weight in alcohol, all six of us moved from the table to settle on the long cushions in the other half of the room. James brought with him two bottles of red wine and sat close to Rachel, who looked as pleased as a boy who’d just been given a bike for Christmas. Georgie and May placed themselves on either side of me, like bodyguards. Georgie was just being Georgie, but May, I think, saw me differently now and I wondered whether she would have tried to adopt me if my mother hadn’t survived.

For the next half hour the Frenchman continued to bore us with stories about himself, but unlike at the dinner table, James didn’t seem to mind anymore, nodding now and again as he leaned back on the cushions, slumping closer to Rachel’s side. I thought they looked nice together.

When Philippe began a new story about his time in a place called Sudan, Rachel took the chance to escape. Getting to her feet, she apologized for the interruption and asked for directions to the toilet. As she left, Philippe continued with his talk about something called solar energy. I really had no idea what he was going on about, and I had no interest in trying to find out either. As nobody else interrupted him, I guessed they felt the same way.

When Rachel didn’t return from the bathroom for a full ten minutes, Georgie also took the chance to get away from Philippe and went to look for her—and that’s when the party pretty much ended.

“Rachel’s leaving,” Georgie said quietly, having popped her head around the door a few seconds later. James got to his feet, and we followed him.

In the clear light of the hallway we found Rachel pulling on her coat. The mask of makeup that had hidden her face had been washed away, leaving her skin pink. It looked like she had been crying. I looked at Georgie, not sure what was going on, and she pointed to the light and the mirror and made a face full of shock. I remembered then about Rachel getting ready in the dark and realized it must have been the first time she had seen her made-up face properly when she went to the bathroom. I felt quite sorry for her. She hadn’t looked that bad in the candlelight.

Pulling her gloves on, Rachel hurriedly thanked Georgie and May for inviting her to the party, pretending she needed to go because she didn’t feel well.

“Rachel, stay a while longer, you may feel better in a minute or two,” James tried, but as he spoke she hardly looked at him, her eyes darting quickly to the door as if she couldn’t run away fast enough.

“No, really, I must go,” she insisted, and as her gaze finally met his, her cheeks turned from pink to red and small tears came to blur her eyes.

Georgie gave her a hug, and before James walked her to the gate May also moved to embrace her. As she headed back into the living room, I could tell from May’s face that she felt ashamed about the jokes she’d made earlier.

Once Rachel had left the house and jumped into the front seat of the car that was waiting for her, nobody seemed to be in the mood to party anymore, only to drink. And as another bottle of wine was magically brought out from the kitchen, this was my cue, apparently, to go to bed. Taking me by the hand, Georgie led me upstairs and into James’s room.

“Well, that was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t it?” she said, coming over to sit on my bed.

“The food was good,” I stated, wanting to rescue something from the night to make her feel better.

“Yes, the food was good, you’re right. As always.”

Leaning forward, Georgie placed a kiss on my cheek before whispering, “Happy New Year, Fawad. I hope all your wishes come true this year.” Then she got up and switched off the light.

As she closed the door behind her I offered a quick prayer to my God, asking Him to help make Georgie’s dreams come true too.

In my head, behind my eyes, there was a storm of color; ugly rips breaking up the sky I saw there, flashing clouds of black and red, fighting for space in giant, greedy swirls. I felt the anger of the world wrap itself around the wind and I ran for a bush to take cover, but I struggled to reach it in time and the night tore it away before I got there, so I ran from the hill, tumbling through the long grass as I lost my feet, rolling through blades grown black in the dark. I knew I had to get away, but my hands were caught and I couldn’t free them until the light came to carry me away to the valley.

High in the sky I saw eagles circling above me, swooping in pairs to a pocket of brown lying on the ground. I got to my feet and saw I was wearing Rachel’s gloves.

Slowly I walked toward the brown, and as I drew close I recognized it as a dead thing. I thought it was a sheep at first, but as I walked nearer I realized it was too large, and now there was Georgie knelt near, holding the goat comb she carried. She was stroking the dead thing’s hair and smiling, so I smiled back.

“You want to help?” she asked.

“Okay.” I smiled.

But as I leaned closer to comb the dead thing I saw long black hair covering its back and I grew afraid.

“Go on,” Georgie encouraged, so I leaned forward and parted the hair. It covered a woman’s face, and it was the face of my mother.

Throwing the comb to the floor, I backed away.

“Don’t leave me, son,” she cried.

She was crawling toward me on her hands and knees. Her fingers reached for me, but they were rotten and black and the buzz of flies hung around them, feeding off her sickness. She jumped for me, and I screamed.

It was pitch-black in the room, and I could hear James snoring in the dark beside me. The lights were off, and the generator stood silent.

I needed water, but I was too scared to get out of bed. My mother’s face was still strong in my mind, and it was so cold I could see my own breath. My eyes felt sticky with sleep, and my throat had turned tight as if my body was trying to strangle me.

I needed water.

“James?” My voice sounded weak, as if it was traveling from another place. “James?”

When he gave no answer I grabbed the knife that was stuck in the board on my side of the wall and slipped out from under the blanket. I put on my plastic slippers and walked to the door.

Outside our room everything was covered in night, creating fuzzy black shapes that knew I was afraid. I reached out with my feet, found the stairs, and moved slowly toward the kitchen, now helped by a faint light that broke through the blackness and came from the candles still burning in the living room. The tiny flames turned the air red where the light crept through the sides of the door. It was a flickering, dancing light that pulsed with the sound of voices coming from the other side. And as I half listened my heart quickened because I knew it was wrong.

I watched my hands reach out and push the door open.

“No, you drunken idiot. I told you, not here!”

She was struggling, and he was on top of her, holding her down, his hands too strong, his body too heavy. It was crushing her.

“Come on, stop fucking around; you said you wanted this.”

The voice was thick, heavy, but I heard it, like I’d heard it before, and I saw him pressing her arms into the cushions as the flames danced around them, turning them both orange; him fighting to control her, his body on top of hers, light licking at his feet and revealing the terrible black of his eyes and the white of hers as they both turned to look.

Around me, the air turned to screams. It sounded like hell in my ears as it pushed through the hate and the fear, burning like fire in my blood. Then the anger burst from my mouth with the howl of a million animals, and because I couldn’t let it happen again, not a second time, not this time, I ran forward and raised my hand, feeling the knife sink into softness as I slammed myself hard against him.

Still the screams kept coming, tearing at my head.

I kicked my legs at the air around me, trying to break free of the noise and the fear, but now there were more screams and they were different from mine, and I saw the flames laughing and the shape of a thousand terrors surrounded me and then she was upon me and she forced the fire to leave, bringing her arms to catch me, smothering me in her smell.

In the chaos of my mind I recognized Georgie and I melted into her flesh as she took my head into her body and I let her breathe her love into me. She was telling me not to worry, and I felt the warmth of her hands press on my hair, and it felt good, but in the distance somewhere around us I heard a man shouting.

“He stabbed me in the ass! The little shit stabbed me in the fucking ass!”

The accent was French.

9

I DON’T THINK I’m particularly special. I’m not amazingly beautiful, but I’m not Jahid-ugly either. I’m not the biggest brain in my class, but neither am I dumb as a donkey. I’m not the fastest runner; I don’t tell the best jokes; I’m not the best fighter; and though I know I’ve seen things that maybe a boy my age shouldn’t have seen, even that doesn’t make me particularly special.

My father was killed, my brothers are dead, and my sister is missing. But in Afghanistan, that’s a big “so what?”

Spandi’s mother died in childbirth, the sister she was trying to deliver died with her, and from the age of two Spandi never felt his mother’s warmth again or the comfort of her love. He doesn’t even have a photograph to remember her by, just a picture in his head that fades with every year he grows taller.

Jamilla’s parents are both alive, but their house has become terrorized by drugs. Sometime in the past her dad went to work with the poppy, and he fell under its spell as he licked the resin from his fingers during the harvest. Now he is hungry for the drug, day and night, while the rest of his family just remains hungry. And even though he stays away from the home for days on end, he always returns eventually, looking for money; and when he can’t find any money he visits his fists on the head of his wife as well as Jamilla and her two older sisters.

