Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

“We’re protesting because the Americans murdered five hundred Afghans,” I shouted above the other rioters, whose voices seemed to find more power in the journalists’ presence.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” James shouted back, which was true actually. “This isn’t a game, Fawad. Get home now; otherwise I’ll take you there myself—and I’ll tell your mother exactly what you have been up to.”

“But James—”

“Don’t ‘but James’ me,” he demanded, which didn’t make any kind of sense at all, though it put a stop to the argument.

Spandi and I agreed that we had done our bit to honor the memory of the murdered Afghans, and although it would have been fun to stay with the rioters, they probably didn’t have mothers at home who would torture them, and their friends, with hard looks and silence.

And just in case James did turn us in, Spandi and I decided to go our separate ways at the corner of my street.

“Your mother can be pretty fierce,” said Spandi.

“Tell me about it.”

I walked home slowly, now dreading the return of James, who was usually the easiest member of the house to get along with. However, when he did eventually turn up, about two hours later, he simply nodded at me to join him in the garden.

“Look, Fawad, what you did today was pretty silly,” he told me. “People got hurt in that riot, and a lot of families lost people they love. It was a very dangerous situation that could easily have got further out of hand. I’m sorry I shouted at you and all that, but I was worried for you. If you had been injured, I would never have forgiven myself. Anyway, you’re safe now, and that’s the main thing. So, are we cool?”

“Yes, we’re cool,” I told him, my heart growing big at the thought that he cared so much. “We’re very cool.”

After James went inside to write his story, I joined my mother in the kitchen. She was listening to a report about the trouble on the radio as she prepared a stew of sheep’s bum and carrots. Georgie and May hadn’t come home at all. My mother said they had phoned Shir Ahmad and Abdul, who were both guarding our gates with brave talk that didn’t match their faces, to say they had been ordered to stay behind the high walls of their office compounds until everyone was sure the rioters had got tired and gone back to their own homes. Finally, at nine at night, Georgie and May appeared, looking serious, a little drunk, and talking about “the end.”

The next day, while sitting on a crate of Iranian yogurt cartons, I found out what had really happened as I read Pir Hederi the report from the Kabul Times . Apparently a U.S. military truck had lost control in Khair Khana, where we all used to live, because of “mechanical failure.” It hit a load of cars, killing someone. The report said some soldiers, American or Afghan, started shooting as people picked up stones and threw them. That killed another five people. Then, as the protesters marched into the city, even more people died, and offices belonging to foreign aid agencies were set on fire as well as a whorehouse. There was no mention of a Chinaman, though. The newspaper also said the rioters were not all real protesters but “opportunists and criminals” trying to cause trouble. What’s more, the government had promised to arrest them—information that made my heart race because it meant that Spandi and I were now wanted by the cops.

Because of the riots the government ordered everyone to stay in their houses after ten at night. This was called a “curfew,” said James, and it was the first time Kabul had seen one for four years. Personally, I was quite glad no one was allowed out because it kept all my foreign friends at home, which I thought might be useful if the police came to raid the place looking for me.

“It’s getting bloody tense out there,” James told Georgie one evening as they sat in the warm night air eating the chickpeas and potatoes my mother had prepared for us all. “You can almost taste the hate growing, on both sides.”

“It will pass,” said Georgie, who didn’t sound too convinced of her words.

“Will it?” James asked her. “The Afghans aren’t exactly renowned for their tolerance of occupying forces.”

“We’re not occupying!” Georgie almost shouted. “Nobody thinks that.”

“Not yet they don’t,” James said seriously. “But it only takes a couple of fuck-ups for that dynamic to change.”

I said nothing, mainly because I didn’t want the adults to move their conversation inside the house, where I wouldn’t be able to hear if James was going to betray me to Georgie, but I knew he was right. In the newspaper reports over the past two weeks I’d read of fighting between the international soldiers and the Taliban. The week before the American truck had done murder through mechanical failure, about thirty Afghans had been killed by bombs dropped from airplanes, a family in Kunar had died the same way, and roadside bombs and suicide attacks were causing death and misery everywhere.

Maybe May and Georgie were right when they first came home after the riots. Maybe this was “the end.”

“YOU KNOW, HAJI Khan really is very handsome,” remarked Jamilla in the singsong voice she sometimes used to annoy me, “like something out of a storybook.”

“He’s okay,” I admitted.

“If you go for that good-looking rich-as-a-king kind of thing,” agreed Spandi.

“Oh yes,” added Pir Hederi, “he’s a heartbreaker all right.”

“How can you even know that?”

My hands flew up in amazement at the old man’s gift of apparently knowing everything about anything even when he could see nothing.

“I can smell it.” Pir laughed. “He smells like a man women would die for… and men too for that matter.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“Gross,” agreed Spandi.

“I’d marry him,” admitted Jamilla.

“Would you now?”

Spandi jumped down from the counter and moved over to her.

“Well, he’s a bit old and all that, but if no one else asked me I would.”

“Don’t worry, Jamilla, I don’t think you’ll be short of offers,” Spandi told her as he helped her down from the chair she’d been standing on to wipe the rows of cans on the shelves. “You’re a star that shines in the darkest sky, girl. You’ll have men falling at your feet in a couple of years.”

“Really? You think so?”

“I know so.”

“Oh, here we go,” grumbled Pir as Jamilla giggled and corrected the scarf to cover the bruise her father had freshly planted on her face. “Stop it, both of you. I’ll have none of that romancing in my shop.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“Don’t be such a child!” Jamilla told me, laughing.

“No, really, I think I’m going to be sick,” I insisted.

And I was, right on top of Dog’s tail.

I’d been feeling hot and sweaty all day and a devil had been sitting in my head playing the tabla drums for the best part of two hours when Haji Khan suddenly walked into Pir’s shop saying he wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes. All of us immediately stopped what we were doing—not that we were doing that much in the first place—and we followed him with our eyes. Anyone who happened to be watching us must have thought we were guarding the shop from Kabul’s best-dressed shoplifter.

I knew he was lying, of course—about the cigarettes; he had men who brought in boxes of them from Europe. I’d never seen him smoke the Chinese horse shit that everyone else did here.