Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

“Salaam aleykum, Mariya!” the woman sang, clasping my mother’s hand as she did so.

“Waleykum salaam,” my mother replied.

“How are you? How is your health? Are you well? How was your trip? No problems?”

As my mother rattled off her replies, I stared at the woman I guessed to be Georgie, surprised to hear her speaking one of our languages and surprised to find that not only was she dressed like a man, she was also as tall as one.

“And this must be your handsome son, Fawad. How are you, Fawad? Welcome to your new home.”

I held out my hand, and Georgie shook it. Although I tried to speak, my mouth was a few steps behind my head and I couldn’t find the words to answer her.

“Ha! He is a little shy, I think. Please, come in, both of you.”

My mother walked farther into the yard, where she felt free to lift the burka back from her face. My first thought was that she looked afraid, which didn’t exactly set my mind at rest. But then I realized that, like me, she didn’t quite know what to say.

Silently, we followed Georgie to a small building sitting behind and to the right of the gate.

“This will be your place, Fawad. I hope you will be happy here.”

Georgie pointed to the building, waving at us to follow her in. So we did.

Inside there were two rooms separated by a small, clean toilet and shower area. As she opened the door to the first room I saw two beds with blankets sitting upon them. They were still in their plastic cases and looked new. In the other room there were three long cushions, a small table, an electric fan, and a television—a real live Samsung television! And it looked like it might even work! All my life I had dreamed of owning a TV, and I felt tears sticking sharp pins in the backs of my eyes at the very sight of it.

“Come,” Georgie said with a smile, “leave your things here and I’ll show you around.”

My first day in the new house was a blur of sights, smells, and sounds. There was our home and a bigger building where Georgie and her friends lived upstairs. There was a kitchen the size of the yard where my mother was told she would do much of her work, and a sitting room with another television (much bigger than ours), a music system, and a pool table. To the back of the house was a massive lawn framed with rosebushes. When I saw them parading their pretty colors in the sun my heart leaped at the thought of my mother once again being surrounded by such beauty.

But then I saw a man standing in the middle of this beauty with his chest as bare as that of Pir the Madman, who played with the dogs in Shahr-e Naw Park, and I began seriously to worry for my mother’s reputation. The man was holding a long stick in his hand, a bottle of beer in the other, and he had a cigarette balanced between his teeth. He had been using the stick to hit a small ball into a glass lying on the ground, and not doing very well by the looks of it.

“Hello, I’m James,” he shouted, looking up in time to catch us staring at him.

He wandered over to offer his hand to my mother, who, quite rightly, waved but didn’t accept it. Georgie said something sharp in what I recognized was English, and the man gave a small easy laugh before reaching for his shirt, which lay close by on the back of a white plastic chair.

“This is James,” explained Georgie. “He’s a journalist, so please forgive his manners.”

After James pulled on his clothes he walked back to us saying something I didn’t quite understand before reaching out with his right hand to mess up my hair. I shook my head, knocking him away, and threw him a look to warn that this kind of attention wasn’t appreciated, but then he rolled his hand into a fist, knocked me on the chin, and started laughing. Georgie spoke again, and James raised his arms in pretend surrender before putting his right hand to his heart and smiling at me. It was a true smile that made moon-shaped holes around his lips, and I accepted it with one of my own. I knew then that I liked the man James. He was tall and thin, and he had a dark beard. He could easily have passed for an Afghan if he managed to keep his clothes on.

Behind us I heard the gate open, and a woman came striding into the garden. She looked angry and slightly confused, but when Georgie spoke she smiled and waved.

“Our final house mate,” explained Georgie. “This is May; she’s an engineer.”

May greeted us with handshakes. She was short, with yellow hair escaping from a green headscarf. She had spots on her face, and she also looked nothing like the woman from Titanic . The man called James gave her his beer, and she seemed happy with this. And although I tried not to look, I could see that under her blue shirt she had the most enormous breasts I’d ever come across. I wondered whether James had seen them.

“We are all quite friendly here and very relaxed, so please treat this place as your home for as long as you need it,” said Georgie.

My mother then thanked her and led me back to our rooms—away from the foreigners who had invited us into their home and away from the sight of May’s chest.

Over the next few days, as my mother washed and cooked and basically did everything the foreigners seemed incapable of, I kept a careful eye on my new landlords. Although I was glad to be there, I had to protect my mother, and to do that I needed to know just who and what I was dealing with. My main concern was the naked journalist.

Thankfully, the layout of the place gave me the chance to observe pretty much everything, unseen. The passageway behind the house allowed me to watch the garden unnoticed; the big windows gave me a grand view of what was happening downstairs, when it was dark outside and the lights were on; and the high walls and balconies gave me a way in to some of the sights above. Now and again my mother would catch me spying on the foreigners and shake her head, but although her eyes looked puzzled they seemed fairly unconcerned. She’d also taken to laughing more—and mainly when one of the guards, Shir Ahmad, came from his hut to refill his teapot.

I made a mental note to investigate Shir Ahmad as soon as I’d finished with the foreigners.

With so much spying to do, for the first few weeks after we moved to Wazir Akbar Khan I kept away from Chicken Street, despite the almost unbearable ache to tell Jahid about our television, and fill Jamilla’s head with the sights and sounds of my new home. Instead, I would return from school, sit in the doorway of the kitchen, chat with my mother as she did her chores, and wait for Georgie, James, and May to come back from wherever they had been.

“How does Georgie know our Dari language?” I asked my mother as she peeled potatoes for that night’s dinner.

“From her friends, I think.”

“She has Afghan friends?”

“Apparently so. Pass me that pan, will you, Fawad?”

I reached for the metal container, tipped a dead fly out of it, and handed it over.

“So, have you seen these friends?” I asked, settling back onto the kitchen step.

“Once, yes.”

“Who are they?”

“Afghans.”

“I know that !”

My mother laughed, throwing the naked potatoes in the pan as she did so. “They are Pashtuns,” she finally offered. “From Jalalabad.”

“Oh, she’s got some taste then.”

“Yes.” My mother smiled before adding somewhat mysteriously, “Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

“They’re not… how should I put it? They’re not the kind of friends I might choose for you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re my boy and I love you. Now that’s enough, Fawad. Go and finish your homework.”

Dismissed, and left dangling once again by my mother’s riddles, I returned to my room to practice the multiplication tables we had been given at school that day. I guessed that in the same way I’d found out about the Taliban shadow, the reason Georgie had sort-of friends would become clear at some later stage of my life. However, I was glad they were Pashtun, like me. If they had been Hazaras, they would have cut off her breasts by now.