Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

As green tea arrived, joined by glass plates of green raisins, pistachios, almonds, and papered sweets, Ismerai came to sit with us. The other guests settled closer to the television, even though the sound had now gone.

Away from our house and the protection of its walls, Ismerai acted differently with Georgie, much more formally. I knew this was largely due to the other men being in the room. Despite all the years Georgie and Ismerai had been friends, they were friends in Afghanistan and therefore there were rules to follow, which mainly involved not being too friendly with women, foreign or not. The fact was, laughing and joking with women didn’t look good, it looked weak, and it was probably only one step away from finding pleasure in the bracelet-jangling swirls of Afghanistan’s dancing boys.

But although I wasn’t that surprised by Ismerai’s behavior—he was a Pashtun after all—I was a little amazed to see the change in Georgie. She was terrible for teasing Ismerai when he came to our house, but now she was quiet and respectful, and she didn’t speak again with the other men unless they looked over to invite her into their conversation, which they didn’t really.

In our culture, a woman is usually permitted to sit only with the men she is related to. Georgie’s presence was tolerated only because she was a foreigner. If she hadn’t come from England, she’d have been hidden in the back of the house with the rest of the women.

Haji Khan was in Shinwar, Ismerai told us. “The signal doesn’t work well in the mountains.” He apologized to Georgie with a shy smile, looking at her silent mobile phone as he did so.

Georgie shrugged as if she didn’t care, and I almost believed her. “I’m just grateful you invited us over,” she replied, “especially at such short notice.”

As she spoke I suddenly realized she must have called Ismerai that morning when I wasn’t listening, and the knowledge of it made my cheeks burn with added shame because now everyone must know what I’d done, even my friends living half a world away in Jalalabad.

Therefore, when our dinner was laid out for us and Ismerai joked that the household help had “better keep the knives away from the boy,” I didn’t laugh.

“So, do you want to talk about it?”

Georgie stopped to light a cigarette after beating me for the fifth time at carambul , a wooden board game imported from India where two players fight with their fingers, flicking bright-colored disks into four holes drilled into the corners. She was impossibly good at it for a girl.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully, sensing that Georgie was looking for reasons for my behavior. “Maybe.”

“Sometimes it helps to talk about things, especially difficult things,” Georgie pushed gently, fiddling as she did so with a box of matches showing the Khyber Pass on the front. “It’s a way of chasing the bad spirits out from your head.”

“I guess,” I said, even though I was certain the devils that lived there were too strong for the magic of talk. “Okay. I’ll try.”

Long before I was born my mother was married to my father, and together they made Bilal. He was my oldest brother. Three years later, when the Russians packed up to begin their long journey home, rolling out of Afghanistan in the tanks they had brought with them, my parents celebrated by bringing Mina into the family. In Pashto, her name means “love.” Some years after that Yosef, my other brother, arrived, and then finally, after all of them had taken up most of the space in our house, I was born.

This was my family, as complete and happy as it would ever be.

Then, one by one, like leaves falling from a tree, they began to die.

First to go was Yosef, who stopped eating the day after he was bitten by a dog. I was a baby, so he was lost to us before I could remember him, but my mother says I’m a little like him and that Allah took him away because He needed more sunshine in Paradise.

A year after Yosef died, my father also left us. He was a teacher, but he laid down his schoolbooks and picked up a gun to fight alongside the soldiers of the Northern Alliance with a group of other men from our village. Mother says his heart became furious as his eyes watched the Taliban change our ways, and because he was a man of honor and courage he felt it was his duty to stop them, being as he was a son of Afghanistan. Unfortunately for my father, it turned out that he was better suited to schooling than fighting, and he died in a battle near Mazar-e Sharif in the north of the country.

That left my mother a widow, a widow with a baby and two young children. But because of her tears she clung to our home, as it still held the smell of my father and the ghostly laughter of my brother, even though everyone said she would be better off living with her sister.

Of course, this being Afghanistan, things then went from bad to worse than bad.

Sometime after my father died, and at the time when my head began to save the pictures of my life, the Taliban came to Paghman. By now I was no longer a baby—I was walking and talking—and I heard the fear in my mother’s voice when one night she shook me awake to pull me into her arms and carry me from my bed to the corner of the kitchen where my sister and brother were waiting. I remember it clearly now: my mother was trembling through her clothes, and outside I could hear the sound of heavy trucks filling the street with the noise of their engines.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Please, Fawad, please be quiet,” my mother begged. She was crying, and, outside, shouts and screams invaded the stillness of the night as the light coming in through our window burned the color of flames.

As we hid in the corner, the sound of panic and pain grew closer, steadily creeping upon us, looking to find us. All this time my mother whispered to Allah under her breath, quick and quiet as she rocked on her legs, holding on to all three of her children. Her prayer was broken by a sharp intake of breath as the door cracked open at the front of our house and the barks of men we didn’t know began to fill our home.

It wasn’t a big house, and it didn’t take long for them to discover us—five black shadows jumping on our huddle to snatch my sister’s arm away from our mother and shout their hate into our faces. As my mother leaped to her feet, one of the Taliban soldiers threw her to the floor, slamming his boot onto her head to keep her in place. My brother Bilal, who had the heart of a lion, immediately sprang from the ground, raining blows on the man’s back and kicking at his legs. Another of the men then grabbed my brother as if he were a toy. He smashed his fist into Bilal’s face and threw him across the kitchen, his head bouncing off the corner of a cupboard.

As my brother slipped to the floor, no longer awake and no longer able to help us, my mother screamed into the Talib’s boot and pushed with all her power to reach her eldest child. As she threw herself at Bilal, the man who had hurt her came on her again and pulled her back to the ground. But this time it wasn’t the boot he laid on top of her; it was his body. I saw his hands ripping at her clothes while, from somewhere behind us, the smell of burning began to fill our noses.

“Run, Fawad, run!” she shouted.

The man hit my mother in the face, but as he did so another shadow came running into the room. His black eyes caught me first, and he stared at me for a moment that seemed to last forever. When I remember it now, I think I saw sadness written there. Releasing me from his gaze, he turned toward the man on top of my mother and pulled him from her, shouting something angry and hard.

“Run, Fawad!” my mother shouted again.

Because I was scared and I didn’t know what to do, and because my brother was asleep, and because one of the men had my sister’s arm, and because my mother had told me to, I did. I ran as fast as I could from the back of the house and found a place in the bushes near our home.