Meanwhile the orphanages of Kabul are filled with children whose parents have been lost and killed.

So none of us is particularly special. We just carry with us different versions of the same story.

However, when I woke up the morning after the night came to haunt me, I opened my eyes to see May and Georgie sharing the bed next to me while James was wrapped in a blanket snoring on the floor by my side, and I did at last feel in some way special.

So I was really sorry when seconds later I touched the mattress under me and realized I’d wet the bed.

10

JALALABAD IS THE capital of Nangarhar Province in the east of Afghanistan, and for more years than anyone can remember Kabul’s rich have come to this city to escape the biting cold of winter.

Georgie and I, however, had simply come to escape.

With my mother’s illness still keeping her at Homeira’s house and my recent attack on Philippe, it was decided I needed a break.

“He was only play-fighting with May,” Georgie explained as we worked our way through the seven sisters, the snow-topped mountains that took us away from the capital and into the warm valleys of the east. “He wasn’t really trying to hurt her.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, Fawad, I am.”

Although the pictures in my head told me a different story, everything was so muddy in there right now I couldn’t be clear of anything anymore, and if Georgie said it was so, then I guess it must have been.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t realize.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” she continued, ruffling my hair. “How could you have known? Philippe had drunk far too much, and so had May. But I promise you, they are really very good friends, and they would never hurt each other. And maybe May and James and I are all to blame for what happened, not you. We should have been more sensible with you, Fawad, what with your mother being away. So, we’re sorry too. We didn’t think.”

Georgie pulled me into her side, which felt a little bony, and held me there for as long as the journey allowed. The rest of the time we were thrown around the back of the car like two bees in a jar as the city road crumbled and turned into rocks.

The journey from Kabul to Jalalabad was pretty interesting, and if my thoughts hadn’t been so busy with miseries pouring in from the night before, and if my head hadn’t kept smacking against the window with the force of the drive, I guess I would have enjoyed it tremendously because it took us through the pictures of a million painters and a million more stories. For four hours we traveled beyond the giant mountains that guarded the Kabul River; past the command post where the warlord Zardad kept a soldier chained up as a dog, feeding him on the testicles of his enemies; over the small bridge where four foreign journalists were murdered in 2001; down into Surobi and past its shimmering lake; along gentle bends hugged by brilliant green fields, overtaking kuchis and camels and dark clouds of fat-bottomed sheep; back along the river toward the fish restaurants of Durunta; and through the Russian-built tunnel that skirted a dam and led us to Jalalabad.

It was my first proper trip out of Kabul—holidays not being that common among people who can hardly feed themselves—and the ever-changing views were more than amazing, but I was simply too upset to take any pleasure in them. The fact was, I felt truly sorry and deeply ashamed about what I’d done to Philippe, and I knew that his view of Afghan hospitality would have changed quite a lot now that one of us had stabbed him in the ass.

It was unforgivable, really.

May had told me the next day that Philippe had gone to see the surgeons at the Italian Emergency Hospital in Shahr-e Naw, where they had sewed a row of stitches into the wound. He also had to have something called “a tetanus jab.”

James, on the other hand, had spent much of the day laughing.

When we arrived in Jalalabad it was late afternoon, and we drove straight into the heart of the city, which, unlike the winter gray of Kabul, was still glowing yellow in dusty sunshine. There were more donkeys and carts crowding the streets than in the capital, and the place crawled with tiny tuk-tuks, Pakistani-style buggies painted blue and decorated with wildly colorful pictures of flowers and women’s eyes.

Beeping and pushing our way through the traffic, we eventually slipped into a side road, a beaten track leading to the front doors of about ten high-walled houses. Halfway down we stopped at Haji Khan’s place, a large white mansion set in a garden of green that could easily have been home to King Mohammad Zahir Shah, if he still had any money.

As our Land Cruiser pulled into the drive, we found Ismerai already waiting for us on the steps of the house. He was talking into a mobile phone that he clicked shut as we jumped out of our vehicle, and after greeting us with warm handshakes and big smiles he took us inside.

The sight that filled my eyes almost blinded me. Through two large wooden doors, outside of which waited a number of sandals, a massive hall appeared with eight white leather sofas facing one another in rows of four. Georgie sat on one of them and pulled off her boots. I’d kicked my own shoes away at the door, which was the proper thing to do, but Georgie’s boots were complicated. At the back of the hallway a giant staircase grew from the ground, going off in two directions to meet up again on the top floor. Upstairs, beyond a fence of wooden balconies, I could see a number of doors leading to a number of rooms. A small man no bigger than a child grabbed our bags and disappeared up there. Back downstairs, to the left of the hallway was a raised floor glinting with a golden carpet and long lapis-blue cushions. Relaxing on them were four brown men in brown pakols and brown patus. They were watching a wide-screen television and seemed quite at home.

As we entered the house and made our way to the TV area, all the men stood up and offered their hands to Georgie in welcome. She obviously knew them, and they seemed happy to see her, gently scolding her for having stayed away too long. They then waved at her to sit down, offering her the position of honored guest on the cushion farthest from the door. I followed her to the end of the room and sat down nearby, but not too close because I wasn’t a baby and I wanted the men to see that.

As green tea arrived, joined by glass plates of green raisins, pistachios, almonds, and papered sweets, Ismerai came to sit with us. The other guests settled closer to the television, even though the sound had now gone.

Away from our house and the protection of its walls, Ismerai acted differently with Georgie, much more formally. I knew this was largely due to the other men being in the room. Despite all the years Georgie and Ismerai had been friends, they were friends in Afghanistan and therefore there were rules to follow, which mainly involved not being too friendly with women, foreign or not. The fact was, laughing and joking with women didn’t look good, it looked weak, and it was probably only one step away from finding pleasure in the bracelet-jangling swirls of Afghanistan’s dancing boys.

But although I wasn’t that surprised by Ismerai’s behavior—he was a Pashtun after all—I was a little amazed to see the change in Georgie. She was terrible for teasing Ismerai when he came to our house, but now she was quiet and respectful, and she didn’t speak again with the other men unless they looked over to invite her into their conversation, which they didn’t really.

In our culture, a woman is usually permitted to sit only with the men she is related to. Georgie’s presence was tolerated only because she was a foreigner. If she hadn’t come from England, she’d have been hidden in the back of the house with the rest of the women.

Haji Khan was in Shinwar, Ismerai told us. “The signal doesn’t work well in the mountains.” He apologized to Georgie with a shy smile, looking at her silent mobile phone as he did so.

Georgie shrugged as if she didn’t care, and I almost believed her. “I’m just grateful you invited us over,” she replied, “especially at such short notice.”

As she spoke I suddenly realized she must have called Ismerai that morning when I wasn’t listening, and the knowledge of it made my cheeks burn with added shame because now everyone must know what I’d done, even my friends living half a world away in Jalalabad.

Therefore, when our dinner was laid out for us and Ismerai joked that the household help had “better keep the knives away from the boy,” I didn’t laugh.

“So, do you want to talk about it?”

Georgie stopped to light a cigarette after beating me for the fifth time at carambul, a wooden board game imported from India where two players fight with their fingers, flicking bright-colored disks into four holes drilled into the corners. She was impossibly good at it for a girl.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully, sensing that Georgie was looking for reasons for my behavior. “Maybe.”

“Sometimes it helps to talk about things, especially difficult things,” Georgie pushed gently, fiddling as she did so with a box of matches showing the Khyber Pass on the front. “It’s a way of chasing the bad spirits out from your head.”

“I guess,” I said, even though I was certain the devils that lived there were too strong for the magic of talk. “Okay. I’ll try.”

Long before I was born my mother was married to my father, and together they made Bilal. He was my oldest brother. Three years later, when the Russians packed up to begin their long journey home, rolling out of Afghanistan in the tanks they had brought with them, my parents celebrated by bringing Mina into the family. In Pashto, her name means “love.” Some years after that Yosef, my other brother, arrived, and then finally, after all of them had taken up most of the space in our house, I was born.

This was my family, as complete and happy as it would ever be.

