by Anna Perera
9
TO KANDAHAR
Inspired by Masud’s calm dignity, Khalid finds plenty to think about when they take him back to his room and he lies down—but he can’t sleep. There’s a car outside that keeps honking its horn and there’s no comfort to be found on this hard floor and itchy mat. So there are others here who have lost not only their families—Masud had a wife and four children in Cairo—but their businesses too. Masud has lost everything. What’s going on in the world that this can happen? Khalid cannot get his head around any of these crazy facts and each day he feels weirder than the day before.
Not until the first glimmers of daylight begin to peep through the gap in the window and he spreads flat on his stomach does Khalid finally fall asleep.
Waking up hours later to another quivering bolt of blue sky at the top of the window doesn’t rid him of the feeling of impending doom. The shooting pains down his arms, caused by trying to sleep with his wrists cuffed behind his back, are so severe now he feels sick and light-headed. Worse than ever.
He curls into a ball on the floor and cries. He’d always thought of himself as strong, but he realizes now that this was because he had his mum and dad to pick up the pieces whenever anything went wrong. And what went wrong in the past—letters from school and underage drinking and stuff—was nothing like this. Now there’s no one to make his aching arms better. He can’t even touch the sore skin under his eye to feel if the swelling’s going down. Has to ask permission to go to the toilet, like he’s at primary school.
Five minutes of suffering the rough bristles of the mat on his wet face is enough, though. Khalid stops crying and turns on his side, only to endure the sudden pressure of the hard floor on his shoulder. He sits up, groaning in agony. Letting his head fall, he moves it slowly round to stretch his stiff neck, but it doesn’t help ease the pain.
He never wanted to come to Karachi. Why didn’t he argue with Dad? He could have stayed with Mac next door, or Nico, or one of Dad’s friends from the restaurant. He doesn’t like Pakistan. He’s totally British, so why did he smile politely when Auntie gave him the shalwar kameez to wear? It was so uncool and a horrible sand color, and if he hadn’t worn it that day when he was trying to get past the demonstration maybe he wouldn’t be here now.
Panicked and frightened, locked inside this unending pain, Khalid begins to imagine he’s still in England, waving his family goodbye at the airport—off they go to Karachi without him. Great. He feels better for a moment, until the door clicks open and the ordeal of breakfast starts again. Two unsmiling guards. Warm water. One thin piece of bread. Watchful dark eyes on him. Guilty downward glances as he eats and drinks. But then the routine changes. He’s cuffed more tightly and, after being taken to the toilet, led from the house. The only sound is the faint rustle of his denim jeans as he walks barefoot between the guards, tears falling.
They push him into a car that smells of grease and petrol. One guard on either side. Khalid doesn’t bother to wonder if they are taking him home to his aunties’ house. In these handcuffs it doesn’t seem likely. At least this time there’s no hood and, despite the hot, sticky air, he can vaguely see tall buildings through the grimy window as they turn the corner and merge with the traffic on a wide highway.
The scruffy driver keeps his deep-set shadowy eyes on the busy road ahead. The serious man beside him speaks only to give what sound like directions in short, angry bursts. In the seat next to Khalid the heavily covered man keeps his head down the whole way, veined hands in his lap, so Khalid doesn’t get the chance to see what he looks like. He doesn’t dare challenge him or reach for the door handle to try and escape. The tense, clammy atmosphere in the car is so unbelievably bad he knows they will happily kill him if he moves a limb.
After about an hour, worried sick, Khalid senses an airport as the car turns off the main road. He can hear the sound of planes overhead. Engines whirring. As they draw nearer, he sees lines of men in shalwar kameez, heads bent, handcuffed like him, being led up the ramp of a cargo plane. He scans them quickly for anyone who might be Masud. Other men in army uniform yell orders with an American accent. Then a few men shout in Urdu or another language he’s never heard, perhaps Arabic. The same harsh tone to their voices causes his skin to creep with fear. A fear Khalid fails to master as they lead him trembling from the car up the ramp of the plane. An aggressive soldier screams abuse, kicks Khalid up the backside to hurry him inside the door. A suffocating feeling of unbearable heat lays into him like a branding iron the moment he steps into the entrance of the dark plane. A plane crammed with men. They push Khalid down the lines to join the middle row, where he squashes into the aisle, grateful for a bit of space to one side—until another man crashes down on the floor next to him.
