Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

Crouching low into the prickles, I watched the whole world catch fire. As the houses of my neighbors spat out flames, the screams of fear filling my ears gradually turned into howls of mourning as the men dressed in black ripped apart our lives, beating the old people with sticks and stealing the young from their arms. In the orange light of that night I watched those men drag my terrified sister onto the back of a truck, along with twenty other girls from our village, and drive her away.

As the engines faded into the distance and the air died around us, leaving only the sound of fire and tears, I saw my mother come from the house, carrying my brother over her shoulder. Her face was pale, and blood poured from a cut by her mouth.

“Fawad?” she shouted. “Fawad?”

I stood up, and she saw me. The light of relief flickered in her eyes before she fell to her knees and opened her mouth to let go of a scream that would have frozen the blood of the devil himself.

With our house now a broken shell of black and our neighbors just as broken, my mother, Bilal, and I walked from our home in Paghman to arrive at the place of my aunt. I remember nothing of the journey, so I guess I must have slept, my mother carrying me for most of it. I also can’t remember any discussion once we got to my aunt’s house, but I can clearly see the look in my mother’s eyes. It was one of death, and the blankness that went with it was mirrored in the eyes of Bilal.

All I knew for certain was that my mother had been hurt by the Taliban; my sister, who was only eleven or twelve years old, had been taken by the Taliban; and my brother was now lost to the Afghan obsession with revenge.

After waking from his sleep, Bilal had been greeted by the battered face of our mother and the hole in our family that used to be filled by our sister. Giant tears of anger came falling from his eyes, spilling onto the dirt that used to be our garden. Because Bilal had become the man of the house after my father was killed, he made himself crazy with thoughts that he should have done more to protect us. But he was only a boy—a boy up against an army of black turbaned devils. There was nothing more he could have done for any of us. Even so, for the next few weeks Bilal covered himself in silence, hardly able to speak through his own shame and dishonor, until one day his place simply stood empty. My only living brother had left our aunt’s house to join the Northern Alliance.

He was fourteen years old at the time, an age when he should have been moving closer to God, as he was now old enough to deliver his prayers at the mosque and fast with the adults at the time of Ramazan. Instead, he gave himself up to war and revenge, and we never saw him again.

Once the Americans had bombed the Taliban out of our lives, I wondered whether Bilal would return, but when the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul he still stayed away. Though neither my mother nor I said anything, we both knew he was dead.

IT WAS NIGHT when the lights woke me, the time of night when you’re stuck between yesterday and today and everything’s so quiet and deaf with sleep there’s no sign of the morning coming to get you. It was the time of night that calls for a stretch and a smile.

And it was this time of night that Haji Khan chose to return home.

It started with the sound of metal on concrete as the gates were pulled open and three Land Cruisers with blacked-out windows roared into the driveway, spilling guards from the doors and Haji Khan from the front seat. As two men with guns pulled the gates shut behind him, another man jumped into the seat he’d abandoned and the cars facing the house now turned in circles on the grass to point at the exit instead.

Watching this dance of headlights from my window, I saw Haji Khan lead a group of men into the house. His face looked fierce, and I wondered whether he’d just found out that Ismerai had let Georgie and me come to stay.

I tiptoed toward the bedroom door and pulled it ajar, blinking at the sudden light that shone from the floor below. Rising from the ground, a mumble of voices came to my ears, low man sounds it took me a few seconds to catch properly. Then, above them all, I heard Haji Khan’s words filling the air like coming thunder.

I opened the door a little farther and leaned into the crack, which allowed me to see what was going on through the wooden pillars of the balcony. Haji Khan was now standing by the door, with five men nearby holding quiet conversations with one another. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they looked pretty rich, dressed as they were in pressed salwar kameez with large, heavy watches hanging off their wrists.

Haji Khan was talking to the small man who had taken my bags upstairs when I arrived. The man nodded upward to the side of the house where Georgie was sleeping, just along the corridor from where I should have been sleeping, and Haji Khan’s gaze briefly followed the man’s head, causing me to catch my breath and fall a little farther into the darkness of my room.

If he didn’t know we were here before he arrived, he certainly did now.

After a few seconds, and when no sound of footsteps came to throw us out of our beds, I inched forward again.

Haji Khan was now sitting on one of the sofas, his pakol balanced on his knee and a cup of green tea in his hand. As he reached for the sugared almonds that had been placed on a table before him, a man approached holding a mobile phone. Haji Khan put it to his ear, and though he never shouted, his voice echoed loudly around the room, causing the other men to stop their conversations and eye one another from beneath bowed heads and heavy eyebrows.

“I don’t care how you do it, just do it,” Haji Khan ordered. “I want him out by the morning.”

He clicked the phone shut and handed it back to the man who had given it to him, and I wondered if this was the reason Haji Khan never called Georgie: he’d lost his phone and had to keep borrowing someone else’s.

In the morning I went downstairs looking for breakfast and found the hall empty of the big men who had filled it the night before and busy with three small ones armed with cleaning cloths and a vacuum cleaner. A boy a little older than me was playing carambul by himself on the platform floor close to the TV.

“Salaam,” I said, going over to join him. “I’m Fawad.”

The boy looked up from his game.

“Salaam,” he replied. “Ahmad.”

He then carried on playing, and with nothing else to do, I sat on a long cushion and watched him. He was very good, flicking the disks effortlessly into the holes opposite him. He also looked very clean, new even. But although his skin had the look of the rich about it—a soft creamy brown—his eyes held an old man’s stare within them.

We were the only children in the room, but the boy called Ahmad didn’t seem in a rush to talk, so I was glad when my breakfast arrived because it at least gave me something to do. I was also starving, which was strange, because I never usually had much of an appetite. “You eat like a bird,” my mother once remarked, and I immediately wondered how worms tasted.

After I’d finished my eggs and a cup of sweet tea, Ahmad knocked the carambul board in my direction and jerked his head upward, inviting me to play. As I shuffled toward him to take up the challenge, he set the pieces in place and let me go first.

“You came with Georgie, didn’t you?” he finally asked.