Born Under a Million Shadows

16

WHEN GEORGIE LOST her baby, it was as if a little something inside all of us died, even those of us who didn’t know a baby was coming in the first place.

But because Allah is merciful, even to unbelievers like Georgie, he took away her baby and gave her Dr. Hugo instead.

Of course, it took Georgie a long time to see the good doctor because her eyes were clouded by tears and bad dreams for weeks after the baby left her. She was like a ghost living in our house, a white space of sadness that ate all the happiness from our lives—and for a while I was convinced she would leave us too.

After James brought Georgie back from the hospital, he walked her to her bed and gathered the rest of us in the front room downstairs to tell us she had suffered something called a “miscarriage.” James explained that although there was nothing wrong with her body and that a miscarriage was quite normal for women whose babies are still so tiny in their stomachs, Georgie’s mind would be broken for a while and she would need all of our help to make it better again.

So for the next few weeks that’s what we all tried to do.

James spoke to Georgie’s boss at the goat-combing company, and she was allowed to stay at home and still get paid. May forgot about the Frenchman and stayed by her friend’s side in the evenings, reading to her and trying to get her dressed. During the day my mother took on the job of sitting by her bed as May went out to do her engineering. She spent most of her hours up there just stroking Georgie’s hair and begging her to eat. But Georgie’s mouth was too full of grief to make room for food, and it was a daily battle even to get her to eat some Happy Cow cheese, and she used to love Happy Cow.

In the meantime—in between school, which had started again, and working at Pir Hederi’s shop—I stood at the doorway or sat on the floor of Georgie’s bedroom, watching the woman who had given me and my mother a new life get thinner and thinner until her pale face collapsed and her arms and legs became twigs under her clothes.

Finally, when it looked like a small breeze might be enough to snap her in two, James fetched Dr. Hugo to our house, who seemed to be a friend of his and who he said could help, although I had my doubts. Tall and a little thin himself with dark hair that was short but somehow messy and eyes as blue as sky, Hugo arrived dressed in jeans and a big coat that wasn’t even white. I’d seen the health advertisements on television; I knew what doctors were supposed to look like. Hugo didn’t even come close. However, James and May seemed a lot happier when a little later he came back downstairs and revealed that he had given Georgie “something to help her sleep.” I would have preferred it if he had given her “something to help her eat,” but what did I know? I was just a kid.

“She just needs time,” my mother said as we sat in the kitchen preparing chicken soup for Georgie. ‘She is very sad, and sadness doesn’t just disappear overnight. Georgie loved her baby very much because it offered her hope, and now she needs time to get used to the idea that her baby has gone and that her hope may have gone with it.”

“What do you mean ‘hope’?” I asked, carefully ladling the hot soup into a bowl.

My mother sighed, took the spoon from my fingers, and knelt down to take my face in her hands.

“I suppose Georgie hoped that the baby would mean the father would be in her life forever, Fawad. It is the kind of hope that nests in the heart of a woman very much in love. I pray that when you are older, if you ever see this hope in the eyes of a woman close to you, you take the very best care of it that you can because this hope is the most precious thing and the greatest gift God can give to a man. It means you are truly loved, son.”

Although we all knew who the father of Georgie’s baby was, we never talked about it in the house. It was as if the baby had been made by magic and taken by God, because it was wrong. There were rules to follow, and, although it doesn’t happen often in Afghanistan, if you break those rules you must be punished.

And Georgie was being punished: she had lost her baby, she had lost her hope, and she had lost her appetite. I was convinced that very soon we would lose her too—our punishment for having guarded Georgie and Haji Khan’s secret.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pir Hederi stopped loading the plastic bags on the counter to turn, almost, in my direction. “You speak less than a mute these days.”

“It’s nothing,” I replied. “I’m just feeling quiet, that’s all.”

“I may be blind, Fawad, but I’m not stupid,” he answered back. Then, moving to the doorway to hand me the bags of shopping, he slipped one hundred afs into the pocket of my coat. “Cheer up, boy. Here’s a bonus for all the delivery stuff.”

“Great,” I joked. “All of two dollars. I’ll go right ahead and retire then.”

“You ungrateful donkey!”

Pir playfully reached out to hit me on the shoulder, but as I’d started getting onto my bike he punched me in the head instead—a hazard of the job, I guess, when you work for a blind man.

It had been a long time since I’d made any kind of joke, and although it felt good to let the air of one into my brain, the guilt soon followed. I wondered how I could be such a bad friend to Georgie when I could return home at any time and find her stretched out on her bed, cold dead.

Despite all of her ways, Georgie wasn’t an Afghan like me and my mother, and therefore she wasn’t as strong as us. Just this one death of a baby that didn’t even have a name could be the end of her. And I couldn’t speak of my fears to anyone outside our house because it would have been wrong in so many ways. Georgie wasn’t married, and she was going to have a baby. Women used to get stoned for that kind of behavior in my country; in some parts they still do. And it wouldn’t only be Haji Jawid calling her a whore for not taking care of her body and for having sex with a man before marriage. So I couldn’t explain my bad mood, and I couldn’t hide it. For once in my life, I sort of wished I was a girl because girls are experts at hiding things, and as they never speak straight you hardly ever know what they’re thinking.

“Well, I’m glad you had such a good time,” Jamilla huffed one day after I accidentally told her about chasing Baba Gul’s goats with Mulallah. Despite her words, she didn’t look at all glad, and I realized something was up when she hardly spoke to me for the rest of the day. If I asked her a question, she would simply say, “Why don’t you go and ask Mulallah?”

My mother was exactly the same. Even though I felt she was beginning to like Shir Ahmad because he was now reading books about computers and going to a special class in the afternoons, whenever I asked her about it she would say, “My only wish is for your happiness, Fawad,” which I knew wasn’t strictly true because she had started wearing makeup on her eyes and taking better care of her clothes, and I wasn’t really bothered by what she looked like.

In fact, Georgie was the only woman I knew who seemed to talk real. After all, she had told me about her love for Haji Khan, and also that May was a lesbian. So to think she might just fade away into nothing was unbearable, especially as giving up smoking wasn’t really enough to get her out of Hell.

Therefore, when I’d dropped off the last bag of shopping close to a house by the hospital and saw him standing there in the street—as clear as day, laughing with a fat man and surrounded by all of his guards—a hot redness colored my sight, and suddenly I was off my bike and on top of him.

“You bastard! You lying fucking bastard! You’re killing her!”

My fists pounded at his chest and I felt his body tense at the blows, but he didn’t move, not one muscle, so I kicked and I beat him even harder, using all of my heart and all of my hate and letting it explode on top of him.

“She’s dying, and you’re laughing!” I screamed. “You’re killing her, and you don’t even care, you ugly bastard whore-fucking camel cock! You’re killing her!”

And I shoved myself away from him and ran.

17

IRAN FROM WAZIR Akbar Khan, stumbling through the chaos of people and cars, over the bridge covering the river, and into the dark of Old Makroyan. I didn’t know where I was running to until I arrived there, and it was the house of Spandi.

“You did what?”

“I beat up Haji Khan,” I repeated.

Spandi was sitting on the steps of his block, fiddling with a mobile phone he had recently bought. It played a Bollywood love song when it rang, it had a camera fixed into it, and it was pretty impressive, but he put it down when I burst into his sight gulping for breath with tears covering my face.

“You beat up Haji Khan, and you’ve still got your legs?”

“Looks like it…”

Spandi let out a soft whistle between his teeth.

“Ho, that’s crazy. Why did you do it?”

“Because he…” As I began to explain, the picture of what I was about to say came running into my head: Georgie on her bed, the baby dead on her skirt, the promises that lay broken all around her, and I knew I couldn’t betray her, not even to Spandi, who knew at least half the story. “Because he was joking with someone,” I stated finally, knowing how stupid it sounded even as I said it.

“Shit,” replied my friend. “It must have been a hell of a bad joke.”

“Yeah, it was,” I admitted.

For the next three hours Spandi and I talked about the possibility of me being a dead man walking and whether my attack on his boss would be bad for Spandi’s business. We both agreed, with black hearts, that I should look for somewhere new to live and Spandi should find another job.

“There are some empty flats around here that we could hide you in, and I can bring you food once or twice a day while I look for something more permanent,” Spandi suggested, warming to the idea after his initial shock and despair at the thought of having to find a new can of herbs. “You’ll need a gun as well.”

“I don’t know how to use a gun,” I said, frightened but excited by the thought.

“How hard can it be? We’re Afghans; it probably comes more naturally than riding a bike.”

“My bike!” I shouted, suddenly remembering I’d left it with its wheels spinning somewhere in Wazir as I launched my attack. “I forgot it when I ran off.”

“Damn shame,” Spandi sympathized, patting me on the shoulder. “That was a fine bike.”

“Maybe I should go back and look for it.”

Spandi shrugged. “You’ll need wheels,” he admitted. “I should also say good-bye to my mother,” I added, thinking of her for the first time since I’d punched Haji Khan in public and imagining her sadness as the last of her children left her.

“Haji Khan might be watching the house,” Spandi warned. “Maybe you should wait until it is dark… and we’ve got you a gun.”

“And how long will that take?”

“I don’t know,” Spandi admitted. “I’ve never tried to get a gun before.”

“No, I’ll have to risk it,” I decided, getting to my feet, my mother’s face now the only picture in my mind.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Spandi asked, which I thought was kind of him.

“No,” I told him after thinking about it a short while. “I’ll move faster alone. Besides, Haji Khan might be looking for you too because you’re a friend of mine.”

“Shit! I never thought of that.” Spandi got to his feet. “Do you think I should hide too?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It might be a good idea.”

It was practically dark when I made my way back to Wazir Akbar Khan. Now that I was alone, my bravery had disappeared, so I walked home frightened to the point of one hundred percent scared—ducking into the shadows every time a Land Cruiser came into view, thinking one of them might belong to Haji Khan and imagining it pulling up close to me with its window rolled down so that someone could shoot me in the head.

As I turned the corner into our street, the fear that had been itching at the surface of my skin took on the life of a giant when I saw his three Land Cruisers parked outside the house.

I immediately spun on my feet to run away from the ambush and certain death—and straight into the legs of Ismerai.

“Whay!” he grunted, grabbing me by the shoulders.

“Get off me! Get off me!” I shouted, fighting at the massive hands now trying to hold me. “Help! He’s going to murder me!” I screamed, and a handful of people stopped what they were doing to watch Ismerai carry out his crime.

“Don’t be stupid!” Ismerai barked in my ear. “Nobody’s trying to murder you!”

“Yeah, not while everyone’s looking you’re not! Help! Murderer!”

Ismerai shook my body roughly, making my eyes bounce sorely in my head and bringing me to a stop.

“Listen to me! Listen to me, now!” he ordered. “We were worried about you, Fawad. All of us were, and that includes Haji Khan. He sent me to Pir Hederi’s shop to look for you.”

“Yeah, to find me and kill me!” I interrupted, though with less strength than before as Ismerai’s words began to walk around my brain, looking for a place to stay.

“Not to kill you, to bring you home. That’s all, Fawad. We just want you home.”

I stopped struggling and looked hard into Ismerai’s eyes. They didn’t look like the eyes of a killer. They looked like the eyes of a man who liked to tell jokes and smoke hashish.

“Honestly, son. Nobody is angry with you. We’re worried, that’s all. It’s been a shock for all of us.”

I looked at him again, searching his face for any signs of a trap. “Okay,” I said finally, deciding he was probably telling the truth. Still, a boy can’t be too careful, and as he took me by the hand I turned to the people still hanging around us and shouted, “If I’m dead tomorrow, he did it!”

“For the love of God,” Ismerai hissed, pulling me away.

And I let him drag me home.

As we walked past the guards, one of whom saluted as I approached, and through the gate of the house, the first thing I saw was my bike leaning against the wall. Haji Khan must have brought it with him after I ran away from Wazir.

The second thing I saw was the worried face of my mother.

Ismerai let her hug me and whisper a few words that melted together in a dozen ways to say “Don’t worry, son.” He then asked her to bring us some tea and led me away into the garden.

There was no sign of Haji Khan, but as his uncle was here as well as his army of guards, I guessed he must be upstairs with Georgie, no doubt planting more false promises into her already broken head.

Inviting me to sit first, Ismerai settled into the seat opposite me and lit up one of his cigarettes. His face looked sadder and older than I remembered, his eyes becoming slowly pinched by time and heavy lines.

“He does love her, Fawad.”

Ismerai looked at me as he spoke, but I said nothing because I didn’t believe him.

“I know you probably don’t believe me right now,” he continued, “but it’s true. I’ve known Haji Khan for most of my life. We played as children, we fought as men, and we’ve both known and understood love.”

“Then why does he never phone her, Ismerai?” I could hear the sound of tears breaking in my voice as worry, and relief at not being killed, tugged at the bottom of my throat. “Why does he make her so unhappy that her baby died and she can’t eat anymore? Why?”

Ismerai sighed, releasing the smoke from between his lips, as my mother arrived with the tea. After saying his thanks, he waited for her to walk away before answering. “You know our culture, son. This is not the West, where men and women live their lives as one person. We live in a society of men, where the women wait indoors and look after the family. The men aren’t used to answering to women, and they’re certainly not used to checking in with them either. And though Haji is a freethinker and he knows the ways of the West, he is still an Afghan man. And he is too old to change that part of him now, even if he wanted to, even for a woman like Georgie. And even though Georgie is like a member of our family and she knows our ways as good as anyone, she is still a foreigner and her heart and her expectations remain from her own country.”

“But she tries so hard…,” I said, feeling the need to defend her.

“I know she does, son. We all realize Georgie makes sacrifices for Haji, and her respect for him makes her the person she is and the person we love. But although we know she stays inside the house more than other foreigners and she takes care of herself more than other Western women who drink and party here like it is Europe, she is still a world away from us and always will be. Every time Haji spends evenings with Georgie, every time she comes to his house, he takes a risk. He also commits a terrible sin that rests heavy in his heart for days after. The fact is that people talk, Fawad, and when you’re a man whose standing in the community is as important as Haji’s, talk is dangerous. It is not something that can be easily ignored. Power is a difficult balance of wealth, honor, and respect. If you lose just one of these elements, you risk losing it all.”

“So he’s scared of losing his power and his money, then? That’s what you’re saying. That’s how much Haji Khan loves Georgie?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” Ismerai corrected, taking up his tea and blowing hard, which isn’t really allowed in Islam because of the germs. “Haji loves Georgie. But what can he really give her? And what can she give him? No, what they should have done a long time ago is give each other up, but they were too scared or too stubborn to let go, and now both of them are trapped in a world where they have no future. They can’t walk forward and they can’t walk back, so they stand still, holding on to each other with no place to go.”

“But why do they have no future if they love each other?”

“What kind of future do you think they could seriously have? Marriage? Here in Afghanistan?” Ismerai laughed harshly and relit the cigarette that had died in his fingers.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s impossible, you know that, Fawad. They are too different, and both of them are far too strong to change for the other. Haji once described Georgie as a bird, a bright, beautiful bird whose very song brings a smile to your face and happiness to your heart. Would you have him cage that bird within our customs and traditions? Do you imagine, even if she converted to Islam, that Georgie could live as the wife of a high Pashtun man, locked behind the walls of her home, unable to go out, unable to see her male friends, unable to work? It would kill her. You know that.”

“They could move…,” I offered, silently admitting that Ismerai was right and that if she did marry Haji Khan in Afghanistan he would probably be forced to shoot her within a week for bringing dishonor on the family.

“Where should they move to?” Ismerai asked. “Europe?”

I shrugged and nodded.

“And can you see Haji being able to live that life, away from the country he has fought for, that he has lost family for and whose soil is as much a part of him as his skin and bones? If he left to live with a foreign woman, how could he ever return and still keep the respect he and his family have earned over all these terrible years? He would have to live in virtual exile, and that would destroy him.

“The fact is, Fawad, Haji and Georgie are two people who fell in love at the wrong time and in the wrong place. The question they must now ask themselves is what do they do next?”

As Ismerai lit his second cigarette, Haji Khan appeared in the garden. His brown face was white, and tears hung in the corners of his eyes, waiting to be freed. My blood froze when I saw him, and I bowed my head as he walked over to us to take Ismerai’s cigarette from his hands.

“I didn’t know,” I heard him whisper to Ismerai, who had got up from his chair. “She never told me, and now I can’t reach her.”

“She needs time,” Ismerai replied, causing me to look up, remembering my mother’s own words.

“No,” Haji Khan corrected, his voice sore and rough. “She needs someone better than me… we both know that. But how can I even let that happen? She’s my life.”

As Haji Khan turned away he paused to look at me, and that’s when the tears fell, spilling out quietly from his dark brown eyes like two small rivers, kissing the edges of his nose as they ran to his lips.

18

“WHAT IN THE name of Allah is that noise?” I asked, finding James hiding in the yard after I’d finished the morning shift at school. Afternoon lessons were for girls.