As the plane taxis to the end of the runway, there’s no doubt in his mind he’s going to Kandahar. The sound of the sudden powerful rush of the engine tears into his heart, scooting him back to that day, which now seems so long ago, when he sat down in the comfy seat to fly to Karachi. Packet of crisps and fizzy drink safely stowed in the seat pocket. Then a terrible noise starts up that makes Khalid feel he’s inside a tumble dryer as the plane roars off with its cargo of prisoners, squashed together like sardines in a tin.
All of a sudden an insane panic builds up at the realization that he’s leaving his family behind. How will they find him now? The chaos, the craziness—it feels like he’s being stunned with charges of high-voltage electricity, destroying his ability to think clearly.
Strips of sunshine from the plane windows light up the bent shapes huddled on the ground as Khalid breathes in the foul smell of hopeless desperation.
10
PROCESSING
Some time later, in a vile, sticky heat, the plane lands with a thump on the runway, screeching to a halt as a soldier yells, “Welcome to Kandahar, folks!” The loud voice has a ring of satisfaction to it that crushes Khalid as well as confirming where he is.
He’s squashed between two much larger handcuffed men who’ve spent the whole journey praying. Their bobbing heads and closed eyes are now impossible to ignore as men nearby join in. Each in turn, including Khalid, is hauled up, pushed towards the wide ramp and led stumbling from the plane to an area of dusty ground and the noise of engines, generators and mad barking dogs.
Khalid sinks to his knees after a thump on the back. A plastic hood is shoved over his head while he sniffs the spreading dust. Then he’s thrown down on his face to wait.
A man begins wailing, pleading for help nearby. A man Khalid hopes isn’t Masud. Within minutes, Khalid’s bundled towards what sounds like a big echoing building. A building teeming with yelling soldiers and the sound of men crying and groaning as they’re herded and kicked into line with hard boots.
A soldier trips Khalid, crashing him to the concrete floor with a violent yell. A familiar pain rips through his side, giving him the sensation his arms are splintering from their sockets. He bangs his head so hard he blacks out for a second and teeters on the edge of consciousness. Coming round only when they start stamping on his aching spine to hold him down before buzzing a metal-cutter through the tough handcuffs, allowing his arms to flop to the ground like rags.
Then they begin ripping off his T-shirt and jeans and pull him to his feet totally naked. Surrounding him, one pulls off the hood. Khalid squints at the extraordinary sight of soldiers screaming abuse at naked men lined up against the white walls of a massive hangar-like, metal-ceilinged building. The prisoners’ heads are bowed in shame like something out of a horror movie as another man photographs each one in turn.
Men with gloves start searching Khalid’s body. Touching him all over. Others scream in pain at the intrusive violence of the searches. The worst embarrassment of their lives. Humiliated at every turn by the soldiers’ ugly taunts, the naked men are taken to one side and photographed again. When it comes to Khalid’s turn, he refuses to move forward. Standing proudly, no matter what they intend doing to him. With a swift
punch, he’s knocked into line.
Several photos are taken of his face, front on as well as in profile. After that a barber shaves his adolescent face stubble, then his head, with the same tenderness as a sheep shearer with a thousand fleeces to go. Then another photo’s taken of Khalid with his head shaved.
“OK, move it. You’re done!” The photographer dismisses him. Swearing harshly at the next man in line to hurry up. The middle-aged, soft-faced man, naked, vulnerable, with tears in his eyes, glances at Khalid as if to say the experience means his life is over. It ignites a terrible anger in Khalid, who knows the shaving of the man’s beard—an important part of his Muslim identity—is the final insult for him.
