Chapter 2: The Loneliest Winter

September, 2001. Pakistan.

 

 

On my way to school early in the morning, beads of sweat on my forehead reminded me the scorching Peshawar summer had yet to end. Nonetheless, I was happy to be outside now, knowing the day would only get hotter with the sunrise.  

 

By the time I reached the classroom, I was in full sprint. “‘Salamulaikum, Tariq!”

 

“Salam!” Tariq greeted, as I swerved into the seat next to him. Barely catching my breath, I exchanged a smattering of “Salams” and “Walekum salams” with the boys who sat around us. I thought I was going to be late that day, but our teacher wasn’t even in the room yet.

 

When our teacher, Kamaran Sir, finally entered the room, Tariq rose to his feet, commanding the rest of the class as he did so, “Stand up!”  A chorus of shuffling feet and chairs being pushed back answered him as we all stood up to show our respect to Kamaran Sir. Our schools in Pakistan had student leader positions--usually first, second, and third positions. These students helped the teachers by giving instructions, collecting papers, and doing whatever other tasks they were told to keep the class organized. Tariq held first position in our class. I, as his official sidekick, held second.

 

Once everyone was on their feet, Kamaran Sir calmly asked us to sit back down, pausing just long enough to let us know that he acknowledged our greeting. He was a thin, darked haired man with a clean shaven, unsmiling face, probably in his late twenties. He towered high above us--in fact, he towered above most adults I knew--with a posture that reminded me of a tree struggling to stay upright against the wind. Kamaran Sir put his files down on his desk and wrote on the left-hand corner of the blackboard with white chalk, September 10th, 2001, before beginning his lecture.

 

After class ended, Tariq and I, as student leaders, stayed behind to collect everyone’s notebooks and give them to Kamaran Sir, so that he could check their homework. It was just the three of us in the classroom, and we could hear the rest of the students running and laughing outside during their break.

 

“Boys,” Kamaran Sir began quietly, “you are both mahajer, aren’t you?” Mahajer is the Pakhto word for refugee.  

 

“Yes, we are,” Tariq replied.

 

Kamaran Sir kept his eyes on the papers he was grading as he asked, “You boys watch the news?”

 

Tariq and I looked at each other uncertainly, not knowing what to say. I watched Tom and Jerry before class every morning. I thought the news was so boring. I wondered why he was asking.

 

When neither of us said a word, Kamaran Sir mysteriously added, “Well, I asked because of your leader.” He kept his eyes on his papers, still not looking at us, offering no further hints.

 

Tariq and I still had no clue what the teacher was on about.

 

At last acknowledging our befuddled faces, Kamaran Sir clarified, “Ahmad Shah Massoud was killed last night. Don’t you know who he is?”

 

Tariq’s face was still blank, unusually so. It was one of the few times I had seen him unprepared to answer Kamaran Sir’s questions.

 

“Of course we do,” I chimed in. I knew of him--Ahmad Shah Massoud was a hero of my homeland. I remembered my dad telling stories about him when I was younger. I didn’t know enough to say anything more about him, but for the sake of mine and Tariq’s dignity, I felt compelled to speak up.

 

I wasn’t sure if Kamaran Sir was disappointed in us, or if he felt he had said something he shouldn’t have. Without saying anything further, he packed his graded papers into his bag and left the room.

 

By the time I left school that day, I had just about forgotten our odd interaction with Kamaran Sir. I was almost skipping on my way home, I was so excited. Lala was home again, after two years. Lala was what my siblings and I called our father. Lala is actually the word for “elder brother” in Pakhto, but when my brother Khalid was young, he heard our uncles call him Lala and quickly followed suit. Our parents never corrected him, and the name stuck. I remember my siblings calling our dad Lala in my earliest memories, and I think that is the only name I ever called him by.

 

Lala lived in Panjshir, a province in northern Afghanistan, and one of the few areas of the country that was not controlled by the Taliban at the time. It was governed by Jamiat-e-Islami, one of Afghanistan’s oldest political parties. Whenever my dad came home--and these visits were rare, sparse treats, since he disappeared for more than a year at a time--he would be full of stories about Kabul, and the odd and fascinating people from faraway parts of world who colored the bustling capital. 

