Shauzia Read online

  Shauzia put her glass of milk back on the table. She made her face say nothing.

  ‘It’s not that we haven’t enjoyed having you here,’ Barbara said, ‘but we need to just be together as a family.’

  ‘I went to see a friend of mine this morning who works for one of the aid agencies,’ Tom said. ‘He told me about a special orphans and widows’ section of one of the refugee camps. The woman who runs it is used to taking in new children unexpectedly.’

  ‘You’ll be able to go to school there,’ Barbara said cheerfully. ‘Tom’s friend says they even have a nurse’s training program.’

  ‘There are so many Afghan children like you,’ Tom said. ‘We can’t possibly take care of everyone.’

  Shauzia straightened her back and raised her chin. She didn’t need them to take care of her.

  ‘The children love your dog,’ Barbara said. ‘We’d be happy to give him a home here with us. After all, what sort of life will he have in the camp?’

  Jasper moved closer to Shauzia and put his paws on her lap.

  ‘Well,’ said Barbara, stiffly. ‘Would you like girl clothes or boy clothes?’

  ‘Boy clothes, please,’ Shauzia replied. She then proceeded to eat everything in sight. Food was food. And she was still a long way from the sea.

  She kept her arm around Jasper in the van all the way to the refugee camp. She could still smell the laundry soap on her clothes. In her lap was a bag with a new boy’s shalwar kameez, some lollies, a toy car with only two wheels that Jake had given her and a small bar of the good-smelling soap.

  Barbara and the boys stayed behind at their house while Tom drove Shauzia back along the road that had first brought her to the city. Tom kept his eyes on the traffic and did not speak to her.

  I could push him out of the driver’s seat, she thought, picturing Tom bouncing and rolling along the highway. She could take his place behind the wheel and drive the van to the sea. How hard could it be to drive? There were a lot of bad drivers in Peshawar. She’d just be one more.

  She didn’t do it, though. She didn’t push Tom out onto the highway, and she was still in the van when it passed through the main gates of the refugee camp and into its maze of mud-walled streets.

  ‘You’ll be fine here,’ Tom said after stopping the van in front of the entrance to the Widows’ Compound. ‘There are lots of other children here, and I’m told that the woman in charge will be happy to have you.’

  Shauzia and Jasper got out of the van.

  ‘Would you like me to go in with you?’ Tom asked.

  Shauzia shook her head. It was right to thank Tom, so she said thank you, and she meant it.

  But as she watched his van drive away, she couldn’t help thinking that all he’d done was take her out of one prison and put her into another.

  ‘Shauzia’s back!’ Children streamed out of the compound and threw their arms around her and Jasper. Jasper kissed everyone hello, and wagged his tail so fast it was almost a blur.

  Shauzia was surrounded by the stinky camp smell again. She could no longer smell the laundry soap on her clothes, and the flowery scent had already left her skin.

  She opened the bag and gave away the lollies, the car and the shalwar kameez. She kept the little bar of soap.

  She’d use it to give Jasper a bath.

  When they got to the sea.

  TEN

  Rows and rows of purple flowers, fields and fields of them. Sun shining down out of a brilliant blue sky. A place where nothing bad ever happened.

  Deep creases lined the picture. It had been folded up in Shauzia’s pocket for a long time. The edges were frayed.

  ‘I don’t understand, Jasper,’ Shauzia said. They were sitting by a wall in the shade. ‘I used to be able to look at this picture and imagine myself there, sitting among the flowers. It was so clear in my head. It looked like a magical place. Now it just looks like a picture torn out of a magazine.’ She showed it to Jasper. He didn’t even raise his head. He’d seen it way too often.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she conceded. ‘Maybe I should forget it. It will take ages to earn the money, and I just don’t know if I can face trying to do it again. The thought of starting over is awful. Besides, what’s so great about a field of purple flowers? It’s probably full of thorns. And snakes.’