Then, one by one, like leaves falling from a tree, they began to die.

First to go was Yosef, who stopped eating the day after he was bitten by a dog. I was a baby, so he was lost to us before I could remember him, but my mother says I’m a little like him and that Allah took him away because He needed more sunshine in Paradise.

A year after Yosef died, my father also left us. He was a teacher, but he laid down his schoolbooks and picked up a gun to fight alongside the soldiers of the Northern Alliance with a group of other men from our village. Mother says his heart became furious as his eyes watched the Taliban change our ways, and because he was a man of honor and courage he felt it was his duty to stop them, being as he was a son of Afghanistan. Unfortunately for my father, it turned out that he was better suited to schooling than fighting, and he died in a battle near Mazar-e Sharif in the north of the country.

That left my mother a widow, a widow with a baby and two young children. But because of her tears she clung to our home, as it still held the smell of my father and the ghostly laughter of my brother, even though everyone said she would be better off living with her sister.

Of course, this being Afghanistan, things then went from bad to worse than bad.

Sometime after my father died, and at the time when my head began to save the pictures of my life, the Taliban came to Paghman. By now I was no longer a baby—I was walking and talking—and I heard the fear in my mother’s voice when one night she shook me awake to pull me into her arms and carry me from my bed to the corner of the kitchen where my sister and brother were waiting. I remember it clearly now: my mother was trembling through her clothes, and outside I could hear the sound of heavy trucks filling the street with the noise of their engines.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Please, Fawad, please be quiet,” my mother begged. She was crying, and, outside, shouts and screams invaded the stillness of the night as the light coming in through our window burned the color of flames.

As we hid in the corner, the sound of panic and pain grew closer, steadily creeping upon us, looking to find us. All this time my mother whispered to Allah under her breath, quick and quiet as she rocked on her legs, holding on to all three of her children. Her prayer was broken by a sharp intake of breath as the door cracked open at the front of our house and the barks of men we didn’t know began to fill our home.

It wasn’t a big house, and it didn’t take long for them to discover us—five black shadows jumping on our huddle to snatch my sister’s arm away from our mother and shout their hate into our faces. As my mother leaped to her feet, one of the Taliban soldiers threw her to the floor, slamming his boot onto her head to keep her in place. My brother Bilal, who had the heart of a lion, immediately sprang from the ground, raining blows on the man’s back and kicking at his legs. Another of the men then grabbed my brother as if he were a toy. He smashed his fist into Bilal’s face and threw him across the kitchen, his head bouncing off the corner of a cupboard.

As my brother slipped to the floor, no longer awake and no longer able to help us, my mother screamed into the Talib’s boot and pushed with all her power to reach her eldest child. As she threw herself at Bilal, the man who had hurt her came on her again and pulled her back to the ground. But this time it wasn’t the boot he laid on top of her; it was his body. I saw his hands ripping at her clothes while, from somewhere behind us, the smell of burning began to fill our noses.

“Run, Fawad, run!” she shouted.

The man hit my mother in the face, but as he did so another shadow came running into the room. His black eyes caught me first, and he stared at me for a moment that seemed to last forever. When I remember it now, I think I saw sadness written there. Releasing me from his gaze, he turned toward the man on top of my mother and pulled him from her, shouting something angry and hard.

“Run, Fawad!” my mother shouted again.

Because I was scared and I didn’t know what to do, and because my brother was asleep, and because one of the men had my sister’s arm, and because my mother had told me to, I did. I ran as fast as I could from the back of the house and found a place in the bushes near our home.

Crouching low into the prickles, I watched the whole world catch fire. As the houses of my neighbors spat out flames, the screams of fear filling my ears gradually turned into howls of mourning as the men dressed in black ripped apart our lives, beating the old people with sticks and stealing the young from their arms. In the orange light of that night I watched those men drag my terrified sister onto the back of a truck, along with twenty other girls from our village, and drive her away.

As the engines faded into the distance and the air died around us, leaving only the sound of fire and tears, I saw my mother come from the house, carrying my brother over her shoulder. Her face was pale, and blood poured from a cut by her mouth.

“Fawad?” she shouted. “Fawad?”

I stood up, and she saw me. The light of relief flickered in her eyes before she fell to her knees and opened her mouth to let go of a scream that would have frozen the blood of the devil himself.

With our house now a broken shell of black and our neighbors just as broken, my mother, Bilal, and I walked from our home in Paghman to arrive at the place of my aunt. I remember nothing of the journey, so I guess I must have slept, my mother carrying me for most of it. I also can’t remember any discussion once we got to my aunt’s house, but I can clearly see the look in my mother’s eyes. It was one of death, and the blankness that went with it was mirrored in the eyes of Bilal.

All I knew for certain was that my mother had been hurt by the Taliban; my sister, who was only eleven or twelve years old, had been taken by the Taliban; and my brother was now lost to the Afghan obsession with revenge.

After waking from his sleep, Bilal had been greeted by the battered face of our mother and the hole in our family that used to be filled by our sister. Giant tears of anger came falling from his eyes, spilling onto the dirt that used to be our garden. Because Bilal had become the man of the house after my father was killed, he made himself crazy with thoughts that he should have done more to protect us. But he was only a boy—a boy up against an army of black turbaned devils. There was nothing more he could have done for any of us. Even so, for the next few weeks Bilal covered himself in silence, hardly able to speak through his own shame and dishonor, until one day his place simply stood empty. My only living brother had left our aunt’s house to join the Northern Alliance.

He was fourteen years old at the time, an age when he should have been moving closer to God, as he was now old enough to deliver his prayers at the mosque and fast with the adults at the time of Ramazan. Instead, he gave himself up to war and revenge, and we never saw him again.

Once the Americans had bombed the Taliban out of our lives, I wondered whether Bilal would return, but when the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul he still stayed away. Though neither my mother nor I said anything, we both knew he was dead.

11

IT WAS NIGHT when the lights woke me, the time of night when you’re stuck between yesterday and today and everything’s so quiet and deaf with sleep there’s no sign of the morning coming to get you. It was the time of night that calls for a stretch and a smile.

And it was this time of night that Haji Khan chose to return home.

It started with the sound of metal on concrete as the gates were pulled open and three Land Cruisers with blacked-out windows roared into the driveway, spilling guards from the doors and Haji Khan from the front seat. As two men with guns pulled the gates shut behind him, another man jumped into the seat he’d abandoned and the cars facing the house now turned in circles on the grass to point at the exit instead.

Watching this dance of headlights from my window, I saw Haji Khan lead a group of men into the house. His face looked fierce, and I wondered whether he’d just found out that Ismerai had let Georgie and me come to stay.

I tiptoed toward the bedroom door and pulled it ajar, blinking at the sudden light that shone from the floor below. Rising from the ground, a mumble of voices came to my ears, low man sounds it took me a few seconds to catch properly. Then, above them all, I heard Haji Khan’s words filling the air like coming thunder.

I opened the door a little farther and leaned into the crack, which allowed me to see what was going on through the wooden pillars of the balcony. Haji Khan was now standing by the door, with five men nearby holding quiet conversations with one another. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they looked pretty rich, dressed as they were in pressed salwar kameez with large, heavy watches hanging off their wrists.

Haji Khan was talking to the small man who had taken my bags upstairs when I arrived. The man nodded upward to the side of the house where Georgie was sleeping, just along the corridor from where I should have been sleeping, and Haji Khan’s gaze briefly followed the man’s head, causing me to catch my breath and fall a little farther into the darkness of my room.

If he didn’t know we were here before he arrived, he certainly did now.

After a few seconds, and when no sound of footsteps came to throw us out of our beds, I inched forward again.

Haji Khan was now sitting on one of the sofas, his pakol balanced on his knee and a cup of green tea in his hand. As he reached for the sugared almonds that had been placed on a table before him, a man approached holding a mobile phone. Haji Khan put it to his ear, and though he never shouted, his voice echoed loudly around the room, causing the other men to stop their conversations and eye one another from beneath bowed heads and heavy eyebrows.

“I don’t care how you do it, just do it,” Haji Khan ordered. “I want him out by the morning.”