 

Lala didn’t come with us when we left Afghanistan in 1996. I was only four years old at the time, and all I remember is a confusing blur of activity--my mother made me give all my toys to the neighbor’s children, and Khalid helped me and my three sisters get into a van, along with my mother--and all of a sudden we were living in tents in Pakistan, with no Khalid, no Lala, not even any of my uncles. 

 

Our tent was in the UN-managed Akora Khattak refugee camp Peshawar, in western Pakistan. It was the worst place I’ve ever lived in--or perhaps, I just remember it that way because it was the first terrible place I had ever seen. We had gone from the idyllic hills of our cool, green village to a city of tents in this scorching wasteland, with nothing but sheets of UN-branded tarp to protect us from the sun, the wind, or the rains. I never understood why such a powerful organization wanted to write its name all over something so miserable. 

 

Just days after our arrival, Khalid suddenly appeared at our tent, along with Lala’s younger brother, Uncle Jamal, whose wife and children already lived in a tent near ours. Khalid teased me when we were older, saying that I got to travel comfortably in a van while he had to walk through forests to get to the same place. The men had all traveled on foot, under cover of night, in fear that the Taliban would execute them if they were caught. Khalid, at the age of thirteen, was man enough for the Taliban to kill. 

 

We still didn’t know what happened to Lala. I used to dream of him while the six of us tried to sleep on the floor of our tent. It was hard to stay asleep--sometimes I woke up because of the heat that collected mercilessly under our cloth roof, and sometimes because of the stones I could still feel through the sheets that separated us from the earth below--and whenever I woke, I missed Lala so terribly. As the months passed, however, he began to feel like something from a dream, like the house, the gardens, and the comforts we left behind. 

 

Then, almost a year later, Lala came back into our lives, and like magic, he started to turn everything around. He became a leader in the camp community, and got to know important people who were connected with the UN and other organizations. He made sure we got a blue card from the World Food Program, the WFP, so that we could get the food rations and pots and pans that WFP gave to all the refugees. 

 

The Pakistanis who worked for the WFP had refused to give us a blue card because they thought Uncle Jamal was trying to double count his family, to get twice his allotted rations. They were doing their “check-ins” to count how many people lived in each tent when Uncle Jamal was watching me in my mother’s tent. The Afghans all pronounced “check-in” as “chicken”, so I thought the man from the WFP had come to give us chickens. 

 

“You were just in the other tent,” the man accused Uncle Jamal, standing at the foot of our tent. “Who is this boy to you? Your son?”

 

“He is my nephew,” Uncle Jamal corrected, but to no avail.

 

“Look at him! He has your nose,” the WFP man sneered, as if our faces were proof enough that Uncle Jamal was my father. Then the man turned to me. “Boy, is this your father?” I shook my head, no, but the man countered, “Yes, he is, isn’t he?”

 

Not knowing what else to say, I just smiled. Somehow, he seemed to take a four-year-old boy’s shy smile as an admission of guilt. He didn’t give my mother’s tent a blue card. 

 

The weeks were long and hungry after that. Uncle Jamal shared some of his family’s meager rations with us. To buy food of our own, Khalid started to work at a recycling plant, from which he brought home colorful bits of plastic that my sisters and I could use as toys. My favorite was a tiny plastic tube that whistled if you blew in it--but it was a world away from the toys I had to give away in Afghanistan. 

 

Without a blue card, we didn’t even get upgraded to the bigger, waterproof tents that Uncle Jamal’s family got. Our tent was so flimsy that, once, during a thunderstorm, the wind completely blew it away, leaving us all soaking wet in the middle of the night. That night left me so terrified of storms that the very sound of thunder made my heart race as if would burst out of my chest. We started going to Uncle Jamal’s tent whenever it rained after that. I used to beg my mum to go to his tent at the mere sight of storm clouds. I don’t know why, but I felt so safe and protected when we were all huddled together with his family in that tiny space. 

 

Of course, Lala changed all of that. Not only did he make sure we got our rations, before he went back to Afghanistan, he even moved us out of those tents, and into a house he rented from a Pakistani Pakhtun on the outskirts of Peshawar. 

