22

For months now, Raza had been living two lives. In one, he was plain Raza Ashraf, getting plainer each day as his friends’ lives marched forward into university and he remained the failed student, the former factory worker, the boy marked by the bomb. In the other, he was Raza Hazara, the man who would not speak his language – or speak of his family or past, not even to other Hazaras – until he had driven the last Soviet out of Afghanistan, the man for whom an American took off his own shoes, which could only signal that somehow, in some way – though Raza would only look mysterious when questioned about it – he was of significance to the CIA (every American in Pakistan was CIA, of course).

       While Raza Ashraf’s greatest pride came from the joy with which his father turned on his new cassette-player from Sohrab Goth every evening after work, Raza Hazara learnt to measure pride in the decreasing number of seconds it took him to take down and reassemble an AK-47. Raza Ashraf spent more and more time alone, locked in a world of books and dreams, while Raza Hazara was greeted with cries of delight each time he entered the slums of Sohrab Goth to teach English to an ever-expanding group of students. Raza Hazara never had to duck his head forward so his hair would hide his features.

       It was exhilarating, it was thrilling – it was wearying.

       As he spent an increasing amount of time with the Afghans in Sohrab Goth, Raza found, surprisingly, that he missed his own life. He missed a world free of guns and war and occupied homelands. He missed being able to answer any question about his life without thinking twice about how best to construct a lie. He missed a world less fraught about honour and family than this world of men who recited poetry about mountains. He missed women, though he’d hardly ever thought of them as being a significant presence in his life.

       So some days, weeks even, he stayed in Nazimabad, played cricket with the neighbourhood boys, studied for his exam. And found that each time he started to worry about what would happen in the examination hall he needed only to bring to mind the memory of assembling an AK-47, that satisfying click as the piece came together, and all his anxieties would dissipate. Then he would be restless to return to the life of the Hazara once more, and he’d take the now familiar bus route to Sohrab Goth to find Abdullah – and in his absence, any one of the Afghans who now welcomed him as a respected teacher – and if queried about his long absence he’d give that same mysterious smile which he directed at all enquiries about the American who gave him the shoes off his feet.

       But he knew there was no living in two worlds, not for any length of time. And the day he walked out of the examination hall, knowing he’d performed to excellence, it was entirely obvious which world he was going to give up. Who chooses borrowed dreams over the dreams they’ve grown up with? The dream Raza had thought he’d lost – of excelling academically, of feeling knowledge propel him forward through the world – had become possible once more. The Intermediate exams had demanded little more than exercises in memorisation – but beyond was another world, of following clues and making connections, of analysis and argument. He didn’t need America! He would be a lawyer, as his father had always wanted. All those months of thinking he would never get into law college had made the prospect of studying law exciting for the first time.

       He didn’t see quite how much his newly acquired confidence and the re-emergence of his love for learning owed to the hours he had spent in the shady patch in Sohrab Goth where he conducted his English classes, with Afghan boys of different ages sitting cross-legged on the ground before him, riveted by every word he said as though it were a promise of a previously unimagined future; but even so, he felt, as he sauntered from the examination hall, a great burst of affection towards Abdullah, who had made possible the life of Raza Hazara, and then the thought that he was planning to simply vanish from the life of the young Afghan without explanation or words of farewell struck him as a travesty in a way that his daily lies to Abdullah were not.

       Thinking all this, he was unusually preoccupied – unusually for Raza Hazara, that is – as he sat with Abdullah at a kerbside eating place favoured by truck drivers, eating chapli kababs. He recalled Uncle Harry pointing out a similarly constructed ‘restaurant’ as Harry had called it (and though Raza knew that a restaurant was grand, and that this was merely a ‘hotel’, he had picked up the American’s usage, never considering the possibility that he knew the names of things in Karachi better than Harry did) – Harry had said he loved the way the absence of an outer wall made it possible to imagine passers-by might trip over their own feet on the narrow bustling pavement, fall into a chair inside the restaurant, and simply stay on for a meal with whoever was already sitting around the table. But as Raza sat across from Abdullah he wished he didn’t have to look at the world jostling around, which only served to remind him that his presence in it was a lie. Today the exam results had been announced. Raza had done as well as he’d expected. And the time for choosing one life over the other suddenly seemed to be at hand.

       Afridi, the truck driver, walked up to their table – he’d been involved in a protracted conversation with a group of men outside – took hold of Raza’s chair-back and jerked it down a few inches, laughing at Raza’s cry of fright before righting it again.