He clicked the phone shut and handed it back to the man who had given it to him, and I wondered if this was the reason Haji Khan never called Georgie: he’d lost his phone and had to keep borrowing someone else’s.

In the morning I went downstairs looking for breakfast and found the hall empty of the big men who had filled it the night before and busy with three small ones armed with cleaning cloths and a vacuum cleaner. A boy a little older than me was playing carambul by himself on the platform floor close to the TV.

“Salaam,” I said, going over to join him. “I’m Fawad.”

The boy looked up from his game.

“Salaam,” he replied. “Ahmad.”

He then carried on playing, and with nothing else to do, I sat on a long cushion and watched him. He was very good, flicking the disks effortlessly into the holes opposite him. He also looked very clean, new even. But although his skin had the look of the rich about it—a soft creamy brown—his eyes held an old man’s stare within them.

We were the only children in the room, but the boy called Ahmad didn’t seem in a rush to talk, so I was glad when my breakfast arrived because it at least gave me something to do. I was also starving, which was strange, because I never usually had much of an appetite. “You eat like a bird,” my mother once remarked, and I immediately wondered how worms tasted.

After I’d finished my eggs and a cup of sweet tea, Ahmad knocked the carambul board in my direction and jerked his head upward, inviting me to play. As I shuffled toward him to take up the challenge, he set the pieces in place and let me go first.

“You came with Georgie, didn’t you?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I admitted, badly missing the cluster of disks I had to break. The boy waved as if he didn’t care and let me take the shot again, which I thought showed very good manners.

“I saw you last night,” he said as I carefully lined up my shot, “spying on my father.”

The disks clattered around the board as I hit them, and Ahmad reached for the large one to take his turn.

“I saw you across the hall,” he continued as he casually flicked a blue piece into the far right hole. “My bedroom is opposite the one you’re staying in.”

“And your dad is?”

“Haji Khalid Khan. Who else?”

I looked up, surprised. Although I knew Haji Khan had children by his dead wife, I was a little shocked to find one of them sitting opposite me because Georgie had told me they stayed with his sister.

“I thought you lived somewhere else,” I said.

“I do. I sleep at my aunt’s place usually, but the noise is a nightmare. Too many women in the house, that’s the problem. Here, your turn.”

I took the disk and managed to slide one of my whites close to a hole.

“Not bad,” Ahmad said. “Of course, you seriously need to practice.”

“I only started playing yesterday.”

“Yes, and you seriously need to practice.”

Ahmad laughed, and as he did so I saw some of Haji Khan in his face.

“Your father seemed a bit angry last night,” I mentioned, watching Ahmad steadily demolish the board in front of me.

“Ha! He was pissed all right.”

“Is it because of us?”

“Who?” Ahmad looked up from the game, genuinely puzzled.

“Me and Georgie,” I explained. “Is he angry because we turned up uninvited?”

“No, of course not.” Ahmad shook his head. “Georgie has always been welcome here. This is her home, that’s what my father says.”

“Oh.”

“No, if you must know, he’s pissed about some family business, but it’ll soon be sorted because it always is.”

About three hours after I’d finished my breakfast, and about two hours after Ahmad had disappeared back to the house full of women in one of his father’s Land Cruisers, Georgie appeared downstairs looking fed up. “Come on, Fawad, it’s time to see a man about some goats,” she said, and we grabbed our boots, jumped into another of Haji Khan’s cars, and roared out of Jalalabad.

It was a beautiful day with brilliant skies that carried none of the dust and car-fog hanging above Kabul, and an Indian love song played from a cassette. As well as me and Georgie there was a driver and a guard with a gun placed between his legs in the front seat. He didn’t belong to us, so I guessed he must belong to Haji Khan.

Driving out of the city toward Pakistan, we passed a large portrait of the martyr Haji Abdul Qadir, the former vice president who was murdered eight months after the Taliban fled. Jalalabad had been his home, and I thought the people must have really loved him to place his picture there.

Climbing out of the city, we drove higher, through a mud village and on to a large flat space of brown before dipping back into green, passing rows of olives trees, and into a tunnel of giant trees that seemed to be leaning over the road in an effort to hug their friends on the other side. As we came to another village, we turned right off the main road, through a small bazaar and onto a rough track taking us to Shinwar. This was where we would find a man and his goats, apparently.

As we drove farther into the countryside, we passed scores and scores of old poppy fields. I’d recently seen photographs of them printed in one of the Kabul newspapers Pir Hederi had me read to him. The poppies shone bright and pretty from the pages, and I remember thinking at the time that if they tasted as good as they looked it was no wonder people became addicted.

As we passed an old man with a donkey laden with twigs, Georgie rolled down her window, and after saying her hellos and asking after his family, she asked where we could find a man called Baba Gul Rahman. The old man lifted his hand and revealed that we could find him at the hut over the next field under the hill. “If he still has a hut,” he grumbled. Georgie said thank you, looked at me, and shrugged, and then we all set off toward the hill over the next field to see if Baba Gul still had his hut.

When we arrived at the foot of the hill we were relieved to find Baba Gul’s hut was still standing, but annoyingly for us there was no Baba Gul in it. One of the children we assumed to be his went running off to the next village in search of him.

Sitting on the grass, watching a herd of goats eating and playing, we passed the time drinking tea given to us by a girl who was about my age or a little older. She was Baba Gul’s oldest daughter, revealed Georgie, who had met her before. Her name was Mulallah, and she had the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen.

“How are you doing?” Georgie asked as she came to sit with us. “Your goats look well.”

“Yes, the goats are good,” she replied, roughly wiping the hair from her face and frowning.

“Something wrong, Mulallah?”

The girl shrugged. “This is Afghanistan, Khanum Georgie. Sometimes, life is not so easy. You know this better than us.”

Georgie nodded, but I saw the questions sitting in her eyes.

As I didn’t know what to say, I kept my mouth shut.

“My father’s playing at the cards again,” the girl finally explained as we sat there in silence. “And when he loses we pay for it. It must be Allah’s punishment for the sin he’s committing. I mean, just look where we’re living now.” The girl waved her hands at the hut, which was more of a tent really, a flimsy house of wood covered in plastic sheeting bearing the initials of something called UNICEF.

As the girl spoke, her mother approached. She was a tiny woman with a face that could have been carved out of the mountains behind us. She greeted Georgie affectionately but didn’t hang around. After nodding her head at her daughter, they both left to round up the goats, but as she turned away I caught the look on her face, and it was one of deep shame. I understood then that the lifelong humiliation she had suffered at the hands of her husband had been the cause of the ugly lines cut into her skin. And now that the girl was speaking of the family’s dishonor to virtual strangers, there wasn’t any use in pretending life was anything different.

Sometimes, when you possess nothing at all, the only thing you can do is hang on to your dignity. But even simple words can take that away from you if you’re not careful.

“Was Haji Khan happy to see you?” I asked Georgie as we continued to await Baba Gul’s arrival.

“He was tired, but yes, I think so,” she answered, fiddling with the frayed ends of her jeans as we sat on the grass.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well…” Georgie breathed in deeply and then out again. “No, I don’t really.”

I shook my head in disbelief. As far as lovers’ reunions went, this didn’t really sound up there with Laila and Majnun.

Theirs was a story Jamilla had told me one day in Chicken Street after her mother had told it to her one night to take the sting out of her father’s fists. In the legend, Laila was a beautiful girl born to a rich family. Of course, when she grew up her family wanted her to marry a rich man, but instead she fell in love with Majnun, a very poor man. When everyone found out, there was hell to pay, and Laila and Majnun were banned from seeing each other ever again. Laila’s parents then forced her to marry a man of great wealth, and he took her away from the area. But even though she had a beautiful home, her love for Majnun stayed strong, and one day when she couldn’t stand being apart from him any longer, she killed herself. When Majnun heard of Laila’s death he went mad-crazy with grief, and in the end he died on her grave.

In no part of the story did I hear that Majnun was a little tired and might or might not have been happy to see Laila.

“Were you pleased to see him, then?” I asked.

“Fawad, I’m always pleased to see Khalid, but life is complicated, you know.”

