Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller - The Broken Circle - A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan

“You were always ready to fight to get to your destination.”

My cheeks flushed.

“Yet you always doubt yourself. And that is not good. I’ve seen that in you since your mother left to have her surgeries.” He leaned back and took a long pull from his pipe.

“She never said when she was returning.”

He nodded, but I wondered if he truly understood. “Yet you wonder if you had done anything differently, if she wouldn’t have left you.”

“Sometimes, yes, I think that.”

He nodded again, as if he were sifting my thoughts for some malady he could cure. “You want to know why we are here, and your mother, brother, and sisters are in India?”

“Don’t you wonder that sometimes?”

He shook his head. “This situation, I know, is difficult to understand, but I believe it is as the poet says it is: ‘This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.’”

“God means for us to be here, suffering?”

“He does not mean for people to do terrible things. Soldiers kill and murder and do harm because they are evil. But God knows we have come to this place, that we have things to learn so we can grow as human beings, as spiritual creatures. It’s not enough to have all the things you wish for to make us comfortable. We must have much more.”

God circled this village on the map and said I must come here —I didn’t understand.

“You have a question for me, don’t you?”

“Is she okay?”

“Do you mean did she survive her surgeries? Yes. She is recovering well. But it has been many months since we have spoken. Yet I’m certain she is okay.” He took his pipe from his mouth, smoke curling upward. “You are afraid she might not love you anymore, aren’t you? That when you see her, she might not remember you.”

“I don’t remember what she looks like anymore. Her face has faded from my memory. I remember Vida’s and Shapairi’s, but not hers. It’s scary.”

He pointed the mouthpiece of his pipe at me. “Have I ever taught you ‘How Birds Fly’?”

I shook my head. He spoke most often to us in lines of poetry, but this felt different, as if he saved this one for me alone:

He puffed away for a long moment, staring at me with his dark eyes, waiting for a sign from me that I understood what he might be teaching me. Finally, he broke the silence in his softest voice. “You must observe nature carefully, Enjeela. Most people think birds fly because of the wind. What they don’t see is that there is something more powerful than the wind that lifts them. That is what lifts us as people as well.”

I wasn’t certain of his meaning.

“Everything I do for you and the others is for love. Everything your mother does for her children is for love, even taking care of herself so she will be alive for all of us. It’s this love that lifts us during dark times like this.”

I wanted to nod my head that I understood, but I didn’t have the certainty he did. I knew that he loved me, and if that was all I had, that would be enough.

The next day Ram drove us along the banks of the Padma River, which meandered west, then north. We were headed toward the far northern tip of Bangladesh, where the border with India and Nepal dissolved into a series of enclaves, and the border became fuzzy in places, according to Ram.

“The Padma River is called the Ganges once you cross the border in India.” Ram nodded toward the wide, muddy green river that flowed by us as we headed north. Bangladesh was so lush, with well-watered fields and forests. He told us stories of how the Hindus came down every spring to the banks of the Ganges, a river they revered as holy, to wash in a ceremony that cleansed them of ten of their sins.

“What happens to the rest of their sins?” Zia asked.

“If God only forgave ten sins at a time, we would all be in trouble,” Padar said.

We crossed over where two rivers met and followed the N5 north beside the Brahmaputra River. We wound through countryside of farms and ponds, across narrow bridges over streams, past more ponds and farms up into a finger of Bangladesh that pushed deep into a corridor of Indian territory. We stopped that night in a very tiny village. The crickets had come out, and the moon rose yellow and full over the distant trees as we made our way to our rooms. Our rooms were spare, with simple beds and a chair on a threadbare carpet that looked ancient. The walls had once been a bright blue but had now faded into a powder blue.

“We are near the border,” Ram said, as he sat on a flimsy chair against the wall. All of us kids were together on the bed, eating a bland chicken-and-rice dish off paper plates. We washed it down with gulps from bottles of water.

“The border with Nepal?” Zia asked.

“Yes and no,” said Padar.

We all turned to him, wondering how it could be both near and not so.

He chuckled lightly. “You see, the borders between Nepal and Bangladesh become very close in a few places, separated only by a small gap of India, so Nepal and Bangladesh are only a few miles apart.”

“A gap?” Laila said, her voice rising in incredulity.

“Yes,” Padar said. “It’s a small gap of Indian land that’s not guarded by their soldiers. So it will be easy for us to pass over it into Nepal.”

“Do not worry,” Ram said, as if he were discussing the possibility of rain. “It is not far.”

“Just a few miles,” Padar said. All of our eyes turned to him on the other side of the room. It was obvious that these two men weren’t telling us everything. We were getting only the bits they thought we needed to know.

“Depending on the route we take,” Ram said.

“What possible routes are there?” I said. “I climbed a mountain once to escape Afghanistan. It was one of the highest in the Hindu Kush.”

“I’ve climbed that same mountain, young lady,” Padar said, smiling. “This will be easier, I assure you.”

“Does that mean we will be climbing a mountain?” Zia said.

Both men were concealing a smile. “It won’t be easy, but it won’t be too hard,” Ram said. “You’ll see. Now let’s do something fun tonight.”

“Let’s have a poetry session,” Padar said, his glee evident. Laila and Zulaikha groaned.

“Let’s play fis kut,” Zia said.

“I’ll keep score,” Ram said. “We have all night. We can sleep tomorrow.”

All that night, we played cards while Ram kept score and Padar played his usual cagey game of outwitting us. Ram told one joke after another, and we laughed and played deep into the night. We were happy and warm and full of food, and we were healthy and ready for what was next. To reach India.

The next day we left our rooms after darkness had fallen. We carried only our backpacks. Padar had allowed us one change of clothes and a jacket. Our dress shoes and new dresses and bangles and earrings we had to leave behind. The rest of the space in our packs was for his stash of money. We all wore sneakers, just like we had when we escaped Afghanistan.

A man we’d never seen before pulled up in Ram’s car. He was a local, whom Ram had hired to help us. Ram sat in the front while Padar squeezed into the back seat with us. The driver took us deep into the country along stark dirt roads, through rustic farms, along barbed-wire fences that, we were told, were guarded by Indian border patrol on the other side. We were tense, trying to not lean too hard into each other as the car jostled over potholed and rutted roads. We finally came to a wide space, where fields of grass straddled either side of the road. The driver stopped the car, shut off the ignition, and doused the lights.