  She started to tear up the paper. Jasper raised his head and growled low in his throat. So she folded the picture back up instead and put it back in her pocket.

  She stared at the mud wall across the alley.

  ‘I can’t stay here, though. I can’t look at these walls for the rest of my life.’

  She lay down on the ground so that her head was close to Jasper’s. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ she said quietly. ‘I still want to get to France. I still want to get to the sea. But I just don’t want to be alone anymore. What do I do about that?’

  Jasper kissed her nose. It was no answer, but she felt better.

  No one said anything to Shauzia about her time away. Mrs Weera must have asked them not to. The little kids hugged her and said they’d missed her, the same way they hugged and said they’d missed Jasper, but no one asked her what had happened and why she was back.

  At first she wished someone would, especially one of the boys her age. She felt like fighting someone.

  As the days went by, though, the anger drained out of her. She spent most of her time following patches of shade around the compound.

  Mrs Weera was being as annoying as always, but in an entirely new way.

  She did not give her any more little jobs.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to leave again soon to get to the sea, dear,’ she said when Shauzia picked up some empty water jugs to get filled at the United Nations water pump outside the compound. ‘Save your strength for that.’

  Mrs Weera took the jugs from Shauzia’s hands and called a boy over to fetch the water.

  That was two weeks ago. Lazing around while others did all the work was fun for awhile, but now Shauzia was so bored she could hardly stand it.

  ‘Are you still here?’ Mrs Weera asked, striding by Shauzia on her way to another part of the compound. ‘I thought you’d be long gone by now. An active girl like you must be getting awfully bored just sitting around.’ She kept walking with those quick, giant steps of hers.

  Shauzia leapt to her feet. She wanted to yell something, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, so she kicked the wall of the hut instead. Hurting her foot made her angrier, and what made it even worse was that there were two boys nearby who watched the whole thing.

  They were playing soccer, using a small rock as a ball, and they paused in their game long enough to laugh at her.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Shauzia yelled at them. ‘And why are you wasting time with games when there is work to be done around here? See those empty water jugs over there? Go and get them filled. Do what I tell you!’

  With each word Shauzia came closer and closer to the boys, until she was yelling right in their faces. She paused to take a breath and they ran off, grabbing the empty jugs on their way to the UN pump.

  ‘That was fun!’ Shauzia said to Jasper. She looked around the camp with new eyes. ‘Mrs Weera thinks she’s so good at running things, but there’s a lot around here that’s not being done properly. Anything she can do, I can do ten times better. Come on.’

  She started out, then realised Jasper hadn’t moved. He was sitting on his haunches and watching her.

  She bent down and scratched his ears. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We are going to the sea. We are going to France, and we’ll send Mrs Weera a letter telling her how happy we are to be away from her. But we’ll go when I say, not when Mrs Weera says we should go. And I just don’t feel like going right now.’

  Shauzia threw herself into activity. Instead of taking orders from Mrs Weera, she thought up projects on her own.

  She organised scrounging parties with the older children. They would go to other parts of the camp and pick
up stray boards or bits of pipe and anything else they could find lying around that might be useful.

  She started an arithmetic class for the little kids, using stones to teach them how to form their numbers.

  ‘One day you will be working,’ she told them. ‘If you don’t know how to count, you won’t know if your boss is cheating you.’

  She fetched the compound’s ration of flour and cooking oil from the warehouse and took her turn carrying containers of water from the UN pump. She stayed out of Mrs Weera’s way, and Mrs Weera left her alone.

  She even made a friend. Farzana was a few years younger than Shauzia, and she was new in the compound. She had been living in another part of the camp with her aunt. Mrs Weera brought her to the Widows’ Compound when her aunt died and there was no one else to take care of her.

  ‘She wasn’t really my aunt,’ Farzana told Shauzia. ‘I had a real aunt, but she died. I get passed from person to person. I’m glad to be here, because there are so many people. I won’t have to move again when somebody dies.’