“That, my dear Fawad, is the Sex Pistols,” he informed me, which I took to be the name of the noise screaming English words from Georgie’s room. “Count yourself lucky,” James added. “It was Bonnie Tyler this morning.”

“Bonnie who?”

“Big hair, big shoulder pads, big headache—”

“Hey! I like Big Bonnie Tyler!”

Georgie appeared at the door. She was dressed in blue jeans and a tight long-sleeved T-shirt, and she was eating a piece of naan bread, which, if I wasn’t mistaken, was painted white with Happy Cow cheese.

“God, I’m starving,” she added.

As she walked past us carrying a box in one hand and her lunch in the other, I noticed her finger and her neck were empty of the jewelry Haji Khan had bought her just a few short months ago. I also noticed a pack of cigarettes sticking out from the back pocket of her jeans.

“What’s in the box?” James asked as she placed it near the outside trash can.

“Stuff,” she replied. “I’m spring-cleaning.”

Once she’d disappeared back into the house and into the noise, James and I looked at each other and raced to the box. James got there first, but his legs were twice the size of mine and he’d also pushed me to the ground before we set off.

“Ahhh,” he said as he reached it, pulling open the cardboard flaps for me to see.

“Ahhh,” I agreed.

Inside was a pile of neatly folded shirts of the finest silk, several perfume bottles, too many rainbow-colored scarves to count, and a bone-carved jewelry box.

On top of them all sat Haji Khan’s photo.

As Georgie welcomed in the spring by cleaning away her memories, my mother greeted the season by shaving off my hair. It happened every year, but it didn’t make the experience any easier.

May laughed when she saw me. “Who loves ya, baby?”

“Kojak,” explained James, which didn’t actually explain anything.

“It’s for health,” I insisted, touching my head to rub away the humiliation my so-called friends were adding to.

“It’s for lice, you mean,” corrected May.

“Whatever,” I said, doing the W sign with my thumbs and fingers as James had once taught me in the kitchen after Georgie had teased him about Rachel.

May laughed again.

“Here,” she said, throwing me a blue suede coat, “see if you can find a happy home for this!”

“It’s beautiful,” I replied as it landed in my arms, feeling the softness of it between my fingers and looking at the yellow pattern embroidered around the edges. “Why don’t you want it?”

“I so do!” May insisted. “But Ismerai brought it round for Georgie, and she doesn’t want it. Sadly, I don’t think she’d appreciate me wearing it either. Women can be unpredictable creatures when they’re angry, Fawad.”

“You’re a woman,” I noted.

“Barely,” muttered James, who received a punch in the ear from May.

“Why didn’t Georgie just give it back then?”

“Ismerai wouldn’t take it,” May explained.

“But who should I give it to?”

“Anyone, as long as they don’t live around here,” she said, and walked back into the house just as the gate opened behind us and Shir Ahmad’s head appeared.

“Fawad,” he hissed, waving at me to come over. “I think someone is looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Come see for yourself. I think he’s in disguise.”

I followed Shir outside, and he pointed to a dark figure across the road, standing a little up the street from us. It was a boy drowning in a giant-sized patu, wearing dark sunglasses and apparently reading the Kabul Times. He looked suspicious, like a spy, and not a very good one at that because the whole street was watching him.

As the newspaper lowered, I recognized my friend.

“Spandi!” I shouted, which made him drop the paper altogether as he reached for the patu to cover his face and turned quickly away to look at the wall.

I ran over to him, laughing. I’d totally forgotten he was still in hiding.

“I’ve been a nervous wreck,” Spandi moaned as we walked toward Shahr-e Naw for no reason other than we had nothing better to do. We’d gone to Pir Hederi’s beforehand, but Jamilla had taken no orders before she left for school, so the old man told us to “go enjoy the sunshine before the government taxes that as well.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I told Spandi. “It left my mind.”

“Honestly, I was convinced you’d be dead by now, but I had to check. I’m glad you’re alive and all that.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You’re a good friend, Spandi.”

“The best you’ll ever have.”

He laughed. And though I joined in and called him a homo, in my bones I knew he was right.

After we walked past the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, trying to sneak a look at the ladies as we went because it annoyed the guards, we moved on toward Chief Burger to pick up a Beef 5—a fried sandwich of shredded meat, potato, and egg that left your lips slippery. After the winter our whole bodies were dry as old twigs, and the grease felt good, like medicine.

With our bellies full, we wandered over to the park where the poor and the hungry gathered to share their misery and jump on anyone fool enough to join them. There, by the side of the wall, opposite the A-One supermarket, we found Pir the Madman, picking through a rotten heap of rubbish with the rest of the city’s unwanted dogs. He wore no shoes on his cracked black feet, and his wild curly hair had matted together, making it look like he was wearing a badly made helmet.

“Fleas!” he shouted as he saw us coming. “The fleas return to bite the dog!”

“The only fleas are on you,” said Spandi, laughing.

“Fleas on me, fleas on you, all fleas pleased to be fleas,” the mental sang, roughly scratching at his head as he did so. “Isn’t that so, little flea?”

“I guess,” I replied, realizing he was talking to me and wondering how it was possible to fall so low that you had to spend your day ankle-high in shit.

Nobody really knew Pir the Madman’s story. He was just the mental who managed to survive everything Kabul could throw at him. But I guessed it was a bad one, and it made me sad to think that at some time in his life he must have been a boy like me with everything to look forward to.

“Here, Pir,” I said, moving over to him and holding out the coat May had given me, and that Ismerai had given Georgie, “a coat for the king of fleas.”

Pir roughly snatched it from my hands and tucked it under his arm, quickly shifting away from us, back toward the park, as if he was scared I might change my mind. As he reached the wall, he cocked his head to look at me in a way I didn’t understand. Then he jumped over the wall and ran in zigzags across the mud brown grass.

“A coat for the king of fleas!” he shouted. “All hail, the king! The king of fleas!”

“Nutcase,” Spandi remarked as we turned to walk back to Wazir Akbar Khan.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Still, that was a good thing you did there, Fawad.”

“Not really,” I said. “It was just a coat that nobody wanted.”

19

“COME ON, FAWAD!” Spandi said, running toward me as I cycled to Pir Hederi’s to start work for the afternoon. “Kabul’s on fire, and we’re missing it!”

“What do you mean, ‘on fire’?” I asked, bringing my wheels to a stop to look at the sky for smoke and flames and other fire-type signs.

“The Americans have killed a load of people, and now everyone is rioting,” he explained, reaching my side and collapsing against the seat of my bike. “The radio says hundreds of people are marching in the streets and burning everything in sight. Someone told me they even set fire to a Chinaman in Shahr-e Naw.”

“No!”

“Yes, really!” Spandi insisted, his cheeks red with excitement where they used to be gray.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why not?” he replied. “It’s a riot! There are no rules!”

“Okay then, let’s go before we miss it!”

Spandi jumped onto the seat of my bike and grabbed hold of the back of my jacket for balance, and we raced off looking for the riot.

Now, you would think it would be quite easy to find hundreds of rioters setting fire to Chinamen in the city, but by the time we got to Shahr-e Naw the place was empty of anyone looking even a little bit angry. Only the charred remains of police checkpoints, broken shop windows, and stolen goods dropped on the street showed that anything serious had happened there. However, after following the trail and asking a few other boys where everyone had got to, we finally found a small crowd of people in Taimani shouting “Death to Karzai!” and “Death to America!”; they also held posters of the dead Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud high above their heads. We guessed this was about as good as it was going to get, so we joined them.

By the time we fell in behind the snake of people, there weren’t that many left and most of them looked like students, but we decided to help them anyway, shouting “Death to America!” because that seemed to be all you had to do to become a member of a riot. A man in black just in front of us turned around with a smile when he heard our voices, which encouraged us to scream even louder. “Death to America! Death to America!” we yelled at the top of our lungs, laughing together in the excitement of it all.

As we marched through the streets like a crazy gang of American-hating brothers, a couple of the older boys tried to pull down any guard huts they found outside houses with foreign signs in front of them. And although Spandi and I weren’t strong enough or brave enough to help them, we made up for our weakness in noise, scrunching our faces into masks of hate like we saw the others doing.

“Death to America!”

“Yeah! Die, America! You’re rubbish!” Spandi shouted.

“And you smell of cabbage!” I screamed.

“And dog shit!” added Spandi.

“And you fight like girls!”

“And cry like women!”

“And you all eat babies!”

“And shag worm-bum donkeys!”

“And—”

I felt a tug at my neck.

“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” an angry voice exploded in my ear.

I turned around to see James behind me. Once again I’d forgotten he sometimes had to work for a living. Along the road behind us were a handful of other white faces holding pens, notebooks, and cameras.

“We’re protesting because the Americans murdered five hundred Afghans,” I shouted above the other rioters, whose voices seemed to find more power in the journalists’ presence.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” James shouted back, which was true actually. “This isn’t a game, Fawad. Get home now; otherwise I’ll take you there myself—and I’ll tell your mother exactly what you have been up to.”

“But James—”

“Don’t ‘but James’ me,” he demanded, which didn’t make any kind of sense at all, though it put a stop to the argument.

Spandi and I agreed that we had done our bit to honor the memory of the murdered Afghans, and although it would have been fun to stay with the rioters, they probably didn’t have mothers at home who would torture them, and their friends, with hard looks and silence.

And just in case James did turn us in, Spandi and I decided to go our separate ways at the corner of my street.

“Your mother can be pretty fierce,” said Spandi.

“Tell me about it.”

I walked home slowly, now dreading the return of James, who was usually the easiest member of the house to get along with. However, when he did eventually turn up, about two hours later, he simply nodded at me to join him in the garden.

“Look, Fawad, what you did today was pretty silly,” he told me. “People got hurt in that riot, and a lot of families lost people they love. It was a very dangerous situation that could easily have got further out of hand. I’m sorry I shouted at you and all that, but I was worried for you. If you had been injured, I would never have forgiven myself. Anyway, you’re safe now, and that’s the main thing. So, are we cool?”

“Yes, we’re cool,” I told him, my heart growing big at the thought that he cared so much. “We’re very cool.”

After James went inside to write his story, I joined my mother in the kitchen. She was listening to a report about the trouble on the radio as she prepared a stew of sheep’s bum and carrots. Georgie and May hadn’t come home at all. My mother said they had phoned Shir Ahmad and Abdul, who were both guarding our gates with brave talk that didn’t match their faces, to say they had been ordered to stay behind the high walls of their office compounds until everyone was sure the rioters had got tired and gone back to their own homes. Finally, at nine at night, Georgie and May appeared, looking serious, a little drunk, and talking about “the end.”

The next day, while sitting on a crate of Iranian yogurt cartons, I found out what had really happened as I read Pir Hederi the report from the Kabul Times. Apparently a U.S. military truck had lost control in Khair Khana, where we all used to live, because of “mechanical failure.” It hit a load of cars, killing someone. The report said some soldiers, American or Afghan, started shooting as people picked up stones and threw them. That killed another five people. Then, as the protesters marched into the city, even more people died, and offices belonging to foreign aid agencies were set on fire as well as a whorehouse. There was no mention of a Chinaman, though. The newspaper also said the rioters were not all real protesters but “opportunists and criminals” trying to cause trouble. What’s more, the government had promised to arrest them—information that made my heart race because it meant that Spandi and I were now wanted by the cops.

Because of the riots the government ordered everyone to stay in their houses after ten at night. This was called a “curfew,” said James, and it was the first time Kabul had seen one for four years. Personally, I was quite glad no one was allowed out because it kept all my foreign friends at home, which I thought might be useful if the police came to raid the place looking for me.

“It’s getting bloody tense out there,” James told Georgie one evening as they sat in the warm night air eating the chickpeas and potatoes my mother had prepared for us all. “You can almost taste the hate growing, on both sides.”

“It will pass,” said Georgie, who didn’t sound too convinced of her words.

“Will it?” James asked her. “The Afghans aren’t exactly renowned for their tolerance of occupying forces.”

“We’re not occupying!” Georgie almost shouted. “Nobody thinks that.”

“Not yet they don’t,” James said seriously. “But it only takes a couple of fuck-ups for that dynamic to change.”

I said nothing, mainly because I didn’t want the adults to move their conversation inside the house, where I wouldn’t be able to hear if James was going to betray me to Georgie, but I knew he was right. In the newspaper reports over the past two weeks I’d read of fighting between the international soldiers and the Taliban. The week before the American truck had done murder through mechanical failure, about thirty Afghans had been killed by bombs dropped from airplanes, a family in Kunar had died the same way, and roadside bombs and suicide attacks were causing death and misery everywhere.

Maybe May and Georgie were right when they first came home after the riots. Maybe this was “the end.”

20

“YOU KNOW, HAJI Khan really is very handsome,” remarked Jamilla in the singsong voice she sometimes used to annoy me, “like something out of a storybook.”

“He’s okay,” I admitted.

“If you go for that good-looking rich-as-a-king kind of thing,” agreed Spandi.

“Oh yes,” added Pir Hederi, “he’s a heartbreaker all right.”

“How can you even know that?”

My hands flew up in amazement at the old man’s gift of apparently knowing everything about anything even when he could see nothing.

“I can smell it.” Pir laughed. “He smells like a man women would die for… and men too for that matter.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“Gross,” agreed Spandi.

“I’d marry him,” admitted Jamilla.

“Would you now?”

Spandi jumped down from the counter and moved over to her.

“Well, he’s a bit old and all that, but if no one else asked me I would.”

“Don’t worry, Jamilla, I don’t think you’ll be short of offers,” Spandi told her as he helped her down from the chair she’d been standing on to wipe the rows of cans on the shelves. “You’re a star that shines in the darkest sky, girl. You’ll have men falling at your feet in a couple of years.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I know so.”

“Oh, here we go,” grumbled Pir as Jamilla giggled and corrected the scarf to cover the bruise her father had freshly planted on her face. “Stop it, both of you. I’ll have none of that romancing in my shop.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“Don’t be such a child!” Jamilla told me, laughing.

“No, really, I think I’m going to be sick,” I insisted.

And I was, right on top of Dog’s tail.

I’d been feeling hot and sweaty all day and a devil had been sitting in my head playing the tabla drums for the best part of two hours when Haji Khan suddenly walked into Pir’s shop saying he wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes. All of us immediately stopped what we were doing—not that we were doing that much in the first place—and we followed him with our eyes. Anyone who happened to be watching us must have thought we were guarding the shop from Kabul’s best-dressed shoplifter.

I knew he was lying, of course—about the cigarettes; he had men who brought in boxes of them from Europe. I’d never seen him smoke the Chinese horse shit that everyone else did here.

“So, is everything okay?” Haji Khan asked as we watched him, and as Pir practically spun himself into a woman around him, inviting him for tea, offering him biscuits, and even telling him “it’s nothing” when he tried to pay for his Seven Stars, which was the first time I’d ever heard those words fall out of his cracked lips.

I nodded in answer to Haji Khan’s question, knowing he was after more but refusing to give it.

“No problems,” he tried again, “at the house?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Yes, that’s very good. So, everyone’s okay then?”

I nodded.

“So, nobody was affected by the riots?”

I shrugged and shook my head again.

“And James? His work is going well? And May?”

“She’s fine!” I suddenly blurted out, feeling embarrassed about the whole discussion that was taking place, which was being watched and listened to with great interest by my friends because I hadn’t yet told them that Georgie had cleaned out Haji Khan from her life. I could see they were a little confused about what was going on. Big men don’t often come into small shops for no reason.

“Good, good,” Haji Khan repeated, looking huge and lost in the cramped space of Pir’s shop. “I just wanted to, well, you know…”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.”

And Haji Khan nodded and left, leaving the Seven Stars pack on the counter behind him.

“It’s probably just something he’s eaten.” Dr Hugo stroked the top of my head to feel the heat of it before placing two fingers on the side of my neck to look for God knows what. “Plenty of water and some rest,” he added, leaning back on our cushions and picking up his tea.

I put my head to one side and looked at him. I’d only heard him doctoring twice, once with Georgie and now with me, and it seemed to me that as far as he was concerned all anyone ever needed was a bit of rest. I seriously wanted to hear what he’d say if someone’s leg got blown off.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” agreed Georgie.

I rolled my eyes.

“What was that look for?”

“What look?” I asked, feeling my cheeks grow even hotter because she wasn’t meant to see it.

“That look!” Georgie rolled her eyes around her head.

“Oh, that look,” I admitted, rolling my eyes again.

“Yes, that look,” she said, copying me.

“Nothing.”

“Boys!” She laughed, pulling me into her arms, which were getting softer now she was eating again.

“Women!” I mimicked.

“Are you two always like this?” interrupted Dr. Hugo as he dipped one of our biscuits into his cup. It broke off before it reached his mouth, and fell onto his trousers.

“Nice,” said Georgie, rolling her eyes.