 

I broke into a run as I approached the small earthen house. It was a small, three room structure, with one bedroom that my sisters and I shared, a room for Khalid, and a TV room that doubled as a bedroom for my mother. Khalid always stayed in his room, but when Lala wasn’t home, my sisters and I sometimes abandoned our room and snuggled next to our mum on her mattress. There was actually a fourth room, a guest room, but I often forgot it was there because it we never used it. If you’re an Afghan, you always have a guest room, no matter how poor you are, and it’s always the nicest room of the house. 

 

Jutting out of the dirt roof that we replaced every year was a satellite dish, whose smooth, ultra modern surfaces stood in stark contrast with their sand-colored surroundings. We also had a small courtyard that was encircled by the same kind of dirt-brick wall that the rooms were made of, with wooden, black-painted double-doors at its entrance. The top of the wall was uneven, rising and falling with what I imagined must have been the exhaustion of the man who laid those bricks. 

 

I hurried across the courtyard and almost tripped over my feet as I rushed to take my shoes off at the threshold of the TV room. To my surprise, I found Lala and Khalid fully absorbed in discussing Ahmed Shah Massoud’s death. 

 

“The Americans will fulfill their cruel plans in Afghanistan now. It's they who killed him!” Lala asserted vindictively, his brows furrowed with a mix of grief and fury. I was taken aback by the magnitude of his emotions. He looked as if his own brother had been killed, for a man whom we only knew through legends and stories--or so I thought at the time. 

 

Bewildered by Lala’s reaction but not wanting to pass up any time I had with him, I quietly sat cross-legged on the floor, making sure Khalid was sitting between me and Lala so that it would be him and not me interacting with our father in his unexpectedly emotional state. I didn't dare to talk to Lala for the whole day.

 

“Why would America kill him?” Khalid asked earnestly. “His war--I mean, our war was with Russians wasn't it?”

 

Lala sighed. “It's a game, son. We fought for our country, but when we defeated the Russians, we won the war for other countries that wanted Russian Federation to end. The Americans, the Britons, the French, even Iran and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--they all used the Mujahideen for their own gain.”

 

I was slightly relieved when my mother, whom we called Addy in Pakhto, announced that lunch was ready, giving me an excuse to get up and do something other than listen to Lala and Khalid talk about who was at war with whom. Our house didn’t have a table, or chairs, or couches. No one did. In fact, I didn’t get used to expecting furniture in homes until I lived in Europe, many years later. Instead, we kept rugs on our floor and cushions against the walls to lean on. When we ate, we sat around a delicately embroidered mat, a destarkhwan, that we spread on the floor of the TV room. I spread the destarkhwan in the center of the TV room, while my sisters, Nazia and Fauzia, who were eleven and thirteen, set pots of stew on top of it. Rohya, who was fifteen, was helping Addy with the last of the naan bread in the kitchen. 

 

Usually, when Lala came home, Nazia and Fauzia abandoned their chores and surrounded him, giggling and laughing with delight, crafting and embroidering little gifts to impress him with. Or rather, Nazia took a break from doing both of their chores, since she was so innocent that Fauzia often tricked her into doing both of their share of housework. Nazia used to try to win Lala over by pressing his legs while he rested, and Fauzia would cackle at her, laughing at the way she put so much energy into heaving her little shoulders up and down that she forgot to actually press down with her tiny hands. 

 

Between the three of us, Fauzia was the naughtiest, and always took advantage of me and Nazia. Whenever we were playing pretend games, like house, or doctor-patient, Fauzia decided what roles Nazia and I could play. She often made me play the dog. When Lala was around, she never missed a chance to embarass me, saying loudly in front of everyone that I was acting even younger than I actually was to get his attention. 

 

This time, even Fauzia must have sensed that Lala was in no mood for jokes and laughter, and stayed in the kitchen with Addy and my other sisters.

 

We ate our meal without talking, seated around our destarkhwan. Lala’s morose silence left no room for conversation. When we finished eating, I followed Addy and my sisters as they carried the used dishes back into the kitchen.

