Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

I DON’T THINK I’m particularly special. I’m not amazingly beautiful, but I’m not Jahid-ugly either. I’m not the biggest brain in my class, but neither am I dumb as a donkey. I’m not the fastest runner; I don’t tell the best jokes; I’m not the best fighter; and though I know I’ve seen things that maybe a boy my age shouldn’t have seen, even that doesn’t make me particularly special.

My father was killed, my brothers are dead, and my sister is missing. But in Afghanistan, that’s a big “so what?”

Spandi’s mother died in childbirth, the sister she was trying to deliver died with her, and from the age of two Spandi never felt his mother’s warmth again or the comfort of her love. He doesn’t even have a photograph to remember her by, just a picture in his head that fades with every year he grows taller.

Jamilla’s parents are both alive, but their house has become terrorized by drugs. Sometime in the past her dad went to work with the poppy, and he fell under its spell as he licked the resin from his fingers during the harvest. Now he is hungry for the drug, day and night, while the rest of his family just remains hungry. And even though he stays away from the home for days on end, he always returns eventually, looking for money; and when he can’t find any money he visits his fists on the head of his wife as well as Jamilla and her two older sisters.

Meanwhile the orphanages of Kabul are filled with children whose parents have been lost and killed.

So none of us is particularly special. We just carry with us different versions of the same story.

However, when I woke up the morning after the night came to haunt me, I opened my eyes to see May and Georgie sharing the bed next to me while James was wrapped in a blanket snoring on the floor by my side, and I did at last feel in some way special.

So I was really sorry when seconds later I touched the mattress under me and realized I’d wet the bed.

JALALABAD IS THE capital of Nangarhar Province in the east of Afghanistan, and for more years than anyone can remember Kabul’s rich have come to this city to escape the biting cold of winter.

Georgie and I, however, had simply come to escape.

With my mother’s illness still keeping her at Homeira’s house and my recent attack on Philippe, it was decided I needed a break.

“He was only play-fighting with May,” Georgie explained as we worked our way through the seven sisters, the snow-topped mountains that took us away from the capital and into the warm valleys of the east. “He wasn’t really trying to hurt her.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, Fawad, I am.”

Although the pictures in my head told me a different story, everything was so muddy in there right now I couldn’t be clear of anything anymore, and if Georgie said it was so, then I guess it must have been.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t realize.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” she continued, ruffling my hair. “How could you have known? Philippe had drunk far too much, and so had May. But I promise you, they are really very good friends, and they would never hurt each other. And maybe May and James and I are all to blame for what happened, not you. We should have been more sensible with you, Fawad, what with your mother being away. So, we’re sorry too. We didn’t think.”

Georgie pulled me into her side, which felt a little bony, and held me there for as long as the journey allowed. The rest of the time we were thrown around the back of the car like two bees in a jar as the city road crumbled and turned into rocks.

The journey from Kabul to Jalalabad was pretty interesting, and if my thoughts hadn’t been so busy with miseries pouring in from the night before, and if my head hadn’t kept smacking against the window with the force of the drive, I guess I would have enjoyed it tremendously because it took us through the pictures of a million painters and a million more stories. For four hours we traveled beyond the giant mountains that guarded the Kabul River; past the command post where the warlord Zardad kept a soldier chained up as a dog, feeding him on the testicles of his enemies; over the small bridge where four foreign journalists were murdered in 2001; down into Surobi and past its shimmering lake; along gentle bends hugged by brilliant green fields, overtaking kuchis and camels and dark clouds of fat-bottomed sheep; back along the river toward the fish restaurants of Durunta; and through the Russian-built tunnel that skirted a dam and led us to Jalalabad.

It was my first proper trip out of Kabul—holidays not being that common among people who can hardly feed themselves—and the ever-changing views were more than amazing, but I was simply too upset to take any pleasure in them. The fact was, I felt truly sorry and deeply ashamed about what I’d done to Philippe, and I knew that his view of Afghan hospitality would have changed quite a lot now that one of us had stabbed him in the ass.

It was unforgivable, really.

May had told me the next day that Philippe had gone to see the surgeons at the Italian Emergency Hospital in Shahr-e Naw, where they had sewed a row of stitches into the wound. He also had to have something called “a tetanus jab.”

James, on the other hand, had spent much of the day laughing.

When we arrived in Jalalabad it was late afternoon, and we drove straight into the heart of the city, which, unlike the winter gray of Kabul, was still glowing yellow in dusty sunshine. There were more donkeys and carts crowding the streets than in the capital, and the place crawled with tiny tuk-tuks , Pakistani-style buggies painted blue and decorated with wildly colorful pictures of flowers and women’s eyes.

Beeping and pushing our way through the traffic, we eventually slipped into a side road, a beaten track leading to the front doors of about ten high-walled houses. Halfway down we stopped at Haji Khan’s place, a large white mansion set in a garden of green that could easily have been home to King Mohammad Zahir Shah, if he still had any money.

As our Land Cruiser pulled into the drive, we found Ismerai already waiting for us on the steps of the house. He was talking into a mobile phone that he clicked shut as we jumped out of our vehicle, and after greeting us with warm handshakes and big smiles he took us inside.

The sight that filled my eyes almost blinded me. Through two large wooden doors, outside of which waited a number of sandals, a massive hall appeared with eight white leather sofas facing one another in rows of four. Georgie sat on one of them and pulled off her boots. I’d kicked my own shoes away at the door, which was the proper thing to do, but Georgie’s boots were complicated. At the back of the hallway a giant staircase grew from the ground, going off in two directions to meet up again on the top floor. Upstairs, beyond a fence of wooden balconies, I could see a number of doors leading to a number of rooms. A small man no bigger than a child grabbed our bags and disappeared up there. Back downstairs, to the left of the hallway was a raised floor glinting with a golden carpet and long lapis-blue cushions. Relaxing on them were four brown men in brown pakols and brown patus . They were watching a wide-screen television and seemed quite at home.

As we entered the house and made our way to the TV area, all the men stood up and offered their hands to Georgie in welcome. She obviously knew them, and they seemed happy to see her, gently scolding her for having stayed away too long. They then waved at her to sit down, offering her the position of honored guest on the cushion farthest from the door. I followed her to the end of the room and sat down nearby, but not too close because I wasn’t a baby and I wanted the men to see that.