The naked man sits and weeps while his face is being shaved. The barber carries on, while the sight of grown men crying and yelling like babies as they’re routinely humiliated gnaws at Khalid’s heart. The two nearest him, naked as the day they were born, close their eyes and silently pray. It’s then that Khalid spots two kids younger than him: one skinny boy about thirteen years old who’s acting brain-damaged, with his tongue hanging out and rolling eyes, and another scared-looking boy at the back of the line who’s so small he could be eleven or younger. He cranes his neck to see them better, but they disappear from view when, one by one, men are taken into a nearby concrete building.
Shielded by a soldier on either side, Khalid is shoved into a small room where more American soldiers take his fingerprints, then swab saliva from his mouth before herding him through another door where two men in jeans and white shirts sit behind a green plastic desk.
The biggest American smiles. Holding out his hand as if welcoming the shivering, naked Khalid to Afghanistan.
“Hi, I’m Anthony. This is Sam. We’re CIA.” Khalid doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Standing there waiting to hear his fate, he’s not sure if he’s supposed to say hi back to them or not.
With a poker-like expression on his pink face, Sam asks, “When did you join al-Qaeda?”
Not this again! “Listen to me—I’ve never joined them. I don’t know anyone in al-Qaeda,” Khalid says breathlessly. Scared of the thoughts going on behind Sam’s sharp voice, he’s not sure what else to say.
Then Anthony raises his eyebrows. “You speak good English!”
“I am English!”
“Oh yeah? Where you from?”
“Rochdale.” Khalid watches Anthony lose interest, not having any idea where Rochdale is. “It’s near Manchester!” But the queue behind him is getting longer and the Americans keep looking past him to check it out, giving him the impression these questions are just a formality.
“When did you last see Osama Bin Laden?” Sam pipes up.
“What?” Khalid frowns. “I’ve seen him on telly if that’s what you mean. I’ve never met him. You lot can’t even find him, so how am I supposed to know where he is? Just let me go. I haven’t done anything.”
“Tell me about your links to terrorist cells in England.”
“What?” Khalid’s too puzzled to answer.
“You communicated by code on the computer with other terrorists.”
“No way. Who said that?” Khalid says. “What computer?”
“But you know Al-Jaber?” Anthony asks.
“Who’s he? What computer are you talking about?”
Sam clasps his fingers together on the green desk. “As usual, another time-waster!” He nods to the soldiers to take Khalid away. Making space for the next naked man to be asked the same questions.
They lead Khalid off to one side and hand him a large white T-shirt and navy-blue plastic-feeling trousers with an elasticated waist. They don’t bother with underwear, taking him as soon as he’s dressed to another room, where a different man asks his name and address, and whether he’s married or not. The names of his children.
“I’M FIFTEEN!” Khalid screams for England. “DON’T YOU GET IT?”
That’s when he loses consciousness. Blacking out from the thump to his back. Waking up later on a cold earth floor in a makeshift wire cell. One of many cells dividing a long, low building into ugly compartments. The prisoners are dressed in the same blue trousers, some in Afghan-style white caps. The grinding sound of a nearby generator interrupts everyone’s thoughts with the same constancy as a road digger and there’s a faint smell of urine in the air. Then a whiff of cooking oil.
“No talking while you’re here,” the military policeman warns him as he patrols the space between the cells.
Khalid gazes around him, through the dazzling spotlights shining from either end of the row. Eyeing the bucket in the corner with disbelief. A bottle of water to one side. Blanket folded on the floor next to a thin mat. Woollen shawl on top.
A man with big cheeks and bushy eyebrows in the next cell watches him closely, sympathy in his eyes as he waggles his head from side to side, as if to say, Keep quiet. Take no notice. You’ll be OK.
Beside the open doors at either end of the building, soldiers with huge rifles, machine or hand guns laugh and joke among themselves. Their eyes move down the lines every few seconds to check nothing’s changed. As if any of them have the smallest chance of escaping when they can’t even leave their cells to go to the toilet without asking permission.