       ‘Stop fighting now. Talk to each other,’ he said, smacking Abdullah on the back of the head before wandering out again.

       Both Abdullah and Raza looked up in surprise at each other. Each had been too caught up in his own silence to notice the other’s lack of conversation.

       ‘What’s wrong?’ they said in tandem.

       ‘Nothing,’ Raza said. ‘You’re so quiet I thought maybe I’ve offended you.’

       Abdullah’s hazel eyes crinkled.

       ‘How could you offend me, Raza Hazara?’ Very slowly, in English, he said, ‘You only can call me “walnut”.’

       Raza looked guiltily down at his plate. He had never known such generosity as Abdullah extended him with an air that suggested Raza was the one doing him the favour in being pulled in so completely, so unreservedly, into his life. A few weeks ago Raza had arrived in Sohrab Goth after an eight-day absence, and there was no recrimination from Abdullah, only a broad smile of delight at Raza’s return. It was Afridi who told him, accusingly, that Abdullah had to be forcibly dragged out of the environs of Sohrab Goth on the days Raza was absent – ‘Otherwise he just stays, waiting for his teacher to arrive.’ Raza hadn’t missed a day since then.

       ‘Why are you so quiet then?’ Raza asked.

       ‘I’m fourteen now,’ Abdullah said, leaning back vertiginously in his plastic chair. ‘My brothers promised when I was fourteen I could go to one of the training camps.’ Abdullah’s surviving brothers were all mujahideen, as had been the brother who died near the start of the war – the rest of his family was in a refugee camp outside Peshawar but Abdullah, at twelve, had left the camp on the back of a truck to Karachi, where a family from his village had taken him in, and the truck driver in whose company he’d travelled to Karachi had said, ‘Come and work with me,’ and so Abdullah had become a gun-runner between Karachi and Peshawar.

       ‘Really? When was your birthday?’ In Abdullah’s company Raza’s Pashto had become increasingly the Pashto of Kandahar, not of Peshawar.

       Abdullah shrugged.

       ‘I don’t know exactly. Some time near the beginning of summer.’ He ripped a piece off his naan and made a complicated gesture that Raza couldn’t make any sense of. ‘Afridi’s going to Peshawar next week. My brother Ismail said I should go with him, and he’ll meet me and take me to the camp. But I don’t know. You said once, there are other ways to fight the Soviets. Maybe I’d be more useful here, with Afridi. You can’t underestimate the importance of the supply line from Karachi.’ He looked imploringly at Raza. ‘Isn’t that so?’

       Raza chewed slowly on a large mouthful of kabab and naan. Ever since he’d started to spend time with Abdullah he’d hankered to travel as the younger boy did, heading all the way north through Pakistan in a truck, lying at night in the open-top container watching the stars, stopping along the way for chai and parathas and kababs, no parents to say what was and wasn’t allowed, just the open road, the shifting landscape, the thrilling knowledge of gun-running.

       Peshawar. Sajjad’s sister and brother-in-law lived there – Raza had last been to visit them years ago with his father. His uncle had promised to take him to the fort on his final day there, but rain had interfered with the plan. ‘Next time you’re here, we’ll go, I promise,’ his uncle had said – but that next time hadn’t come again; the Ashraf siblings of Pakistan gathered each year in Lahore instead, and mentions of return trips to Peshawar remained unfulfilled ideas.

       ‘Raza?’ Abdullah said. ‘I should tell my brother I’m needed to help with the supply line, shouldn’t I?’

       Here it was, Raza thought. The chance to bring the friendship of Raza Hazara and Abdullah to a close in a manner that it deserved, in a burst of adventure and camaraderie.

       He grinned.

       ‘What’s the matter, little boy? Scared?’

       Abdullah stood up, knocking the kabab out of Raza’s hand.

       ‘When was the last time you slit the throat of a Soviet?’

       The men at tables near by turned to watch, and Raza heard someone call out to Afridi.

       ‘Sit down,’ Raza said, reaching across to Abdullah’s plate and taking his kabab. The younger boy had reacted precisely as he’d known he would. He gestured to Afridi to say everything was OK. ‘Next week, you and I will go to Peshawar together.’

       Abdullah stared at him.

       ‘You’ll come to the training camps with me?’

       ‘Why not?’ Raza said. ‘A true Afghan doesn’t waste time with the CIA. He attacks the Soviets directly. I’ve learnt this from you.’

       Abdullah smiled his broad, joyful smile.

       ‘You and me together. The Soviets won’t stand a chance!’ He caught Raza in a wrestling hold and the two boys tumbled, laughing, to the pavement outside, where the men gathered around reached out hands to break their fall.