“No, I don’t know actually. I’m only a boy; I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

Georgie smiled.

“Sorry, Fawad, sometimes I forget your age because you’re so wonderfully grown-up! But you’re right, there are complications in life you won’t know about just yet. So, yes, I was happy to see him, of course I was, but then we argued a little and there were a lot of hot words said, and that doesn’t really make me very happy at all.”

“What did you argue about?”

“I don’t know really… the usual. We never used to fight like this, not back when we first met. In those days everything used to be quite lovely. But things change, don’t they?”

“Yes, I guess they do,” I replied. Then, bowing my head to look at her from the side of my eyes, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it? I mean, sometimes it helps to talk. It chases the bad spirits out from your head.”

“Well, that serves me right, doesn’t it.” Georgie laughed, recognizing her own words from the day before. “Okay. I’ll try.

“When I first met Haji Khalid Khan I was working on your country’s first ever elections. It was an exciting time, a moment of real hope and opportunity, and walking into all this crazy expectation came the most beautiful man I had ever set eyes upon. Up to that point I’d never believed in love at first sight, and it’s not something you can easily explain, but it’s a state of the mind and heart that makes your body feel alive and makes each morning that comes worth waking up for.

“So there we were, me and a group of other internationals and a team of Afghans who had arrived in Shinwar to prepare for the elections. In those days Shinwar was said to be a pretty dangerous place, filled with hiding Taliban and bloodthirsty bandits, so Khalid offered our party a place to stay and also his protection.

“Coming from London, it was all terribly exciting—we don’t have men with Kalashnikovs driving us around there. And your country was just amazing to me right from the start: the incredible scenery; the beautiful call to prayer that would drift into my dreams at five in the morning; the people we met who had lived such hard, broken lives yet retained the most wonderful spirit. You know, one day I went to visit a refugee camp to speak about the coming elections, and the people I found there were so horrendously poor that they were saving animal dung to burn for the winter, yet when we turned up they immediately offered us tea and what little bread they had because we were guests. To me that was really very humbling, and I began to feel something really special for this country.

“Of course, not every Afghan I met was that poor, and even in those days Khalid was a rich man. But it wasn’t his money that brought me to him, no matter what your friend Pir Hederi likes to think; it was his attitude, his warm humor, and his tenderness. He was really kind, Fawad, and in those days he taught me so much about this country and about your ways without me even realizing it. I’d never met a man like him before, and looking back on it, I think I fell in love with him almost immediately.

“Although my colleagues and I stayed in his house, which wasn’t as big as the one in Jalalabad, we rarely saw him throughout the day, as we were all busy with our jobs and he was always locked in talks with various elders, politicians, and military men. However, sometimes when we used to return to the house he would be sitting in the garden amid a circle of men dressed in turbans and lavish robes, and when we passed by to go to our rooms I would glance in his direction and our eyes would meet and I would see a small smile play on his lips.

“Once the sun had gone down and the guests had gone home, Khalid would come to our rooms to sit and talk with us for a while, joking with the men and charming the ladies, and I think every one of us fell in love with him—even the boys! But even though the room was full of people, it felt like we were alone. Of course, I didn’t know for sure at that time that he was really interested in me; it was just a feeling I had. But for my part, I spent the days desperate to be back in his company, and most nights his face filled my dreams.

“Then one day, while I was visiting a village some thirty kilometers away from his home, a convoy of cars pulled up and Haji Khan stepped into the sun. All the villagers we were talking to immediately ran to greet him, treating him like a king and leading him to the elder’s home for sweet tea. I kept a discreet distance, but as he passed by me he stopped to shake my hand and said under his breath, ‘See what you are making me do just to get one look at you?’ I nearly fainted with the heat of his words, Fawad, and I knew then that there was something between us and it wasn’t only in my head.

“That day, after drinking himself full of tea, Khalid said thank you to everyone as his driver handed out money, and then he offered me a lift home in his car. I remember looking at my driver, not sure if that was really allowed, as we hadn’t even finished half of our work in the village, but then Khalid spoke to him. I didn’t know Pashto or even Dari in those days. My driver just shrugged and nodded his head, so I left with Khalid. He immediately jumped into the front seat in order to drive, and the door was opened for me by a guard so that I could take my place in the back. Then, as we pulled out of the village I noticed Khalid adjust his mirror so he could see me. Every time I found the courage to meet his gaze, his eyes were so dark and intense that I felt like my skin was on fire. I wanted that journey to last forever. But of course that would have been impossible.

“Anyway, when we got back to the house I was relieved to find that my colleagues hadn’t come home yet, and Khalid and I took the opportunity to drink tea in the garden together—we obviously couldn’t sit in the house alone, so we had to sit outside where everyone could see. Still, the guards kept their distance, and we were able to talk for once without everybody else wanting to join in.

“As we sat there talking and picking at our biscuits, Khalid revealed a little of his life to me: about how he had fought the Russians alongside his father as soon as he was man enough to do so; about how his family had moved to Pakistan in fury and disbelief as freedom turned into civil war; about how he had returned to fight again when the Taliban took control; and about how he had been captured trying to creep back into Pakistan one night. You know, Fawad, he spent six long months locked inside a Taliban prison in Kandahar, where he was whipped almost daily with electric cables on the soles of his feet. Even now he suffers from those beatings. His legs cramp with a pain so bad he can barely walk.

“Khalid eventually escaped thanks to a sympathetic guard and a healthy bribe, and he fled to Iran with another man, who lost his life when their vehicle hit a land mine. Amazingly, Khalid escaped with only cuts and bruises. After that he traveled to Uzbekistan and met up with some leading members of the Northern Alliance. He agreed to join their war, bringing what he could to the effort via his contacts in Pakistan. Unfortunately, this is probably the reason that his wife and daughter were murdered.

“After their deaths, Khalid said he was almost numb with grief, but he had one more daughter and a son to think about. You see, Khalid loved his wife very much. They were cousins, but because they had grown up together and the adults saw it was a love match they were allowed to marry—something pretty rare in Afghanistan. And then there was his daughter, his first child. Khalid was so proud of her because she was such a clever little girl.

“Well, as you can imagine, after they were killed, Khalid went wild with rage, and he sneaked back into Afghanistan on a regular basis to fight to the death if need be. When the Taliban finally fled and ran into the mountains of Tora Bora, he even followed them there. By then the war was all but over, and when the trail of the Taliban and al-Qaeda grew cold he returned home to the land he loved, satisfied that he had honored the memory of his wife and his daughter.

“As he spoke, Fawad, I was spellbound. Khalid had done so much in his life compared to me; he had seen so many things that usually come only from the pages of storybooks in my country. I thought he was incredibly brave and honorable, and as this man opened up before my eyes, laying his history in my lap for me to wonder at, he suddenly, out of nowhere, told me he loved me.

“I laughed in his face at first, which wasn’t the reaction he was expecting, and I told him that it was impossible; that we had only known each other for five minutes and that was far too quick for anyone to sensibly fall in love. But he answered me by saying, ‘I’m not joking, Georgie. I know my heart, and my heart is telling me I love you.’ And that’s when I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this man.

“After that conversation it became almost unbearable to be in his company with so many people watching us, to be unable to do anything but touch with our eyes. But as the weeks went on everyone seemed to notice, and we were given space to spend more and more time alone, until I was certain that his words weren’t just words and that they came from his heart.

“It was a magical time, full of late nights talking amid the buzz of the gaslight or sitting under the stars on the flat of his roof. Everything was so beautiful: the brilliance of the stars; the giant moon that hung in the sky; and, of course, Khalid. ‘You see how close the star comes to the moon?’ he asked me one night. ‘Well, you are like that star and I am like that moon, but soon that star will begin to fall away from the moon and slowly that star will disappear into the darkness and become lost to the moon.’

“We both sat silently on the carpet that had been laid out on the rooftop for us, and he gently reached for my hand—brave now because only the tea boy remained with us, to fill our cups when needed, and the boy needed the money too much to tell anyone.

“It was a very sweet moment, but it was also a very sad one because we both knew the story of the star and the moon was true. I did have to leave soon because my job was coming to an end. And even though we tried to treasure every moment we had left together, we felt the days slipping away from us like sand through our fingers.