Dr. Hugo had been coming to our house quite a lot lately, even during the curfew, because the government had given him a special password to stop him from getting shot at police checkpoints.

I still wasn’t sure how good a doctor he was, but I was sure he would be good for Georgie if she let him. He was a bit messy, that was for sure, but he had a good heart. He told me he cried the other day when he had to cut off a woman’s arm after her husband shot her during an argument. And though Georgie and I hadn’t spoken about him, I guess she liked Dr. Hugo at least a little bit because all the makeup was back on her face. She didn’t touch him or stroke his knee or talk with her eyes like she did with Haji Khan, but she smiled when he was near and disappeared when he phoned, which was quite a lot compared to what she was used to.

But then there were the other times, when Georgie’s phone rang and she just let it play its tune. We all pretended not to notice because we guessed it was Haji Khan reaching out for her voice and it was up to her if she chose to hide it or not. However, if she was truly over him, I knew in my heart she would just tell him.

“I think Dr. Hugo wants to make Georgie his girlfriend,” I told my mother as we sat watching the Tulsi soap opera that came from India. Tulsi was a young bride who had married into a rich family, and everybody seemed to spend most of their time trying to ruin one another, or crying.

“I think you’re right,” my mother replied as the program finished in another explosion of tears and sad music.

“And do you think she will let him?”

“I don’t know, but I think she deserves to be happy.”

“Like Tulsi?”

“Yes, like Tulsi.”

“But Tulsi’s never happy.”

“It’s only television, Fawad. It’s not real.”

“I know that! I’m not stupid!”

“Don’t act it, then.”

I looked at my mother, who was now reaching for some sewing she’d stored underneath one of the long cushions. Sometimes it was really quite difficult to have a normal conversation with her because she didn’t listen that well. I wondered whether this had anything to do with her being uneducated.

“All I’m saying is I’m not sure Georgie can love Dr. Hugo as much as she loved Haji Khan, and I don’t know whether she ever will.”

“What makes you say that?”

“A feeling…”

My mother raised one eyebrow and looked at me, straight in the eye.

“Okay, okay. I caught Dr. Hugo trying to kiss her the other night, but she hid her lips from him and he ended up kissing her ear.”

“Fawad! I really wish you wouldn’t keep spying on people. It’s not nice.”

“I wasn’t spying; I just happened to be there!”

Of course, that was a lie, because it’s hard to be in a place by accident when it’s close to midnight and you should be in your bed, but my mother let it pass.

“Well, it’s early days,” she replied. “Georgie may still love Haji Khan, but things change—people change. They just need a little time.”

“Time’s all good and well,” I said, getting to my feet because I was a little mad with all this talk of rest and time and sleeping and everything else adults throw at you when they don’t have any proper answers. “The trouble is, Mother, Georgie hasn’t got a lot of time left, and she’ll have to pick someone to make her happy soon because she’s not getting any younger. And neither are you, come to think of it.”

“I beg your pardon?” My mother looked up, surprised.

“I’m just saying, that’s all.”

“Saying what exactly?”

“Look, there’s a man outside these gates”—I pointed my finger at the window to make it clear exactly which gates I meant—“and he’s learning computering and trying to better himself, and I don’t think it’s because he wants to be the most big-brained guard in Wazir Akbar Khan, do you?”

“Now look here, young man—”

“No! You look here! Do you people ever stop to think about me? To think about how I feel? Do you ever wonder why my eyes are always half closed in the morning? It’s because I’m up all night worrying about who’s going to take care of all the damn women in this house!”

“Don’t use that language with me!”

“Language! Language! Who cares? It’s only words. Actions count more than words. If I’m not worrying about you and who will make you happy when I grow up and get married, then I’m worrying about Georgie, whose head is with one man and whose heart is living with another, and if it’s not Georgie, it’s May, who hasn’t got a chance in hell of marrying anyone unless she unlesbianizes. I mean! Do any of you have even the faintest idea of the kind of stress I am under?”

And with that I stormed out of the room, leaving my mother still as stone, her mouth hanging open, for once empty of anything to say.

21

AFTER MY OUTBURST, Allah punished me with a night of almighty misery that brought every evil in the world to my house so it could move into my stomach and explode from my bum. “Rest,” that’s what Dr. Hugo had said, which as far as I was concerned absolutely, beyond one hundred percent, proved he didn’t know shit about shit—especially the shit that had been pouring from my hole like an open tap every fifteen minutes.

Luckily, my mother did. Having woken up to the sound of my groans and farts bouncing from the walls of the toilet for the hundred millionth time that night, she gave me a spoon of pomegranate dust washed down with a glass of warm milk and took me back to bed, finally rocking me to sleep with the soft sound of her singing.

“I love you, son,” was the last thing I remembered her saying.

We don’t have much in Afghanistan—apart from drugs, guns, and great scenery—but over the years we’ve learned how to get by without all the pretty colored pills and buzzing machinery the sick surround themselves with in the West.

If we feel dizzy, we have a glass of lemon juice, water, and sugar. If we have a sore throat, we stick our fists in our mouths three times in the morning to open up the channel to our stomach. And if we have the shits, we eat dried pomegranate skin. Of course, our self-doctoring is not always perfect. I recently read in a cartoon made by an NGO that putting fire ash on top of a wound might actually kill you rather than cure you, and I knew that after taking my mother’s medicine I wouldn’t go near a toilet for at least three days. But by and large it works.

Like with the drug addicts and the mentals. When it gets too much for their families, they simply chain them up to a holy shrine for forty days so that God can sort out the problem. And, okay, it’s not brilliant for the junkies and the crazies because they only get to eat bread and drink green tea for more than a month and most days they get stoned by bored kids, but that also works. If it doesn’t, they die, and that must have been God’s plan for them all along. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been mental or addicted to drugs in the first place; they would have done well at school and become a lawyer, or something. Or, in Pir the Madman’s case, they would have grown up to be the king of fleas.

However, absolutely the best thing about being ill is that you don’t have to go to school the next day. It’s not that I didn’t like the lessons; they were easy enough, and I was still getting good marks for my handwriting. But if I had to make a choice between a warm bed and a wooden chair I share with a boy whose armpits smell of beans, the bed would win every time.

And if the front gate hadn’t kept banging open and shut, forcing me out of my dreams, I’m sure I would have slept right through until the middle of the following week and missed even more school. But I didn’t because the front gate kept banging open and shut. So eventually I got up to see just what the hell was going on.

Walking out into the sunshine that was annoyingly bright and trying to stab my eyes with its light, I followed the hum of grown-up talking. Rubbing at my face and scratching at the soft layer of fur now growing on my head, I wandered into the garden to find Georgie, James, and May sitting on a carpet on the grass, sorting out plates and bread on a plastic mat, getting ready for lunch. With them were Dr. Hugo, Rachel, and a woman I’d never met before. Her hair was short and dark, and her face looked a little hairy.

“Don’t you people have jobs to go to?” I asked.

“Afghanistan can do without us for one early lunch,” replied May, waving me over to sit at her side.

“I suppose so.” I smiled. “Especially in James’s case.”

“Feeling better then, are we?” James replied, laughing along with the rest of them.

It felt good to be surrounded again by these white-faced people who seemed to like being surrounded by me.

“How we doing, little fella?”

Dr. Hugo leaned over to me, and as he did so I noticed Georgie touch his knee, which surprised not only me but also the doctor, judging by the quick movement of his head to look at her.

“Fine, thank you.”

“Fawad, this is Geraldine,” interrupted May, placing her hand on Geraldine’s knee.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Geraldine said back.

I looked over at James. I noticed he was touching Rachel’s knee.

Something was definitely going on.

Behind me I heard the gate open and shut again, and Shir Ahmad came in, just in time to help my mother carry glass plates of mantu and salad over to us.

“Salaam,” he greeted everyone.

“Salaam,” everyone said back, and James edged himself closer to Rachel so he could join us on the carpet.

I watched my mother carefully as she came over to join us, lightly lowering herself to sit by Georgie’s side, her covered knees far enough away from Shir’s hands to stop me from having to make a scene.

Yep, something was definitely going on.

“It’s the spring,” explained Pir Hederi, “also known as the mating season.”

“Oh please…,” I protested.

“Just telling it like it is, son.”

I looked at Pir, slightly disturbed by the picture he had just painted in my head, and even more disturbed by the orange glow of his beard, which he had freshly hennaed. Why men did this to themselves was a mystery to me, and right now I had enough mysteries on my mind without him adding to them.

After lunch had broken up and everyone had let go of everyone else’s legs to return to their jobs, my mother had agreed that some fresh air would do me good, so I’d gone to the shop to pass some time with Jamilla before she went to afternoon school, and to ask the old man about the ways of adults.

I knew it was a mistake almost as soon as I felt the words fly from my mouth.

“Yes,” he said, “sounds like the adults are getting frisky.”

“Frisky?”

“Yes. It’s the effect of another glorious Afghan spring: the sun is bright, the skin grows warm, and the blood heats up after winter. And when the blood heats up it rushes straight to the heart, causing everyone to make a damn fool of himself.”

“Isn’t that called love?” asked Jamilla, who was trying to clean what was left of Dog’s teeth with the wooden brush Pir Hederi used for his own. He’d have gone mental if he could have seen her.

“Some call it love, some call it madness, little one.”

“Who calls what madness?”

Spandi walked into the shop swinging his chain of plastic cards behind him. He had been spending a lot of time with us lately, which had made Pir Hederi remark the other day that the place was looking more like an orphanage than a place of business.

“Love,” answered the old man. “The stuff of poets, teenage girls, Indian dancers, and overpaid Westerners.”

“Haven’t you ever been in love?” Jamilla asked him.

“Never had time,” he replied. “I was too busy—”

“Fighting in the jihad!” we all finished with him.

“It’s true!” he barked. “Besides, it’s hard to fall in love when all the women are covered from head to toe and you end up marrying your own cousin.”

Despite Pir’s crazy old-man ways, and despite the fact that he’d chosen to look like a can of Fanta, there was always something a little real to his words.

Take the other Friday. My mother had dragged me along to her sister’s house as they were now talking again. When we got there we were shocked to discover my aunt had another baby growing inside her belly. As she hadn’t grown any more beautiful since the last one, I guess my uncle must have been feeling the power of spring in his blood when he made it.

“It’s too disgusting for words,” Jahid had spat when I congratulated him on getting another brother soon. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

I didn’t blame him. I felt genuinely sorry for him too because sex was usually the only thing Jahid wanted to think about.

“It must be awful never to know love,” Jamilla remarked as Spandi and I walked her to school.

“I guess,” I said.

“I guess,” agreed Spandi.

“Do you think we’ll marry for love?” she asked, which was a bit of a shocker.

“Who? Me and you?”

“Not me and you.” She laughed. “All of us.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

“I hope so,” admitted Spandi, and we all fell quiet, because in each of our hearts that’s all any of us wanted, if we were honest about it.

The trouble is, in Afghanistan marriage is all about deals. Your father, or in my case mother, arranges the match, sometimes even before you’re born, and you just have to do it—usually to a member of your own family, so I wasn’t sure who I would be married off to, what with all my cousins being boys. But Spandi had girl cousins, so he might end up with one of them, and Jamilla, well, that was a different story. As she got older, the danger grew of her father selling her to someone for drugs. I didn’t like to think about that too much because she was my friend and she was a good girl, so I really hoped she could marry for love because I knew that’s what filled her dreams at night and it’s also what kept the darkness in her life from covering her completely.

“Okay, I’ll have to love you and leave you,” Spandi said with a wink as we turned the corner at Massoud Circle. “I’m going to hang around here for a while and try and sell some cards to the Americans.”

“Okay,” Jamilla said. “Maybe catch you after school.”

“More than likely,” replied Spandi.

“See you later.”

I waved and carried on with Jamilla because I had nothing to sell and nothing else to do.

“If you could marry anyone, who would you marry?”

“Jamilla!” I groaned. “I’m not one of your girlfriends!”

“Come on, you must have thought about it,” she continued in her best whiny girl voice.

“No way, it’s too disgusting!” I lied.

But even as I spoke, pictures of Georgie came running into my mind, followed by Mulallah and then Jamilla, which was worrying.

“I’d marry Shahrukh Khan.”

“The actor?”

“Yes, the actor. He is so good-looking. I watched Asoka on television last night. It was very romantic! Shahrukh Khan plays a prince who falls in love with a beautiful princess called Kaurwaki. But then he thinks she is dead, and he becomes a vicious conqueror because his heart died with her. In the end he marries another woman, who is lovely, but not as lovely as Kaurwaki.”

“A vicious conqueror? Yeah, right. He’s probably gay.”

“He is not!” shrieked Jamilla.

“He’s an actor,” I teased. “He’s nothing more than a very well-paid dancing boy.”

“Take that back!” Jamilla screamed again. “Take it back or—”

“Or you’ll what?”

As Jamilla pushed me into a cart loaded with oranges, a bang as loud as anything I’d ever heard exploded in the air around us, slamming us both to the ground. Beneath our hands and knees the earth trembled with pain as our ears thumped with the shock of it and our hearts burst in knowing fear.

Almost immediately, the smell of burning skin filled the air, even as the world stayed silent. I looked backward, back toward Massoud Circle, where the twisted mess of a Land Cruiser and a Toyota Corolla was being eaten by flames; back to the place where we had stood only seconds before; back to where we’d left Spandi.

Spandi!

My eyes raced over the red-hot flames licking the sky like lizard tongues, past the black and bloody faces of people I didn’t know, around the mess of skin and bone mashed on the ground, over soldiers shocked and still, until I found him, standing far away from me but close enough to touch because my eyes were now concentrating on him, reaching for him, pulling him in.

He was standing near the wreckage of the Corolla. A small boy caught in a gigantic nightmare. Around him the air was dark with smoke, and I watched pieces of metal and black-red body parts float to the ground like feathers as our eyes met and our lives came to a stop. There was no sound I could hear, just the beating of our two hearts connected by our eyes.

Spandi was alive, and I felt my love for him race through my veins, thumping its message inside my body, from my heart to my ears, in heavy thuds. He was my brother, he was as close to family as it got, and I stared that message into his head with all my strength and power as the screaming started.

Beside me I felt Jamilla jump to her feet, and under the noise of the bomb and its killing I heard her whisper his name.

“Spandi…”

Together we ran toward him—just as the bullets began to crack through the air. There was no time to be frightened because there was no time to think—and that’s all fear really is: the worst thoughts you can ever imagine coming real inside your head—so we continued to run, side by side, making the world blur as we passed it, forcing ourselves into the hell before us that was trying to swallow our friend.

Then, far away, I heard the shouts start, Afghan and foreign. It was the terrible sound of scared, angry men roaring their hate and fear into the air as people ran from them or dropped to the ground, hit by invisible bullets. Yet still we ran, and all the time I kept my eyes on Spandi, begging him to stay alive, to keep with me, not to be afraid, because we were coming for him, and I felt him take my words and hold on to them. We were getting so close to him it was almost true.

But then those eyes, those eyes I had known almost my whole life, those eyes that were as much a part of me as they were of him, were snatched away as his head suddenly snapped back. I saw a hole open in his chest, spitting blood onto his shirt as he fell to the ground like a broken toy.

“No!” screamed Jamilla, racing to save him as my legs slowed in pain and shock and the deepest blackness. “No! Please, no! He’s only a boy!”

22

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

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

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

Really, I was.

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

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

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

I was being eaten by holes.

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

Spandi was gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

I nodded again.

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

“How much time?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, I’ll tell my mother,” I replied.

In Afghanistan, when people die there are strict times for prayers. The first are said on the day of burial, of course, then three days after we say them again, then again after a week has passed, then forty days from the time they went into the ground, and then finally a year later. This was the first time I had ever been properly involved in the business of saying good-bye to the dead, and I wondered how many more I would have to say good-bye to before my own life was over.

I wasn’t looking forward to returning to Khair Khana, but in the end I was glad I did because it was almost beautiful. At his brother’s house, Spandi’s father was surrounded by people who had come to repeat the words of Allah, and speak their own words of help and hope to him. As they fed their love into his bones through handshakes and whispers, I saw the difference it made to Spandi’s father, who looked bigger than the last time I’d seen him, not nearly so destroyed. And it helped me too because I could see that away from the politicians and their arguments, away from the suicide bombers and their murders, and away from the soldiers and their guns, people were good. Afghan people were good. And even though I was having trouble controlling my brain, I knew I had to try to hold on to at least that truth.

In the small front room of Spandi’s uncle’s house, dozens of people I didn’t know were taking time out from their own lives and their own problems to remember a little boy who had been my best friend. I saw the sadness in their eyes, and I saw it was real. I heard the soft hum of their words, and I heard they were true.

And so I took these pictures and sounds, and I stored them in my head so that I would always remember that there was more to Afghanistan and Afghans than war and killing.

“When I was about your age one of my best friends died.”

Haji Khan was driving and smoking. Beside him was a man with a gun that looked as terrifying as he did. I was sittings in the back, feeling small.

