Authors: Amber Green
I didn't have time to stare out windows. I was busy chasing down Mohammed, bringing him back to our seats over and over, and cleaning up when he became sick. Many times, I secretly wished he was a girl, or as small as Sorrow, so Mom would do all his herding and tending. But I'd promised to be a father to him, and the tending of sons is a father's work.
At the other end of the line, at the border to India, we debarked and huddled all night on the station's veranda. The station opened at sunup, but the border did not.
We waited on through the long, hot morning. My mother squatted in the shade, brushing flies from Sorrow's face, while I kept Omar and Mohammed from bothering the madrassa pupils kneeling in the shade of the next building. I whispered the
tajweed
along with the students, teaching my brothers as was my duty, comforting myself with familiar chanted lines of scripture, prayer, and proverb.
At noon the border opened with great fanfare and high-stepping soldiers in glittering uniforms on both sides. When they finished stamping and dancing, and raising the flags, we waited a few more hours.
Finally, the Pakistani guards took a break, leaving behind only one man to bribe. At my mother's tense instructions, I gave the gatekeeper her rings in lieu of a passport or identity papers. He scraped one ring and then the next along a black stone and told me they were worthless.
He had eyes like a snake, if a snake could be considered covetous. I told him to give them back if he found them without value. He said if he gave them back, he would need to arrest us for attempting to bribe an official.
My mother raised an ululating wail that stiffened the hair on my arms. She howled for divine justice, demanding to know how she could take her sons to their father's brother now that this evil man had stolen her jewelry and traveling papers—see, the marks of the rings still on her fingers? He was a thief, a robber of widows and orphans, and doubtless an apostate!
Sorrow shrieked in her arms. Mohammed clutched fistfuls of her travel-stained burqa. Omar sucked his fingers anxiously. I stood aghast, knowing we'd never had any traveling papers. She yowled on.
As she drew her third deep breath, the mullah's students surrounded us all, shaking their hands at the border guard, chanting, “Shame, shame! Have you no mother?"
The man eyed me with respect, as if I'd engineered all this, gave me the first bow I'd ever received, and let us through.
When challenged on the Indian side, my mother shed the burqa and became an American citizen in distress. We were rushed away from the border and tucked into a tiny, white-tiled room with too many very bright lights set within wire cages.
The voice of a man echoed off the walls. He shouted in a language I could not make out. I looked at my mother, who knew so many strange things, but she shook her head.
We smelled rich fried foods, but were given not so much as a bowl of pilau to share. Omar, known as Fat Boy to the cousins, sucked his fingers annoyingly, but to his credit did not whine. Little Mohammed whined. In the next room, the shouting man switched to English.
Hearing English disoriented me as much as anything else on that trip. My older brother Hamid and I had speculated English was a secret code my parents invented, an elaborate ruse to keep the rest of the family from knowing what nonsense we were taught. Now, I heard a stranger speaking English in this foreign place.
My mother handed me Sorrow, who whimpered unceasingly in my lap. Mohammed slanted his peculiar blue eyes sidelong at Sorrow and ceased whining. I held out my arm to him, and he leaned in under it. Omar, trying not to be a child, stared wide-eyed at me. I beckoned him close. He stood at my back, his fingertips picking at my shoulder. I didn't know what to tell them.
We had passed several shrines without asking more than a night's sanctuary. If this were a kind of hujra, where unlimited hospitality could be expected without asking, they would not have shut us in this painfully bright room.
All I knew truly was that we were among men so foreign they must be Punjabi, or even
feranghi
. Men who used English.
My mother paced, gnawing her knuckle, her eyes fixed on the door however she walked. Her taut face echoed the rising tones of the shouting man.
I gnawed my own knuckle, wondering how to get us all home when she had accomplished whatever she had set out to do. We had no horses to sell. No goats. I would have to find work, driving sheep or goats for some wealthy family, and insist on coins for payment.
Omar would have to help as well. He had not been cut, but he was old enough. Since the New Year, only my mother's stubbornness had kept him closeted with the little ones.