“Eventually, and because the world does keep on turning and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, the day came when I had to return to Kabul, and then to London. Khalid traveled with us, and we were able to steal a few more days together in the capital before I left. We even went to your district one night.

“As soon as I saw Paghman, driving past the old golf course and over the bridge, I was amazed by how pretty it was. It felt like I could have been visiting somewhere in the Mediterranean, which is a warm place where people from my country go on their holidays. And it was in Paghman, as we sat on a stone wall in front of the lake, that Khalid looked at me and whispered that he loved me with all his heart. For the first time I told him that I loved him too, but then his eyes turned sad and, staring hard at me, he said, ‘Thank you for that, but I know I love you more. You are my world, Georgie.’ It was a beautiful thing to say, because I suppose that’s all anybody ever wants in life—to find someone who thinks the world of them.

“Then, as we carried on talking, he said there may be times in the future when I wouldn’t hear from him and that I shouldn’t become ‘hungry for other men’ when that happened. I laughed at that because I thought he’d said ‘angry for other men,’ but as I did he looked at me and said, ‘I’m serious, Georgie. You are my woman now. If you leave me, I will kill you.’ And of course I laughed again, but although he smiled I couldn’t be sure that his eyes were doing the same. In fact I still can’t be sure that he was joking, even today.

“Anyway, after I returned to London my life felt pretty empty. No one talks about the moon and stars in my country, and everything seemed so dull and ordinary compared to Afghanistan. I think I became a little obsessed, and I began to fill my time with everything Afghan: watching every documentary about your country, reading every book, helping out at a local community center for asylum seekers, even learning Dari. I chose Dari because it was a lot easier than Pashto, and besides, Pashtuns are so clever they know both languages. But I was waiting, you see, waiting and killing time until I found another job to take me back to Khalid and this country I had so quickly fallen in love with.

“Although it was almost like torture in those first months away, Khalid would call me maybe twice a week, staying on the phone for hours at a time, and we would playfully discuss the future and how he wanted to have at least five children with me and how we would spend our days drinking pomegranate juice in the Shinwar sun.

“Needless to say, within six months I couldn’t stand the separation any longer, and I returned to Afghanistan just for a holiday. For two weeks I stayed at Khalid’s home in Shinwar and his new house in Jalalabad. We spent the days traveling around, visiting old friends and making new ones. I came to know his family, and he showed me all the projects he was working on. We walked through giant fields filled with tiny ankle-tall saplings that would one day become fruit trees, olive trees, and perfume bushes. Everything was just as I had left it, and more, and I felt the pull even more strongly to return to him once and for all.

“When I flew back home again I applied for every job going, and in the meantime Khalid kept up his calls, whispering his love over satellite phone lines. But then, as the months dragged on, Khalid’s calls began to fade, first to once a week, then to once a month, until, by the time a job offer did eventually arrive and I’d packed my bags for Afghanistan, I hadn’t spoken to him for three months. I was livid with him, but I couldn’t allow myself to believe that everything he had told me was lies, so I carried on with my plan and returned to the country, without even telling him.

“For that first month, I lived in Kabul under a cloud and cried tears like you wouldn’t believe, wondering what I’d done and thinking it was all one big giant mistake. Then one day the doorbell rang at the house I was staying at, and it was Ismerai. I’d first met him in Shinwar and had seen him again during my holiday. Even so, I was pretty shocked, although overjoyed, to see him. He told me that Khalid had sent him to track me down after one of their friends had spotted me on the street one day waiting for my car. ‘Kabul is a big city,’ Ismerai told me, ‘but if we want to find you we can.’

“However, even though Ismerai had dutifully found me, Khalid still didn’t call. It was two weeks later that I was summoned to Jalalabad and brought to his house like a naughty schoolgirl.

“When I arrived, Khalid’s hall was full of guests so our talk was careful and polite, but when the men finally grew tired of their curiosity and left for their own homes, Khalid turned to look at me as the doors banged shut and his eyes burned bright with fury. ‘You come into my country, and you don’t even tell me?’ he shouted. ‘I know you are angry because I didn’t call you, and I know what I did was unacceptable, but what you have done is even more unacceptable to me! If I came to your country, the first thing I would do is come to your door.’

“He was right, of course, and I felt ashamed. I tried to argue back, but Khalid was so concentrated on the offense I’d caused him and his own sense of outrage that he wouldn’t budge.

“Thankfully, the next morning he was calmer, and the day after that he was calmer still, until we were laughing and joking and talking of our love in the way we used to. Even so, I sensed he was different in some way I couldn’t yet understand; not quite the man he used to be. But I ignored the feeling and let my love continue to grow for him until it was the only thing left holding my life together.

“But maybe I should have listened to that little noise in my head rather than the love in my heart, because nearly three years later he still doesn’t phone as often as I would like, as often as I need to hear him, and no matter how many times he tells me he’s sorry and how many promises he makes to try harder, within two weeks he does exactly the same again. And that’s why I’m not sure he was all that happy to see me last night because I told him that if he continued to treat me like this he would push me away forever. I would leave him.

“I love Khalid, and when I’m with him and I look into his eyes I know he loves me too, but sometimes that love seems so far away and almost impossible to hold on to.”

Georgie lit a cigarette and stared over at the goats filling their bellies with dry grass.

“Why don’t you just get married?” I asked, thinking this might be the ideal solution for everyone because Haji Khan would have to come home at least once a week on “ladies’ night,” the Thursday before the Friday holiday when the men return from their compounds to spend time with their families.

Georgie turned to me, tears burning her eyes red. “I’m a Godless kafir, Fawad. Khalid’s a Muslim. How is that even possible in today’s Afghanistan?”

12

LIKE THE RAINS of spring that come to wash away the gray of winter, once Georgie had cried her tears, the world around us brightened.

Baba Gul, who was as thin as a stick and seemed to laugh a lot for a man on the fast track to Hell, eventually arrived before the sun dropped, and before the guard in charge of our lives grew fidgety to leave for Jalalabad. Disappearing into the hut that might or might not be his by the time Georgie visited again, Baba Gul was shown some paperwork, which he might or might not have been able to read, and my friend talked to him about his goats while I spent the last of the day in the fields with Mulallah, who seemed a lot happier once her father returned without having lost anything else they owned to a game of cards.

As we chased the goats around the field, it soon became clear that Mulallah wasn’t like other girls I knew—not that I knew that many. She was strong in her eyes and hard in her talk, and, more amazingly for a girl, she was a very fast runner, which is a good talent to have in Afghanistan. As she raced through the fields with her red scarf floating from her neck, I thought she looked like a firework.

I really hoped to see Mulallah again when Georgie returned to talk to her father once the winter had left us, and I don’t know why, but I decided under that hill as we tumbled in the grass and she helped me clean the goat shit off my knees that I wouldn’t tell Jamilla about her.

“You and Mulallah looked like you were having fun,” Georgie remarked when we were back in the car.

I saw the twinkle in her eyes and knew she was trying to tease me.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “She’s actually quite good fun—for a girl.”

“Oooh,” Georgie sang, “you lurve her. You want to kiss her, hold her, and marry her.”

“Georgie,” I said, shaking my head, “sometimes for a woman as old as my mother you are very immature.”

Once we got back to the big house, Haji Khan also seemed to be in a better mood than I was expecting, given Georgie’s talk of hot words the night before, and after kicking off our shoes and pulling off our boots we spent the evening filling our bellies with food so pretty it could have come from a painting. It was a massive feast of chopped green and red salad, bowls of creamy white yogurt, fried chicken coated with orange-colored spices, rice and meat, dark green spinach, and warm naan bread followed by fizzing Pepsi and plates piled high with yellow bananas, red apples, and pink pomegranate seeds.

After the meal—when we were all able to sit straight again after all the food we had eaten—we took turns playing carambul, with Georgie coming out the clear winner after Haji Khan missed a couple of easy shots because she was a guest and he didn’t want “to give her another reason to complain.” We then slouched on the cushions wrapped in furry blankets to watch a comedy show on Tolo TV, and I drank so much green tea my stomach grew round as a ball.