I looked up at his words and caught him watching me in the rearview mirror. His eyes were dark as night, and his forehead was broken by lines above heavy black eyebrows. He looked both fearsome and kind, which should be impossible, and I remembered Georgie’s story about the time he had traveled to see her in a Shinwar village so many years ago.

“How?” I asked. “How did your friend die?”

“We were playing by the river in Surkhrud, a village just outside Jalalabad where the water runs red from the mountains. He fell in and drowned.”

“It must have been a deep river.”

“No, not really. I think he hit his head on some rocks when he slipped because, when I realized he wasn’t fooling around and I tried to pull him out, there was a deep cut on his head.”

“You thought he was playing?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I did. Hey! Mother of a cow!”

Haji Khan suddenly swerved the car to avoid a one-legged man riding a bicycle almost into our path. After sounding his horn and frowning at the cripple, who would soon lose the other leg if he wasn’t more careful, Haji Khan looked at me apologetically.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Best not tell Georgie I said that.”

“Said what?” I asked.

And he looked at me in the mirror again, smiling with his eyes.

“So, how did you feel when your friend died?” I asked.

“Not good.”

“I don’t feel very good either,” I admitted.

“You won’t right now,” Haji Khan replied with a shrug, “and maybe you never will. I still think of my friend even today.”

“Ho… that’s a long time.”

“Yes,” Haji Khan agreed. “Sometimes I think the dead have it easy. The difficult part is staying alive and, more than that, wanting to stay alive.”

When we arrived back at the house, Haji Khan reached into the space between the two front seats of his Land Cruiser where a little drawer was hidden. He pulled out a book and passed it back to me. It was covered with the softest leather, like a baby’s skin, and inside were about a hundred handwritten poems in Pashto. When I flicked through the pages I saw the verses were all about love, each and every one of them.

I looked at Haji Khan, not sure what to say.

“It’s not for you.” He laughed, obviously picking up on the worry that had crept into my head. “It’s for Georgie. But maybe you can read these poems to her now and again because she’s been very lazy and hasn’t learned Pashto.”

“Okay,” I agreed, relieved. “Did you write them?”

“Me?” He laughed again. “No. A man from my village wrote them. He’s blessed with the gift. I am only blessed with the money to get him to write his words down on paper.”

“But Georgie doesn’t understand one word of Pashto,” I reminded him.

“No, she doesn’t. But she knows the sound of love, and she knows the word for love.”

Mina. Love. My sister.

“Also,” Haji Khan added, breaking into my thoughts, “will you tell her that I’ve prepared the house for her, ready for when she comes? Ismerai will be there.”

“Where will you be?” I asked.

“I’ll be… giving her time.”

Back in the house, I couldn’t deliver Haji Khan’s message because Georgie was nowhere to be found. As it was still early, I guessed she was probably still in her office sorting out goats to comb. It came as no surprise to me that James was at home, however. As I fetched myself a glass of water, he jumped on me.

“Psst! Fawad! Come here!”

I sighed, heavily and dramatically so he would understand the full force of my tiredness.

“I’m not playing any of your stupid games,” I told him. “And besides, I’m sure they’re against Islam.”

“What on earth do you mean?” James asked, looking slightly hurt. “Twister, my dear fellow, is not against Islam. It is a competition involving skill and agility—that’s sort of like being good at moving—and great courage.”

I looked at James and raised my eyebrows in the way May did when she knew he was talking rubbish.

“Okay, okay,” he admitted, “it also allows you to touch ladies’ bottoms.”

“See! I told you it was against Islam!”

“Details, Fawad, only details. Now come with me, I want to show you something.”

As ordered, I followed James into the living room and over to the table where May liked to do her work. On top of it sat a small box and some green and silver paper.

“Right,” he said, “take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

He passed me the box. I opened it and found a beautiful ring inside, a silver circle with a cover of gold on top that had been carefully marked with tiny scratched flowers.

I looked at James, not sure what to say.

“Don’t give me that look!” He laughed. “It’s for Rachel. I just wanted to see if you think she would like it before I wrapped it up.”

“I’m sure she will. Are you getting married?” I asked, surprise making my voice climb high.

“What? No! No, of course not,” James replied with even more surprise. “It’s for her birthday.”

“Oh.”

“Fuck! You don’t think that she’ll think that I’m proposing, do you?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, fuck!” whispered James, pulling at his hair, which could really have done with a wash. “Fuck! Fuck! Fucking fuck!”

A little after the sound of evening prayers had floated across the sky and my mother had skipped across the road to see Homeira “about something,” Georgie came home with Dr. Hugo following behind her. This gave me something of a problem. I really liked the doctor—he was gentle and kind, and he closed the holes in children whose legs had been blown off by land mines—but I was a bit mixed-up as to who I liked best, him or Haji Khan. Dr. Hugo saved Afghans, but Haji Khan was Afghan. Either way, I didn’t think I should give Georgie the book filled with poems right there in front of him, and as I knew I couldn’t hide my heart from my eyes, or even keep my mouth shut, I stayed in my room.

Within ten minutes Georgie came to find me.

“Why are you hiding in here?” she asked after I shouted permission for her to come in when she knocked at my door.

“I’m getting some rest,” I lied.

“Really? Had a busy day, did we?”

And of course I couldn’t stop the truth from slipping out.

“Yes, it was quite busy actually. Haji Khan came for me, and we went in his car to Khair Khana with a man with a gun to pray for Spandi. Then he brought me home and told me about his best friend who died after hitting his head in the red river when he was a boy, and then he gave me a book and he said I should read it to you sometimes because you’re lazy.”

“Oh, he did, did he?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

I reached for the book hiding under my pillow and gave it to her. Georgie gently took it in her hands, stroking the skin of it with her long white fingers before opening it carefully.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and I nodded.

“He also told me that the house was ready for you and that Ismerai would be there.”

Georgie nodded. “That’s kind,” she said.

“I didn’t know you were going to Jalalabad.”

“I’ve some work to do there. I’ll be leaving tomorrow because I need to speak to Baba Gul about his goats again.” Georgie looked a little sad. “Hey! Shall we ask your mother if you can come with me?”

I thought about it for a second and, because I didn’t really feel like traveling and I felt I should concentrate on Spandi a little more, I was going to say no, but then I remembered Salman Khan and I turned left instead of right.

“Okay,” I said.

“Great!” Georgie smiled and moved back toward the door, holding the book Haji Khan had made for her in one of her hands and hanging the other in the air for me to grab. “Now come with me,” she ordered. “I think something interesting is about to happen.”

In the front room of the big house a mat had been set on the floor and food had been brought in from Taverne du Liban and placed on paper plates in front of May, her hairy friend Geraldine, Dr. Hugo, James, and Rachel, who must have sneaked in when I wasn’t looking, which kind of proved that I wasn’t feeling myself yet.

James looked like death.

“Hello, Rachel, happy birthday!” I said.

“Hello, Fawad, thank you very much. How are you doing?”

“Oh, okay, not too bad,” I replied.

“Good,” she said in her special singsong voice. “Sometimes we all just need a little time.”

Because it was Rachel’s birthday I swallowed the “tut” rising in my throat and smiled. I then went to sit next to her as she had moved over to make room for me. It was quite lucky, really, because James was opposite us and it gave me a fantastic view of his face. His skin was whiter than paper.

As ever, the food from the Lebanese restaurant disappeared down our throats faster than a boy born before his father. However, James hardly touched a thing, and as we washed down our meal with fizzing Pepsi—laughing because it made Geraldine do the loudest burp I’d ever heard come out of a woman’s mouth—the journalist got quieter and quieter until his face nearly turned green and I thought he was going to vomit.

“Present time!” shouted Georgie, with a wink at James.

“Yes, yes,” agreed James, who didn’t sound like he wanted to agree at all.

When Rachel clapped her hands and squealed like a girl, he pulled back, as though he’d just been bitten.

I was finding it quite funny.

Georgie was the first to hand over her present, a beautiful green scarf that really looked pretty on Rachel. Next, Dr. Hugo gave her a little plastic case that held bandages, some needles, some ointment, and other things that might be useful in an emergency but were hardly the stuff of dreams. After Dr. Hugo, May presented Rachel with a framed photo of some buzkashi players from Mazar-e Sharif, saying it was from her “and Geri.”

“And, erm, here’s a little something from me,” said James finally. “Many happy returns.”

He didn’t sound too convincing, and his arm looked weak as jelly as he held out the little box covered with sparkling green and silver. Not that Rachel seemed to notice.

“Oooh,” she said, tearing open the package and carefully opening the box.

As the silver and gold shone in her eyes, everyone stopped talking and held their breath. Rachel slowly picked up the ring and turned it in her fingers.

“It’s beautiful, James,” she said quietly. “And I’m so honored, really I am. It’s such a wonderful thing to do. But… really… I’m sorry… there’s absolutely no way I can marry you.”

James groaned. “I was afraid this might happen,” he said. “It’s just a ring, Rachel, I didn’t mean—”

He stopped midsentence because everyone was laughing at him, Rachel the hardest of all.

“I know, James!” she said. “I’m joking! Georgie told me about your little panic attack!”

James groaned again and slapped his forehead, which brought some of the color running back to his face.

“But the ring really is beautiful,” Rachel told him. “Thank you. I’ll treasure it always.”

“My pleasure—I think.”

James grinned as he leaned across the floor mat to give her a kiss.

“Hey,” he said as he moved back to his place, “what do you mean you wouldn’t marry me?”

Rachel giggled. “Look at you! You’re a mess, darling, a big scruffy—and most of the time drunken—mess. How could I ever take you home to meet my parents?”

“Now hang on—”

“And besides, your surname is Allcock!”

“That’s a very noble old English name, I think you’ll find.”

“That may be so, James, but I can’t go through the rest of my life being known as Mrs. Allcock!”

And everyone burst out laughing, apart from James, who looked disappointed, and me, because I thought Rachel would make a lovely Mrs. Allcock. Judging by the small shadows now crossing James’s face, I think he did too.

24

AS WE WOUND our way around the gray mountains down to the blue of Surobi and into the flatness of green that took us to Jalalabad, it struck me that this was a journey that usually followed some kind of disaster in my life—first it was James’s knife in the Frenchman’s ass, and now it was Spandi’s death—and I couldn’t help wondering what catastrophe might pour soil on my head if I ever came this way again. Would my mother have died? Would Jamilla have been sold for a night of hashish? Would I have woken up one day to find a rat running around Kabul with my nose in its stomach?

The more I thought about it, the more it spoiled the journey, to be honest. I was also sweating in the backseat like a fat man wrapped in a patu because the air-conditioning was broken. Even though Jalalabad was only a few hours away from Kabul, the sun was about one hundred times stronger, and the heat of it filled my mouth in the closed space of the Land Cruiser that had come to pick us up before lunch.

Georgie did little to make the journey any more fun as she sat in the front seat talking to her office most of the time, because the mobile phone reception kept disappearing halfway through her conversations.

“Are you hungry?” she asked me eventually, snapping her phone shut as we came to a stop in front of the Durunta tunnel. Two giant trucks were trapped inside facing each other, unable to pass and unable to go backward because of all the other cars, taxis, and Land Cruisers that had arrived to block them in.

“I’m starving actually,” I replied.

That morning I’d eaten only a little bread and honey because eggs were now off the menu thanks to a report my mother had heard on the news. Apparently we were all about to die from bird flu, so anything that had anything to do with chickens was now officially banned from the house.

“Good, let’s get out then,” Georgie said.

We left the car with the driver because we knew it wouldn’t be going anywhere fast and jumped into the chaos of the street. Around us, the air was thick with bad-tempered shouting and angry car horns as a group of policemen tried to sort out the mess. As usual, everyone was pretty much ignoring them, even getting out of their vehicles to bark their own orders, while other cars tried to overtake and squeeze past one another, hoping somehow to force their way into the tunnel.

I imagined that if I was a bird looking down from the sky, the road might look like it was covered by a giant blanket of metal.

Weaving our way past rattling engines, we reached one of the fish restaurants lining the road. Outside, a man stood in front of a metal bowl that was spitting oil. He waved us inside, away from the smell of burning fat and heavy car fumes.

We walked past him, through a small room where a group of men sat on the floor tearing apart bits of fish with their bread or picking bones as thin as needles from their mouths. We nodded at them, they nodded back, and we walked out through a door at the back of the restaurant.

In front of us, Durunta’s blue-green lake shone its colors before a jagged line of brown mountains. It was incredibly beautiful. And it would have been incredibly peaceful too if the air hadn’t been filled with the sound of men insulting one another’s mothers.

A small, thin man with a small, thin mustache and no beard waved us into another small room balanced on the edge of the lake. Inside there was a massive window, and the man got to work with a cloth, shooing away a cloud of flies that buzzed around in circles before landing back in their original positions.

We sat down on bright red cushions dotted with greasy fingerprints, and Georgie ordered two cans of Pepsi, a plate of naan bread, and some fish.

I looked out of the window that didn’t have any glass in it and saw a tiny boat covered in pretty colored ribbons playing out on the water. Below us I also saw a small boy, about my age, scrambling up the hill from the lake. The top half of his body was naked, and his trouser bottoms, patchy with wet, had been rolled up.

“Well, at least the food is fresh,” Georgie commented, because the boy was holding a plastic bowl filled with flapping bony lake fish.

“Yes, that’s one thing,” I agreed, falling back onto the dirty cushions. “So, why do you need to see Baba Gul again?”

“I need to finalize some details,” Georgie replied. “The organization I work for just received a load of money, and we’ve got a great opportunity to really move this cashmere project forward.”

“In what way?”

“Well, we’ve been trying to get businesspeople to invest, and an Italian company has shown an interest in buying into a factory here. That would bring a lot of jobs, Fawad. It would also create a demand for cashmere, giving hundreds of thousands of farmers an extra source of income. I want Baba Gul and his family to be a part of that. Besides, I thought it would give you a chance to say hi to your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend!” I protested, hitting Georgie with a fly swatter that had been left on the floor.

“But you know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Oh, shut up, Georgie!”

“Oh, shut up, Fawad!”

Smiling, we both began to pick at the bony fish that had arrived on paper plates. And as I ate I thought of Mulallah running through the fields with her red scarf streaming from her neck like the tail of a firework, and I wondered whether Georgie was right and whether Mulallah would become my girlfriend.

After lunch we didn’t stop at Haji Khan’s house; we kept on driving right through Jalalabad, beeping nonstop at the people, cars, and tuk-tuks racing like ants around the yellow streets, on past the picture of Haji Abdul Qadir and into the tunnel of trees until we came to the turn that took us to Shinwar.

As we got nearer, my stomach began to tickle as Mulallah’s face came into my head, and I prayed that Baba Gul’s hut would still be where we had left it months before.

As we bounced up the stony track—the main road, as far as I could see—I thought I recognized the field where we had played together in the winter sun, but I couldn’t see any sign of the old man’s goats or my friend. Under my skin, my heart began to move faster as we missed the turn I was sure took us toward Baba Gul’s hut. I looked at Georgie, who also seemed confused.

“Zalmai,” she said to the driver, “where are we going?”

“Baba Gul has a new place,” was all he said.

Ahead of us the mountains that joined with Pakistan grew larger before our eyes, and we passed strange rocky fields that looked like ancient steps until we turned left at some stone walls bordering fields of flowers. About ten minutes later, up a dusty track that kicked clouds of sand into our mouths through the open window that Georgie shut too late to save us, we came to a stop outside a small house. In front of it stood rows of young trees, fenced off from the mouths of the hungry goats that grazed nearby. They were Baba Gul’s goats, and they looked much thinner than the last time I’d seen them because their coats had now been taken from them to be made into coats for people.

We followed Zalmai out of the car.

“Agha Baba Gul Rahman!” he shouted.

Mulallah’s mother came out of the curtained doorway and into the sunshine. She looked fatter than I remembered, and the weight seemed to have ironed out some of the creases in her face. She came over to greet Georgie, smiling widely with her hands stretched out. When she reached her she stood on her toes to take hold of her face, then she kissed her six times, three on each cheek.

Georgie kissed her back, but I could see the confusion covering her eyes as Mulallah’s mother spoke to her in quick, happy Pashto.

“She says may Allah bless you with a thousand wishes—you are her sister,” I explained as Georgie was pulled toward the house.

“Tell her that’s very kind and I hope God repays her kindness in a million more happy ways,” Georgie replied, so I did.

At the door we kicked off our shoes and followed Baba Gul’s wife inside, where we found Mulallah and two of her brothers sweeping the dust from the long cushions, ready for us to sit down.

“Salaam aleykum,” Mulallah said, grabbing Georgie’s waist in a huge hug before giving her hand to me. Her brothers shyly held out their own hands and giggled their welcome.

Baba Gul was nowhere to be seen.

“You live here now?” I asked, surprised and happy at the family’s good fortune. Either they had combed a lot of goats that spring, or Baba Gul had found the luck of the devil in his card games.

“Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?” Mulallah replied. “And to think I was ready to die a few months ago.”

Over cups of wet tea and plates of dry cake, Mulallah and I shared the job of explaining to Georgie the words of Baba Gul’s wife. It was almost unbelievable what had happened to their family in such a short period of time, and I was glad their story had a happy ending because I don’t think I could have coped with another tragedy.

After the winter, Baba Gul had apparently got into serious trouble with his gambling, and one day he returned home unable to look his own wife in the eyes. Without a word to anyone, he took Mulallah’s hand and practically dragged her to the next village, leaving his wife beating her chest in the wooden hut and crying rivers of tears.

As they walked down rocky lanes, Baba Gul said nothing to Mulallah. She grew increasingly afraid the more he refused to answer her questions until her own eyes filled with tears for a reason she didn’t know.

When they got to the village, she found out why her father could not speak: he was dumb with shame because he had traded his debt to another man using his daughter. Mulallah nearly fainted with horror when she realized what was happening. Her father had sold her to a man she would soon have to call “husband.”

As she backed into the wall of the house she was now expected to live in, the man shook hands with her father. His fingers were thin and dark, and they bent inward with age. With a terrified scream at the thought of those fingers touching her, Mulallah pulled open the door of the house and ran for her life, even though she knew this was the biggest insult she could ever have shown her father, not to mention the man who was about to become her husband. As she ran she knew she was as good as dead because by saving herself she had brought dishonor on her family.

Disappearing into the fields surrounding the village, she sank to her knees and crawled through the growing plants, not daring to raise her head for hours on end as her hands and knees became ripped on the sharp rocks beneath her. For two whole nights she slept under bushes and inside holes that time had made in the hills and mountains, surviving on the berries and raw potatoes she stole while everyone else was asleep in their beds.

By the third day Mulallah realized she could not live like this forever, but she couldn’t go back to her family or the man she had been sold to. So she looked deep inside herself and chose to take her life. Even though it was a terrible sin, one of the worst in fact, she prayed that God would forgive her because she was still a child.

As she waited for night to fall, sitting in a cave hidden by bushes, she made her plan. She would sneak into the village when the sun had gone and steal a can of gas from one of the houses. She would then set herself free in fire.

Of course, Mulallah was terrified by what she was about to do. She knew it would hurt, and she was afraid that God wouldn’t forgive her at all, and she would continue to burn in the next life. On top of that she was heartbroken at the thought that she would never again see her mother, and as she quietly cried to herself she imagined her mother’s voice calling her. “At first I thought I was dreaming,” explained Mulallah, “even though I wasn’t sleeping. And I thought maybe this was the way of death when you had made the decision to embrace it. But it sounded so real. I really felt my mother calling for me.”

Unable to stand the craziness her mother’s shouts were producing in her head, Mulallah moved from the cave where she had been hiding and looked down into the valley. A small woman dressed in green with the blue of her burka pulled back from her face was wandering through the grass. She was shouting Mulallah’s name, and Mulallah realized she hadn’t been dreaming at all. Her mother had come for her.

Unable to stop herself, even though she was certain she would be taken back to the old man who was to be her husband because her mother could never defy her own husband, Mulallah ran out and threw herself into her arms. Wrapped in her mother’s love, she cried and cried until her exhausted eyes could no longer make any more tears.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” her mother cried with her, placing soft kisses all over her daughter’s face. “We are safe now, Mulallah. You are safe.”

As Mulallah quieted, her mother took her hand and walked her back to their home. On the way she told her how she had almost been broken by grief by what her husband had done, and by the news that Mulallah had run away. But then the pain turned to crazy anger, and in a fit of blind rage she walked all the way to Haji Khan’s village almost half a day away to plead with him to do something. He was the strongest man in the province, and if he intervened, then maybe Mulallah could be saved.

Amazingly, Haji Khan was there when she arrived, and when he came to the door of the house Mulallah’s mother fell exhausted at his feet, begging him for help. When Haji Khan heard what had happened, he gently told her not to worry and that she should go and find her daughter and bring her home. He then traveled to the man who had bought Mulallah, and he paid for her freedom.

But his kindness didn’t stop there. Baba Gul’s wife said Haji Khan had spoken such hot words to the goat herder when he turned up at the hut that he had actually put the fear of God into him, for real, and from that day on Baba Gul never went near the cards again. “He spends almost every waking breath in the mosque these days begging Allah for forgiveness while he still has time to save himself from Hell,” Mulallah told us with a smile.

And after saving Baba Gul’s daughter, as well as the old man’s eternal soul, Haji Khan moved the family to their new house. Baba Gul’s wife said he charged them a rent for the house that “was almost as free as the air,” and he gave them enough rice, oil, and beans to fill the whole family’s bellies to bursting for the next month. Even better than that, some men had turned up at the house a few days after they had moved in to plant the trees we had seen in their garden; apparently, one day their branches would be filled with oranges, plums, and pomegranates, which would give Mulallah’s family another way of earning money.

“It’s all Haji Khan’s doing, and it’s all because of you,” Mulallah’s mother finished, reaching up with her hands to bring Georgie’s face toward her. She then kissed her sweetly on the forehead.

On the way back to Jalalabad I was filled with talk about Haji Khan’s kindness, and in the mirror I saw Zalmai smile as I excitedly told him the story he must surely have known already.

Amazingly, though, Georgie stayed silent. I could see only the back of her head, but it seemed her eyes were reaching out across the fields ahead of us as if she were looking for something she had lost, and her lips were tied shut no matter how hard I tried to include her in my chatter.

Just as Haji Khan said it would be, when we finally arrived at his house in Jalalabad we found Ismerai waiting for us. By now the sun had dipped below the mountains, and the house was a ball of light in the dark. It was also very quiet with only the three of us there, and the midget man we had seen before, flitting around serving us food and sweet tea.

After the excitement of the day and the hours of driving we had gone through, my eyes quickly became heavy with sleep. Of course, this may also have had something to do with the thick smoke of Ismerai’s special cigarettes. I leaned back on one of the cushions in the golden room to rest my eyes for a minute.

“Do you want to go to bed?” Georgie asked, breaking away from her conversation with Ismerai.

“In a minute,” I said, too comfy to move.

“Okay, in a minute then,” she replied, and pulled me forward to place my head on her knees.

I closed my eyes in warm happiness, feeling the softness of coming sleep while listening to the gentle hum of adult conversation. Georgie and Ismerai were talking about politics and the growing troubles in the south and the east.

“We live in difficult times,” Ismerai told her. “Personally, I’m at a loss as to what Karzai’s plan is. I can see the need for a strong central government, but this is Afghanistan—it’s not as simple as moving people around on a chessboard. You move the traditional authority out of an area, the men who share a culture and a history with their own people, and you create a vacuum. There are no longer any restraints; there is no longer any loyalty; there is only money.”

“Is Khalid’s position in jeopardy?” Georgie asked.

I heard Ismerai click his tongue to say no. “They can’t move Haji,” he said. “How could they? He doesn’t hold a government position; he’s his own man. But that’s not to say he’s not faced with a million problems of government.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you know he’s thrown his weight behind the governor’s poppy eradication plan, don’t you?”

“No,” Georgie admitted, “I didn’t know that.”

“Well he has. There will be no poppies planted on his land this year, and he’s pushing the strategy at the Shuras, trying to convince other landowners and elders to join, but it’s not easy. Haji’s trying to find the right path to travel down, for the good of everyone and for the good of Afghanistan, but it’s a path blocked by a many-headed enemy, Georgie. You’ve got the farmers who face the prospect of their yearly income being slashed by at least two-thirds, you’ve got the smugglers themselves, and you’ve got the insurgents looking at one of their main sources of money drying up.”

“What will they do?”

“What, besides try to kill him?”

“You’re not serious?”

Georgie moved sharply, but I pretended not to notice in case she packed me off to bed. But I felt the concern in the act, and I felt it in my own heart too.

“Well, no, maybe I’m being dramatic,” Ismerai soothed. “But these are not easy times for him, Georgie. You need to be aware of that.”

Despite the sadness in Ismerai’s voice, Georgie stayed silent. I guessed she must have been taking his words and turning them over in her head before she answered him. But when she did open her mouth, almost a full two minutes later, I nearly choked in my pretend sleep.

“Khalid has asked me to marry him,” she said.

25

YOU KNOW, I really didn’t mean to say anything, absolutely nothing at all, and for hours I didn’t even say a word—which was a kind of torture if you stopped to think about all the questions that must have been shouting in my head demanding to be answered. But as the saying goes, “A tree doesn’t move unless there is wind,” and by the middle of the next morning I realized I might have to do a bit of blowing.

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

Georgie was sitting in the front seat of the car. As I was pretty intelligent for my age, and a master in the art of spying, I spoke in English so that Zalmai couldn’t understand.

“Like what?” she replied, turning in her seat to look at me.

“Like… stuff…,” I replied, stealing a line I’d heard James use a million times before when he was trying not to say anything.

“Oh… stuff…,” returned Georgie.

“Yes… stuff…,” I kicked back.

Georgie yawned, leaned back in her seat, and pulled down the sunglasses from her head to cover her eyes.

“No, not really, Fawad. But if you hear of anything interesting, do wake me up, won’t you?”

Which basically translated as “Don’t stop a donkey that isn’t yours.”

I shook my head. She really was irritating sometimes.

Back in Kabul, my desperation to talk broke out like fleas under my skin—itching, tiny-legged words that crawled up my nose, marched around my head, and rested in my mouth ready to jump out at the slightest opportunity. But there was no one to talk to!

Spandi would have been my first choice because he was my best friend and I knew he could keep a secret. As for Jamilla, well, there was just no way. She had already confessed to being a bit in love with Haji Khan, and on top of that she was a girl, which made trusting her pretty much impossible, especially when it came to subjects like marriage. And though Pir Hederi might have been an old man, he was worse than Jamilla when it came to this sort of thing. If I told him everything I knew, I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the day, as he tossed out the rotten fruit for the goats to feed on in the morning, he had Georgie and Haji Khan already joined and expecting their sixth baby.

So that evening I decided to have another go at Georgie.

And I would have done it too if Dr. Hugo hadn’t beaten me to her.

After a delicious meal of Kabuli pilau, cooked by the expert fingers of my mother, I was heading to the garden, where I knew Georgie sat reading a book in the fading sun, when the doorbell rang and the gate opened to let in the doctor.

Even before I knew Haji Khan was making a proper fight for Georgie, I was having trouble being in Dr. Hugo’s company because he was so nice, and it was obvious that he liked Georgie a lot because his eyes hardly ever left her face when they were together. But “nice” and “like” weren’t that much competition for an Afghan man in love, and I guessed the only thing stopping Haji Khan and Georgie getting back together was Georgie. And even though Haji Khan’s ways had killed Georgie’s baby, we had just found out that he recently saved a whole family, which, if you looked at it like a game of buzkashi, gave him a few more goals than the other team.

So, unable to face Dr. Hugo without my eyes giving away the fact that I thought he had lost the war, I shrank into the shadow of the wall just as his messy head of hair appeared in the yard. Hugging its edges, I crept around the house to the “secret passageway” at the back that led to the garden. There I took up my position, as I’d done so many times before, sitting down on my heels to peep through the rosebushes that once again were bringing their brilliant colors to the world.

As Dr. Hugo walked over to Georgie, she put down her book and smiled, lifting her head to offer him her cheek rather than her lips. Dr. Hugo hesitated, but took it.

“Thanks for coming,” I heard Georgie say.

“Thanks for coming? That sounds very formal,” replied Dr. Hugo, trying to laugh.

“Yes, sorry, I… it’s just that…” She sighed. “I think we need to talk.”

“Okay, now this sounds not only formal but serious.”

“Yes, it is. At least I think it is; maybe you will think differently. I don’t know. I’m not sure how you might feel about it, to be honest with you.”

“Well, why don’t you try me?” Dr. Hugo replied, and I could hear a tightness stretching his voice.

The doctor took a seat and moved it so it was directly opposite Georgie, rather than at her side. It made them look as though they were at a job interview. As I sat there spying on Dr. Hugo’s embarrassment, I felt a bit sorry for him, although I was pleased he was moving things along because Georgie was starting to lose her thoughts in her apologies and I was dying to hear the good stuff.

“Okay, now, Hugo, please let me finish before you say anything.”

“Okay.”

“Good.” Georgie sighed again and sat forward in her chair, pulling the patu around her even though the weather was warm and she couldn’t have been in the slightest bit cold.

I noticed it was the gray patu Haji Khan had given her.

“Well,” she began, “when Fawad’s friend Spandi died we went to the funeral in Khair Khana, as you know, and I saw Khalid there. It was the first time since the miscarriage, and, as you might expect, coupled with the occasion, it was quite an emotional moment. We didn’t speak at the funeral, it wouldn’t have been right, but he turned up at the house a little later and I spoke to him outside in his car. He was distraught, Hugo. If you could have seen him, it would have broken your heart. It was as if—”

“Fawad!”

My mother’s voice rang out like the crack of a bullet in the graying sky, and I slammed myself flat against the ground.

“Fawad!” she shouted again. “Fawad!”

Cursing my bad luck, I crawled farther into the shadow until I was clear and could get to my feet and walk around to the yard without being seen coming from the garden.

“Oh, there you are,” she said when I emerged. “Come, I need to speak to you.”

I wasn’t very happy about it, but I followed my mother into her room. It was clean and tidy, and the television stood silent for a change. I also thought she looked unusually nervous, as if she had done something wrong, which was normally my job in our life together.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“What do you mean ‘what’s happened?’ ” she asked back, seating herself on a cushion and holding out her arms for me to join her.

“You look… weird,” I said.

“Ho, that’s a nice thing to say to your mother, isn’t it?”

“It’s the truth,” I protested.

“Well, I suppose that’s okay then.”

She laughed, and I noticed how pretty her eyes were looking that night, like beautiful green lights.

“Okay, Fawad.” My mother leaned forward and took both my hands in her own. “I need to speak to you about something, and if you don’t like what you hear, then you just tell me and I promise I won’t mention it again. Not ever.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a coldness creep into my insides—the same coldness that must have crept into Georgie when she was about to tell Dr. Hugo that Haji Khan wanted to make her his wife, causing her to hold on tighter to her patu.

“Wait a minute,” I added, an idea suddenly turning the shiver in my heart into something much nicer and warmer, “are you going to get married?”

“What? How…”

My mother pulled away, clearly shocked, and I felt immediately terrible for saying something she found so ugly to hear.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I was just thinking out loud.”

“No, don’t be sorry, Fawad. I’m… I’m just surprised you asked, that’s all, because it’s sort of what I want to talk to you about.”

She paused.

I paused.

In the silence, our eyes held, and I felt how strong our love for each other was.

“Shir Ahmad has asked me to marry him,” she finally said, “and I want to know what you think about the idea and about him becoming your father. If you say no, that’s it, son. We’ll never discuss it again, and I won’t think any less of you. But you have to know he is a good man, Fawad, and I think he can offer us a real future. It’s a chance for us to live some kind of normal life, as a family, as an Afghan family, not a crazy mix of Afghan and foreign. I want to be settled. More important, I want you to be settled. But you are my son, and this marriage can only ever go ahead with your permission.”

When my mother stopped talking, I felt the trembling in her fingers and I let go of them to get to my feet. Slowly, I walked over to the window, where I stood looking out for a time, shaking my head and rubbing at my eyes as if a great pain had suddenly invaded my body. I then sighed, loud and hard, and turned back to look at my mother.

Her face had turned downward, and she was staring at the floor.

“It’s okay, Fawad,” she whispered, “don’t worry. I’ll tell Shir Ahmad—”

“Yes, Mother! Tell him yes!” I shouted, jumping over to her and grabbing her around the neck to plant a thousand sweet kisses on her face. “It’s about time!” I added, laughing hard because my mother had grabbed me by the waist and was tickling my stomach in punishment.

26

I’D NEVER HAD many secrets in my life, mainly because people don’t trust children with things that are important, so most of the time I just made them up. But now that I actually had a head full of the damn things, they didn’t seem half as much fun as they should have been. After thinking about it in bed, right up to the point when my eyes gave up and closed for the night, I decided the main problem with having a secret is that you’re not allowed to tell anyone about it. And when you can’t tell anyone about it, well, what’s the point in even having it?

And I didn’t just have one; I had loads of them. So far, Haji Khan had asked Georgie to be his wife, but I couldn’t say anything because I was pretending to be asleep when I heard about it. Dr. Hugo had almost certainly been told something “formal and serious,” but I couldn’t ask him about it because I was spying when he got told. I couldn’t tell anyone about my mother’s news because after she told me she made me promise to keep quiet until she’d been to Khair Khana to visit her sister. I couldn’t even have a man-to-man talk with Shir Ahmad about his future prospects or where he imagined we might live because my mother was torturing him with silence. I hoped for her sake that he didn’t ask another woman in the meantime. Sometimes Afghan men just want to get married, and it’s not really important who says yes to them.