 

Our kitchen wasn’t exactly a room. It was a small space in the courtyard outside, shaded by a short ledge but without any walls. There was a tandoor oven, a gas stove, and a tap, all clustered together in a corner at ground level. Addy sat on the raised mound of earth opposite to them, barely further than an arm’s length, while she cooked.  

 

“Addy,” I began, crouching down next to her. Drops of lukewarm water flew from the steel plate she was washing and landed on my face. It was so hot that the water was warm, despite the fact that we did not get heated water.

 

“Hmm?”

 

“I need to go to the market, for school things.”

 

“What school things?”

 

“My notebooks are full. And I’m out of pencils. And my shoes are tight, I need new ones.” I hadn’t dared to tell her in front of Lala and Khalid--the mood between them was so dark that asking them to take me to the market felt somehow obscene, like scratching glass.

 

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” she replied curtly.

 

“But I’m going to run out of paper to write my homework on. And have nothing to write with.”

 

Addy looked at me with a pretend-frown--the kind of rehearsed frown she gave me as a token punishment whenever I made demands of her. I could feel Fauzia smirking at me through the back of my head. 

 

“Laa hulla walla quwata!” Addy sighed. There is neither might nor power without Allah. “Tomorrow, Rahmat. Leave me alone now.”

 

“But you will forget by tomorrow, I know you will!” I persisted.

 

She sighed, looking at me sternly. I felt like she was X-raying me to see if I truly did need school supplies, or if I was looking for an excuse to go to the market with Lala. I must’ve passed her test, because she said, “Look, Lala is not going to be in the mood to take you shopping right now. But I will talk to him about it a little while later. He will take you soon.”

 

Addy was extremely strict--the kind of parent you don’t even dream of double crossing. She used to wake me up at five every morning, and send me off to the mosque so that I could pray and then come home to eat breakfast and get to school on time. After school, she would give me lunch and send me off to the mosque again, no questions asked. Then, it was, “Rahmat, go check if we have enough water,” or, “Rahmat, do your homework or Khalid will beat you!” 

 

Though my sisters and I got our sprinkling of spankings from Addy, we were spared the beatings that most kids in Peshawar got. Addy was too clever to waste her own energy, and instead she just scared us, using our much older brother as a bogeyman. It worked. Khalid was so composed and serious all the time that we all toed the line around him. I was a little bit in awe of him, too. Once, when we were still living in the camp, heavy rains made the nearby river swell to many times its normal size. I was standing by the gushing water with Khalid when he suddenly handed me his watch and dove into the current. Before I even realized what was happening, Khalid pulled a flailing boy out of the water. He had saved his life. 

 

The only one of us Addy never hit was Rohya. She claimed that it was because Rohya never gave her a reason to, but we all knew that it was because Rohya would burst into tears at the slightest bit of harshness. Her crying was probably a bigger headache for Addy than anything the rest of us ever did. 

 

Unlike Lala, Addy was our full time parent--or rather, we were her full time job, her priority. If I needed something--something serious, like school supplies--I knew Addy would find a way to make it happen. Lala, on the other hand, was as much as an honored guest as he was a parent, with an aura of mystery and grandeur about him, but not someone I was entirely comfortable making demands of.

 

As soon as I returned from school the next day, Lala told me to change out of my uniform, that we were going to the market in Peshawar town. I was so excited, I literally raced to my room, changing out of my school uniform and into my good shirt, ready to go to town. Lala still wasn’t in the greatest mood, but he had conscientiously put his troubles aside to be the superhero of a father I always imagined him to be.  

 

He didn’t have to try very hard. I was constantly enamored of him, especially here, in the intimidating mayhem of the city. The streets were overflowing with activity as we approached the city center. We wove between cars, scooters, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, all of which were sounding their horns at various pitches. Clusters of men congregated at the public jeep stands, as drivers rhythmically repeated the names of their next stops, inviting passengers. The buildings that lined the road on either side were almost uniformly rectangular, with barren, brown facades that were the same color as the dusty road, throwing the brilliantly blue sky into sharp relief. Many of the men had shawls in shades of tan and grey draped over their shoulder, further adding to the monochromic feel of the market.

