Mud City Read online

  That had been a nasty job. Dried blood was nothing.

  If the man liked her work, he might have other jobs for her.

  The disinfectant he told her to use smelled strong but clean.

  Shauzia had an idea.

  She took the bucket into the little walled yard, stripped off her clothes, washed herself all over with the clean-smelling water, then quickly washed her clothes as well.

  “I know I look funny,” she told Jasper as she put on her shirt that was wrung out but still wet. “It will dry, and at least I’m clean enough now for people to hire me.”

  She got back to work.

  “Spilled a bit of water on yourself, I see,” the butcher said when he returned from his breakfast. He nodded at the work she had done and poured her a cup of tea from the thermos he had filled at the tea shop. “Take some bread,” he said, pointing to a small stack of nan wrapped in newspaper.

  Shauzia tore a loaf in half and took half out to Jasper, who gulped it down, then sniffed the ground for more.

  “Maybe later,” she said, and he thumped his tail.

  By the time she had finished the job, the heat of the morning had almost dried her clothes.

  “Do you have any more work for me today?” she asked.

  “Not today. I am closed today, so there will be no deliveries or customers. You are a hard worker. Maybe I will have jobs for you from time to time. I just said maybe,” he added, when Shauzia’s face lit up. “Fetch your dog, and I will pay you.”

  Shauzia got Jasper.

  The butcher peeled a ten-roupee note from a bundle he pulled out of his pocket. He hesitated for a moment, then added another ten roupees.

  “Take the rest of the bread,” he said. She did.

  “Look,” she showed Jasper. “Three loaves. We’ll eat like kings today and still have some for tomorrow. Food, money and clean clothes, and we only just got to the city! This will be easy.”

  But she had no more luck that day, or the next. The day after that, her sandals fell apart. She tied them together with a bit of twine that she found on the ground, but that only held for a half a day. It wasn’t just the straps that were broken. She’d worn one sole clean through to the pavement.

  “I can’t go on like this,” she said, looking at the bloody mess the bottom of her foot had become.

  They sat at the side of the road for a good long while, wondering what to do.

  In the middle of the afternoon, a pedlar with a karachi full of rubber sandals pushed his cart slowly past her.

  “That’s what I need!” Shauzia called for him to stop and walked gingerly over to him, her bare feet tender against the hot pavement.

  “How much for a pair of sandals?” she asked.

  The pedlar named a price. It was more than Shauzia had in her pocket.

  “I don’t have enough.” She felt like crying. Her bare feet burned. She had to hop from one foot to the other.

  The pedlar watched her for a moment, then rummaged in the bottom of his cart. Finally he handed her several sandals that did not match.

  “Try these,” he said. Shauzia tried them on until she found a sandal to fit each foot. One was brown, and one was green.

  “Why do you have all these sandals that don’t match?” she asked.

  “People with one leg need sandals, too,” he replied.

  “How much for these?”

  “How much do you have?”

  Shauzia showed him the money in her pocket.

  “That will do,” he told her. He took it all.

  Now she had sandals, but she had no money.

  “It’s all Mrs. Weera’s fault,” she said to Jasper, as they watched the sandal man wheel his cart away. “If she had got me new sandals like she was supposed to… ” Shauzia didn’t complete the thought. Blaming Mrs. Weera suddenly seemed like a waste of time. There was never any money in the compound for things like sandals.

  “What do I do with these?” she asked Jasper, holding up her old torn sandals. She decided to leave them on the sidewalk. She put them down, but before she had taken a few steps, a young man swooped down and picked them up.

  Maybe she should have kept them after all.

  Shauzia slept in a different spot each night for the first few nights she was in Peshawar. The city was never quiet at night. There were always the sounds of gunshots, arguments and trucks. There were sounds that could have been crying and could have been laughing. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

  When people passed by they ignored her, or stared down at her. Sometimes they dropped trash on her. She told herself it was because they didn’t see her. The more it happened, though, the harder that was to believe.