       ‘Walnut!’ Raza said, sitting up and brushing down his clothes. ‘I could have choked on the kabab.’

       Abdullah rested his weight on his elbows, unmindful of the pavement dirt, and continued smiling at Raza.

       ‘There’ll still be time for our lessons, won’t there? When we’re in the camp. You’ll still teach me?’

       ‘If you teach me how you can wrestle people twice your size and win.’

       Abdullah jumped up and pulled Raza to his feet.

       ‘This will be so much fun.’

       And so it was that a little over a week later, Raza was in a truck heading from Karachi to Peshawar. There was much he learnt in that three-day drive: he learnt that nothing in the manic quality of Karachi traffic could prepare you for truck drivers on narrow mountain roads; he learnt that when you’re in a truck filled with guns you can travel the length of the country without harassment from the military at checkpoints; he learnt to recognise cigarette burns on truckers’ palms and the backs of their hands as badges of their profession – testament to the nights they drove their vehicles and their bodies to the brink of what was possible, burning their own hands to ward off sleep; he learnt not to ask Abdullah or Afridi or anyone at the stops along the way if they knew anything about the ancient rock carvings they passed because he’d only hear that they were the work of infidels; learnt the beauty in bleakness as the mountains compelled him, by the sheer force of their presence, to look beyond barrenness; learnt that the closer he got to the Afghanistan border the less people gave him a second glance; learnt, through absence, the luxuries he’d taken for granted; learnt of the existence of muscles he’d never considered until hour after hour on the thin seat of a speeding truck awoke them, screaming in agony; he learnt most of all that he would miss Abdullah’s friendship.

       The Afghan seemed to have forgotten by now his earlier hesitation about joining the mujahideen – he spoke of it now with such fervour that Raza would find himself getting entirely caught up in the idea of the training and the brotherhood in the vast, thrilling playground of the north where the terrain seemed designed for boys to execute grand adventures. And then he’d remind himself of his plan, clear to him that night in the highway restaurant: to accompany Abdullah to Peshawar and then vanish.

       Really he’d just slip away and make his way to his aunt’s house. But to Abdullah it would seem like a vanishing. He wondered what the Afghan would make of his disappearance – would he suspect a failure of courage on Raza’s part, or would he think that, somewhere in Peshawar, that hub of espionage and jihad, Raza’s CIA affiliation had caught up with him. Raza hoped for the latter. Largely, though, he didn’t think of what would happen once he left Abdullah and Afridi – it saddened him too much. He didn’t know who he’d miss more – Abdullah or Raza Hazara, but he knew that there had been a richness to his life these last weeks which it had never known before.

       There were even moments, contemplating that richness, when he thought maybe he’d go with Abdullah to the camps for a while, maybe there’d be no harm in that. But that idea never lasted long. It was too much now, this sundering of his self, he told himself as explanation for why he couldn’t consider the camps for more than a few moments. Three days in the truck with Abdullah, three days on the road with his Afghan brother, and then enough. He squeezed his eyes tightly at the memory of how his students had lined up on his last day in Sohrab Goth, just before he and Abdullah climbed into the truck, each one of them presenting him with a memento – some handwritten notes in English, a tiny Quran, a pair of woollen socks, a clump of soil from Afghanistan, a decorative porcelain shoe. The voice that told him he was betraying them warred with the voice that said he had given them months of education which they would never have received if not for his charade, and those months were his gift to them, and not a commitment.

       ‘Wake up.’ Abdullah shook him.

       Raza sat up, rubbing the side of his face where it had been resting against the truck door as he slept.

       ‘Are we in Peshawar?’ he said, looking out of the windscreen and seeing only mud and pebbles – a path of mud and pebbles cut into mountains of mud and pebbles with a mud-and-pebble drop to the mud-and-pebble valley beneath. Somehow, it managed to be majestic. If you’re big enough, Raza thought, looking up at the mountains, it doesn’t matter what you’re made of.

       Abdullah laughed and half pushed Raza out of the door, on to the side of the road. The dust kicked up by the wheels of the truck was settling slowly, almost regretfully, in the stillness of the early-morning air. Raza swept his arm side to side and felt the stuff of mountains drift on to his skin. This clearly wasn’t Peshawar. Just another bathroom stop.

       He stepped on to the side of the road, untying his shalwar. There was so much nothingness around him. Beyond, he knew, were peaks of white and behind fertile plains but knowing this didn’t stop him from feeling he was on a barren planet where any mythological creature might be lurking – a Japanese tengu would be less out of place here than a boy from Karachi.