 

Lala named all the neighborhoods we walked through on our way to the central market. He told me we were in the Sadar neighborhood when he stopped to buy me a dark pair of trousers and a stiff white shirt to wear to school. Then, he took me to Arab Road to look at shoes. Walking through the town felt like an adventure to me, dodging vehicles and pedestrians to stick close to Lala. Lala was a head taller than almost everyone we passed in the market. He wore a flat-topped pakol hat and loose robes made of white Afghan jamy, and a long dark coat that made him stand out from the other pedestrians in the city. I was holding onto Lala’s hand to keep pace with him. I couldn’t help but notice how huge his hand was in comparison to mine. I felt protected and proud walking next to my Lala, my hero. This was my first memory of just the two of us, and I couldn’t wait to tell my classmates about him, about how brave and strong and clever he was.

 

Even though he lived in Panjshir for more than a year at a time, Lala seemed to know everything and everyone in Peshawar. Shopkeepers in Pakistan always had asking prices that were three or four times what their merchandise was worth, and I had seen adults get into bitter, desperate quarrels with them to haggle the price down to something they could afford. Not Lala though. He didn’t argue at all. Instead, he had this congenial, generous way of talking to the shop owners, as if they knew each other, and the shopkeepers miraculously agreed to let him pay whatever he wanted without any qualms. Watching how Lala communicated, I began to wonder if he was secretly friends with all the shopkeepers we were meeting. I asked him how he seemed to know so many people in Peshawar.

 

He looked at me and smiled. “It is because we are the same people.”

 

“How?” I asked. “We are mahajer and they’re all Pakistani.”

 

Lala shook his head. “No, zoya, this is not true.” Zoya meant son. “Yes, they hold Pakistani citizenship, but they are Pakhtun, like us. All Pakhtuns are Afghan. We are the same people, we speak the same language.” Lala always had a story to answer any question I had. “You see,” he started, “the British drew a line between us called the Durand Line, that separated the land of the Pakhtuns, so that they could carve out the country we now call Pakistan.” The Durand Line was the result of a Memorandum of Understanding between the British diplomat Mortimer Durand and the Afghan Emir, Abdur Rahman Khan, in 1896. “But,” Lala waved his hand dismissively, “that memorandum has expired. Pakistan won’t admit that it has expired, and that is why we have to live as refugees in our own homeland. The Durand Line is just a line drawn by men, and it can’t change the brotherhood between us.”

 

To this day, I don’t know exactly what Lala did when he was in Panjshir, but I eventually pieced together that he was a politician, putting his life on the line to keep the Taliban and other foreign powers out of Afghanistan. Khalid told me years later that Lala was, in fact, a colleague of Ahmad Shah Massoud. They had met in Peshawar in the 1980s, when they both fled Afghanistan during the unrest that followed Afghan Prime Minister Mohammed Daud’s assassination in 1978. Daud had transformed Afghanistan from a monarchy into a republic, and he was popular among his citizens for extending civil liberties to groups who had not previously enjoyed them, like women. The coup against him, however, was brutal. A rival politician by the name of Nur Mohammad Taraki seized power with the help of the Soviets, and slaughtered 62 members of Daud’s family, including women and children.

 

Taraki’s government was just as brutal to its dissenters as it was to its predecessors. Anyone who spoke against him, or was suspected of speaking up against him, was rounded up and killed. 

 

One of Lala’s cousins was picked up by Taraki’s men and taken to the outskirts of Kabul late one evening, along with others accused of dissent. The police fired indiscriminately into the crowd of prisoners, killing most and wounding the rest. As night fell, Lala’s cousin realized with horror that the police were piling dirt onto the bodies, burying alive those like him who were still breathing. Somehow, he managed to dig himself out with little more than a wounded leg, and escaped under cover of darkness. 

 

Within the halls of Kabul’s universities, an underground rebellion burgeoned, and spread like wildfire among the city’s young people. Lala had finished his university studies and was nearing the end of his compulsory military service when he began joining secret meetings to organize against the new government, with other young men who eventually went on to become the Mujahideen. However, the meetings didn’t stay secret for long. Taraki’s government executed the leader of the rebellion, and internal succession struggles splintered the so called Mujahideen into various parties, just as the United States and other foreign powers pitched in to prop up the factions of their choice. 

