Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

But his kindness didn’t stop there. Baba Gul’s wife said Haji Khan had spoken such hot words to the goat herder when he turned up at the hut that he had actually put the fear of God into him, for real, and from that day on Baba Gul never went near the cards again. “He spends almost every waking breath in the mosque these days begging Allah for forgiveness while he still has time to save himself from Hell,” Mulallah told us with a smile.

And after saving Baba Gul’s daughter, as well as the old man’s eternal soul, Haji Khan moved the family to their new house. Baba Gul’s wife said he charged them a rent for the house that “was almost as free as the air,” and he gave them enough rice, oil, and beans to fill the whole family’s bellies to bursting for the next month. Even better than that, some men had turned up at the house a few days after they had moved in to plant the trees we had seen in their garden; apparently, one day their branches would be filled with oranges, plums, and pomegranates, which would give Mulallah’s family another way of earning money.

“It’s all Haji Khan’s doing, and it’s all because of you,” Mulallah’s mother finished, reaching up with her hands to bring Georgie’s face toward her. She then kissed her sweetly on the forehead.

On the way back to Jalalabad I was filled with talk about Haji Khan’s kindness, and in the mirror I saw Zalmai smile as I excitedly told him the story he must surely have known already.

Amazingly, though, Georgie stayed silent. I could see only the back of her head, but it seemed her eyes were reaching out across the fields ahead of us as if she were looking for something she had lost, and her lips were tied shut no matter how hard I tried to include her in my chatter.

Just as Haji Khan said it would be, when we finally arrived at his house in Jalalabad we found Ismerai waiting for us. By now the sun had dipped below the mountains, and the house was a ball of light in the dark. It was also very quiet with only the three of us there, and the midget man we had seen before, flitting around serving us food and sweet tea.

After the excitement of the day and the hours of driving we had gone through, my eyes quickly became heavy with sleep. Of course, this may also have had something to do with the thick smoke of Ismerai’s special cigarettes. I leaned back on one of the cushions in the golden room to rest my eyes for a minute.

“Do you want to go to bed?” Georgie asked, breaking away from her conversation with Ismerai.

“In a minute,” I said, too comfy to move.

“Okay, in a minute then,” she replied, and pulled me forward to place my head on her knees.

I closed my eyes in warm happiness, feeling the softness of coming sleep while listening to the gentle hum of adult conversation. Georgie and Ismerai were talking about politics and the growing troubles in the south and the east.

“We live in difficult times,” Ismerai told her. “Personally, I’m at a loss as to what Karzai’s plan is. I can see the need for a strong central government, but this is Afghanistan—it’s not as simple as moving people around on a chessboard. You move the traditional authority out of an area, the men who share a culture and a history with their own people, and you create a vacuum. There are no longer any restraints; there is no longer any loyalty; there is only money.”

“Is Khalid’s position in jeopardy?” Georgie asked.

I heard Ismerai click his tongue to say no. “They can’t move Haji,” he said. “How could they? He doesn’t hold a government position; he’s his own man. But that’s not to say he’s not faced with a million problems of government.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you know he’s thrown his weight behind the governor’s poppy eradication plan, don’t you?”

“No,” Georgie admitted, “I didn’t know that.”

“Well he has. There will be no poppies planted on his land this year, and he’s pushing the strategy at the Shuras, trying to convince other landowners and elders to join, but it’s not easy. Haji’s trying to find the right path to travel down, for the good of everyone and for the good of Afghanistan, but it’s a path blocked by a many-headed enemy, Georgie. You’ve got the farmers who face the prospect of their yearly income being slashed by at least two-thirds, you’ve got the smugglers themselves, and you’ve got the insurgents looking at one of their main sources of money drying up.”

“What will they do?”

“What, besides try to kill him?”

“You’re not serious?”

Georgie moved sharply, but I pretended not to notice in case she packed me off to bed. But I felt the concern in the act, and I felt it in my own heart too.

“Well, no, maybe I’m being dramatic,” Ismerai soothed. “But these are not easy times for him, Georgie. You need to be aware of that.”

Despite the sadness in Ismerai’s voice, Georgie stayed silent. I guessed she must have been taking his words and turning them over in her head before she answered him. But when she did open her mouth, almost a full two minutes later, I nearly choked in my pretend sleep.

“Khalid has asked me to marry him,” she said.

YOU KNOW, I really didn’t mean to say anything, absolutely nothing at all, and for hours I didn’t even say a word—which was a kind of torture if you stopped to think about all the questions that must have been shouting in my head demanding to be answered. But as the saying goes, “A tree doesn’t move unless there is wind,” and by the middle of the next morning I realized I might have to do a bit of blowing.

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

Georgie was sitting in the front seat of the car. As I was pretty intelligent for my age, and a master in the art of spying, I spoke in English so that Zalmai couldn’t understand.

“Like what?” she replied, turning in her seat to look at me.

“Like… stuff…,” I replied, stealing a line I’d heard James use a million times before when he was trying not to say anything.

“Oh… stuff…,” returned Georgie.

“Yes… stuff…,” I kicked back.

Georgie yawned, leaned back in her seat, and pulled down the sunglasses from her head to cover her eyes.

“No, not really, Fawad. But if you hear of anything interesting, do wake me up, won’t you?”

Which basically translated as “Don’t stop a donkey that isn’t yours.”

I shook my head. She really was irritating sometimes.

Back in Kabul, my desperation to talk broke out like fleas under my skin—itching, tiny-legged words that crawled up my nose, marched around my head, and rested in my mouth ready to jump out at the slightest opportunity. But there was no one to talk to!

Spandi would have been my first choice because he was my best friend and I knew he could keep a secret. As for Jamilla, well, there was just no way. She had already confessed to being a bit in love with Haji Khan, and on top of that she was a girl, which made trusting her pretty much impossible, especially when it came to subjects like marriage. And though Pir Hederi might have been an old man, he was worse than Jamilla when it came to this sort of thing. If I told him everything I knew, I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the day, as he tossed out the rotten fruit for the goats to feed on in the morning, he had Georgie and Haji Khan already joined and expecting their sixth baby.

So that evening I decided to have another go at Georgie.