  One day, after she and Jasper had been in Peshawar for more than a week, Shauzia found a good sleeping spot between two buildings, off a quiet street. It was a sort of a shelf, big enough for her and Jasper to sleep on.

  “This will make a good home for us,” she told Jasper.

  In a nearby garbage dump she found an old cardboard box. She tore it up and used the pieces to line the cement shelf.

  She sat on the cardboard to test how it felt.

  “We’ll be the most comfortable sleepers in the city,” she said to Jasper, who joined her on the bed and wagged his tail.

  Shauzia stepped up her job search. She did many different jobs, some lasting a few days, some just a few hours. In the cloth market, with rainbows of fabrics hanging over the walkway like a multicolored forest, she helped unload bolts of cloth and sorted buttons into jars.

  She did a bit more work for the butcher, cleaning the shop again, and one day she set up sheep’s heads on the table outside the store. He gave her a good-sized bone for Jasper at the end of that day. He also recommended her to his friend with a grocery store, and she got a day’s work there, cleaning the place.

  Everywhere she went, she saw groups of small children dragging blue plastic sacks, poking through garbage.

  “I’ll do that if I have to,” she told Jasper, “but I don’t see how I could make much money that way.”

  She got a few days’ work as a tea boy while the tea shop’s regular delivery boy was sick. This was work she had done in Kabul, delivering trays of tea in metal mugs to merchants who couldn’t leave their shops for a break. She was good at it, too, and could rush through the narrow streets of the market without spilling a drop. Everywhere she took tea, she asked if there was work for her. She was rewarded with a job sweeping out a furniture warehouse.

  One day, instead of looking for work, she went down to the train station.

  “Do any of these trains go to the sea?” she asked the man behind the ticket counter.

  “You want to go to Karachi,” the man said.

  “Karachi,” Shauzia repeated. “Like the cart. Is it expensive?”

  “Return?”

  “One way.”

  The ticket seller told her the price. It was much, much more than she had saved in her money pouch. She thanked him and headed out. She was almost back on the street when some people going on a journey gave her a few roupees to help them carry their bundles.

  After that, on the days when she didn’t have other jobs, she went to the train station and carried people’s bags for tips. She couldn’t go there often. There were men whose regular job was to be porters, and they chased her away if they saw her.

  It was just as well. She found it hard being at the station, watching other people get on the trains, heading off on a trip.

  When would it be her turn?

  “I work cheaper than the other porters,” she told Jasper one evening. “Some day, someone is going to work cheaper than me, and I won’t be able to get work there anymore. The problem is, there are so many of us. There are a lot of Afghans here, and we all need money.”

  Each night, she added more roupees to the pouch hung around her neck. Each night, she was a little bit closer to the sea.

  One day, she saw her reflection in a store window. Her hair was getting lo
ng. She was starting to look like a girl again.

  She went to one of the barbers who set up shop along the edge of the sidewalk. She sat down on the bit of cardboard he’d placed on the cement to make customers more comfortable. Beside him, in a little box, were his scissors, brushes and razors, and a little mirror so people could check out his work when he was done with them.

  “I’d like my hair shaved off,” Shauzia told him, and they agreed on a price. She wouldn’t need to get it cut again for a long time.

  While he was working, the barber joked about giving Jasper a shave, too. The jokes were not very funny, but it made Shauzia feel better about losing her hair.

  She avoided her reflection after that, but her head was a lot cooler.

  When she got to France, she would grow her hair again, she promised herself.

  Each evening, she bought food to share with Jasper out of her day’s earnings. On hard days, when she didn’t earn much money, she bought only bread. On better days, she bought meat patties from a street vendor, after watching him cook the spiced ground meat in huge, round pans over fires.

  Sometimes a grocer she worked for gave her fruit along with her pay. That was a special treat. And Jasper’s nose often found him things to eat on the street.