In Afghanistan there are quite a few ways for men and women to get married: it can be arranged between, and inside, families; it can be a business deal or, as Mulallah nearly discovered, the payment of a debt; and there’s even a system called badal where families make a trade—one family gives their daughter to another so she can marry their son, and in return that family gives their daughter to them so their son can marry. This way nobody has to pay for anything. But although it’s cheap, it’s not the best system in the world because it can get very complicated, and in the end everybody has blood with everybody else and this makes their babies die.

I think this is maybe what happened to Pir Hederi and his wife. He once told me they had never had a child that had lived over the age of two years, and this came down to the “bad blood” between them. Pir said that when their blood mixed, it turned to fire in the bodies of their babies, damaging their brains, until eventually it killed them.

I felt a bit sorry for Pir when he told me about his dead children because I reckoned that given the chance he would have been a good father. You only had to look at the way he treated me and Jamilla, and the way he used to take care of Spandi.

“You live, you lose, you die,” Pir grumbled one day as the radio spoke of another bomb that had come to eat away at some families in Kandahar. “Who in their right mind would bring a child into this world of ours?” It wouldn’t have been nice to remind Pir Hederi that he and his wife had in fact tried and failed to do just that, so I said nothing.

Of course, Pir Hederi wasn’t the only man without a son; there was also Shir Ahmad. But at least he had his computer school to keep his thoughts busy. And maybe one day he would make a baby with my mother. Who knew? In fact, who knew anything for certain?

The only sure thing in this life as far as I could see was that no one would ever be able to hold two watermelons in one hand.

The following day after school, which had been as boring as a room full of women, I was surprised to find Haji Khan waiting in his Land Cruiser for me at the gate. I then realized it was a full week since we had buried Spandi and it was time for prayer.

Even though it was another sad occasion, my face couldn’t help smiling, because Haji Khan had not only remembered my friend, and me, but also recently saved Mulallah from an old man with curled fingers; he’d helped her mother put the fat back on her bones; he wanted to marry Georgie instead of shame her as a girlfriend; and whether he was a drug lord or not, he had this year decided not to be one.

“Ready?” was all he said as he brought down the window to speak to me.

“What about my bike?” I asked.

Haji Khan mumbled something behind him, and the big man with the big gun who had traveled with us to Khair Khana the last time appeared. He picked up my bike and placed it carefully in the back of the Land Cruiser. Haji Khan then nodded at me to get in.

Inside, I leaned forward to give him my hand.

“How is everyone?” he asked.

“Good,” I answered. “Georgie was very happy because of the help you gave Mulallah’s family.”

“Was she?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad. The family deserved a little luck.”

I was going to make a joke about luck and Baba Gul’s cards, but then I remembered myself.

“Haji Sahib?” I asked. “Why don’t you have as many bodyguards with you these days?”

This was now the third time I’d seen Haji Khan with only one of his men instead of his usual army.

“Because it is better this way,” he replied. And when he looked in the mirror and saw the next question arriving in my eyes, he added, “At some point, if you’re trying to convince people that the country is changing for the better, you’ve got to start believing it yourself—and even if you don’t, you’ve at least got to give the impression that you do.”

When we returned from Spandi’s prayers, Haji Khan dropped me off at Pir Hederi’s shop because I was already late for work. As soon as I set foot in the door I could see the old man was up to one of his schemes, and by the grin on his face it was going to involve me.

“We’re going into the food business!” he told me as I came to sit on a crate of Pepsi beside him. “That’s the future, Fawad—Pir Hederi’s Take-out Service.”

“Don’t people already take out food from the shop?” I asked.

“Well, yes, in a way they do… but I’m talking snack food, that sort of thing. It was your friend James who gave me the idea.”

I groaned in reply. James was almost as crazy as Pir Hederi with his get-rich-quick schemes. Lately, after talking to someone, the journalist had become convinced that one of the mountains in the Hindu Kush had a secret door leading to a cave filled with treasure, so he spent all of his time looking through old papers from the Mines Department and learning how to rock climb with the help of the Internet. My guess was that if there was treasure hiding in Afghanistan’s mountains, it would probably be on sale in a Pakistani market by now, along with all the rest of our old stuff.

“So, what’s the idea?”

“Well, your friend James came in here looking for this thing called ‘sandwich.’ Apparently, that’s bread filled with something.”

“I do know what a sandwich is.”

“Good! Then we’re halfway there! Apparently all the foreigners are crazy for these things. So I’ve been trying some out.”

Pir pulled out a tray from underneath the counter. It was piled high with folded-over pieces of naan bread.

“What happened to the ones at the end?” I asked, picking up one of Pir’s homemade “sandwiches.”

“Let me see.” Pir reached out, and I placed the ragged piece of naan in his hand. “Oh right,” he said. “Dog must have got to that. Anyway, have a taste and tell me what you think.”

“I’m not eating that one,” I said, pushing Pir’s hand away.

“Don’t be so gay,” he replied, taking a bite—and quickly spitting it out again. “Allah wept. No wonder the old boy didn’t finish it off. Write it down, Fawad: onion and mango don’t mix.”

“Onion and mango?”

“Why not? James said the more exotic a sandwich is, the better.”

“He was messing with your head!” I said, although in truth I’d seen him eating banana in bread before, which I didn’t think would be the choice of most normal people.

“Okay,” Pir continued, never one for giving up, “try the ones on the tray. Jamilla made most of them before she went to school.”

Because I was hungry, and because this was my job—such as it was—I did as he ordered. Fifteen minutes later we had two lists. Cheese and tomato, peanut butter, cucumber and mutton, strawberry jam, yogurt and kebab, egg and chicken—they all worked. Lettuce and cream, mashed-up apple, honey and onion, honey and cheese, mustard and egg, and boiled carrots definitely didn’t.

Pir clapped his hands, waking Dog, who was asleep on the step of the shop.

“We’ll get the wife to cook up more of this stuff tonight, and Jamilla can do the sandwiching tomorrow, and when you return from school you can go out and sell them.”

“I thought you said this was a take-out Service!”

“Ah yes, I did, didn’t I? Okay, you take out half of what we’ve made at lunchtime, and when you’ve sold them you can come back for any I’ve got left.”

“Great…”

“Isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean… oh, forget it.” I couldn’t really see any point in arguing with the old man because it was quite clear he had made up his mind. “You do know I’m in mourning, don’t you?”

People are always dying in Afghanistan. That’s just the way it goes. And maybe because people are always dying, the ones who are left alive don’t spend that much time thinking about the ones who are dead. They just get on with things. And even though I knew Pir Hederi liked Spandi a lot—I’d even seen his white eyes lose tears at the burial—he was now getting on with things. More to the point, he was making me get on with his things.

Despite my strongest prayers the night before, when I returned to the shop the next day after school I found him waiting for me at the door. He had a metal tray in his hand loaded with his “sandwiches.” Rather rudely, I thought, he hardly gave me the chance to wheel my bike inside before he was pushing me out of the door.

“We’ve got no time to lose,” he shouted, trying to keep Dog’s face away from the food with his free hand, “lunchtime is nearly over. Get yourself over to the Pakistani Embassy. There’s always a massive line of people outside, and they’ll be starving, I bet.”

“I’m starving,” I told him.

“Oh.” Pir paused to think about how this piece of news might affect his plan to take over the take-out world before telling me, “Okay, you can eat on the way.” He passed me the tray. “Only one,” he warned as I walked out the door, “and make sure it’s egg. They’re already starting to smell like hell.”

I walked across the main road, past Wazir’s mosque and the small row of shops selling airline tickets to places in the world I’d never even heard of and would probably never get to see, and turned right, onto the street with the Pakistani Embassy. Pir Hederi was correct: there were tons of people lining up against the wall, all hoping to get visas. Looking at them, I wondered what it was that made so many people want to go to a place they pretty much blamed for everything. But I guessed anywhere was better than nowhere when you had nothing.

Of course, when you had nothing you weren’t going to waste the money you didn’t have on sandwiches.

“How much?” One man laughed when I told him the price of two hundred afs that Pir Hederi had set. “I could buy a damn sheep for that.”

“Yeah, but you couldn’t get it slaughtered, sliced, and placed between bread for the same price,” I countered, quickly dodging the back of his hand.

“I’ll give you ten afs,” another man said.

“That’s very kind of you,” I replied, “but you’ll still have to pay for a sandwich.”

As I began to draw quite a crowd—mainly those who wanted something for nothing—a policeman came over and told me to move along. I was causing a disturbance, apparently. And, apparently, he could arrest me for that. As I was too young to spend the rest of my life in prison for a tray of sandwiches nobody wanted to buy, I did as I was told and walked off toward the barricaded openings of the American camps nearby.

I sat down by the side of the road to wait for passing soldiers and told myself that after nearly losing my freedom I deserved more than one crappy naan bread filled with egg turning green. I opened up a few of the newspaper-wrapped parcels and settled for cucumber and mutton. Although the bread was getting hard around the edges, I had to admit the sandwich tasted pretty good.

“Hey, little fella!”

I looked up into the glaring sun and kind of saw the blacked-out face of Dr. Hugo.

“Hey, Dr. Hugo! Do you want a sandwich?”

“Okay,” he said.

He picked the top sandwich from the pile and opened it up.

“Peanut butter,” I said. “Nice choice. That will be two hundred afs, please.”

Dr. Hugo smiled and came to sit by my side.

“No, I’m serious,” I said.

“Oh.” He dipped into his pocket and pulled out five dollars. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks, I will.”

For a while we sat there saying nothing because our mouths were too busy trying to chew Pir’s sandwiches. As I had a head start on the doctor, I finished first.

“So, what are you doing here?” I asked.

Dr. Hugo swallowed hard and coughed a bit. “I was seeing the Americans about some medical supplies—nothing that interesting.”

“Oh.”

He continued eating. Then he stopped chewing, pushing his mouthful into a cheek in order to speak.

“Look, Fawad, I’ve been meaning to ask you something…”

“Okay.”

I hoped to God it wasn’t another damn secret coming my way.

“Well…” Dr Hugo looked a bit embarrassed, and as he searched for the words and gulped down his sandwich he put a hand through his hair, leaving in it a smudge of peanut butter. “Do you know where Haji Khalid Khan has his house in Kabul?”

I looked at the doctor, trying to work out in his eyes what he was up to as I nodded my head slowly.

“Good. That’s excellent news. That really is. Now, can you possibly take me there?”

I picked up another sandwich and bit into it. Tomato, onion, cucumber, and honey—not a combination I remembered being on the list Pir and I put together. It tasted like rat vomit.

“Fawad?”

“Look,” I said finally, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“I only want to talk to him.”

“What about?”

“Georgie.”

“Then that really isn’t a good idea. I don’t think he’d like it very much.”

“Be that as it may, young man, but I have to. If I don’t, she’ll leave.”

I turned my head at his words, surprised and just a little bit pleased.

“Is Georgie going to live in Jalalabad?”

“No, of course not,” Dr. Hugo replied, looking confused. “She’ll go back to England.”

“England?”

“Yes, England. And I’m sure that, like me, you wouldn’t want to see that happen, would you?”

It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Georgie might leave Afghanistan—or rather that she might leave me.

“No, I don’t,” I admitted.

“In that case, take me to Haji Khan.”

Although I knew it was a bad idea to take Dr. Hugo to see Haji Khan because he would almost certainly be killed, there were now more urgent worries crowding my head than the life of a foreigner. There was my life with a foreigner. I couldn’t imagine Georgie not being near me; more than that, I didn’t want to imagine it. After recently losing one of my best friends, I couldn’t face losing another, so if Dr. Hugo thought he could fix the problem by getting killed, I wasn’t going to stop him.

“Here it is,” I said, pointing to the green metal door in front of us, where a guard with a gun sat on a green plastic chair.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Dr. Hugo said.

“Okay, it’s your funeral.”

The doctor looked at me for a second to see if I was laughing, but I wasn’t. Amazingly, though, he still got out of the Land Cruiser, and I followed him, slightly impressed, holding my tray of sandwiches.

Dr. Hugo told his driver to wait for him, and we walked toward the guard.

“We want to see Haji Khan,” I told him.

“Who’s the foreigner?” he asked.

“A doctor,” I replied.

The guard nodded his head and disappeared inside, leaving us waiting outside.

Two minutes later he was back.

“Okay,” he said, and he stepped back from the gate to let us through.

Haji Khan was in the garden with about six other men dressed in expensive salwar kameez and wearing heavy watches. He got up to greet us and held out his hand to Dr. Hugo first.

“Salaam aleykum,” he said.

“Waleykum salaam,” replied the doctor. “I’m Hugo.”

“Nice to meet you, Hugo,” Haji Khan replied.

It was quite obvious he hadn’t the faintest idea who the British man was, and I smelled trouble coming.

As Haji Khan invited us over to the carpet to sit with him, he asked after the health of my mother and told me he hoped I was fine, doing well, and keeping happy. “If you were hungry, we could have made you something here—you needn’t have brought your own food,” he added, looking at my plate of unsold sandwiches. I tried to laugh, but because of the situation it came out as more of a squeak.

All of us then sat there on Haji Khan’s carpet with his friends gathered nearby, watching one another and saying nothing. Haji Khan must have been wondering what I was doing there with a doctor he didn’t know, but he didn’t ask because it wouldn’t have been polite. We had been invited into his garden, and we were his guests.

Now, if we could just continue to sit there, all nice and quiet, and drink the tea that was being poured for us, I thought we stood a pretty good chance of walking out of the gate in one piece. But then Dr. Hugo started talking.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” he stated.

Haji Khan shrugged his shoulders in a way that said well, yes, actually, I was wondering.

“Well,” Dr. Hugo continued, coughing a little as he did, “I’m a friend of Georgie’s.”

Haji Khan said nothing.

“I also know that you are a good friend of hers, and over the years you have become quite, um, close.”

Haji Khan again said nothing, and because his silence was turning the air weird I tried to concentrate on my tea.

“Well, the fact is that I know things have changed between you two and, um, you’re not as close as you once were. But it’s quite clear that she still feels an awful lot for you, and I think it’s time you, um, well, you know, backed off a bit.”

Haji Khan continued to say nothing, but his eyes were growing dark and his eyebrows were moving inward. This was not a good sign, not a good sign at all, and I prayed the doctor would stop his talking, drink his tea, thank my friend for his hospitality, and go.

But he didn’t.

“I’m saying all this to you because Georgie is thinking of leaving for England, and the fact is I would prefer her to stay, for obvious reasons.”

“What reasons?”

It was the first time Haji Khan had spoken since the conversation began, and I heard the anger cooking in his voice.

“I think I’m in love with her,” Dr. Hugo told him, almost matter-of-factly.

It wouldn’t have been the first reason I’d have given.

“Have you slept with her?”

Haji Khan’s voice was quiet and careful, and I noticed his friends shifting themselves on the carpet.

“Sorry, but I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I said, have you slept with her?”

“Well, no. No, I haven’t slept with her, but that’s not really the point here. The fact is we have become close, and I’m sure that if you just gave her some space, if you finally let her go, I know I could make her happy. I mean, come on, what could you give her here, in Afghanistan, in your culture—”

Suddenly, Haji Khan let out a roar so loud I dropped my cup of tea.

The doctor sprang to his feet in shock, and Haji Khan flew at him, grabbing him by the neck and pinning him to the wall.

“Are you mad?” he raged, spitting each and every word in Dr. Hugo’s face. “Coming to me and talking like this? Do you not know who the fuck you are dealing with?”

“Of course I know who you are,” Dr. Hugo gasped, struggling for breath and ripping with both hands at the one hand that held him. “I’m not scared of you!”

By now I was also on my feet, and from where I was standing Dr. Hugo didn’t look scared—he looked terrified.

“You stupid, stupid, stupid motherfucker!” Haji Khan screamed back at him, slamming his fury into his face. “You think you’re in love with Georgie? You think? Well, let me tell you something: I am Georgie! That woman is my heart; she is locked in my bones, in my teeth, even in my hairs. Every inch of her is me, and every inch of her belongs to me. And you? You come here with your schoolboy dreams to convince me to ‘back off.’ Are you insane? Are you fucking insane?”

Haji Khan threw the doctor to the ground, leaving him choking for air at his feet.

“Get him out of here,” he snarled in Pashto to one of the guards who had crept closer at the first sign of trouble. “Get him out of here before I rip his throat out.”

He then walked away, into his house.

27

ON THE DRIVE back in the car Dr. Hugo was very quiet, which was fair enough—he had just been half strangled after all. His hands were also trembling, and the middle of his eyes looked bigger than normal.

“That man’s a bloody animal,” he finally muttered, “a maniac. What the hell does she see in him?”

I guessed he meant Georgie.