But though I laughed with everyone else at the jokes on the television, under my blanket with its red swirls and bright yellow flowers my heart was breaking because every time Georgie’s words came running back into my brain I felt them trickle down my throat to tear at my insides, as if I’d eaten broken glass for dinner.

It was bad enough that she drank alcohol and smoked like a National Army soldier, and that she had come to my country in search of a moon that spent its days hiding in the sun, but it had never even crossed my mind that she had no God. I’d always thought she was a follower of the prophet Jesus. But to have nothing, nothing at all—not to believe in anything—well, this was the worst thing she could have possibly told me.

Georgie was my friend and I loved her as much as I’d ever loved anyone, but she was going to Hell for all eternity, that was for sure. And in Hell a single day feels like a million years. My mother once described it as a place of terrible grief and sadness where the flames had been fanned for a thousand years until everything burned red. After that, Hell was fanned for another thousand years until it grew white-hot, and then it was fanned for a thousand years more until it became nothing but black. As Georgie’s words kept rushing back into my mind, I couldn’t stop the sight of her pretty face screaming in pain, the fire eating at her skin, and her mouth full of the fruit of the thorny tree that would boil like oil in her belly, bringing unimaginable agony.

It’s true that pretty much all of us would be spending at least some time in Hell unless we were the best of all mullahs, because there are a lot of rules in Islam and not all of them are that easy to follow. But Allah is merciful, so even though Ismerai would go to Hell for his smoking, Baba Gul for his gambling, me for my drinking and thieving, and Haji Khan for falling in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife, as well as for his possible drug empire, all of us would get out eventually and find our way to Paradise because we were Muslims. But Georgie had no chance. She had no God, and therefore she had no one willing or able to save her. And she couldn’t even climb out to the light, because if you throw a rock into Hell it takes seventy years to hit the bottom. Hell is so big it will never become full with all the world’s sinners, and you can never escape from it. Even worse than that, Georgie would have to suffer alone because all her friends would eventually leave her. Even the warlord Zardad and his testicle-eating man-dog would get to Paradise in the end.

And when you know all this, as I do, it’s hard to look into the eyes of the person you love and not see her death looking back at you.

“I’m praying for you,” I whispered to Georgie the next morning over breakfast after a night of terrible worrying.

She looked up from her eggs and smiled. “That’s nice, Fawad, thank you.”

I shook my head. She so didn’t get it.

Also joining us for breakfast that morning was Haji Khan, who walked down from his bedroom looking like he’d just got off a film set. His face was relaxed and handsome, and his light gray salwar kameez was covered by a darker gray sweater that looked as soft as clouds.

I watched him carefully, looking for signs of more hot words during the night, but if he was worried about losing Georgie he appeared to be putting a brave face on it—although I did notice he was teasing her a little more than usual, as well as kissing her ass with compliments that made her cheeks red, and holding eyes with her more than was strictly allowed in our society.

As I watched, I prayed inside my head that Haji Khan would try to change his ways, as he was always promising to do, because I was sure that if he really tried, and if he could charm the birds from the trees like my mother said, he could easily make Georgie take Islam to her heart. He just had to love her enough—and phone her more often.

After breakfast, two cups of tea, and four cigarettes, Haji Khan disappeared from the house in a cloud of dust thrown up by his three Land Cruisers, and Georgie headed back upstairs to take a shower, so I passed the rest of the morning in the garden with Ahmad, who had arrived shortly before his father left. Together we teased the fighting birds that sat in little wooden cages around the edges of the lawn as Ismerai watched us, smoking.

I was itching to talk to Ahmad about Georgie and his father, but I couldn’t. Although we all knew what the two of them were up to, it couldn’t ever be a matter for discussion because that would be like accepting it, which we couldn’t really, because we were all trying to be good Muslims and, more than that, pretending our friends were good Muslims too. And I couldn’t talk about Georgie being a total unbeliever because it was too shameful for her and I had at least to try to protect her from the bad thoughts everyone would surely have of her if they knew the full horrible truth. So we basically talked about all the creatures we had burned using the force of the sun and broken glass.

As Ahmad was telling me about the time he had seen a scorpion commit suicide—someone had placed it on a metal dish set on top of a fire, and realizing it had no chance of escape, it turned its tail on itself and stabbed poison into its body—a car horn beeped outside the tall gates, which were quickly opened to allow a black Land Cruiser with an eagle painted on the back window into the driveway.

“Ah, my uncle returns,” Ahmad said by way of explanation, getting to his feet.

As the car doors opened, a man much smaller than Haji Khan got out of the front seat and moved toward Ismerai, who was nearest to him. He took his hand, smiling wide and revealing a dark hole where one of his bottom teeth had once sat.

“Welcome back, Haji Jawid,” Ismerai greeted him.

“Thank you. Is my brother here?” Haji Jawid’s face was clean-shaven and pinched at the cheeks, as if he was sucking in.

“No, he’s out,” Ismerai told him, “taking care of some business.”

“I see.”

Haji Jawid’s eyes, which were as hollow as his cheeks, moved to the steps at the front of the house where a smiling Georgie had appeared. He returned her smile, but because I was standing close to him when he turned I clearly heard him mutter to Ismerai, “I see my brother is still busy with his whore, then.” Ismerai quickly looked in my direction, his face closing in a frown, but he said nothing so I moved forward in anger.

Ahmad caught me by the hand before my foot was even able to take one step. “Leave it,” he whispered as Haji Jawid moved across to the house, where Georgie held out her hands in welcome. And I did. But I heard polite laughter come from their direction as they touched, and it made me even angrier because Georgie would never have talked to him if she knew what he really thought of her.

“I’m sorry about that,” Ahmad said, letting go of my arm. “He didn’t know you were a friend of Georgie’s. He probably thought you were a friend of mine.”

“That’s hardly the point, is it?” I asked.

“No,” Ahmad admitted. “What he said was unacceptable, but what can I do? He is my uncle.”

“And does he talk of Georgie like that to Haji Khan?”

“No, of course not,” Ahmad replied, shocked. “He wouldn’t dare.”

After Haji Jawid arrived we all gathered to sit in the warmth of the house because the cold wind of Kabul had now drifted over to Jalalabad and it covered our bones with an unhappy feel that came with Haji Khan’s brother. As the adults talked in the raised room, I watched from the sides on one of the white sofas with Ahmad, who, I was happy to find out, didn’t seem to be a fan of his uncle.

“He’s the reason my father was in a bad mood,” he explained. “The police had him for most of yesterday.”

“Why? What had he done?”

“Who knows? But whatever it was, I heard it cost my father a lot of money to get him out.”

I nodded at the information and felt the warmth of new friendship rush in my blood because of it. It was unusual to hear someone speak of their relatives in such a way to a complete stranger and I guessed Ahmad must really hate his uncle—which was good, because I did too.

“By rights, my uncle should be the head of the family,” Ahmad continued. “He’s older, you see. But he didn’t fight against the Russians or the Taliban, and he was in a Pakistani jail for years for killing a man. He brought a lot of bad things to our family’s door, so when my grandfather passed away it was my father who stepped into his shoes. Haji Jawid hates that, you can see it in his face, but there’s nothing he can do about it because it’s my father who has the support of the family and the respect of the community, it’s my father who is called on to fix disputes, and it’s him, not Haji Jawid, who keeps the family together and helps the poor. All Haji Jawid does is spend the money my father gives him.”

As the adults sat chatting, a line of men with large stomachs ballooning under their clothes drifted in and out of the house to slap Haji Jawid on the back and laugh together in quiet corners of the room; but although the buzz of easy conversation filled the hall, it felt like we were all waiting for something. And when the metal gates screamed outside and the Land Cruisers roared into the drive to begin their dance on the grass, I realized what it was. Haji Khan.

As he swept into his house, everything went still, as if the very room was holding its breath. I watched as his brother got to his feet. The laziness instantly slipped from his smile, and his eyes moved nervously around him as he watched Haji Khan greet the guests who had arrived at the house to swap talk with Haji Jawid. After greeting Georgie with a formal handshake because of the number of men now in the room, Haji Khan turned to his brother and nodded his head toward a room across the hallway. Haji Jawid dropped his eyes in respect and allowed his brother to lead him away from the group. We all watched as the door closed behind them.