  Farzana and Shauzia often went together when Shauzia had errands to do outside the compound. She liked having a friend again. It was almost like having Parvana back.

  Everything in the camp was on the verge of falling apart, including many people. Every day they saw men and women sitting against the walls that lined the streets, staring into space. Others talked to themselves. Many looked so sad, Shauzia wondered if they would ever be able to smile again.

  I have to get out of here, she thought. I don’t want to end up like them.

  The clay streets and walls held onto the summer heat.

  ‘I feel like a loaf of nan baking in the oven,’ Farzana said one particularly hot afternoon.

  The air wasn’t moving. They sat in the coolest spot they could find, as far away from the others as possible, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. If they wanted privacy, they had to put up with the stink of the open sewers. If they wanted less stink, they had to put up with more people.

  The babies fussed in the heat, and many of the children had sore bellies. The compound was always filled with the sound of crying and whining.

  ‘The sea will be cool,’ Shauzia said without thinking.

  ‘What’s the sea?’ Farzana asked.

  ‘The Arabian Sea, by the city of Karachi,’ Shauzia said. ‘It flows into the Indian Ocean.’

  ‘What’s an ocean?’ Farzana asked.

  Shauzia was stunned. ‘An ocean is, well, it’s water, a lot of water, in one place.’

  Farzana was quiet for a moment. ‘There is an ocean in this camp. I’ll take you there this evening, after the day cools down. It’s in the part of the camp where I used to live with my aunt.’

  They fell asleep in the shade. If Mrs Weera was yelling out orders anywhere in the camp, they blissfully didn’t hear her.

  ‘Here’s our ocean,’ Farzana said later that day. They were standing by a square cement pond, maybe thirty paces long on each side. It was full of water. It was also full of garbage, green scum and sewage. Clouds of mosquitoes and other bugs hovered over it.

  Shauzia watched a woman dip a bucket into the slimy mess and haul some water away.

  ‘That’s not an ocean,’ Shauzia said. ‘An ocean is water as far as a person can see. It’s deep and blue and smells good, and I’m going to go there.’

  ‘I’d like to see something like that,’ Farzana said. ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘I can’t take you with me to the ocean. It’s a very long way, and I’m having enough trouble getting myself there. Besides, I’m not stopping once I get to the sea. I’m going on, and I don’t want anyone slowing me down. How could I take you with me?’

  Farzana turned her back to Shauzia. ‘I don’t need anyone to take me anywhere. I can get to the sea by myself.’

  Shauzia watched her walk away. The younger girl’s head was held high, but Shauzia knew she’d hurt her feelings.

  ‘Maybe I should say yes,’ she said to Jasper. ‘It would be a lie, but it would make her happy for a little while.’ Sometimes it was hard to know the right thing to do.

  Shauzia hurried after her friend.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you with me. We’ll go to the sea together.’

  ELEVEN

  Shauzia fanned away the flies that kept collecting on the sweat on her face. All around her, others were doing the same.

  ‘Every time we come here, we wait,’ a man beside her said. ‘Do you think we have nothing else to do? I should be looking for a job.’

  ‘Are there jobs around here?’ Shauzia asked.

  ‘There is work in Peshawar,’ the man replied.

  Shauzia brushed the flies away again and went back to her thoughts. She wasn’t ready to return to Peshawar.

  She was sitting with hundreds of others in the camp’s central warehouse. They were waiting for the flour to be distributed.

  ‘Why don’t I just go and get it at the end of the day?’ she had asked Mrs Weera.

  ‘Because by then our allotment could have disappeared. You need to be there to grab our ration when it comes in.’ The flour was delivered on a big truck by an aid agency.

  At the end of the afternoon, one of the warehouse guards announced to the crowd, ‘No flour today. Go back to your homes.’

  ‘What do you mean, no flour?’ a man called out. ‘I can see it through the window. I have children to feed.’

  ‘That flour is for other people,’ the guard said. ‘There is not enough to give out to you today. Go back to your homes.’

