Mud City Page 2

  “She thinks she can control everything,” she whispered to Jasper. “She thinks she can control me.”

  She remembered her first day at the Widows’ Compound. She had been wandering around the camp after being dropped off there by the shepherds, and was directed to the compound by an aid worker.

  As soon as she walked through the door in the compound wall and saw Mrs. Weera, she wanted to back out, but it was too late.

  “I know you!” Mrs. Weera exclaimed in her loud, booming voice. Everyone in the compound stopped what they were doing and stared at Shauzia. “You’re Parvana’s little friend.”

  Mrs. Weera had been a physical education teacher and field hockey coach before the Taliban closed all the schools for girls and made the female teachers leave their jobs. She had lived with Parvana’s family in Kabul for awhile. Shauzia remembered how bossy she had been then, and wasn’t surprised that she was still bossy.

  In a few strides, Mrs. Weera’s long legs crossed the courtyard. She stood in front of Shauzia. Shauzia could imagine what the older woman saw – a skinny girl whose face carried on it months of living out in the sun and the wind, clothes filthy and tattered, but with her back straight and her head up high.

  “You stink of sheep,” Mrs. Weera said, “but we can fix that. And I see you still look like a boy. We can fix that, too.” She hollered out an order for hot water and girls’ clothes.

  “I’d rather keep looking like a boy,” Shauzia said. “If I look like a girl, I can’t do anything.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Weera said. It was a word Shauzia was to hear her use many times. “The Taliban are not in charge here. I am. Oh, you have a dog, too.” She bent down and peered intently at Jasper, who wisely took two steps back. “A most adequate dog,” was her verdict.

  She turned away, and Shauzia allowed herself a small smile of relief. Mrs. Weera obviously didn’t remember how angry she had been with her the last time they had met in Kabul.

  The smile came too soon.

  “You left Kabul without a thought to how your family would survive without you.”

  “They didn’t like me!” Shauzia yelled. “They were always shooting, and they were going to marry me off to some old man I didn’t even know, just to get some money. I meant nothing to them!”

  “You don’t abandon your team just because the game isn’t going your way,” Mrs. Weera replied. “Now then, before you get settled, I have a little job for you.”

  Shauzia had been doing Mrs. Weera’s little jobs ever since.

  “No more,” she told Jasper. “And I won’t be a housemaid for her, either. I don’t need a house to sleep in. I slept outside with the shepherds. I can sleep outside in the city. Then all the money I make can go toward getting to the sea.”

  She reached under her pillow, where she kept her most valuable possession – a magazine photo of a lavender field in France. She couldn’t see the picture in the darkness, but she felt better with it in her hand.

  That was where she needed to be, in a field of purple flowers, where no one could bother her. She would sit there until the confusion left her head and the stink of the camp left her nostrils. When she had had enough of that, she would go to Paris and sit at the top of the Eiffel Tower until her friend Parvana joined her there, the way they had promised each other. They would spend the rest of their days drinking tea and eating oranges and making fun of Mrs. Weera.

  She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Let’s leave tonight,” she said to Jasper. He thumped his tail, and that was all the encouragement she needed.

  She got up and groped around in the corner until she found the bundle of her old boy clothes. She changed into them. Then she grabbed a fistful of hair and, using the scissors from the table top, cut and cut until the hair on her head felt short again. She put on her cap, tossed the blanket shawl around her neck and picked up her shoulder bag. She didn’t have any other belongings.

  Resisting the urge to yell “Goodbye!” in Mrs. Weera’s ear, Shauzia quietly left the hut with Jasper right behind her.

  They passed the hut used for embroidery training, and the one used to teach older women how to read. They doubled as sleeping huts for some of the families.

  Shauzia went into the food storage hut. There wasn’t much there, but she took the few pieces of nan left over from the day’s meals and wrapped some cold cooked rice in a bit of cloth. She put the food and a small plastic bottle for water in her shoulder bag.

