Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

As we actually had water connected to the house, I no longer had to make the backbreaking trip to the nearest tap to fight with other kids and dirty dogs for a bucketful of liquid that lasted five minutes, and so after I completed my homework my only real job was to run to the baker’s each evening with a handful of afs to collect five hot fresh long breads.

Other than that, my life usually involved waiting for the foreigners.

Georgie was normally the first to arrive home, and quite often she would allow me to sit in the garden with her as she drank her coffee. Although my mother was always invited, she rarely came to join us. She had quickly made friends with a woman across the road who managed a house for the wife of one of the Ministry of Interior’s men. Her name was Homeira and she was pretty fat, so I guessed they paid her well. I was happy my mother had found a friend, so I felt no jealousy when she spent much of her time talking to her in our rooms or at the house of Homeira’s employer. In fact, I was more than happy; I was amazed. It was as if a hidden key had turned in my mother’s head, releasing a river of words that had been locked in there for years.

More amazing, however, was my mother’s willingness to let me stay in the house alone and to sit with the Westerners for as long as “they don’t become bored.” Perhaps she thought it would be good for my English, although James was hardly ever around, May always seemed to be crying, and Georgie and I usually spoke Dari together.

From these little conversations I learned that Georgie came from England, the same country as London. She’d been in Afghanistan for ages and came to live with James and May two years ago because they had become friends and James needed the rent money. She worked for an NGO and combed goats for a living, and because she knew the country and traveled a lot she had made loads of Afghan friends. In that way, and many more, she was different from most foreigners I had met, and I think I fell in love with her instantly. She was gentle and funny, and she seemed to like being with me. She was also very beautiful with thick almost-black hair and dark eyes. I hoped one day to marry her—once she had given up smoking and converted to the one true faith, of course.

The engineer, May, was usually the second one home and tended to disappear into her room as soon as her quick greetings were over. Georgie told me she came from America on a contract with one of the ministries and that she was “a little unhappy right now.” She didn’t explain further, and I didn’t ask more. I liked the mystery it gave to May’s tears.

As a rule, James was always the last one home, and at least twice a week he would return very late, bouncing off walls and singing to himself. The more I got to know him, the more I was convinced he was related to Pir the Madman.

“He works very hard,” Georgie explained, “and mainly with the ladies.”

Georgie laughed at that, and I wondered how these women got permission from their husbands to work so late with a man who freely showed his nipples to the world as if they were medals of war.

“What work does he do with them?” I asked, causing Georgie to laugh even louder. It was a good, strong sound, like thunder in summer.

“Fawad,” she finally said, “you’d best ask your mother that question.”

And that put a stop to that.

And because that’s always the way with adults—they shut you out just as things get interesting—I had no choice but to carry on with my own investigations, investigations my mother might call “snooping.”

Through much trying and failing, I found the best time to watch my new friends was at night, when the lights were on, it was dark outside, and everyone thought I was asleep. Luckily, my mother was a great help when it came to my nighttime spying, as she had chosen to sleep in the TV room, meaning I now had a bedroom to myself for the very first time, which gave me complete freedom to explore my surroundings and their strange Godless inhabitants.

Now and again, about an hour after I’d turned out my light, my mother would open the door to my room, which surprised me the first time because I was a breath away from leaving. But it was one of those warm surprises that make your toes tingle and your heart feel like it’s bleeding inside, because, thinking I was asleep, she kissed me softly on the cheek before returning to her own room, satisfied I was safely locked up in my dreams. Which of course I wasn’t. As a result of that first sweet surprise, I quickly learned to wait a good hour until after my mother’s visit before pulling on my shoes and allowing my adventures to begin.

Creeping along walls and crouching in bushes, I listened to magical, mysterious conversations that exploded with laughter as Georgie, James, and May spoke with other white-faced friends around the table in the garden. Of course, I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but this simply meant I now had a code I would have to learn to decipher.

Really, I felt like I’d been plucked from the flames of Hell and placed into Paradise. In those first few weeks I wasn’t simply Fawad from Paghman; I was Fawad the secret agent. In those days, Kabul was crawling with spies—British, Pakistani, French, Italian, Russian, Indian, and American men as big as giants who wore their beards long to try to look Afghan. My mission from the president was simple: to discover who in the house was working as a spy, and the identity of their masters.

As I crept and crawled my way through the heavy heat of those Kabul summer nights, I wrapped layers of dreams and heroic tales around my adventures, and I plotted escape routes and hatched complicated plans to avoid detection so that I might hand over my carefully gathered information to my comrades at the palace. I lived in a world of hazy future glories, picturing myself as a national hero thanks to all the good work I had carried out as a mere boy.

“He was so young!” the people would say as they listened to the story of my successes.

“Yes, but he was a true Afghan,” President Karzai would tell them, smiling widely because he was the man who had appointed me.

“So brave! So fearless!” they would marvel. “He must have had balls as big as Ahmad Shah Massoud’s.”

“Bigger!” the president would correct. “The boy was a Pashtun!”

In order to fulfill my mission, I kept a careful record of all the foreigners’ movements in a red notebook Georgie had given me to practice my writing. Because James was hardly ever there, and Georgie was too beautiful to work for the enemy, I decided to concentrate on May.

Once my mother had gone to sleep, I would sneak out of my room and shimmy up the wall of the “secret” passageway. From there I could see the door to May’s bedroom, on which was hung a long woolen jacket. On the far wall there was a wooden board with a collection of photographs pinned on it. I guessed they were of her family because the people caught in various poses all seemed to be short and yellow, but in my imagination they were part of a terror network supported by the pigs of Pakistan. The ISI, the country’s secret service, knew that the Afghan government would never suspect a Western woman from America of carrying out their evil plans. In that way they were as cunning as the devil himself. But they weren’t clever enough for Fawad—Afghanistan’s silent protector.

Unfortunately, though, May seemed to be going through some kind of trauma. Most of the time she just disappeared to her room. And if she wasn’t in her room, she would be shouting into her mobile phone. And if she wasn’t shouting into her phone, she would be downstairs picking at the food my mother had spent all day preparing for her, or even worse, she would be crying. Although it’s never good to see a woman cry, her face looked angry rather than sad, and I found it confusing. To be honest, I thought May was slightly mental, and by the end of the second week I decided to give up investigating her spying activity for the Pakistanis and dedicate my time to getting a look at her breasts.