Translated from the Pashto by Shekiba Habib
We were playing the same old game of hopscotch—me, my friend Zarghoona, and her sister Spozhmai. The rules are simple: we kick a small pebble from one of the seven heptagons we have drawn on the ground to another heptagon. If a foot or the pebble touches one of the lines, then that player is out and it is the next person’s turn.
Now, Zarghoona—who’d been hopping from one heptagon to another—was out and they were both telling me it was my turn.
I looked at my muddy feet and felt embarrassed. I remained where I was, with one foot behind the other. Zarghoona and Spozhmai lived across the street from me. Their feet were healthy and soft, and they were wearing new sandals. My sandals were plastic and hand-stitched by my mother. But I felt even worse about my feet, which were dry and dirty. They didn’t look good at all.
I turned and ran across the courtyard, past the mud walls of the dusty room we used as a makeshift kitchen, and into the bathroom at the far end of the yard. One half of the floor was paved with concrete while the other half was muddy.
I realized that the old soap was finished and there was no money for new soap. I looked down at my feet, covered with mud and cracked because of the cold. I began to scrub them hard with the little loofah but couldn’t get them clean.
I didn’t want to go out anymore.
When I came out of the bathroom, my mother was in the courtyard, wearing her burqa.
“Where are you going?” I said.
She glared at me.
“Moor Jani, where are you going?”
“Shopping! Why so many questions?”
“I wanted to tell you that we have run out of soap. Will you buy some?”
“On top of taking care of your hungry stomach, now I have to think of soap too,” she said.
I lowered my head and said nothing. She was turning the silver ring on her finger. It had a bluish stone set in a double shank. I didn’t like it very much. My father had brought it back for her when he’d returned home after a long spell in the army. I’d seen her talking to that ring when he was away. She would even cry and sing to it.
Once, I heard my mother tell my aunt, “This ring is very precious to me. Even when I die I won’t have it taken off my finger. I will wear it on judgment day. It is my first marriage gift.”
My mother left without another word while I leaned against the doorway watching her go. In my heart, I wished I were Zarghoona’s sister, so I could have new sandals, and soap to wash my hands and feet.
I looked at the clock. It seemed as though the hands hadn’t moved since my mother left. My two little sisters and brother were crying for food. I was very hungry too. We hadn’t eaten anything since morning. My hands and legs were shaking and the room seemed to be spinning. My older sister, Samina, sat next to the window with her hand under her chin. I knew she was even more worried than me. I lay down on the mattress on the floor and closed my eyes but my hunger kept me awake.
When I looked at the clock again it was quarter past three in the afternoon. Moor had left home before ten that morning. I began wondering where she’d gone.
I must have drifted off to sleep because I had a dream in which I was sitting in a room full of women baking bread. I reached out and took a piece but it slipped from my hand and dropped into a deep black hole. I threw myself after it, but it had disappeared.
A sharp knock on the door woke me. I jumped to my feet and answered it. It was Zarghoona holding a big doll in her hand. “Come, Dunya, let’s play. Aba just brought me this.”
Zarghoona’s doll had bright yellow hair and a round face. My mind took me back to the time when my father used to bring us gifts, and the day I realized he would never do so again. I remembered the afternoon when the courtyard door was suddenly pushed open by my uncle Rahim, dressed in black, his top and trousers muddy. He was accompanied by four men in military uniform. He rushed into the house and called out to my mother. She didn’t answer. I don’t think she heard him.
Uncle Rahim opened both sides of the front door and I saw that four military men were carrying a long wooden box. My uncle called again, and Moor came out.
“Sister-in-law,” Uncle Rahim said, “may God give you patience. Sharif is martyred!”
When my mother saw the box with my father’s body in it, she crumpled in a heap on the floor. I ran towards the box, called out to my father and tried to shake him awake. Then I began screaming. The neighbors came and dragged me away.
“Come on, Dunya, let’s play.” Zarghoona was poking my shoulder.
“No,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Why not? Come on, please! I will ask your mother for permission.”
I shook my head and forced a smile. “I have a bit of a temperature. I need to lie down. I’ll play with you tomorrow.”
