Born Under a Million Shadows

by Andrea Busfield

  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.