Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

AFTER MY OUTBURST, Allah punished me with a night of almighty misery that brought every evil in the world to my house so it could move into my stomach and explode from my bum. “Rest,” that’s what Dr. Hugo had said, which as far as I was concerned absolutely, beyond one hundred percent, proved he didn’t know shit about shit—especially the shit that had been pouring from my hole like an open tap every fifteen minutes.

Luckily, my mother did. Having woken up to the sound of my groans and farts bouncing from the walls of the toilet for the hundred millionth time that night, she gave me a spoon of pomegranate dust washed down with a glass of warm milk and took me back to bed, finally rocking me to sleep with the soft sound of her singing.

“I love you, son,” was the last thing I remembered her saying.

We don’t have much in Afghanistan—apart from drugs, guns, and great scenery—but over the years we’ve learned how to get by without all the pretty colored pills and buzzing machinery the sick surround themselves with in the West.

If we feel dizzy, we have a glass of lemon juice, water, and sugar. If we have a sore throat, we stick our fists in our mouths three times in the morning to open up the channel to our stomach. And if we have the shits, we eat dried pomegranate skin. Of course, our self-doctoring is not always perfect. I recently read in a cartoon made by an NGO that putting fire ash on top of a wound might actually kill you rather than cure you, and I knew that after taking my mother’s medicine I wouldn’t go near a toilet for at least three days. But by and large it works.

Like with the drug addicts and the mentals. When it gets too much for their families, they simply chain them up to a holy shrine for forty days so that God can sort out the problem. And, okay, it’s not brilliant for the junkies and the crazies because they only get to eat bread and drink green tea for more than a month and most days they get stoned by bored kids, but that also works. If it doesn’t, they die, and that must have been God’s plan for them all along. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been mental or addicted to drugs in the first place; they would have done well at school and become a lawyer, or something. Or, in Pir the Madman’s case, they would have grown up to be the king of fleas.

However, absolutely the best thing about being ill is that you don’t have to go to school the next day. It’s not that I didn’t like the lessons; they were easy enough, and I was still getting good marks for my handwriting. But if I had to make a choice between a warm bed and a wooden chair I share with a boy whose armpits smell of beans, the bed would win every time.

And if the front gate hadn’t kept banging open and shut, forcing me out of my dreams, I’m sure I would have slept right through until the middle of the following week and missed even more school. But I didn’t because the front gate kept banging open and shut. So eventually I got up to see just what the hell was going on.

Walking out into the sunshine that was annoyingly bright and trying to stab my eyes with its light, I followed the hum of grown-up talking. Rubbing at my face and scratching at the soft layer of fur now growing on my head, I wandered into the garden to find Georgie, James, and May sitting on a carpet on the grass, sorting out plates and bread on a plastic mat, getting ready for lunch. With them were Dr. Hugo, Rachel, and a woman I’d never met before. Her hair was short and dark, and her face looked a little hairy.

“Don’t you people have jobs to go to?” I asked.

“Afghanistan can do without us for one early lunch,” replied May, waving me over to sit at her side.

“I suppose so.” I smiled. “Especially in James’s case.”

“Feeling better then, are we?” James replied, laughing along with the rest of them.

It felt good to be surrounded again by these white-faced people who seemed to like being surrounded by me.

“How we doing, little fella?”

Dr. Hugo leaned over to me, and as he did so I noticed Georgie touch his knee, which surprised not only me but also the doctor, judging by the quick movement of his head to look at her.

“Fine, thank you.”

“Fawad, this is Geraldine,” interrupted May, placing her hand on Geraldine’s knee.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Geraldine said back.

I looked over at James. I noticed he was touching Rachel’s knee.

Something was definitely going on.

Behind me I heard the gate open and shut again, and Shir Ahmad came in, just in time to help my mother carry glass plates of mantu and salad over to us.

“Salaam,” he greeted everyone.

“Salaam,” everyone said back, and James edged himself closer to Rachel so he could join us on the carpet.

I watched my mother carefully as she came over to join us, lightly lowering herself to sit by Georgie’s side, her covered knees far enough away from Shir’s hands to stop me from having to make a scene.

Yep, something was definitely going on.

“It’s the spring,” explained Pir Hederi, “also known as the mating season.”

“Oh please…,” I protested.

“Just telling it like it is, son.”

I looked at Pir, slightly disturbed by the picture he had just painted in my head, and even more disturbed by the orange glow of his beard, which he had freshly hennaed. Why men did this to themselves was a mystery to me, and right now I had enough mysteries on my mind without him adding to them.

After lunch had broken up and everyone had let go of everyone else’s legs to return to their jobs, my mother had agreed that some fresh air would do me good, so I’d gone to the shop to pass some time with Jamilla before she went to afternoon school, and to ask the old man about the ways of adults.

I knew it was a mistake almost as soon as I felt the words fly from my mouth.

“Yes,” he said, “sounds like the adults are getting frisky.”

“Frisky?”

“Yes. It’s the effect of another glorious Afghan spring: the sun is bright, the skin grows warm, and the blood heats up after winter. And when the blood heats up it rushes straight to the heart, causing everyone to make a damn fool of himself.”

“Isn’t that called love?” asked Jamilla, who was trying to clean what was left of Dog’s teeth with the wooden brush Pir Hederi used for his own. He’d have gone mental if he could have seen her.

“Some call it love, some call it madness, little one.”

“Who calls what madness?”

Spandi walked into the shop swinging his chain of plastic cards behind him. He had been spending a lot of time with us lately, which had made Pir Hederi remark the other day that the place was looking more like an orphanage than a place of business.

“Love,” answered the old man. “The stuff of poets, teenage girls, Indian dancers, and overpaid Westerners.”

“Haven’t you ever been in love?” Jamilla asked him.

“Never had time,” he replied. “I was too busy—”

“Fighting in the jihad!” we all finished with him.

“It’s true!” he barked. “Besides, it’s hard to fall in love when all the women are covered from head to toe and you end up marrying your own cousin.”

Despite Pir’s crazy old-man ways, and despite the fact that he’d chosen to look like a can of Fanta, there was always something a little real to his words.

Take the other Friday. My mother had dragged me along to her sister’s house as they were now talking again. When we got there we were shocked to discover my aunt had another baby growing inside her belly. As she hadn’t grown any more beautiful since the last one, I guess my uncle must have been feeling the power of spring in his blood when he made it.

“It’s too disgusting for words,” Jahid had spat when I congratulated him on getting another brother soon. “I don’t even want to think about it.”