  Back out in the courtyard, she looked around the compound one last time. Everything was quiet except for the sound of Mrs. Weera’s snoring and, farther away, the sound of someone crying outside the Widows’ Compound.

  There was no reason to stay. The camp was dark. Shauzia began to regret her decision to go off in the middle of the night. But before she could talk herself out of it, she turned and walked through the compound door and continued on her journey to the sea.

  Three

  There was a loud honk from behind. Shauzia jumped out of the way, and a huge truck roared past her. The exhaust fumes made her cough.

  Jasper stuck close to her legs – so close that she was finding it difficult to walk. She could feel him trembling.

  “It’s all right, Jasper,” she said, patting him, but she was feeling pretty shaky herself.

  It had been dark when they walked away from the refugee camp, and they had kept walking right through dawn. Now the day was in full swing, and the closer they came to the nearest city, Peshawar, the crazier the traffic became.

  The highway was clogged with every type of vehicle. There were buses so full that men clung to the outsides, and little three-wheeled cars that looked like toys zooming in and out of traffic. They were all brightly painted, with many colors and designs. There were white vans and taxicabs and regular cars. It seemed to Shauzia that they were all honking their horns at the same time.

  They shared the road with motorcycles that had whole families piled on them, and bicycles loaded down with parcels. There were carts pulled by horses, donkeys, buffalo and even a camel. Shauzia watched an old man use all his strength to pedal a bicycle loaded down with lumber. The bike teetered and weaved and was almost run into by a passing bus.

  It was too much. Shauzia took Jasper to a shady spot under a tree. They sat and watched the traffic speed by while they caught their breath.

  “I wonder if we made a mistake coming here.” Shauzia said. “I didn’t think it would be so noisy. I didn’t think it would be so… confusing.” She scratched Jasper behind one of his ears, more for her comfort than for his.

  “Maybe we should even have stayed with the sheep,” she said. “At least the air was easier to breathe, and not so hot. Besides, the sea is such a long way away. What if we never make it? We’ll be stuck here.”

  Jasper nudged her hand so she would keep scratching.

  “Do you think we’ll make it?” she asked him. He wagged his tail and licked her face.

  Shauzia took the photo of the lavender field out of her pocket and looked at it for what was probably the millionth time.

  “This is where I’m going,” she said, more to herself than to Jasper. “And to get there, first I have to be here.”

  She put the picture back in her pocket, stood up and took a deep breath full of gasoline fumes.

  “Let’s go,” she said to Jasper. Then she grinned. “I’ll pretend to be a mighty warrior, like that Ghengis Khan who conquered Afghanistan. I’ll invade this puny city. Nothing stands in my way!” She swaggered back to the highway in what she imagined was a Ghengis Khan strut, got honked at again and resumed her journey along the side of the road. She went back to being just Shauzia, but at least she was moving forward.

  “I remember trucks and cars from Kabul,” she told Jasper, keeping her hand on his head to reassure him. He was still trembling. “All you’ve known is sheep. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to this.”

  Jasper wasn’t so sure. He darted away at the sound of every horn or loud rumble. Shauzia was a
fraid he would get confused and run into the traffic instead of away from it. When she spied a length of blue binding twine on the ground, she picked it up, tied part of it around Jasper’s neck and used the rest as a leash.

  “It’s for your own good,” she said. “Just until you’re not scared anymore.”

  Jasper scratched twice at the rope. Then he licked Shauzia’s cheek, and they started to walk again.

  “There are so many Afghans here, it looks like Kabul,” she said. Even the market looked like Kabul’s market, with fruit piled high on outdoor platforms and skinned goats hanging on hooks. Butchers fanned newspapers over them to keep the flies away.

  Two things were different, though. One was that although some women wore the burqa, others had their faces showing, and no one beat them for it.

  The other thing that was different was that all the buildings were intact. No bombs had fallen here. Shauzia had lived among bomb rubble all her life. It felt strange not to see any.