  Each evening, as the sky was getting dark, she would sit with Jasper in their little space, and she would tell him about the sea until they were both ready to sleep. She was lonely, but she was usually too tired to spend much time thinking about it.

  One night, Shauzia was jolted out of her sleep by the sound of Jasper barking. She opened her eyes to see lights shining brightly down into her face.

  She tried to sit up, but Jasper was standing right on top of her, barking and snarling.

  She could feel something grabbing at her, and she tried to pull away. Men’s angry voices reached her ears through Jasper’s barking. Every time they tried to get hold of her, they were kept back by his snapping jaws and pointed teeth.

  “We’ll come back with a gun and kill your dog,” the men said. “You wait here for us.”

  They laughed and then went away. Jasper sniffed at Shauzia, licked her face, then lay down right across her belly.

  Shauzia clung to Jasper and struggled to breathe through her panic.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, gently nudging him to the ground.

  They headed off down the alley. Shauzia was shaking so badly that she could hardly walk, and she clung to Jasper’s fur for support.

  They kept walking for the rest of that night, and avoided all the people they saw.

  Five

  Shauzia and Jasper walked until the sky got light. Exhausted, they collapsed in the doorway of a gun shop on the modern main street of the Saddar Bazaar. They managed to get a bit of sleep until they were chased away by the owner when he came to open his shop for the day.

  Shauzia’s head was thick with unslept sleep. She kept bumping into people and stumbling over the uneven places on the pavement. Once she walked right into a newspaper stand, almost tipping over the table full of newspapers

  “Watch what you’re doing!” the angry newspaper seller spat out at her. He kicked Jasper. Jasper yelped at him.

  Shauzia pulled her dog away, and they bumped into an Afghan antiques dealer, setting out his goods outside his shop. He yelled at them, too.

  “I don’t like it here,” Shauzia told Jasper, kneeling to pet him and quiet him down. She pushed her face deep into his soft fur and smelled his good dog smell. The world was full of nasty-tempered adults, and what she really wanted was to never have to see any of them again.

  They kept walking. Shauzia just wanted to sit some place and be quiet, but every time they sat down they were told to go away.

  She left the main street, wandering through the narrow, dark streets of the older market. Finally she came back into the sunshine where the market ended by the railway tracks.

  There were a lot of people here, too, but they were spread out, not so cramped together as they were in the shops. Shauzia felt she could breathe a bit. She and Jasper turned and walked along the tracks.

  A small herd of goats and fat-tailed sheep poked their snouts among patches of weeds. Afghan families had set up crude shelters in the dirt beside the tracks. A Pakistani used-clothes pedlar displayed torn Mickey Mouse sweaters and tweed skirts on big sheets of plastic for customers to see. The air smelled of exhaust fumes, excrement and smoke from little cook fires dotted here and there.

  A group of Afghan children scavenged in a rubbish heap, dragging large blue sacks behind them. Shauzia watched them for awhile from the tracks. Jasper wagged his tail and strained at his leash, so she let him go. He trotted up to the children, wagging his tail and pushing at them with his snout, wanting to be petted.

  Shauzia hung back while the children – four boys and a small girl – greeted Jasper. The little girl was scared at first. Jasper was as tall as she was. But he licked her face, and she giggled, and Shauzia could see she wasn’t scared anymore.

  “His name is Jasper,” she said, leaving the tracks and joining the children. “It’s an old Persian name.”

  “Can he do tricks?” one of the little boys asked.

  “Of course he can. He’s a very smart dog. Jasper, sit!” Shauzia took him through his tricks. The children left their bags to one side while they played with him, tossing a stick for him to chase and retrieve.

  Two of the boys seemed to be around Shauzia’s age. The other two were younger, maybe eight or nine years old. Shauzia thought the little girl looked to be around five. She and the smallest of the boys had nothing on their feet. Shauzia wondered how they managed.

  She wondered what they were searching for among the garbage, and picked up one of their sacks to take a look.