  There was nothing else to do. Shauzia and the others went back to their homes.

  ‘We can make do without it for a few days,’ Mrs Weera said, when Shauzia told her what happened.

  ‘How?’ Shauzia demanded. A picture of the full shelves and refrigerator in Tom and Barbara’s house came into her head. She pushed it aside. ‘We should complain to somebody.’

  ‘We will manage,’ Mrs Weera said, putting an end to the argument. They managed by eating less.

  Shauzia went back to the warehouse on the next scheduled day for flour distribution, at the end of the week. The same thing happened again, and Shauzia returned to the Widows’ Compound empty handed.

  When it happened again the following week, she was fed up. And hungry.

  ‘I should go back to the city,’ Shauzia grumbled to Mrs Weera. ‘I could find a job there and buy something to eat.’

  ‘But how would you get the food back here?’ Mrs Weera asked. ‘You’re not thinking, Shauzia.’

  ‘Why would I bring the food back here? I’m not responsible for all these people!’

  ‘Yes, you are. And so am I. We have two good legs, two good arms, two good eyes, and minds that work properly. We have a responsibility to those who don’t have what we have.’

  ‘Then let’s do something,’ Shauzia yelled. ‘Everyone in the compound is hungry, and we just sit here on our two good legs and do nothing.’

  ‘I’ve already met with the camp management,’ Mrs Weera replied. ‘There’s nothing we can do. The aid agency that sends us flour is dependent on donations. If they don’t have the money, how can they buy flour?’

  ‘But there’s flour in the warehouse, just sitting there. I saw it through the window.’

  ‘That flour must be for some other group of people.’

  ‘So we just starve?’

  ‘I’ve put out a call to other women’s organisations, and I’m sure they will help us. Until then, we must be patient.’

  Shauzia stomped away in frustration.

  ‘We hate being patient, don’t we, Jasper?’ Jasper wagged his tail in agreement.

  Shauzia remembered the raids on the hotel garbage cans. She had an idea.

  ‘The guards only watch the front door,’ she told Farzana. ‘They don’t watch the back window. They’re too lazy.’

  They came up with a plan. They needed the help of a dozen of the older children in the compound. They all said yes. Everyone wa
s hungry.

  They left the compound early the next morning, just as the sky was getting light. Jasper went with them. None of the adults saw them leave.

  Farzana and one of the small boys went to the front of the storehouse. Their job was to keep the guards occupied by talking to them and asking endless questions. The rest of the children went to the back of the storehouse. Shauzia pried open the window with a knife she had borrowed from the compound’s kitchen.

  They soon had bags of flour making their way out the window and onto the little wagon they had brought with them.

  Shauzia never knew how word of what they were doing got out. She didn’t recall seeing anyone on their way to the warehouse, but there were a lot of people in the camp with nothing to do but watch other people.

  The children’s wagon was only half filled with sacks of flour when the first adults started to show up. The larger men pushed the children out of the way and tried to snatch the flour off their wagon. Children had to drape themselves over the sacks of flour to protect them.

  The noise the adults made brought the guards, and the noise the guards made brought more people out to the warehouse.

  In what seemed to be only moments, a large crowd had gathered. Everyone pushed to the window and tried to break down the front doors to get at the flour. A crowd always draws a bigger crowd, and there was soon a full-fledged riot.

  A huge mob of hungry, desperate people swarmed around the storehouse. Shauzia was in a panic about Farzana and the small boy with her, but she couldn’t get to them. The crowd of grown-ups was too thick, too crazy with hunger and anger.

  There was too much yelling, too much pushing. People beat against the storehouse with sticks, and when they couldn’t reach the warehouse, they beat on each other.

  Shauzia still had a bag of flour clutched tightly in her arms. She used it to protect her as she pushed toward the crowd.

  Someone started pulling on it. Shauzia looked up. A man twice her size was trying to grab her flour.

  ‘I have hungry children to feed!’ he yelled.