Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

Pir clapped his hands, waking Dog, who was asleep on the step of the shop.

“We’ll get the wife to cook up more of this stuff tonight, and Jamilla can do the sandwiching tomorrow, and when you return from school you can go out and sell them.”

“I thought you said this was a take-out Service!”

“Ah yes, I did, didn’t I? Okay, you take out half of what we’ve made at lunchtime, and when you’ve sold them you can come back for any I’ve got left.”

“Great…”

“Isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean… oh, forget it.” I couldn’t really see any point in arguing with the old man because it was quite clear he had made up his mind. “You do know I’m in mourning, don’t you?”

People are always dying in Afghanistan. That’s just the way it goes. And maybe because people are always dying, the ones who are left alive don’t spend that much time thinking about the ones who are dead. They just get on with things. And even though I knew Pir Hederi liked Spandi a lot—I’d even seen his white eyes lose tears at the burial—he was now getting on with things. More to the point, he was making me get on with his things.

Despite my strongest prayers the night before, when I returned to the shop the next day after school I found him waiting for me at the door. He had a metal tray in his hand loaded with his “sandwiches.” Rather rudely, I thought, he hardly gave me the chance to wheel my bike inside before he was pushing me out of the door.

“We’ve got no time to lose,” he shouted, trying to keep Dog’s face away from the food with his free hand, “lunchtime is nearly over. Get yourself over to the Pakistani Embassy. There’s always a massive line of people outside, and they’ll be starving, I bet.”

“ I’m starving,” I told him.

“Oh.” Pir paused to think about how this piece of news might affect his plan to take over the take-out world before telling me, “Okay, you can eat on the way.” He passed me the tray. “Only one,” he warned as I walked out the door, “and make sure it’s egg. They’re already starting to smell like hell.”

I walked across the main road, past Wazir’s mosque and the small row of shops selling airline tickets to places in the world I’d never even heard of and would probably never get to see, and turned right, onto the street with the Pakistani Embassy. Pir Hederi was correct: there were tons of people lining up against the wall, all hoping to get visas. Looking at them, I wondered what it was that made so many people want to go to a place they pretty much blamed for everything. But I guessed anywhere was better than nowhere when you had nothing.

Of course, when you had nothing you weren’t going to waste the money you didn’t have on sandwiches.

“How much?” One man laughed when I told him the price of two hundred afs that Pir Hederi had set. “I could buy a damn sheep for that.”

“Yeah, but you couldn’t get it slaughtered, sliced, and placed between bread for the same price,” I countered, quickly dodging the back of his hand.

“I’ll give you ten afs,” another man said.

“That’s very kind of you,” I replied, “but you’ll still have to pay for a sandwich.”

As I began to draw quite a crowd—mainly those who wanted something for nothing—a policeman came over and told me to move along. I was causing a disturbance, apparently. And, apparently, he could arrest me for that. As I was too young to spend the rest of my life in prison for a tray of sandwiches nobody wanted to buy, I did as I was told and walked off toward the barricaded openings of the American camps nearby.

I sat down by the side of the road to wait for passing soldiers and told myself that after nearly losing my freedom I deserved more than one crappy naan bread filled with egg turning green. I opened up a few of the newspaper-wrapped parcels and settled for cucumber and mutton. Although the bread was getting hard around the edges, I had to admit the sandwich tasted pretty good.

“Hey, little fella!”

I looked up into the glaring sun and kind of saw the blacked-out face of Dr. Hugo.

“Hey, Dr. Hugo! Do you want a sandwich?”

“Okay,” he said.

He picked the top sandwich from the pile and opened it up.

“Peanut butter,” I said. “Nice choice. That will be two hundred afs, please.”

Dr. Hugo smiled and came to sit by my side.

“No, I’m serious,” I said.

“Oh.” He dipped into his pocket and pulled out five dollars. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks, I will.”

For a while we sat there saying nothing because our mouths were too busy trying to chew Pir’s sandwiches. As I had a head start on the doctor, I finished first.

“So, what are you doing here?” I asked.

Dr. Hugo swallowed hard and coughed a bit. “I was seeing the Americans about some medical supplies—nothing that interesting.”

“Oh.”

He continued eating. Then he stopped chewing, pushing his mouthful into a cheek in order to speak.

“Look, Fawad, I’ve been meaning to ask you something…”

“Okay.”

I hoped to God it wasn’t another damn secret coming my way.

“Well…” Dr Hugo looked a bit embarrassed, and as he searched for the words and gulped down his sandwich he put a hand through his hair, leaving in it a smudge of peanut butter. “Do you know where Haji Khalid Khan has his house in Kabul?”

I looked at the doctor, trying to work out in his eyes what he was up to as I nodded my head slowly.

“Good. That’s excellent news. That really is. Now, can you possibly take me there?”

I picked up another sandwich and bit into it. Tomato, onion, cucumber, and honey—not a combination I remembered being on the list Pir and I put together. It tasted like rat vomit.

“Fawad?”

“Look,” I said finally, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“I only want to talk to him.”

“What about?”

“Georgie.”

“Then that really isn’t a good idea. I don’t think he’d like it very much.”

“Be that as it may, young man, but I have to. If I don’t, she’ll leave.”

I turned my head at his words, surprised and just a little bit pleased.

“Is Georgie going to live in Jalalabad?”

“No, of course not,” Dr. Hugo replied, looking confused. “She’ll go back to England.”

“England?”

“Yes, England. And I’m sure that, like me, you wouldn’t want to see that happen, would you?”

It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Georgie might leave Afghanistan—or rather that she might leave me.

“No, I don’t,” I admitted.

“In that case, take me to Haji Khan.”

Although I knew it was a bad idea to take Dr. Hugo to see Haji Khan because he would almost certainly be killed, there were now more urgent worries crowding my head than the life of a foreigner. There was my life with a foreigner. I couldn’t imagine Georgie not being near me; more than that, I didn’t want to imagine it. After recently losing one of my best friends, I couldn’t face losing another, so if Dr. Hugo thought he could fix the problem by getting killed, I wasn’t going to stop him.

“Here it is,” I said, pointing to the green metal door in front of us, where a guard with a gun sat on a green plastic chair.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Dr. Hugo said.

“Okay, it’s your funeral.”

The doctor looked at me for a second to see if I was laughing, but I wasn’t. Amazingly, though, he still got out of the Land Cruiser, and I followed him, slightly impressed, holding my tray of sandwiches.

Dr. Hugo told his driver to wait for him, and we walked toward the guard.

“We want to see Haji Khan,” I told him.