Ali’s Friend

Jack Steele was ready when Ali Hanif arrived.

Jack was a New Zealander and an exchange teacher at Spinner’s Inlet Secondary School. He had assumed that, being in a sister country of the Commonwealth, he would find cricket to be a popular sport. Not so much, as he discovered. But he was not about to be deterred and had enlisted Ali to help explain the finer points.

Ali had not been Jack’s first choice. Earlier, he had asked Constable Ravina Sidhu to drop by and “offer some tips to a group.” Ravina turned up, thinking it likely had to do with drugs.

Instead, “Cricket?” she said. “What the hell do I …”

“Surely a national game,” Steele said. “I mean, where are you from—Mumbai? Delhi?”

“Abbotsford,” Ravina replied. “And my national game is hockey. The ice kind. UBC T-Birds for two season, and I was in line for the national team before I decided to be a cop. Cricket is daft. Five hours or more, run around shouting ‘Howzat?’ stop for tea … I think my dad still follows it. Maybe you could call him, though you’d have to pay his ferry fare. And you might have trouble understanding him—he’s from Bradford.”

So, no Ravina.

When he arrived, Ali had said he would willingly help but would not have much time this first day. He kept checking his watch as he explained to the assembled and mostly indifferent Grade 9 students that those things were called wickets, not sticks as one voice suggested, that the ball was not thrown at them but bowled, and he was getting on about overs and boundaries and hitting for six, when the many-times-refurbished Gulf Queen announced her arrival in the Inlet.

Ali left and trotted down the hill to the dock, where the passengers were streaming ashore and the soldier was turning heads. His faded camouflage top carried the marks of service abroad. He seemed distressed, staring around him, grabbing at something, at nothing, opening then closing his fists. His eyes seemed unfocused—until he saw Ali. He pushed through people to reach the Afghan, whom he folded in an embrace as tight as embraces can get.

“All right, Harry. It’s all right now. You’re safe,” Ali said.

The soldier said, “Thank you, my friend.” His face was wet.

“No, it is I who should be saying that!”

A young man standing nearby studied the scene. He carried a reporter’s notebook. His boss, Silas Cotswold, owner and editor of The Tidal Times, had said, “People, Cameron, that’s where you find the stories. Everybody has a story. Let them tell it.”

Cameron Girard decided to heed that advice. As the one intern taken on by the Times, he needed to impress, which meant more than quoting Annabelle Bell-Atkinson after she had hunted him down to deliver “some more significant community news,” mostly with herself up front.

He had already done a decent job on a welcoming piece about the Hanif family of five—Ali, his wife, Aila, two young girls, Nadia and Balour, and one younger boy, Fabian— although he sensed that there was much unsaid about their story.

Ali Hanif had been pleased with the story that Cameron had produced: straightforward, quotes exactly as he had spoken, and a suggestion that there was more to the tale than the reporter was able to tell. Now the reporter could have the rest. Ali beckoned the clearly curious Cameron over.

Cameron asked how the cricket coaching was going. Ali rolled his eyes. Then he tapped the soldier on the chest and said, “Here is your story, Cameron, and it’s time that someone told it.”

The story appeared in the next day’s edition of The Tidal Times, as told by Ali.

“I lived in Kabul. I have a degree in engineering from the university there, and I was working what I thought was secretly as an interpreter for the Canadian forces. Harry was my main contact. He was Corporal Dyson. The Taliban learned of my work, and I and my family became targets. Harry became my protector. He was close by one day when an old pickup truck stopped outside my house. A young girl stepped out, and the truck left, quickly. The girl walked toward the house. She looked odd, staring straight ahead, a fixed smile, but her eyes were blank. I suspected that she was drugged. And I knew what she was wearing under her bulky, quilted jacket: a suicide-bomb pack.

“She started to open her jacket, just as Harry walked out from behind the house, carrying his assault rifle. She stared at him and put her hand on a red square on the bomb pack. Harry spoke to her, using the Pashto language I’d been helping him learn. He told her quietly that what she was about to do was against the true spirit of Islam and not what Allah wanted. I don’t know if he actually believed it, but he got her attention—for a moment. While he spoke, he raised his rifle.

“He spoke to the girl again, asking her to take off the bomb pack. She smiled at him, nodded—and stabbed a finger at the red square. Harry was responding to his training. He shot her. He followed the ambulance to the hospital and waited by her bed for two days, before she died.

“She was seven years old. Her name was Aila, same as my wife. And the same age as Harry’s daughter. The bomb squad found that her device was improperly wired and would not have detonated. Harry cried. He’s been crying, in a way, ever since.

“The army did try to help him, declared him as suffering from PTSD and referred him to their best doctors. But the damage was too deep. His life fell apart. He lost his wife, who left with their daughter, and his home. He had been due for promotion to sergeant. Harry said he had no interest in promotion, or anything further to do with the army. He would leave the regiment, but he insisted that the army keep their promise, that they would help interpreters and their families get to Canada, when the Canadians left. We had heard that the British were backing down on the same promise, leaving people like us to the Taliban. The army kept their promise and here we are.

“I found where Harry was living—on the streets in Vancouver—and now he has a new home, with us, for as long as he needs it.”

Silas Cotswold had smiled as he read Girard’s last line. “You’re getting the hang of it, Cameron,”

Ali did not show at the school for the next week, and longer. With the interest in cricket receding like an outgoing tide, Jack Steele put away the bails and wickets and asked how many would be interested in starting a rugby sevens program.