It’s not really a surprise to Khalid when the nearest man covers his lower body with a shawl to go to the loo in the metal bucket, but surely they have toilets here for all these men? What kind of place is this? In desperation, Khalid scans the cages for Masud, for Dad, for any familiar face in the midst of this madness—or even for more boys who look his own age. As he gazes from cell to cell, face after face stares back at him with the same look of miserable resignation. Utter defeat in their dark eyes. Angry, afraid, lost and forgotten—just like him.
One man kneels to pray, hands clasped to his chest. The hum of his words gradually spreads round the cages until many adopt the same position. The volume of their voices increases to such a pitch, it adds a strange echo to the noises outside of planes and barking dogs.
Khalid sits back against the wire wall, full of compassion for their devotion but angry at the same time. Angry at the Americans for seeing them as just that: Muslims. Dangerous foreigners who they can’t even tell apart. Angry too at the Muslim religion for getting him into this mess. He once heard a newsreader say it was the fastest-growing religion in the world. Khalid remembers wishing the media wouldn’t say stuff like that. People don’t want to hear those facts, and he doesn’t particularly want to be lumped together with loads of people he doesn’t know, Muslim or not. And Muslims aren’t all the same, just like Christians aren’t all the same. He’s Khalid—himself, not a result of any religion. He hasn’t even done anything with his life yet.
Time drags. Not being allowed to talk makes the hours go by slowly. There’s nothing to do but watch the soldier with the machine gun walk up and down, staring into each wire cage as if there’s a chance something might happen.
The soldiers at either end of the row chat idly to each other. Laughing. Coming and going after coffee breaks and lunches. Performing high-fives after only ten minutes apart, as if they haven’t seen each other for years. Acting as if they’re guarding a warehouse of baked beans instead of forty kidnapped men with no access to a lawyer and no way to reach their families.
Khalid realizes that the only stuff he knows about prisons is from films. American films. Exciting ones where the hero wins the respect of the most hardcore prisoners before breaking out. But then he remembers they have the death penalty in America too.
Death Row—yeah, people are electrocuted there all the time. Khalid remembers a news item about some guy who spent twenty years on Death Row before they found him innocent. Plus that film, what was it called? He’d watched it on Nico’s computer after he’d downloaded it from the Internet. They watched loads of films like that when there was nothing else going on. Usually lounging around on the beds and floor with the rest of the gang in Nico’s older brother’s bedroom until Pete came
in and screamed at them: “Get off my bed!” And everyone would scramble as if they’d committed a crime by just sitting there.
Holgy was always the first to straighten Pete’s stripy duvet, plump up the pillow and apologize: “Sorry, mate.”
“Don’t sit there again!” Pete would yell, while Khalid and the others kept their eyes focused on the computer, annoyed by his interruption but unwilling to react. They all know Pete is a mess—a bad-tempered bloke all round. The complete opposite to Nico, who rarely has anything but a smile on his face.
Suddenly realizing there’s nothing to relieve the boredom but remembering his mates and small incidents like this, Khalid wonders if perhaps little fox-faced Holgy had been right when he said, “We’re all holograms, you know?” He’d made the mistake of saying this when they were in the first year, all about eleven years old. Repeating the fact to everyone whenever he got the chance. So much so, they gave him the nickname Holgy, even though his real name, Eshan, is so much nicer. Being short for hologram, it was the obvious choice. Invented by Nico, who else?
“Your real life is happening on another planet,” Holgy argues whenever he gets the chance. “You are just a stupid gonzo reflection.”
“No, YOU are,” Mikael puts him right. He’s the brainbox, after all.
“Shut up about holograms,” Tony would add. “I’m a deathless star.”
Then the conversation would spin quickly to include Darth Vader, possible life on Mars and whether Lyn Howser has better legs than Jancy King. Yeah, awesome Lyn Howser and the new tattoo of a butterfly on her right ankle that makes them all drool.
In fact, Khalid was the only one who liked talking to Holgy about holograms. Holgy forced him to think about things that were far beyond his imagination, and the idea of reality being nothing but a projected 3D perception made him feel weird. Almost like electrodes were sparking fires in his brain.