  “There must be lots of ways to make money here.” Shauzia doubted Jasper could hear her in the noise of the crowd, but she spoke to him anyway, just to have someone to talk to.

  All around her, boys her age and younger were working. She saw them in auto repair shops, pounding metal at a blacksmith’s, selling oranges off a cart and carrying trays of tea. She saw boys hanging off the sides of buses. They hopped off and urged in customers, taking their money, then climbed back onto the railing as the bus pulled away from the curb. She passed a construction site and saw small boys covered in dirt, leading donkeys loaded down with bricks.

  Languages swirled around her. She recognized the Afghan languages – Pashtu, Dari and Uzbek – and she heard others, too, that she thought must be the Pakistani languages.

  The crowd got thicker, and Shauzia kept a good grip on Jasper’s leash.

  A foul-smelling, slow-moving river divided the two sides of the market. Shauzia saw shops that sold jewelry and canned goods. She saw a shop that sold nothing but burqas, lined up on the walls, hanging like blue ghosts. Everywhere there were people selling goods off trays and karachis.

  Shauzia walked around the market looking at all the shops and trying to imagine herself working in them. When she was too tired to walk anymore, she found a place on the ground in a bit of shade from a building and leaned back against the wall. Jasper sat beside her. She took out her plastic bottle, drank some water and poured some in her hand for Jasper. They shared a piece of the bread she’d brought with them from the camp. Then they each drank more water, to wash down the bread.

  It was good to eat and drink. Shauzia felt completely worn out. She closed her eyes to rest.

  “This is my spot.”

  Shauzia opened her eyes. Standing in front of her was a woman covered by a burqa.

  “This is my spot,” the woman said again. “I come here every day.”

  “I’m just sitting,” Shauzia said.

  “Sit somewhere else.”

  Too tired to argue, Shauzia and Jasper got to their feet.

  The woman took their place. “Help me,” she begged to a passerby, who ignored her. “Just one or two roupees?” she called to another.

  “Do you make much money that way?” Shauzia asked.

  “Maybe ten roupees a day.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “It’s enough to keep my children hungry.”

  “Maybe if you lifted your burqa so people could see who you are... ” Shauzia suggested.

  “What do you know?” the woman replied angrily. “I keep my face covered when I beg so that no one can see my shame. I was an office manager in Afghanistan. I’ve graduated from university. And now look at me! No, don’t look at me! Go away!”

  Shauzia stood there for a moment feeling awkward that she’d hurt the woman’s feelings, and angry that the woman had made her get up just when she had gotten comfortable. Finally, since she didn’t know what to do with either her awkwardness or her anger, she just walked away, and Jasper went with her.

  The woman had scared her. If someone who had been to university was reduced to begging, what hope did Shauzia have?

  She knelt down beside Jasper and pretended to fuss with his leash. She kept her head low so no one could see her crying.

  “I don’t like it here,” she whispered. Jasper licked at her tears. Shauzia hugged him close. Then she stood up and kept walking.

  There were a lot of beggars in the market. Some were women, covered and uncovered. Some were sick people with twisted limbs. Others were children her age. People walked past the beggars’ outstretched hands as if they were invisible.

  “The people they’re begging from look as poor as they are,” Shauzia said. She turned away. It was all too awful to watch.

  They walked through the market again.

  I’ve got to ask someone for a job, she thought, but each time she got close to approaching a shopkeeper, she felt too shy to do it.

  “You can’t possibly manage on your own,” Mrs. Weera had said. Shauzia remembered how everyone had laughed.

  She took a deep breath and headed to the nearest shop, a bookstall.

  “Give me a job!” she demanded of the man behind the stack of books.

  She was quickly ordered out of that shop, and away from the four other shops she went to.

  The day slipped away. The market stayed open after dark, but the bare lightbulbs hanging here and there from poles and wires created weird, frightening shadows in the streets. Shauzia and Jasper squeezed themselves into an alcove between shops. She could tell from the smell that they were sharing the space with decomposing fruit and other garbage, but at least they were out of the way of people, cars and shadows.