In the evening, men in turbans and business suits arrived, along with a woman painted like a bride and wearing the first sari I had seen. I had to avert my eyes from her uncovered skin. She took us upstairs to a cool room with blue walls adorned with photographs of elderly but beardless men, and a breezy veranda overlooking a garden.
Another woman brought us sweet rice and a curry thick with cream and yellow peas. Using barely comprehensible English, the first one told my brothers and me to eat our fill, then unroll sleeping mats from the lacquered chest over there and take a nap.
My mother nodded.
As the senior male, the decision of whether to obey the stranger's orders was mine, but a man worthy of being called Pakhtun does not contradict his mother. Especially among strangers. I bowed to she who had so gracefully guided my decision.
While settling Mohammed with his bowl, I looked back.
Our mother was being led away.
A virtuous widow, alone with strangers outside her home? I ran after them, protesting this indecency.
They stopped me at the door. They thrust something soft at me, used it to push me back into the room, and shut the door.
I looked at the thing in my hands. A plush yellow stuffed toy. A teddy bear.
Our helo took the straight route southeastward from Bagram, mostly paralleling Highway 1 and the river flowing along the northern flank of the highway. Below us, trucks raced at top speed along the highway, leaving us behind, but Mike said the convoy wasn't going all the way to Jalalabad. Nor were we important enough to requisition a plane.
For the first hour or so, Echo busied himself with a computer, its screen shrouded so that the only light emission reflected off his face. Mike and Oscar napped. Napping sounded like a wise use of my own time, but it didn't happen.
I wanted to inventory my packs, especially the medical kit, but our sitting compartment was too cramped. I'd be in everyone's way and would interfere in their sleep. Nor could I disassemble and clean the M4 they'd issued me. It was a cut-down M16, easier to maneuver from horseback but plenty enough weapon to keep me from standing out in a crowd of soldiers. I kept looking out the window instead, even when there was nothing to see out there in the night.
After a while, a convoy on the highway below caught up with us and passed in the same direction, slit-eyed truck after slit-eyed truck, giving the feeling we were flying slowly backward.
Way ahead of us, the road suddenly lit up. A monstrous brass chrysanthemum bloomed, its petals lighting and outlining a floating truck.
The noise hit then, hard enough to shake the helicopter.
Our helo rose, lifting quickly out of the light and passing to the south of the fire.
"Poor fuckers,” Echo said.
Mike's lips moved. A prayer?
What was wrong with me, that I hadn't prayed?
I stood and took the two steps of pacing the cabin allowed, partly so I could stretch—a sailor learns to stretch in spaces so tight most men cramp up thinking about them—and partly to sneak a peek at Echo's screen. He had a chess game in progress. Huh. I would have picked some zombie apocalypse shoot-'em-up for a guy like him. When I went back to my seat, Oscar moved his feet for me.
I muttered thanks. He nodded.
The helo returned to paralleling the highway, but kept moving higher and lower. Basic maneuvers to deny an easy target to anyone with a rocket launcher.
Had the truck fallen prey to a rocket or a set bomb? I peered back toward the fire, but trucks were all around it now, presenting too many lights and shadows in too many broken-up pieces to show what was going on.
A line of trucks stretched out ahead of the mess. So either the convoy had divided so some troops could effect a rescue while others hurried on, or they'd put the damaged truck on a flatbed and were dragging it to a safe place. A safer place.
Oscar returned to his nap. Mike yawned, checked his phone, and went into a flurry of texting. Echo went back to his chess game.
Cleaner light, less yellow, caught my eye. North of the river, dawn painted snow-capped mountains with orange and pink, while night still held the valley. A moment later, when dawn lit our helicopter, I took a moment facing the tail of the plane for silent prayer. No one seemed to notice.
When I looked up, I saw distant lights in the still-dark valley dividing the mountains to the north. City lights. Mehtar Lam or one of the towns on the road there. Mihtarlim, I think it was, on the last map I'd seen. I remembered how the various riverbeds came together at the narrows here. There should be a major bridge, down there in the darkness, unless it had been bombed.
