Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

Jamilla turned down the sound but kept on watching regardless. She wasn’t that interested in his singing in the first place.

Despite having moved halfway across town, most days I still came to work at Pir Hederi’s shop because I had my bike and Shir Ahmad would come and pick me up when he’d finished at the Internet café. As I thought it would, his business with Haji Khan was going well—so well, in fact, that he now drove his own car, we had a generator in the house, and last week he even bought my mother a fridge.

Really, we were getting quite rich by Afghan standards, but I still liked to come to Pir Hederi’s because it gave me an excuse to catch up with James and Rachel, who were now living together in my old house and pretending to be married, “for appearances’ sake and because she can cook,” explained James.

He was such a fat liar. Despite his words, I knew he wanted to make Rachel his wife because she told me that every time he was drunk—which didn’t seem as often as when I lived with him—he would get down on his knees and propose.

“Why don’t you just say yes one day?” I asked.

“You know, Fawad,” she replied, turning to me with a wink, “one day I just might.”

As I was seeing James at least once a week, I also got to find out what had happened to May after she left Af ghan i-stan to have her baby.

“It’s a boy!” James had shouted when I stopped by to drop off the Four Weddings and a Funeral DVD he’d asked for—no doubt another part of his scheme to trick Rachel into marriage.

“What’s a boy?”

“The May-Geri-Philippe love child!” Laughing, he lifted me over his head and then dropped me again because this was before he had started working on his muscles. “They want to call him Spandi. What do you think?”

I took a moment to think about it, as he asked me to, weighing up all the good points and the bad points of giving my best friend’s name to a boy who would most probably be lesbianized before he reached the age of five.

“I don’t think so,” I said finally. “It’s a nice idea and everything, but Spandi was a good Muslim and it might be dishonorable. Maybe they should call the baby Shahrukh.”

“Shahrukh, eh?” James nodded his head. “Okay, I’ll e-mail and say it’s a no to Spandi but you’d be happy with Shahrukh.”

“Yes, I’d be very happy with that.”

Of course, Jamilla would be furious when she found out, which made it even funnier.

Even though Jamilla was now a full head taller than me and her mind had become filled with things like lipstick, we were still the best of friends. More important, her life had started getting a lot less painful as we got older because her father no longer left so many marks on her face. I half suspected this was because he was frightened of ruining his chances of selling her, but Jamilla said the drugs were starting to affect his mind rather than his fists and half the time he couldn’t remember his own name, let alone that he had to beat up his own children.

Even though nothing was said, I got the impression that Pir Hederi was hoping to give Jamilla his shop when he died because Mrs. Pir Hederi had started giving her lessons in bookkeeping. I was kind of annoyed about it at first, seeing as I was just as good at math as Jamilla and I had got her the job in the first place. But I calmed down when I saw how happy it was making her, and I guessed I’d probably inherit Shir Ahmad’s Internet café eventually anyway—if I didn’t become a journalist like James. To me this seemed the best of all jobs, other than checking DVDs. I’d been watching James’s career with interest for quite a long time now, and I had come to the thinking that if you were a journalist you could spend most of your working life in bed.

Another person who was spending most of the time sleeping these days was my mother. Secretly I knew this was because she was becoming exhausted with the brother or sister I had growing in her stomach, but I couldn’t tell anyone about it because it would have been disrespectful to my mother. Babies just appear in Afghanistan; how they got there is something good Muslims don’t talk about. So, right now, the only other person, apart from Shir Ahmad, who knew about my mother’s news was my aunt, who was also carrying a new baby in her arms. Amazingly, she had brought a little girl into the world, which of course filled my heart with nightmares. One day they might ask me to marry her. She was quite cute, though, for a baby and for a girl, and at least her eyes were pointing in the right direction.

As were Jahid’s nowadays. Behind my back he had gone to speak to Dr. Hugo about his rolling eye, and as the doctor couldn’t really tell him to get a good night’s rest he had passed him on to another doctor who actually knew what to do about rolling eyes. After a few appointments Jahid finally got his cure: a pair of the most enormous glasses I’d ever seen that made his eyes look as big as saucers. Jahid was happy, though, because for once he could look at things and not see three of them.

“I’m getting my teeth fixed next,” he told me.

“How can you get your teeth fixed?” I asked, not sure that even Allah could sort out that mess.

“I read about it on the Internet. In America everyone wears false teeth, so that’s where I’m going.”

“How are you going to afford that?”

“The marriage money I’ve been saving,” he whispered. “Now that I’ve got my eyes sorted out, all I need to do is fix my smile and the ladies will be falling over themselves to get a taste of the Jahid love snake.”

As he spoke he thrust his hips in my direction, which didn’t look quite as sexy as he probably meant it to on account of his lazy leg.

At least he’d stopped fantasizing about my sister.

Since my mother’s marriage we had seen Mina five more times—four of them in Kabul and the other in her own home in Kunar. Now that was a hell of a drive, but every painful bump of it was worth it because my sister grew more beautiful each time I saw her. It was kind of sad that we had missed so much of our life together, but despite what had happened to her, Mina seemed calm enough, if a little lost in her eyes, as if she had been caught remembering something. Thankfully her husband continued to be a good man, and he brought her with him to the capital whenever he came to hand over his wood to his business partner. But what really brought the light to her face was baby Daud, who was a loud, fat, happy child who wouldn’t have looked out of place running around Homeira’s house.

Of course it was still difficult for my mother and my sister to have spent so many years apart and still to be cursed with so many miles between them, but when they couldn’t be together they clung to each other on their mobile phones. I think the chatter and the cost of it was doing Shir Ahmad’s head in because if he wasn’t at his shop he was out in the street buying Roshan cards. To be honest, my mother could have done with Spandi still being around—at least he might have been able to cut her a deal on the cards, or showed her the tricks some of the other boys knew to get their calls for free. And I’m sure Haji Khan wouldn’t have minded. He didn’t seem to be that fussed about anything these days, not since his head had become full of his new wife.

To our surprise, Haji Khan had married Aisha Khan as spring came to break through the dead of winter. Although some people in his district grumbled that she wasn’t good enough for him, on account of the fact that she didn’t wear gloves when she went out in her burka—as a woman of her standing should—and because she sometimes worked for a company in Kabul—and, even worse than that, men would come to her home who weren’t male relatives—Haji Khan didn’t take much notice of them because he loved her. What’s more, most other people loved her because she had made Haji Khan so happy, in a way none of us thought would have been possible after his brother was jailed for his attempted murder.