  She leaned against the wall, missed Mrs. Weera’s snoring, and fell asleep sitting up.

  Shauzia woke to a gray predawn morning, her head pillowed on a pile of rotting cabbage. Jasper was already awake, chewing on something he had found in the garbage.

  She got up and they went to a water tap she’d seen in the market. She threw water on her face, and she and Jasper had long drinks. The water filled up her belly – for awhile.

  She spent the day looking for work. Many of the shopkeepers told her she was too dirty to work in their shops. Others already had all the help they needed.

  The sun was starting to go down when she passed a butcher shop, almost empty of meat, full of dirt and dried blood.

  “Your shop needs cleaning,” she said to the butcher, who was sitting on a stool just inside the doorway and drinking a cup of tea. “I could clean it.”

  The butcher swallowed a mouthful of tea, looked her up and down and said, “This is a man’s job. You’re a small boy. Go away.”

  Shauzia didn’t budge. “I can clean your shop,” she said again. She put her hands on her hips and stared right at him. She was hungry and tired and not in the mood for nonsense.

  The man drank some more tea and swirled it around in his mouth before swallowing it.

  “That’s a fine dog,” he said finally, nodding at Jasper. “He looks hungry.”

  Of course he’s hungry, Shauzia thought. So am I.

  “Wait.” The butcher disappeared into the shop and came out again with chunks of meat on a piece of newspaper.

  “That’s good meat,” the butcher said, rubbing Jasper’s ears while he gulped down the meat. “Good meat for a good dog.” He stood up. “Be here early in the morning. I’ll give you half a day’s work cleaning the shop. You do a good job, and I’ll pay you. You do a bad job, and I’ll toss you out.” He disappeared into the shop, but appeared again a moment later. “You can bring your dog,” he said, before disappearing for good.

  “Thank you,” Shauzia called after him. She knelt down and threw her arms around Jasper.

  “I have a job!” She felt like singing.

  She had to have something to eat. As soon as Jasper was finished with the meat, they went to the bread bakery, which was starting to close up.

  “If you let me have a piece of br
ead tonight, I’ll pay you for it tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll have a job in the morning.”

  The baker picked up a loaf of nan from a small stack and tossed it at Shauzia. She wasn’t expecting it, and it landed in the dirt. She quickly picked it up.

  “How much do I pay you tomorrow?”

  “Go away, beggar. I’ve given you food, so go away.”

  Shauzia’s face burned with shame. She wasn’t a beggar.

  She opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind. She might need free bread again.

  She shared the bread with Jasper. Then they both had a drink of water at the tap. The food felt good in her stomach.

  The marketplace was quiet. All the stalls were shut down. Shauzia saw people sleeping in the shadows and doorways.

  She and Jasper went back to the butcher shop. It, too, was closed. They settled down in the doorway.

  “This way, I’ll be sure to be on time for work in the morning,” she said. The doorway smelled funny, but she was so tired that she fell right asleep.

  Four

  Shauzia woke to the sound of the butcher unlocking the iron grill over his shop.

  “Your dog will get too hot out here,” he said. “Bring him through to the back. There’s a pan on the shelf. Give him some water.”

  Shauzia and Jasper followed the butcher through the shop to a small cement yard in the back. There was just enough room under an awning for Jasper to stretch out in the shade.

  Shauzia found the pan, filled it with water and took it out to Jasper.

  “Wait here for me,” she said. “If I do a good job, maybe he’ll give me more meat for you, or at least some bones for you to chew.”

  “Clean the shop,” the butcher said. He showed her where the bucket, brushes and cleaning solution were kept. “I’m going to go out to have my breakfast now. I’ll be back soon to check on you.”

  Shauzia got to work. She worked quickly, washing down the empty shelves and trays where the meat would go when it was delivered. She wasn’t bothered by the dried blood. One of her jobs as a shepherd was to pick up sheep dung and flatten it into cakes. They used the cakes for fuel when they couldn’t find wood.