“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 sist
er. 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.
Born Under a Million Shadows Page 22