Amidst the infighting, many former fighters left the cities and fled to their villages for sanctuary, where they hoped the lack of roads and telephones would keep them safe from the eyes of Taraki’s army. Others, like Lala, fled to Peshawar, to regroup, away from the chaos, and figure out how to keep fighting for their country. It was during his short months in Peshawar that Lala met Massoud, but the two men continued to work together for decades to come, even when Lala worked for Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. At the time though, I only knew, vaguely, that he stayed in Panjshir to protect our country, making him even more of a superhero.

 

When Lala and I returned home that day, Khalid was sitting cross legged on our living room mat, leaning forward, intensely concentrating on the TV. There was a man on the news talking about a plane crashing into a building somewhere. Addy was peeling the skin off of a large pot of potatoes for our dinner that night, and Rohya was helping Nazia and Fauzia weave a threads through a wooden loom.

 

Back at the Akora Khattak camp, I used to see refugees everywhere spinning wool into grayish-white threads. It was only after moving to Peshawar, however, that I learned that the threads came in all sorts of different colors, and were used to make rugs that big companies paid for. Khalid learned how to make rugs from a cousin of ours and taught the rest of us. We needed the extra income, and we could easily do the work from home. This was critical, because it meant that my sisters and Addy could work, too, since it was improper for girls be outside the house after they turned thirteen.

 

Fauzia gleefully took advantage of this custom, because it meant she didn’t have to go to the tap in the next alley everyday to fill up our drum of water. Poor Nazia had to go stand in line by herself, over and over again with the blue plastic water jug we had gotten in the camp, until the drum in our courtyard was full. The tap only ran for a few hours around midday, when I was at school, so I usually couldn’t go with her. On school holidays, however, Nazia and I took turns standing in line. 

 

I eagerly ran into the TV room, sliding onto my knees to sit next to Addy. “Addy, look at what Lala got for me!” Nazia left the loom to her sisters and sidled over to us. 

 

I turned the unmarked yellow plastic bag one of the shopkeepers had given us upside-down to empty it, spreading the spotless new school uniform and shoes out for Addy and Nazia to see. I held up the shoes. “Lala got the shopkeeper to give us these for only 50 rupees!”

 

“Hush, son,” Lala said from across the room. He was frozen just in front of the doorway, his eyes fixed on the TV.  “Let us watch the news now. We’ll show everyone your clothes a little later.” By the look on his face, I guessed that the news today was something important. On the screen, two buildings crumpled to the ground. People were running for their lives in the clouds of dust and debris rose up like they were going swallow the sky. 

 

It was such a small space that we lived in, it was difficult to have multiple dialogues going on at once. If I was talking to Addy or my sisters too loudly, Khalid and Lala would have to really focus on the news to tune me out. If anyone was having an important conversation, then the TV had to be off. The more important matter always got the floor, and, as a nine-year-old, my matters were rarely the more important ones. So, I was used to waiting quietly.

 

When Lala had watched enough of the news, he turned the TV off, not saying anything for a while. He looked lost in thought. Then, solemnly, he said, “All that humans’ hunger for power has ever given them is war. They kill each other by the thousands, over and over again.”

 

I heard him somewhat disinterestedly. The idea of people killing each other, and by the thousands, seemed so bizarre to me, that I assumed it was some strange grown-up matter, something I did not need to be bothered with. I wondered, though, what argument could they have been having, that it could not be resolved with all parties still alive?

 

“I think this is the start of World War III,” Khalid commented, his voice grim. “Why does this world have to be so fragile?”

 

I had heard of the phrase “World War.” I imagined it as a time where men, all over the globe, were fighting one another, in the markets, the streets, everywhere, under an angry dark sky that hailed fiery missiles down on the people below. I didn’t know how a World War got started, so Khalid’s comment alarmed me. War was the reason we had to run from Afghanistan and move to Pakistan. If there was another war, especially a World War, would we have to move again? Where would we go from here?