  “That’s mine! Are you trying to steal?” One of the older boys pushed her hard away from his bag. Shauzia fell back against the ground, grinding bits of gravel into her palms.

  Jasper was beside her in an instant, barking at the boy.

  “I wasn’t stealing,” Shauzia insisted. “I just wanted to see what kinds of things you were collecting.” She patted Jasper with long, slow strokes to calm him down.

  She got to her feet. Jasper stopped barking. The little girl came up to pet him, and he wagged his tail again.

  “You’ve never picked junk before?” asked the boy who had pushed her.

  “Do I look like a junk picker?” Shauzia retorted, brushing herself off. “I work.”

  “At what?”

  “At proper jobs.”

  “So why don’t you go and do your job, and quit trying to steal our stuff?”

  Shauzia kicked at the boy’s junk bag. “There’s nothing in there worth stealing.”

  “You call this nothing?” He grabbed the bag and pulled out items, waving them under Shauzia’s nose.

  “Three plastic bottles, a whole newspaper, and two empty tin cans. That’s better than you could find!”

  “We’ll see about that,” Shauzia replied.

  “This is our junk pile,” another boy said. “Why should we share it with you?”

  “My dog is a watch dog,” Shauzia said. “He’ll attack anyone who tries to bother us.”

  The boy who had pushed Shauzia had bruises on his face, as though he had been in other fights recently.

  “Some watch dog,” he said. “He doesn’t look so fierce.” He hung back, though.

  “If you’re not afraid of him, go ahead and pat him,” Shauzia said.

  “All right, I will.” The boy bent down and reached out a hand. Jasper growled, and the boy backed away.

  “It’s all right, Jasper,” Shauzia said, putting her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go ahead and pat him,” she said. “Now that he knows you’re my friend, he won’t hurt you.”

  The boy held out his hand. Jasper sniffed it, then pushed at the hand with his snout.

  “I was sleeping in the alley last night,” Shauzia told them. “Some men tried to get at me. Jaspe
r scared them away.”

  “Would your dog protect us, too?” the little girl asked.

  “Sure he would. He’d love to, wouldn’t you, Jasper?” Jasper was already wagging his tail so hard he couldn’t wag it any harder.

  “My name is Zahir,” the boy with the bruised face said. The other boys were Azam, Yousef and Gulam, and the little girl’s name was Looli.

  “I’m Shafiq,” Shauzia said, giving them her boy name.

  “A boy I know was taken by men like that,” Zahir said. “They kept him and they cut something out of his belly before they let him go.”

  “Was he still alive?” Shauzia asked.

  “He was alive for a little while,” Zahir replied.

  “Then he died,” Yousef added.

  “Go ahead,” Zahir said. “Look in my bag.”

  Shauzia looked at the collection of cardboard, newspaper, bottles and cans.

  “We sell it to a junk dealer,” Zahir said.

  “Not all of it,” Gulam said. “The things that burn, we take home to cook our meals.”

  “Do you have families?” Shauzia asked.

  “Gulam and Looli live with their uncle’s family,” Yousef said. “The rest of us are on our own.”

  “So am I,” Shauzia said. “How much money do you make?”

  “Maybe five roupees. Maybe ten. You can come with us if you like,” Zahir said.

  The children drifted back to work. Shauzia realized how lucky she’d been to find the jobs she had. She joined them as they sifted through the junk that other people had thrown away.

  She started off rooting through the garbage with her foot.

  “Not that way,” Looli said. She was munching on some dry cones an ice-cream shop had thrown away. “You have to use your hands.” She showed Shauzia how to dig right into the pile of garbage to get at whatever might be buried there.

  The trash smelled bad, but the smell didn’t bother Shauzia. After all, she had lived with sheep for months. The flies were familiar, too. She dug right into the trash, opening plastic bags and dumping the contents onto the ground. She put the paper and rags she found into the little girl’s bag.