By the look on Haji Khan’s face, his brother wouldn’t be cracking any more jokes tonight.

13

THE DAY AFTER Haji Khan’s brother turned up, Georgie and I left for Kabul, where the snow had arrived in giant flakes. On the streets there were more men carrying shovels than guns as everyone spent the day clearing flat rooftops to stop them from collapsing. It was always amazing to me how something so light it tickles your nose as it falls can grow into something so heavy it can bring the whole world crashing down upon your head. But I loved the winter—especially as I now had socks to wear thanks to the wages my mother was earning at Georgie’s house—and because everything looked so different from when I’d left it, all white and clean and new, it seemed like a million years since cholera hit my mother in the stomach and moved her to Homeira’s house.

And when I walked through the door of our home, I could have burst my insides open with happiness as I saw my mother run toward me to gather me into her arms and smother me in her huge love.

“I told your mother I was taking you to Jalalabad for a little holiday,” Georgie had explained as we weaved our way through the mountains back to Kabul. “She probably doesn’t need to know the full details of why we went…”

“Yes, quite right,” I’d agreed.

But when my mother wrapped me in her arms and I felt her heartbeat next to mine and she asked what I had been up to, I plain forgot.

“We went to Jalalabad because I needed a break after I stabbed a Frenchman in the ass,” I told her.

I saw the look of shock appear on my mother’s face, and I quickly moved to calm her.

“Oh it’s okay, don’t worry. I thought he was attacking May, but Georgie says they are really very good friends and it was only because he was really, really drunk that he was fighting on top of her, and although he needed stitches he didn’t call the police.”

Behind me I heard a groan, and I turned to see James doubled up and holding the top of his head with both hands.

After my outburst, my mother, Georgie, James, and May all disappeared into the main house to have what James later described as a “peace summit.” So, with nothing else to do, I walked to Pir Hederi’s, where I found him sitting in front of the cigarette counter by the bukhari with Jamilla snuggled up against the warm fur of Dog. She was holding a mobile phone.

“Ah, good, you’re back!” Pir shouted as I struggled to greet them while trying to stop Dog from sniffing at my boy’s place. “What do you think?” he added, grabbing a long piece of paper from behind the desk and unrolling it. “It’s a sign for the window. I had it made in Shahr-e Naw to bring in the foreigners.”

As Pir Hederi rolled out the plastic paper, big blue letters appeared in English. They read “Free Delivry Survice for foods stuffs. Call 0793 267 82224. We Also Sell Cak.”

“What’s ‘cak’?” I asked.

“Sweets, biscuits, you know. Eid is coming. I thought it might be a selling point.”

“Oh, you mean ‘cake.’ ”

“Cake, cak, what’s the difference?”

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“Good. Here, help me glue it to the window.”

Despite our sign offering free delivery and cak to the nation, our new business plan got off to quite a slow start, and Jamilla and I spent most of the day looking at the mobile phone, which stubbornly refused to ring.

I was now properly beginning to understand why Georgie got so annoyed.

“We need to advertise,” Pir Hederi stated as we closed up early because the snow was trapping even our regular customers inside and we’d run out of wood for the bukhari. It seemed he was turning into quite the businessman now he had a phone in the shop.

“Advertise? Like on the television?” I asked, excited by the thought of TV men coming to film us.

“Not on the television. Who do you think I am? President Hamid Karzai? I’m not made of money, you know.”

“Then how?”

“Don’t worry, I have an idea,” he said with a wink, which looked pretty creepy coming from his milky eyes.

The next day I found out what Pir Hederi’s great idea was as he placed two wooden boards connected with string over my shoulders. On the front he had written in paint “Free Delivry” and our phone number; on the back it read “We Sell Cak.”

“Are you joking me?” I asked.

“Do you see me laughing?” he answered before practically shoving me out the door to walk the freezing streets of Wazir Akbar Khan.

As I trudged through the snow I had to accept that this was probably the most humiliating experience of my life. My cheeks burned even hotter than the time when Jahid told Jamilla I’d pissed my pants after we’d had a competition to see who could drink the most water without going to the toilet. With every tenth step I took, another guard would appear from inside his hut to make some crack about my new costume and whether I might also be hired as a table, and the whole shameful experience wasn’t helped in the slightest by James, who passed me on the way back from wherever he had been and started laughing so hard he nearly wet his own pants.

“Well, at least you won’t be contravening any codes of the Advertising Standards Authority,” he shouted as I carried on walking.

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, and wandered off in the opposite direction toward the part of Wazir where the only Westerners trawling the streets were the ones looking for Chinese whores.

Thankfully, the next day I was unexpectedly relieved of my new job as Pir Hederi turned up grumbling that he’d had “a devil of a night.”

“It was past midnight, and the mobile phone wouldn’t stop ringing,” he moaned. “Every time I answered it there was some damn foreigner on the other end asking for ‘cak.’ I switched it off in the end.”

“I think I know why,” I offered, coming over to sit by Jamilla close to the warmth of the fire. “James told me last night that when you read the sign out loud it sounds like the English word cack.”

“And what does that mean?” Pir Hederi asked, wiping at his nose with a dirty handkerchief.

“It means we sell shit,” I replied.

14

SEVENTY DAYS AFTER the end of Ramazan, a couple of weeks after the foreigners’ New Year, and the day after the pilgrims return from hajj, coloring the roads in cars decorated with glittering tinsel and flowers, Afghanistan celebrates Eid-e Qorban. This is one of our favorite festivals, and Muslims celebrate it in memory of Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son for Allah. For three days our country of tears and war becomes a place of fun, beauty, and full bellies, with everyone dressing in their finest clothes and those who can afford it slaughtering their best sheep, cows, or goats as a symbol of Ibrahim’s sacrifice. As it is written in the Koran, a large portion of the meat is given to the poor while the rest is served up for the family meal, to which friends and other relatives are invited.

And even though Eid is always brilliant, this year was better than I ever remembered it being because it brought an armful of surprises into our lives that made the celebration come and go quicker than usual.

First of all, Georgie announced she had given up smoking.

“A New Year’s resolution,” she explained.

“Bit late, isn’t it?” remarked James.

“I had to get used to the idea,” Georgie snapped back, hitting him on the head with the empty pen she was now spending her days sucking on.

Personally, I didn’t care whether her “resolution” was late or not. I took it as a sign from God that my prayers were working and that Georgie was finally moving in the right direction and away from the flames of Hell that were waiting to eat her.

The next surprise was the fat-bottomed sheep that suddenly turned up in our yard, along with a local butcher to perform the halal act of slaughter. As we all gathered to watch him pronounce the name of God and slit the animal’s throat, May turned her back on the river of blood that quickly turned the snow red.

“Christ, it’s enough to make you vegetarian,” she muttered.

“I thought all you lesbians were anyway,” James joked, earning himself a kick in the shins.

It appeared that in the West, if you were annoyed by just about anything you simply beat the nearest man to you.

My next happy surprise was Haji Khan’s phone call to Georgie, which sent her running up to her room. She emerged thirty minutes later with the stupid grin covering her face that she seemed to save especially for these occasions.

Then Rachel arrived at the house looking fresh and pretty and bringing a similar stupid look to James’s face.

That afternoon Massoud also turned up, and I went with him to take cuts of freshly hacked meat to the homes of Jamilla and Spandi, whose families filled my hands with sugared almonds and papered sweets to take back to the foreigners.

One of the biggest surprises came on the second day of Eid when my aunt arrived at our house with her husband, my cousin Jahid, and their two other kids trailing behind. Although it is expected that Muslims should use the festival to visit their relations, I wasn’t sure this applied to relatives you had recently tried to kill. So, naturally, I was shocked when my mother’s family turned up out of the blue, though this was nothing compared to the shock of seeing my aunt again because it looked like someone had stuck a pin in her skin, letting all the air out and leaving her a shriveled copy of her old self.

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

IT 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.”