       When he turned back towards the truck, he saw Afridi leaning out from the driver’s seat, clasping Abdullah’s hand.

       Then the older man raised a hand in Raza’s direction.

       ‘Look after each other. And don’t fight over that last Soviet.’

       ‘What? No, wait.’

       But his voice was lost beneath the roar of the engine, and then the truck was pulling away, leaving Raza and Abdullah in the middle of a vast emptiness.

       ‘Where did he go?’

       Abdullah looked at him in surprise.

       ‘To Peshawar, of course. My brother’s going to meet us near here. Come, we have to walk a little.’

       His words echoed strangely in the mountain pass. Raza looked down at his feet. There seemed to be heavy weights attached to them. It was clear he couldn’t move.

       ‘Come on, Raza.’

       Raza took a deep breath. It was OK. Somewhere during the few seconds when he’d considered joining Abdullah in the camps he had thought of an idea to get himself out. When he was ready to leave, he’d decided, he’d come to Abdullah with a look of anguish and say he’d just had a phone call from home, his grandfather was dying. This grandfather had been an early and, it now transpired, inspired invention: the sole surviving relative with whom Raza lived, in a little shack near the railway lines, away from other Afghan refugees, who the grandfather could not look at without weeping for the lost mountains of his forefathers.

       Of course he’d have no option but to leave the camp and return to his grandfather, promising to come back as soon as the old man was buried. It was his duty, after all, to lower his grandfather’s body into the ground and close his eyes while the mauvli by the graveside prayed for his soul.

       Yes, Raza thought, considering that plan again. Yes, that would work. And maybe – maybe he’d spend a day or two in the camps first. Listen to the mujahideen stories, learn to fire a rocket-launcher. He moved his feet forward towards Abdullah.

       They walked along the narrowing dirt road through nothingness for what seemed hours, the mountains providing no shadow at this time of day to protect against the harsh sun; then, as they rounded a corner, Abdullah pointed to something rising from the plains beyond – a range of low mountains, stretching on for ever. No – Raza looked again. Tents. A city of refugees.

       ‘It doubles in size every time I come back,’ Abdullah said, his voice quieter, more grave than Raza had ever heard it before.

       They kept walking towards the tent city but, just when Raza thought they were going to start to descend to the plain on which it stood, Abdullah sat down by the side of the path, which had widened again, his back to the tents, and said, ‘Now we wait.’

       ‘I want to see it,’ Raza said, nodding in the direction of the refugee camp. At this distance, all he could tell was that it was vast.

       ‘What do you want to see?’ Abdullah said sharply. ‘People living like animals? These places are the enemies of dignity. It’s good. It’s good that we should live there, like that.’

       ‘How is that good?’

       Abdullah looked over his shoulder towards the camp.

       ‘I was forgetting, Raza.’ He said it as though confessing the worst of crimes. ‘I went to Karachi, I saw its lights and its promise, even all the way at the edges in Sohrab Goth – and I was forgetting this. I haven’t been to the refugee camps in a year. Afridi always offers to stop when we travel up to Peshawar, but I tell him no, I don’t want to see it. I was forgetting why there is no option for me except to join the mujahideen. The boys growing up in the camps, they won’t forget. They’ll look around and know, if this is the better option that must mean our homeland now is the doorway to hell. And we must restore it to Paradise.’ He turned to Raza, his expression as adult as the tone of his voice. ‘Thank you, brother.’

       Raza looked from the camps to Abdullah, and for the first time saw the smallness of his own heart, the total self-absorption.

       ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Before. When you said there were other things you could do. The supply line. Abdullah, that’s so important. All the boys down there’ – he waved his hands towards the tents – ‘they’ll all go to the training camps. Who’ll be left to look after the supply line? How will Afridi manage without you? The camps are no good without guns for the mujahideen to fight with.’

       Abdullah looked curiously at Raza.

       ‘Why are you saying all this now?’

       ‘I just didn’t see before.’ Raza stepped closer to Abdullah and put a hand on his arm. ‘You have the number of that friend in Peshawar who Afridi is staying with. You should call him as soon as we get to the training camp. Tell Afridi to come back and pick us up.’

       Abdullah looked at Raza as though he didn’t recognise him, but before he could say anything a jeep turned the corner, headed for them, and the boys held their hands against their eyes to guard against the pebbles ricocheting from beneath the wheels.

       ‘They’ve come to take us to the training camp. And, Raza, don’t be such a city boy. There are no phones there.’