 

In the days that followed, I gleaned from the boys at school that two planes had crashed into tall buildings in an American city called New York. I had heard about America from the Bollywood movie that I watched with Nazia and Fauzia, Aa Ab Laut Chalen--”Come, let’s go back”. My sisters and I loved watching Bollywood movies together in the evening, and singing along with Bollywood songs on the radio when we weren’t glued to the BBC Pashto soap opera, Nawy Kor, Nawy Jwand, “New Home, New Life”. Khalid hardly ever joined us, preferring instead to study in his room. 

 

All I knew of America, however, was that it was a faraway country, where people had a lot of nice things--big houses, cars, nice hair--but I had never heard of New York. Some of the boys at school said that the people who crashed the planes in New York were from Afghanistan. I hoped this wasn’t true. If a rich country like America attacked Afghanistan, how would we ever go back home? I was too young to follow politics, but between the snippets of older people’s conversation I caught at home and in school, I was nervously bracing myself for World War III to begin.

 

Since Lala’s return, the news was on TV every afternoon when I came back from school. In other words, we were all watching it. Lala and Khalid were leaning forward with interest, Addy and Rohya’s eyes were on it as they prepared dinner or sewed buttons back onto my overused shirts, and I sat against my cushion with Nazia and Fauzia, getting as close as I could to Lala, half trying to follow along and half waiting for it to be over so that we could watch cartoons, or see if an Indian movie was playing. About a month after the planes had crashed, a reporter streamed footage of an American ship based in Karachi launching jets into Afghanistan. 

 

This was it, I thought. This was the start of World War III, and we would have nowhere to run to this time. We would never be able to go home. I felt like we had to run, now, before the sky started hailing missiles down at us.

 

“Lala,” I looked up at him, panicking. “Lala, is this World War III?”

 

To my confusion, Lala actually chuckled. He put his arm around me and drew me closer. “Zoya, it’s okay,” he said softly. He paused for a second, looking up as he rubbed my shoulder reassuringly, putting the words together in his head before he said them. “This isn’t World War III. This is America’s war with the Taliban. America will take the Taliban and all of their violence out of power.”

 

In spite of my nervousness, a flicker of hope rose in my heart at Lala’s words. If the Taliban would no longer be in charge of Afghanistan, then it wouldn’t be so dangerous anymore. “Then we can go home?”

 

Khalid shrugged his shoulders, looking unconvinced. “Maybe. But this fighting could go on for a long time.”

 

Not too long afterwards, I heard the older boys in school saying the Taliban had indeed been taken out of power, and a new Afghan government was going to be in charge. My fellow mahajer classmates looked gleeful, as if their favorite cricket team just won a match. Even the Afghan adults in our neighborhood were celebrating the Americans’ victory as if Eid had come early. Many of them had been mahajers in Peshawar for decades, and were ecstatic at the possibility of going home.

 

The first real change in my life came when Tariq stopped coming to school. Tariq never missed school, and I began to wonder where he was. After a few weeks of absence, he came to school out of uniform. It turned out that his family was moving to Kabul, and he only came to say goodbye. I was happy for him--he was finally going to see the fabled city of Lala’s stories. However, at the same time, I felt deflated. It would be lonely to collect my classmates’ homework for Kamaran Sir without Tariq’s company. I hoped Lala decided to take us back to Kabul before I was on my own helping Kamaran Sir for too long.

 

Only days after I bid Tariq farewell, I returned from school to find my Uncle Jamal at our house with his family, with their belongings packed up in a cloth bag, reinforced with rope. Uncle Jamal was shorter and thinner than my father, not the powerful protector Lala looked to be. Uncle Jamal and his family still lived in Akora refugee camp, but he checked in on us regularly while Lala was away, just as he had the day the UN denied us a blue card. Though I and Nazia and Fauzia all thought of Khalid and even Rohya as our substitute parents, we were, after all, a mother living alone with five children.