When I'd come here as a teen, everyone told me I had a Nangrahari accent, so I'd come here, to Nangrahar, and from here had been pointed north. I'd walked upriver past the narrows to a series of fords. I followed a herd of nauseatingly odorous fat-tailed gray karakul sheep, figuring that whatever didn't drown them wouldn't drown me, then hitchhiked north to Mehtar Lam. Only to find the city full of Gilzai Pashtun, not my people at all.
They'd still fed me, repaired my shoes, refilled my water bottles, and put me on the back of a truck piled with sugar cane. Not my people, but still Pashtun, still Pakhtun.
The mountains had called me north and east, until I finally found an arch that looked familiar, standing beside a tower that looked smaller than the one I'd climbed on a dare. The mosque with the blue fountain was larger, newer, and the fountain had become a galvanized pipe rising from the dusty rocks, with a faucet at the end of it and a dented bucket chained to it.
My people were not there.
The elders regretfully advised me that the hajji had packed up his khel and left, under Soviet pressure, only days before the Shuravi themselves had left. The elders had known my people for generations, could describe them right down to the nearly blind schoolmaster with his feranghi wife. But no one knew where my people had gone.
New people had come, had made a home in my home.
The helo overflew Jalalabad, this country's Dallas. I couldn't see into the depths of the narrow streets, but I could pick out dark spots and guessed they were the vegetable gardens that fed the city. For every parking lot in Dallas, there's a garden in Jalalabad.
Virtually all of the city is south of the highway, on the side the river isn't on. Between the highway and the river, daylight showed fields and enclosed pasture already green, studded with walled enclosures or clusters of them. Much of the land between the tangled strands of riverbed was also divided into rectangular fields, as was all the green land on the other north of the river, to a clear line where the lush green valley met the rocky, near-barren slope of the mountains.
I felt the need to study the valley, but kept looking north into the khaki-flanked, snow-capped Hindu Kush. My great-grandfather called it the kill zone for soft Punjabis captured in the rich lands to the east. Before finding enlightenment, he'd raided both sides of the Kabul River and both sides of the Khyber Pass. He and his raiders were once caught near here, where the two rivers merged. Rather than be caught like ducks in the river mud, they'd charged into their enemy's face, had thrown a British regiment into full disarray.
He'd stopped raiding during the Second World War, he said, when a voice in the moonlight had sent him to Mecca. He'd given away his fine horses in the sacred shadows there and walked back into the mountains. On his way back, he'd stolen Shinwari horses and a Shinwari wife, and had founded our khel ten days north of her father's walls.
I tapped Echo's shoulder. “Can you get on the net here? If you get time and don't mind, could you look for where the boundaries of Shinwari land were in 1945, 1946?"
He frowned and checked. “No bars here. Probably plenty in town, though. Remind me to check then."
"Thank you. And could you also find a village or town named Yaka Ghund or Mian Mandi?” I remembered an aunt coming from Yaka Ghund, and my grandfather had once taken part in a
loya Jirga
, a high assembly, at Mian Mandi. I had a feeling those places were in Pakistan, but maybe not.
If I ended up with any free time here, some computer-assisted triangulation should help me find my old home without three months of wandering around to do it.
Bismillah, maybe this time I could find where my khel had gone.
Echo looked at Mike, then back to his game. “No prob, dude."
Had he looked to Mike for permission, or what? I looked back over the river. The water kept changing its course there, so at any point there might be three or seven or ten intertwined rivers. The little bridges looked like they'd been put together with twigs and wishful thinking.
The view from above highlighted the scars where clusters of homes used to be. For every walled family compound, at least one scar showed where some flood had brought down the roofs and walls of another, had churned the family's dreams to mud.
Could be earthquake damage. Or bombing. From the air, after a few years of weathering, the results would look the same.
People kept building there, wrecking their backs and knees farming that rich valley mud, knowing that the river would sooner or later wash them away. Looking at the khaki dust looming at the edge of the green valley explained why. As long as there was any living to be made in the river valleys, the living to be made was better than anything else available.