“Well, he is very handsome, and last week we found out that—”

“It was a rhetorical question, Fawad.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t know what rhetorical meant, but I guessed it might have something to do with a question that did not want an answer.

Still, if nothing else, Dr. Hugo’s visit to Haji Khan had made up my mind about one thing: the doctor was nice and all that, but a woman needs a man who can fight for her, especially in Afghanistan. And although I knew it was wrong, because my mother told me “Violence is never the answer,” I was beginning to think that Haji Khan was pretty “down-with-it-cool,” to use James’s words. I didn’t say anything, though, and for the rest of the journey Dr. Hugo also said nothing. He only rubbed at his hands now and again, and sometimes his neck.

About ten minutes later we stopped in front of my house, and he leaned over. His voice was almost a whisper in my ear.

“I’d appreciate it, Fawad, if you didn’t mention any of this to Georgie.”

“Okay,” I agreed, because I felt sorry for him. But I was far from happy about it. When I got back to my room, I’d have to write everything down on paper just so I could remember all the things I was now not supposed to tell anyone about.

I was hoping to avoid anyone who might make me lose the secrets hiding in my head but, because life is never how you want it to be, I came into the yard to see the whole house, including my mother, sitting in the garden. She immediately jumped to her feet. As she moved, I noticed an Afghan woman next to her who I thought looked like someone I knew, but I couldn’t think from where.

My mother’s eyes were wet, but her face was happy—incredibly happy in fact. And then I noticed that everyone else looked incredibly happy too, and I guessed that my mother must finally have said yes to Shir Ahmad, which at least meant I could scratch one secret off my list.

“Fawad!” my mother cried, grabbing me by the arm and practically dragging me to the garden. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Obviously I’d not been involved in my mother’s first marriage, so I thought I was about to go through some kind of formal introduction to the man who would soon become my father. But it still seemed odd. After all, I’d been speaking to Shir Ahmad for the best part of the year, every day of it. In fact, without me they probably wouldn’t have been getting married.

I passed Georgie, James, and May, whose faces looked stupid with joy, and then the woman my mother had been close to when I first came into the yard got up from the ground to greet me. Close up I could see she was beautiful. She was also young, much younger than my mother, and, rather weirdly, she shared her green eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unable to do anything else, Mina followed him.

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

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

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

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

But then everything changed again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28

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

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

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

“He’s not usually so quiet,” my mother said with a smile.

“Well,” Mina said, kissing me on the cheek, “it’s a lot to take in. We must get to know each other again.”

As Mina spoke I let myself fall deeper into her body. Though she was right and our eyes and our heads needed time to learn about each other, my heart already knew all there was to know, and it loved her.

When my eyes struggled to stay open, my mother told me to go to my room so she could speak to Mina alone. I wanted to stay, but I didn’t say so because I saw it was important to my mother, and as I waited for sleep to take me I listened to them talking and crying together. I guessed my sister was slowly getting the story of our life—and slowly getting used to the idea that she had lost our older brother, Bilal.

When the sadness of the night was over and the sun woke up to shine its happiness back on their talk, my mother decided that my sister’s return was a blessing from God that she should marry Shir Ahmad. I was pretty relieved when she told me because it stopped the guard from marrying someone else and it also allowed me to tick another secret off my list—well, almost. Apparently we still couldn’t tell any of our friends because we had to travel to Khair Khana to my aunt’s house first.

For two women who not so long ago couldn’t stand the sight of each other, they were sure as hell seeing a lot of each other now. But of course there was a reason for it. After all, this is Afghanistan, and rules have to be followed.

There in my aunt’s house, in front of the mullah who had said the prayers for Spandi, my mother and Shir Ahmad performed the marriage ceremony, nekah, accepting each other three times before Allah. As well as the holy man making sure they did everything right, my aunt and her husband were allowed to watch, as well as two of Shir Ahmad’s brothers, and my sister Mina and her husband.

Hazrat Hussein had turned up at our house earlier that morning, expecting to take his wife home but finding a wedding invitation in his hand instead. To my surprise, he was a lot bigger than I had imagined, and his face was soft and kind. And although his arm looked strange, as if God had tied a child’s one onto his body rather than a man’s, I was relieved to see it was the left one, which meant there were no embarrassing problems when it came to shaking hands.

As all the adults stood around being polite to one another, I heard that Hazrat had spent the night in Kabul, staying with a business partner of his. Apparently my sister’s husband did clever things with wood—so clever, in fact, that he could sell them. And in Khair Khana he presented my mother with a beautiful brown chest carved with flowers and singing birds.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see my sister’s baby, Daud, because he was in Kunar with his grandmother, but Mina promised she would bring him on her next visit. As she spoke she quickly looked at her husband as if she had forgotten something, but he nodded his head and it put the smile back on her face.

In the short time I’d known him I already liked Hazrat Hussein, which I suppose was just as well now that we were family.

When my mother and Shir Ahmad performed the nekah, the kids were made to wait outside, because those were the rules. Jahid’s brothers immediately went off to play in a ditch in front of the house because there was a dead cat in it. Jahid and I disappeared around the corner, well away from the house, so he could teach me how to smoke.

Although cigarettes were pretty disgusting and tasted of dead bukharis, I realized that if I was ever to become a man there were a lot of disgusting things I’d have to get used to. Hair downstairs was one of them, according to Jahid. Worse than that, one day I would wake up to find my cock had been sick.

“Your sister’s pretty good-looking,” Jahid said as he tried to blow smoke rings. “I tell you what, if she hadn’t been kidnapped, I wouldn’t have minded marrying her myself—being blood and all that.”

I looked at Jahid, with his rolling eye, lazy leg, and stumpy brown teeth, and thought that if my sister had accepted his offer, I’d have handed her over to the Taliban myself.

“So, how’s the job going?” I asked, wanting to change the subject before my cousin forgot himself and started making sexy talk about the sister I’d only just got back.

“Slow,” he admitted, “but I’m starting to do more filing now, the paperwork and all that, and my boss says he’ll get me on one of those computer courses soon.”

“Shir Ahmad’s been going to computer school.”

“Well, it is the future.” Jahid nodded. “There’s not an office in Kabul that doesn’t have a computer these days. And you wouldn’t believe the amount of porn you can find on them. There are pictures, even films, of every kind of shagging you’ve never even thought of. There’s women shagging men, women shagging women, men shagging men, women shagging midget men, women shagging dogs, and I’ve even seen women sticking marrows up their—”

“Fawad!”

My mother’s voice rang out loud and clear, and Jahid and I quickly killed our cigarettes. “Here,” he said, handing me some chewing gum that was supposed to taste of banana but actually tasted of plastic. It was pretty disgusting as well. We used to sell it to the foreigners on Chicken Street for a dollar, proving people will buy anything if you look sad enough.

After my mother’s nekah, we said good-bye to Mina, who had to return to her baby. As we all held on to one another, it was both happy and sad, but Hazrat Hussein gave my mother a telephone number so we could call her any time we liked, which then made it more happy than sad.

Shir Ahmad returned to his house and my mother to our house. The next day, after the wedding party, my mother would finally move to her new house, and I would follow a week later—for a reason I didn’t want to know. While she’d spend the week doing stuff I didn’t want to know about, my mother thought I might like to stay at my aunt’s house. She couldn’t have been more wrong if she’d tried.

“Mother, the last time I was in that house Jahid’s father hit me on the head with a water jug, and one of their kids peed in my bed, and let’s not forget that my aunt’s food nearly killed you. Really, I’m not sure you’ve properly thought this through. But that’s okay, I know you’re not thinking straight, what with your mind being on your new husband rather than the happiness of your son and his chances of living to the end of the week.”

My mother smiled at me—which showed how much she had changed since she spat at her sister’s feet and left Khair Khana—and she played a little with my hair.

“Okay, Fawad, you win. If Georgie gives her permission, and promises to look after you, you can stay in the house for a week. I suppose it will give you time to say your goodbyes.”

We have a saying in Afghanistan: “One day you see a friend, the next day you see a brother.” After nearly a year living with the foreigners, I now had two sisters and one brother, and though their ways were sometimes strange and their behavior not in any way to be copied if you were a good Muslim, I loved them all dearly, each and every one of them. So when my mother and I returned home to tell them in Dari (with my English translation) that she had got herself married and would be moving out the next day and taking me with her a week later, they all looked at us with blank faces.

I think they call it shock.

Georgie was the first to recover her mind and remember her manners, and she gave my mother a hug.

“Congratulations, Mariya,” she said. “That’s fantastic news.”

“Yes, wonderful. Congratulations,” added James.

“Absolutely! Congratulations. I hope you have a wonderful life together,” said May. Then, just as everyone was getting used to the idea, she added, “I might as well tell you all now. I’ll also be leaving soon. I’m pregnant.”

If my mother’s news had been a surprise, May’s announcement hit everyone like a grenade. I translated May’s words for my mother. Her eyes grew wide, but she said nothing.

Again, Georgie was the first to recover.

“Congratulations, May! That’s… amazing.”

“It’s not just amazing; it’s a bloody miracle,” added James, stepping forward to give her a hug. “Who’s the father?”

“Well…” May smiled shyly. “The baby will be mine and Geri’s, but there’s a small chance it could be born with a French accent.”

I shook my head. In many of their ways the foreigners were just like Afghans. They laughed and cried, they tried to be good with one another, and they loved their families. But in other ways they were just plain crazy and trying their absolute hardest to burn for all eternity. Worse than that, they all seemed so damned pleased about it.

29

IN MY COUNTRY we wear the salwar kameez—basically a long shirt over baggy trousers. There’s a lot of cloth involved, more than you would believe, and it’s our traditional dress. These days I usually wear jeans like the older boys who copy the Iranian pop stars on TV, but there are times—say, at your mother’s wedding party—when the top of your trousers dig into your stomach because you’ve eaten so much it’s grown to the size of Kandahar, and it’s quite possible that at any moment you will be cut in two by the waistband. That’s when you realize that Afghans are a lot cleverer than Westerners. Not only do we believe in the One True God; we also make clothes big enough to fit Kandahar and Helmand.

“What’s the matter with you?” James asked as I fell into the seat next to him.

“I think I’m dying. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.”

About an hour after we arrived at the Herat Restaurant in Shahr-e Naw, we had started filling our faces. First it was ash—a soup of noodles, yogurt, kidney beans, and chickpeas—followed by potato and green onion bolani, eggplant in yogurt, Kabuli pilau, lamb kebabs, and finally firni, a delicious plate of cold custard. Really, it was no wonder that everyone enjoyed a wedding. It was probably the most food they got to eat in a year.

As I groaned under the weight of kebab lying in my stomach, James leaned over and moved his hands toward my trousers.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, not too full to be shocked.

“Loosening your belt to help you breathe better.”

I looked at James in disbelief. “I don’t think so, James,” I said as I tugged the top of my trousers out of his hands.

Honestly, foreigners had no sense of shame, not even at a wedding.

Of course, it was my own fault, because I hadn’t stopped eating from the moment I sat down at my mother’s table until the moment I left her to collapse next to James in the men’s room. As was only proper, the men and the women were separated at the party. Only my mother and Shir Ahmad got to sit together, in a little room set aside for them where they could greet the family guests who came in to see them.

Although the party wasn’t huge and there was no music or dancing because it was a second wedding for both my mother and Shir Ahmad, she still looked amazingly beautiful in her pretty pink dress with her hair fixed in curls under her matching scarf. Her eyes were huge, painted in pink and black with sparkles around the edges and giant-size eyelashes that a woman had glued to her face back at our house.

As I was her son, I could tell my mother was really happy, even though she didn’t smile much because that was only proper too. In Afghanistan, when a girl gets married she has to look unhappy at her wedding. Her sadness shows everyone how much she loves and respects the family she is leaving. Of course, in some cases it’s also real because the girl is terrified of the family she is about to join. But real or not, an unhappy bride is a good bride, and if on the wedding day she can squeeze the tears out from her eyes, that makes her even better. Of course, in my mother’s case the tradition seemed a little backward given that she had left my grandparents a long time ago, and they were both dead anyway. But the fact that she still followed the rules marked her out as a “good woman.” A “good woman” marrying a “good man”—that’s what everyone kept saying. And I think they were right, because Shir Ahmad had loved my mother for ages and he had changed his life so he could marry her, bettering himself at computer school and fixing up his home to make it ready for her even before he asked her to be his wife.

Yes, he was a good man, and I was pleased. He looked very handsome at the wedding banquet in his white suit and white shoes, and when he served my mother’s food to her, to show his respect, all the other women watched with smiles on their faces and nods of approval.

As well as me, my aunt, and Jamilla, Georgie and May sat in the marriage room, along with May’s woman-husband Geri. Out of all the Afghans at the wedding, only my mother and I knew of the baby hiding in May’s stomach, and before we left the house my mother begged the foreigners not to talk about it in public. If that news had got out, all of us might have been stoned to death, which wouldn’t have been a very good ending to my mother’s special day.

Despite having lived in the same compound as my mother for the best part of a year, James wasn’t allowed into the marriage room because he wasn’t a relative, and because he was a man. When I joined him he was sitting with Ismerai, Pir Hederi, and some friends of Shir Ahmad’s, looking lost because there was no one there to translate for him. Even though he had lived in Afghanistan for more than two years, James’s Dari hadn’t improved much from the few phrases he had learned when he first arrived, such as “Hello,” “How are you?” “Where’s the toilet?” and “Take me to your leader.” Mainly he got by with his hands flying wildly and the pocket dictionary he carried around with him.

I could only imagine how long it must have taken him to mess with Pir Hederi’s head over the business of the sandwiches.

When I began to feel a little better—without the need to run around the restaurant half naked—Ismerai asked me to go and fetch Shir Ahmad and bring him to the men’s room. He had a gift for him, apparently. I did as I was told because Ismerai was an elder. I was also excited to see what the present would be. Georgie had already given my mother a mobile telephone so she could call Mina whenever she wanted to, which I thought was pretty damn brilliant of her. But I could hardly imagine what Ismerai and Haji Khan were bringing to the table.

Shir Ahmad muttered his apologies to the women for having to leave them, but I could tell he was secretly pleased because I think they were starting to do his head in. Slowly, I led him to where Ismerai was waiting. It took quite a bit of time because of all the handshaking he had to do on the way.

Once in the men’s room, Ismerai asked Shir Ahmad to sit down and presented him with a white envelope. “From Haji Sahib Khan,” he said. “He apologizes for not being here in person to celebrate your wedding with you, but he had to return to Shinwar to attend to some urgent business.”

Shir Ahmad accepted Ismerai’s words with some kind ones of his own and opened the envelope. Inside were about four or five pieces of official-looking paper.

My new father looked at Ismerai, confused. I looked at Ismerai, disappointed. I was expecting to see money.

“It’s a contract,” Ismerai explained.

“Oh, a contract,” we all said, continuing to stare at Ismerai.

Laughing, the old man took the papers off Shir Ahmad and slowly explained what they all meant. It turned out that Shir Ahmad and Haji Khan were now in business together—the joint owners of Kabul’s latest Internet café.

30

AFTER THE WEDDING party, my mother left with her husband to get our new house ready for the start of our new life, and the rest of us returned to Wazir Akbar Khan.

Back at the house, Georgie, James, and May opened a bottle of wine because apparently they were all “in need of a drink,” and one by one they tried to convince me to move into James’s room for the week.

“It won’t be so lonely for you,” explained Georgie, coming in from the kitchen carrying my tea.

“Your mother would want you to sleep there,” May tried.

“It will be fun!” cried James.

But I was having none of it. I wasn’t a child anymore, and my mother had only gone to another house; it wasn’t as if she’d nearly died or anything—not like the last time she’d left me alone with the foreigners. And besides, my mother had a TV in her room, and I was moving in there.

After getting a little cross with my friends and all their nagging, I picked up my kettle of tea and left them to their wine so I could settle myself in my mother’s room and finally get some peace. And as I arranged the cushions for the best view of the television, I felt pretty grown up about it.

“This is the life,” I said to myself, sipping at my drink and stretching out on my mother’s bed.

I plumped up the pillow and relaxed for the film that was about to begin.

Eight hours later I was woken by the sound of Georgie calling me to breakfast. The television was silent because the electricity had gone off, and as my head caught up with my surroundings I realized I’d fallen asleep before I’d watched even five minutes of the movie, which annoyed me slightly because it seemed such a waste of my new freedom.

I climbed out of bed, washed myself, changed my clothes, and went into the big house for breakfast. Only Georgie was there, as May had already left for her office and James wouldn’t come out of his room for another three hours at least.

“Did you sleep well?” Georgie asked, pushing a plate of bread and honey in my direction.

“Yes, thank you. Did you?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I poured myself a cup of sweet tea.

“So, did you enjoy the wedding party?” Georgie asked.

“Yes, it was pretty good. What about you?”

“Yes,” she agreed, “it was pretty good.”