 

Uncle Jamal’s two children were there as well. His daughter Sima was just a couple years older than me--the same age as Fauzia--but I always thought of her as much older, like Khalid or Rohya. She never acted like a kid—she was too smart for play. She helped me with my homework, showed me clever ways to hide the stains I got on my school uniform, and was brilliantly talented. By the time she was six years old, she spoke three languages and could read and write fluently. Not many Afghan kids could read and write. She was also an impressive artist, and spent her spare time sketching landscapes that I imagined were of Afghanistan. When she was with my family, she spent as much time talking to Lala and Khalid as she did hanging out with my sisters. She was much too mature to ever run around with me and her brother.

 

My sisters used to attend the same girls school as Sima when we lived in Akora Khattak camp. Since we moved to the house in Peshawar, however, they stayed home and helped Addy weave carpets and do chores around the house. At the time, I never thought to ask why they didn’t go to school anymore. Maybe, outside the camp, it wasn’t safe for them to walk to school alone, and there was no one to take them. Khalid was working--he left the recycling plant when we moved to Peshawar and started working at a factory making bathroom appliances, in addition to making rugs with us at home--and when he wasn’t working, he was attending English classes or studying in his room. He couldn’t walk them to school everyday, so they would have had to walk alone.  

 

We never really felt safe as mahajers in Peshawar. Addy hardly even let me out of the house, if it wasn’t to go to school or go to the mosque. 

 

Uncle Jamal glowed with pride when he looked at Sima. She wanted to be a doctor someday, and if there was anyone who could pull it off, we all knew it was her. 

 

Sima’s brother Shoaib was my age, my partner in crime, and my absolute best friend. We were born just months apart, and even in my earliest memories, our families treated us like twins. Addy said his mother, Aunty Yasmin, had nursed me as if I was her own son. Lala always got us two of everything--two of every toy, two garden statues, one in each of our names, and even two puppies. Just months before we left for Peshawar, Lala came home with two boxes, and told me and Shoaib to each pick one and see what was inside. Out of my box came handsome, white Afghan shepherd dog, wagging his tail excitedly, with a perfect little black circle on his forehead. I named him Khaal, which means Spot. Shoaib’s box also had a shepherd dog, a puppy, but she was kind of shabby looking--not nearly as cute as Khaal. Shoaib wailed rivers of jealous, heartbroken tears when he saw his poor little puppy.

 

To this day, my fondest memories of Peshawar, where our lives had taken a more solemn, desperate turn, are the moments I had with Shoaib. It was like, when we were both together, we could recreate some of the joy we had left behind, even if we were too young to remember much of it. I actually remembered quite a bit, to be honest, but I don’t think Shoaib did. I always had a knack for remembering things.

 

As soon as I saw Shoaib, my day seemed to get brighter. I asked him how long he was staying at our place and if he wanted to go play outside after lunch. 

 

Looking almost sullen, Shoaib muttered, “We’re moving to Tagab.” 

 

My excitement instantly deflated like a balloon that is let go before it is tied. Tagab was our village in Afghanistan. Addy and my siblings reminisced of its beautiful grassy fields and snow-capped mountains as if it was heaven on Earth. Tagab was also far, too far for me to visit. I felt at least as sullen as Shoaib looked. “Oh. When?” I asked.

 

“Tomorrow.”

 

This was the first time I had ever felt disappointed with Shoaib. Or, perhaps my disappointment would have been better directed towards the Americans. For all the mahajers’ celebrations, the Americans’ victory seemed to have done nothing but cost me my closest friends. “I hope we move to Afghanistan too,” was all I could manage.

 

As our families sat around the dinner mat that evening, I intently watched Uncle Jamal try to convince Lala to move us to Tagab as well. I prayed he would be successful.

 

“It is too soon,” Lala boomed, to my dismay. “You should not go right now either. You are rushing. We do not know what these changes will bring.”

 

Then, I prayed that Lala would be successful in convincing Uncle Jamal to stay.

 

Uncle Jamal shook his head solemnly. “No, Lala. It has been long enough. My wife and children have had to live as mahajers for years. I want to take us back as soon as I can. We can’t wait anymore.”

 

I went to bed angry and resentful that night, not knowing when and if I would see my best friend again. I didn’t know who to be angry with, except perhaps the Americans. As winter settled in, more and more of my mahajer friends trickled out of Peshawar, yet Lala showed no inclination of moving us to Afghanistan. It was the loneliest winter of my memory.