Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

Georgie leaned back into the seat of the car and seemed very pleased with herself.

Personally, as far as secrets went I thought this had to be the worst of the worst. However, I quite liked the idea of her teaching the poor goat herders how to become rich. Most people only come to Afghanistan to help themselves get rich, or richer.

“Will you take me one day?” I asked. “To see the goats?”

“Yes, of course I will, as long as your mother agrees.”

“I think it will be okay,” I said. “Unless you invite James, and then it might be a bit more complicated.”

Georgie laughed. “Yes, I think you’re right about that. He’s not exactly her favorite person at the moment, is he?”

No, he isn’t, I thought. Far from it.

Ever since that night, my mother had stopped talking to James. Sometimes she couldn’t even bring herself to look at him, which was a bit embarrassing because he’d taken to bringing her flowers every day as some kind of peace offering. Unfortunately for James, this small effort had also landed him in hot water with Shir Ahmad, and I was certain that if the guard wasn’t being paid three hundred dollars a month, he would have had James murdered.

I think Shir Ahmad had fallen in love with my mother at some point when I wasn’t looking, or maybe when I was looking at someone else. I guess this was because she was still very beautiful, and I felt a little sorry for him—as long as he didn’t try to touch her. For my mother’s part, she laughed at his jokes, fixed his tea, and cooked his food, but she seemed to prefer the company of Homeira across the road. So that left Shir Ahmad alone to take care of his hopeful heart—and to stare dangerously at James when he came home with yet another unwanted bunch of flowers.

In fact, the only person who was allowed and seemed to want to talk to James these days was May, who had stopped crying and started getting drunk. I didn’t know which was worse. Either way her face was still red and puffy.

“What’s happened to May?” I asked Georgie one day in the car.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s always laughing now.”

“Well, that’s better than crying, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. And I’m not sure James does either.”

Georgie smiled and turned to look at me. “Yes, she does seem to spend more time with him these days.”

“She wants to be his girlfriend,” I stated knowingly, only for Georgie to shake her head and laugh hard.

“I don’t think so, Fawad. She’s a… what do you call it in Dari? She’s a woman who likes other women more than she likes men.”

My heart skipped a beat at this latest shock of information, and I felt the sticky prickle of sweat break out at the sides of my head.

“What do you mean likes ?” I whispered, asking about May but thinking of my mother and her many visits across the road.

“Like husbands like wives… that kind of like,” Georgie explained with a wink, obviously mistaking my concern for surprise.

I nodded my head, as if I didn’t care and to show I was a man of the world, but her words bumped around my brain like a death sentence. Like husbands like wives… like husbands like wives… It was unreal. It was unbelievable. That didn’t mean just talking. That meant kissing and everything .

As the words slowly sank in and I pictured the full horror of my future playing out before my eyes, I realized I’d have to take drastic action, and quick.

I’d have to force my mother to marry Shir Ahmad.

“You’re a bit young to be looking for a woman, aren’t you?”

Pir Hederi turned his white eyes in my direction. We were sitting side by side, in front of the shop, enjoying the warm breeze that breathed the end of summer on our faces.

“It’s not for me,” I corrected, a bit disgusted at the thought.

“Who for, then?”

“Just someone—a man.”

Since the shock of discovering my mother might be a woman who likes other women, I’d been trying everything I could think of to make her fall in love with Shir Ahmad, but nothing seemed to be working.

The first thing I’d done was to convince James during the rare moments my mother left us alone in the house to hand over his flowers to the guard so that he might pass them on to her. Both men hesitated at first, not liking the idea of giving and receiving flowers from each other, but when I explained using a mixture of hand gestures and pieces of English that my mother might feel more comfortable getting gifts from a foreigner through an Afghan, they both agreed to try it. And although my mother now accepted the flowers, which she arranged in old coffee jars and placed around the windows, she didn’t seem to be moving any closer to accepting Shir Ahmad’s company beyond quick conversations during the handover of teapots and food plates.

My next tactic involved making Shir appear interesting. “Oh! That Shir! He’s a funny man!” I’d laugh, collapse, and shake my head with the hilarity of another made-up story or joke he’d never told, hoping to arouse my mother’s curiosity. “Here, listen to this!” I ordered one evening, coming to sit by my mother’s side as she washed one of Georgie’s white shirts in a bowl of soapy water. “One day, a mental fell asleep by the side of the road. He was wearing a brand-new pair of boots. A man walked up to him and decided to steal the snoring mental’s boots. Carefully, the thief removed them and put his old pair of shoes on the crazy man’s feet. Not long after, a car came up the road and stopped in front of the mental. The driver woke him and told him, ‘Move your feet out of the road so that I may pass by.’ The mental then looked at his feet and said, ‘Brother, pass by. These feet don’t belong to me!’ ” I slapped my thighs, threw my head back in laughter, and waited for my mother to join in. But she didn’t. She simply gave me a look and asked, “Have you been drinking beer again?” before returning her attention to Georgie’s wet, soapy shirts.

After the jokes failed to work, I slowly began to gather the threads of Shir Ahmad’s life, from the short conversations we shared as I left for and returned from school.

“He used to have a wife,” I told my mother after I had collected all the facts and pulled them into something that might show him to be more than a man who just stood at the door.

“Who did?”

“Shir Ahmad.”

Mother put down the knife she was using to saw up the fatty flesh of one of Afghanistan’s big-bottomed sheep.

“So?” she asked. “What happened to her?”

“It’s a sad story, Mother. A very sad story.”

“Don’t be dramatic, Fawad.”

She turned back to the raw meat and carried on hacking.

“Okay,” I hurried, worried that I’d lost her so early on in the tale, “but it is sad.”

I threw her a stern look to remind her that a good Muslim woman should have more sympathy.

“Shir told me that he was married very young to an even younger girl from his village and that he loved her very, very much. Every day he would bring her flowers.” I paused, watching my mother as I stressed the word flowers , but she didn’t even blink. “So, he brought her flowers every day, and he would sing to her every night as she prepared their dinner. They didn’t have much because Shir only had a small job learning how to file paperwork at the offices of the Department of Agriculture. He was educated, you see. He could read and write; that’s how he got the job with the department, where you have to know your numbers. Anyway, Shir and his wife were planning on having a big family. They wanted at least five sons and as many daughters, but when the first child came—he was a boy—he got stuck inside Shir’s wife. For two days the women of the village tried to pull the baby from her stomach, and their house became filled with her blood and all of Shir’s tears. For those two days he never left his wife’s side, staying instead to hold her hand and press cold, wet cloths onto her head. Then finally, in the early hours of the third day, the women pulled the baby from Shir’s wife’s stomach. The baby boy was already dead, and as the women pulled him free that little dead baby took the last of his mother’s breath away with him.”