We then continued eating in silence until Massoud turned up to take Georgie to her office and I jumped on my bike to go to school. Although it was always nice to spend time with Georgie, neither of us was really a “morning person.”

As usual, I went to the shop after class to earn my money, such as it was, and to tease Jamilla before she went to school.

“I read yesterday that Shahrukh Khan got married to another man,” I told her.

“Where?” Jamilla asked. “In Fawad’s Special Newspaper of Lies?”

“No, in an Indian temple, of course.”

“Very funny,” she said, fixing her scarf before walking out the door.

“I thought so.” I laughed. “See you after school, Jamilla.”

“Whatever,” she replied, in English, making the sign that James had taught me and that I had taught her.

As she walked out the door, I suddenly noticed she was starting to get taller than me, which didn’t please me one bit. I’d scratched a mark on my bedroom door when I first moved into the foreigners’ house, and I didn’t seem to be getting any higher. It was starting to play on my mind, so much so that I’d recently got to wondering whether I’d end up like Haji Khan’s midget man. Even Jahid had commented on my height when I saw him at the wedding.

“Hey, runt,” he’d greeted me.

I ignored him, obviously, because in God’s great plan for us all he hadn’t come off too well either. But it was still annoying.

“How old are you now?” Pir Hederi asked when I mentioned it in the shop.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe ten, maybe eleven.”

“Oh, well then, boy, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Come back to me when you’re maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, and you’re still no higher than an ailing calf.”

“I’m not likely to be here when I’m twenty-five or twenty-six, am I?”

“Where the hell else are you likely to be?”

“Well…” I stopped to think about it, and realized I had no idea. “Somewhere else,” I said eventually, now even more disturbed by the thought that I might end up as a man-midget working in Pir Hederi’s shop for the rest of my life.

“Look, if you’re seriously worried, my advice is to get your mother to boil up a chicken in hot water, throw in some chickpeas and a spoon of scorpion juice, and take a glass of the water every morning when you wake up.”

“We’re not allowed to eat even chicken these days because of the bird flu, never mind scorpions,” I told him.

“In that case, you’re screwed,” was all he said.

“You have absolutely nothing to worry about,” Georgie told me when I returned home later that afternoon to drink tea with her in the garden. “Girls mature faster than boys—that’s a fact. In a couple of years you’ll catch up with Jamilla, and then you’ll overtake her. And really, Fawad, you’re far too clever to end your days in Pir Hederi’s shop, so calm down.”

“Do you really think I’m clever?” I asked.

Georgie laughed. “Fawad, you’re the most intelligent boy I’ve ever met! You are… what is the phrase in Dari? I don’t know. In English we would say that you’re ‘bright as a button,’ meaning you’re amazingly clever and lively for your age. Honestly, I’ve met adults who haven’t got the sense you were born with. You are a very special little boy who will one day grow up to be a very special man. And you’re also very handsome.”

“Wow, I’m pretty good then, aren’t I?” I laughed.

“You sure are, Fawad.”

As I looked at Georgie, her lovely face sweating in the summer sun, I suddenly felt a cloud of sadness come over me. Things were changing so fast, and they would probably never be the same again: May was moving back to her country to have her French baby; I was moving to Kart-e Seh to begin my new life; James was worried about who was going to cook for him now my mother was gone, and why Rachel didn’t want to marry him; and Georgie—well, nobody knew what Georgie was up to.

“Are you going to leave Afghanistan?” I asked, watching her carefully.

“Who told you that?” she asked back, surprise making her voice grow high.

“Dr. Hugo told me before he got beaten up by Haji Khan.”

“He what? Khalid did what?”

My heart stopped. I’d gone and done it again.

“It was only because he loves you,” I added quickly. “And really it was all Dr. Hugo’s fault because he was trying to make him ‘back off,’ and Haji Khan said that you were in his teeth and he called Dr. Hugo a motherfucker and then he got really angry. But he didn’t kill Dr. Hugo or anything, even though he told his guards that he was going to rip his throat out.”

Georgie stared at me over her sunglasses.

“I’m in his teeth, am I?” she asked finally.

“Well, that’s what he said.”

“How romantic,” she replied, but she spoke the words in a flat way like it wasn’t romantic at all.

“So, are you leaving Afghanistan?”

Georgie shrugged. “Right now, I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth. Maybe it will become clearer on Friday when I go to Shinwar.”

“You’re going to see Haji Khan?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t, but I guessed she was about to give Haji Khan his answer.

“Can I come with you?” I asked.

“Well… I don’t know. I’ve got a few things to sort out.”

“Please, Georgie. What if you do leave? This might be the last chance I get to see Mulallah.”

“To be honest, Fawad, I’m not sure I’ll have time to visit Mulallah and her family.”

“Okay then, Haji Khan.”

My friend looked at me through her glasses.

“I don’t know…”

“Please, Georgie. I’ll be ever so good, and I won’t make any trouble, and I’ll play by myself when you need to speak to Haji Khan and—”

“Okay, okay, you can come!”

“Great!”

“But only if your mother agrees.”

Using Georgie’s phone, I immediately called my mother to ask if I could go to Shinwar for the Friday holiday. She agreed, as I knew she would, because when it came to a choice between Shinwar and leaving me in a house with James and a pregnant lesbian, Shinwar would win every time.

“Don’t forget your prayers, and be good!” she yelled in my ear.

“I won’t, and I will,” I promised, making a note in my head to show her how to speak properly into a phone when I next saw her. She was shouting so loud I could have heard her in Tajikistan.

As with our other journeys, it was Zalmai who arrived at the house to drive us to Shinwar, but this time Ismerai came with us and we were taken in a Toyota pickup with a guard in the front and two more outside in the back.

“Expecting trouble, are we?” Georgie asked when she saw our escort.

“No, not really,” Ismerai replied. “Haji just wants to take precautions with you both, seeing as you are such special guests.”

“Oh, come on.” Georgie laughed. “What’s happened?”

“Beyond the usual?”

Ismerai took off his pakol to scratch at the few bits of hair left on top of his head.

“Okay. Last week the governor escaped a roadside bomb and there have been a few other incidents, but nothing to get worked up about.”

“Because of the poppy ban?” Georgie asked.

“Poppies, power, the time of the year… who knows? This is Afghanistan. We don’t do peace that easily, as you well know.”

As we traveled to Shinwar, Ismerai tried to take our mind off roadside bombs and “other incidents” by pointing out the places where people had been blown up in the past. “This is where the mujahideen ambushed a Russian convoy toward the end of the jihad,” he said as we came out of Kabul and into the mountains. “Here there was a mighty battle that lasted a full week… here we had some of our best sniper positions… here we dug tunnels into the hills to escape from the Communists…” He then pointed out the death sites of fallen friends and forgotten heroes and basically sent us all into a bit of a depression.

As we slipped down into Nangarhar and on into Shinwar, the sun burned hot through our windows, making it difficult to talk without completely exhausting ourselves, so we fell into our own thoughts and daydreams until we arrived at Haji Khan’s home.

I’d never been to his Shinwar compound before, and though it was smaller than his place in Jalalabad, it was much nicer—more like a home than a palace. Of course it was a home filled with guards carrying guns, but they were more in the shadows than at the other place.

As the Toyota came to a stop in the driveway, Georgie was the first out. Bending to the ground to stretch out her back, she then lifted her arms to the sky, holding them there for a moment, high above her head, as if she was feeling the air between her fingers.

“God, I love this place,” she said to no one, sighing. Then, turning to me, she added, “You know, Fawad, this is where I first fell in love with Afghanistan.”

“And with Haji Khan,” I added for her.

“Yes,” she accepted, “with Haji Khan too.”

I smiled, because this was important. If Georgie was to make the right decision about her future, she needed to be reminded of everything she loved, not of all the other things that had come to make her sad.

Ismerai came over to join us.

“Go sit on the carpet, and I’ll join you in a minute,” he said. “I’ve just got a couple of phone calls to make.”

Georgie and I nodded, and we walked over to a red carpet that was lying under a huge tree. The air was much cooler under the leaves, and above our heads birds sang to us. Life just didn’t get any better than this.

“It would be sad never to see this place again,” I said to Georgie as she kicked off her sandals and sat back to stretch out her legs.

“Yes, it would,” she admitted. “You know, it’s a shame that so many people don’t get to experience days like this.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed. Then, after thinking about it a bit more, I asked, “Why?”

Georgie smiled. “Well, there’s so much more to your country than war, as you can see, but unfortunately we rarely get to hear about it. I don’t think people get the full picture—about what Afghanistan is like, and what Afghans are like.”

“Yes, it is pretty good here,” I said, “as long as you’re not hungry.”

“Or no one’s trying to kill you.”

“Or you don’t get sold by your family.”

“Or you don’t lack electricity or clean water.”

“Or… or…” I was struggling now. “Or you don’t get your head blown off by a gas cooker.”

Georgie put her chin to her chest and looked at me over her sunglasses.

“It happened once, to a woman in our street,” I explained.

“Oh,” Georgie said, lifting her head back up to the sun that winked at us through the leaves, “well then, you’re right. It’s a pretty good country if you don’t get your head blown off.”

“Or your legs,” I added. “There are still a lot of land mines.”

“Or your legs,” Georgie agreed.

“Actually, what is so good about Afghanistan?” I asked, and we both started laughing.

“Okay,” Georgie said, stopping first. “For one, I’ve never lived anywhere where the sky is so blue it can leave you speechless.”

“It can get very blue,” I agreed.

“And though life is hard here, much harder than we can imagine living in our nice house in Wazir Akbar Khan, there is also kindness hiding behind the walls of these houses, and love.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, let me think how to explain. It’s like the books about your country. Most of them would have you believe that Afghanistan is a land of noble savages, heroic men who kill at the first provocation, and in some ways maybe they are right. There is a quick anger within you all and a brutality that is sometimes shocking to us, but mainly the Afghans I’ve been lucky enough to encounter have been simple people with good hearts who are just trying to survive.”

“I wouldn’t call Haji Khan simple.”

“Well, no, you’re right, again,” Georgie admitted, “but although he’s not poor, he still has a good heart. Khalid means well, I know that, it’s just that sometimes… Well, hey, come on, let’s not even go there.”

Georgie reached for her cigarettes, and as she suggested, I decided “not to go there” just in case “there” was the place where all the bad memories sat waiting.

As Georgie blew the smoke from her mouth, Ismerai returned. His phone was closed, and he had a smile on his face.

“Come,” he said, struggling a little for breath. “We’ve got something to show you.”

Zalmai drove us to a place about fifteen minutes away from Haji Khan’s house. Bouncing off the main track, we came to a stop outside a half-finished building where workmen were still busy building walls and moving dirt around in wheel-barrows.

As we stepped out into the air, Haji Khan appeared from the house talking to a man holding a large notebook. When he saw us, he shook hands with the man and walked over, with a smile on his face. He certainly looked a lot happier than the last time I’d seen him, and as usual he was dressed in the finest salwar kameez of pale blue with a gray waistcoat matching the color of his pakol.

I decided that if I ever got bored of wearing jeans, I would definitely find out who his tailor was.

“So, what do you think?” Haji Khan asked when he reached us. He spoke in English, and I guessed it was to stop the workmen from listening to his conversation.

“It’s a beautiful area,” Georgie said. “Are you building another house then?”

“Yes, I am building a new house,” he said, “but this house is for you. If you choose to accept it or not, this is also a matter for you.”

I was pretty amazed by his words, and I felt my mouth drop open with the weight of a million questions wanting to spill out but not being allowed to.

Georgie said nothing.

“Look,” Haji Khan continued, “come inside and let me show you.”

Before Georgie could refuse him he walked away. So we followed.

Stepping over bags of sand, we entered the house and walked into a square-shaped hall that was cement gray all around, with bits of wire hanging out of the walls. It wasn’t what you might call “pretty.”

“This will be the seating area,” Haji Khan said, looking at Georgie and waving his hand around the room. “It will be for your guests when they come. When it is finished, the walls will be a very beautiful green—this is my thinking—like the meadows of Shinwar, so that when it is cold you will always have spring.”

Without waiting for Georgie to react, Haji Khan moved to the left where two holes were waiting for doors.

“This room is the kitchen,” he explained, “and the other room is where your guests sleep. I am making also a very beautiful toilet place, side by side—what is it you say?”

“En suite,” replied Georgie.

“Yes”—Haji Khan nodded—“yes, in sweet. I think this is a good idea. Very Europe. Come.”

Haji Khan crossed the hall to where a staircase was being made between the ground floor and the top floor. It wasn’t finished yet, and a ladder leaned against the balcony above so the workmen could get up and down.

“This will be the staircase,” Haji Khan said, which made me laugh because we weren’t stupid. “Your rooms will be upstairs. One is your bedroom, one is a large seating area, and the other room is for maybe the children.”

Haji Khan looked at Georgie from under his heavy eyebrows. I could see he was taking a chance with his words, seeing as he had practically killed their last child.

“Here you can relax and see a wonderful view of the mountains to help keep your mind happy,” he added, and Georgie smiled, which made Haji Khan smile, and because both of them were smiling I smiled.

So far it was going very well, and I thought that if the new house filled with the promise of their children couldn’t keep Georgie in Afghanistan, nothing would.

“So, what is your thinking?” Haji Khan finally asked.

Georgie looked around.

“I think it will be wonderful, Khalid, but—”

“Please, Georgie,” he interrupted, frowning as his eyes fell sad, “not with the ‘buts.’ Please, first, let me show you one more thing.”

Haji Khan moved away and out the door, speaking again as he stepped outside.

“You see this garden to the river and to the road over there? This will all be yours. We will build the walls so you have privacy, and we will put beautiful roses in the ground along here”—he pointed to the left side of the garden—“and here”—he pointed to the right—“and here”—he pointed in front of him. “This way all of the day you will be surrounded by color and beauty.”

Georgie slowly looked around, probably imagining the colors that might shine in her world and what her life might be like surrounded by flowers in the garden and spring in her hallway.

As she considered things, Haji Khan moved away from us, his head bent low and his hands reaching out to each other behind his back. He was really trying, anyone could see that. I could almost feel the hope he was holding inside his hands. I knew that if Georgie really loved him there was no way she could refuse him, but when I searched her face she was looking away into the distance and I saw the worry in her eyes as she lifted a hand to block out the sun.

“Shit!” she suddenly shouted.

I looked to where she had been looking and saw something dark move along the roof of a nearby house. I looked back at Georgie, but she was gone, running toward Haji Khan and shouting at him to get down. As he turned to face her, she threw herself straight into his body. He stumbled backward before catching her in his arms, just as the bullets cracked in the distance and began to scream over our heads.

I threw myself to the floor as Haji Khan’s bodyguards opened fire, killing our ears with the noise of their guns.

Scared beyond scared, I raised my head to look for Georgie and saw her lying in the arms of Haji Khan. Blood covered her clothes, and her face was pulled into his chest. He was shouting at the guards firing around him. “Get the car!” he yelled, but his words were barely heard over the noise of battle.

“Georgie!” I screamed, and I got to my feet to run toward her.

When I reached them, Haji Khan pulled me flat to the ground. “Keep down, Fawad!” he shouted. His eyes were wide with pain, and I saw blood rushing from his shoulder.

“Georgie,” I whispered, and I pulled myself closer to her face so I could hold it in my hands.

Her life was pouring from her body like a river. Splashes of it colored her skin, which had grown white. Underneath my fingers she trembled as if a terrible wind from winter had suddenly blown over her.

I didn’t want to believe it. I squeezed my eyes hard shut and prayed to my God with all my strength. But I knew she was dying. We were going to lose her.

“Please, Georgie, please,” I begged, “we haven’t time. You have to say the words. You must believe!”

All around me the bullets kept flying, whistling and cracking over our heads and kicking up dirt around the garden that was waiting for Haji Khan’s roses. Above me I could hear him ordering his men and still calling for the car, but all I could see was Georgie’s face, and her dark eyes now hearing my voice and reaching for me.

We had one chance, just one chance, and it was slipping away so fast.

“Georgie, please believe,” I whispered, and I felt the tears tumble from my eyes, blurring her face. “You must believe, or you are lost! Georgie!”

“Fawad,” she breathed into my face, but her sound was too soft and I had to put my ear close to her mouth. “Fawad, don’t worry… I believe… I promise you, I believe.”

“It’s not enough,” I screamed back at her, because I couldn’t be gentle. There was no time to be gentle. We had only seconds. “You’ve got to say the words, Georgie! Please, you must say the words!”

And as my tears fell onto her lips, I saw her grab at the power deep inside her and she looked at me hard.

“La ilaha,” I told her, pushing the wet hair from her face and pressing my ear to her mouth.

“La ilaha,” she copied.

“Il-Allah,” I said.

“Il-Allah.”

“Muhammad-ur-Rasulullah.”

“Muh… Muhammad-ur-Rasulullah.”

There is no God except Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

And as Haji Khan’s car arrived, kicking up the dust in front of us, she closed her eyes and Georgie was gone.