I stayed beside the door when Zarghoona left. The street was full of the shouts of kids playing. A man’s voice rose up above the noise: “Cheese, fresh cheese.” Then came the music from the ice cream cart. I began desperately wishing for an ice cream. I imagined Zarghoona and Spozhmai running off to buy some. I peered through the little hole in the courtyard door but could see nothing. I turned and went back inside the house.
The time for evening prayer came and went. The sun slowly dragged its rays across the houses. Sabrina, my second sister, and my little brother, Zyarat Gul, had fallen asleep.
I stretched out on the floor and began counting the rafters. After my father died, we moved to this old mud house. There were two rooms, one of which was very dusty, the ceiling ruined. The other room was a bit better, so we lived there. But whenever it got moldy and damp from the rains, little bugs would drop on us from the ceiling.
I counted fifteen rafters. I counted them again, then counted them from the other side. I did this over and over to pass the time.
There was another knock on the courtyard door, but I didn’t have the energy to answer it. Sabrina jumped to her feet and ran so fast to get to it that she fell over in the yard. She got back up, her knee bleeding, and pulled open the door. Sabrina was so delicate, and would cry at the smallest thing. But today hunger had toughened her.
A kilo of rice—that was all we were waiting for Moor to bring us, so we could cook and eat. There was not even a potato left. The previous day we had boiled the last four. Our flour container had been empty for a long time. It was the year of the mouse, the season of meagerness.
Before, it used to be a little easier for my mother. She washed people’s clothes, was paid a small amount of money, and we survived. But for a whole week she could barely move because of the pain in her lower back which meant she couldn’t work. We started praying to God.
When Sabrina opened the courtyard door we all sat up, expecting Moor. She came back to the room and told Samina that it was the landlord asking for the monthly rent. Samina asked me to go and tell him that we would pay the following day.
I went out and said to him, “My mother is not at home, she will pay you when she is here.”
“This is the fifth month that you haven’t paid me,” he shouted. His mouth was full of spit and green tobacco, which stained his long beard. “I will come next week, and if you don’t pay me, I will throw all your things into the street.”
A nearby shopkeeper came out of his shop. The neighbors also came out. They were all staring at me. Worse still, the street boys began laughing. “Uncle Jabbar, they are tricking you. They will not pay you any rent.”
The landlord shouted even more loudly. “I swear, when I come back next time, I will throw you out if you do not pay.”
I fixed my eyes on my feet. I felt the heat rising to my face. I decided there and then that when I grew up I would get a job and earn good money and throw the rent money in his face. I shut the door and turned back.
I was halfway across the yard when I heard another knock at the door. The door opened and this time a tall, forty-year-old woman stood there. She looked exhausted. So much dust covered her sandals that they had lost all color. She had a plastic bag in her hand with pale white rice clearly visible through it. My sweet mother! The woman whose tears would never dry!
Samina hurried out to meet her, took the bag and told us she was going to cook.
I followed Moor into the room. I watched the movements of her hands as she removed her blue burqa. Zyarat Gul came in and she reached down and lifted him to her shoulder, stroking his short hair. I saw Sabrina and Samina through the kitchen door, busy preparing the rice. I left the room, sat on the floor and watched.
This final hour seemed to have no end while I waited. It was late evening when the food was ready.
We ate our fill, then the younger ones fell quietly asleep.
I was lying in bed, still awake, when I heard Samina say softly, “Moor Jani, did you borrow this rice?” Samina’s voice was anxious.
“No. They said they would not lend to me until I paid off what I already owed them. They won’t give me anything.”
“Then how did you get the rice?”
Moor said nothing for a while, then her voice dropped to a whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, Samina: I sold my silver ring.”
“But that was—”
“Be quiet, don’t let anyone know.”
“But who would buy it, Moor Jani? The stone wasn’t real.”
“That’s why they paid only sixty afghanis. I bought two kilos of rice with the money.”
Samina began sobbing quietly and I couldn’t hold my tears back either.
Moor reached across and tapped me sharply on the back. “Go to sleep, Dunya! You’ll wake up the little ones.”