is today. Bamiyan, where we lived, was a beautiful, peaceful valley. There was plenty to eat, and the different peoples did not fight one another: Pashtun, Usbek, Tagik, Hazara – my family is from the Hazara people.
Then the foreigners came, the Russians first, with their tanks and their planes, and after that there was no more peace, and soon there was no more food. My grandfather fought against them with the Mujahadin resistance fighters. But the Russian tanks came to our valley, to Bamiyan, and killed him, and many others.
All this was long before I was born.
After the Russians were driven out, Mother remembers that everyone was happy for a while. But then the Taliban fighters came in. At first everyone liked them, because they were Muslims like us. But we soon learned what they were really like. They hated us, especially Hazara people like us. They wanted us dead. If you did not agree with them, they killed you. They left us with nothing. They destroyed everything. They burnt our fields. They blew up all our homes, every one of them. They killed whoever they wanted to. There was nothing anyone could do, except hide.
That is why I was born in a cave in the cliff face above the village. I grew up in this cave, with my mother and grandmother. I wasn’t unhappy. I went to school. I had friends to play with. I knew nothing different.
Mother and Grandmother argued a lot, mostly about the same thing, about Grandmother’s jewels, which she kept hidden away, sewn into her mattress. Mother was always trying to get her to sell them, to buy food when we were hungry. And Grandmother always refused. She said we were always hungry, and that we would manage to survive somehow, God willing. She would always say that there was something more precious even than food, and she was saving her jewels for that. She would not say what this was, and that always made Mother very angry and upset. But I did not mind them arguing that much. I was used to it, I suppose.
Everyone I cared about in the world lived in these caves, a hundred or more of us, because there was nowhere else to go, because the Taliban had left us nowhere else to live. They had blown up all of Bamiyan, all of the houses, even the mosque.
And they did more than that. They blew up also the great stone statues of the Buddha that had been carved out of the cliff face thousands of years before. Mother watched them do it. She told me they were the biggest stone sculptures in the whole world, and that people from far away used to come to Bamiyan to see them because they were so famous. But there is nothing left of them now, just great piles of stones. The Taliban blew up our whole lives.
They were cruel people.
Then the Americans came with their tanks and their helicopters and their planes, and the Taliban were driven out of the valley, most of them anyway. We all thought things would be better for us from now on. Father spoke a little English, so he became an interpreter for the Americans. People kept saying there would soon be new houses for us to live in, and a new school. But nothing seemed to change. There was more food now, but never enough. So we were still hungry. In the cave Mother and Grandmother started quarrelling again.
Things were getting back to normal.
But then one night the Taliban came to our cave, and they took my father away. I was six years old. They called him a traitor, because he had helped the infidel Americans. Mother fought them, but she wasn’t strong enough. I screamed at them, but they just ignored me.
We never saw my father again. I remember him very well though. They cannot take away my memories of him. He used to show me the house down in the valley where he had lived, and we would sometimes walk the land where he used to graze his sheep, and grow his onions and his melons, and the orchard where he grew his big green apples.
Father would always let me go with him to load up the donkey with sticks for the fire. And every day we would go down to the stream to fetch the water, and carry it back up the steep hill to the cave. Sometimes he would take me into town to buy some bread, or a little meat from the butcher, if we had any money. Everyone liked him. We laughed a lot together, and he would wrestle with me and play with me.
He was a good father. He was a good man.
But the Taliban had destroyed everything, cut down the orchards, burnt the crops, took Father away. I never heard him laugh again. All we had left of him was his old donkey. I would talk to him instead sometimes. He was very sad, like me. I think maybe that donkey missed Father as much as I did.
After that there were just the three of us left in the cave, Mother, Grandmother, and me. For months after Father was taken away, Grandmother would spend her days lying on the mattress in the corner, and Mother would sit there beside her, gazing at nothing, hardly speaking. It was up to me now to find enough rice or bread to live on. I begged for it. I stole it. I had to. I fetched the water from the stream, a long walk down the hill and a long walk up, and I tried to bring in enough sticks to keep the fire going.
Somehow we managed to get through the winters without starving or freezing to death. But Grandmother’s legs were getting worse all the time. She could hardly get up at all now, unless one of us helped her.
What happened to Mother was my fault. I was with her at the market in town when I stole the apple, just one apple, nothing much – we had none left of our own by now. I was good at pinching things. I had never been spotted before. But this time I got careless. This time I got caught.
“Dirty Dog! Dirty Foreign Dog!”
Aman
I remember there was lots of shouting. “Filthy thief! Lousy beggar! Stop him! Stop him!” I tried to run away. But before I could escape, someone grabbed me. He kept hitting me, and would not let go of me.
Mother came to my rescue, to protect me, but a crowd gathered and then suddenly the police were there. Mother told them it was her who stole the apple, not me. So they arrested Mother, instead of me, and took her off to prison. They beat her there. She still has the marks on her back. She was gone for nearly a week.
They tortured her.
When she came back she just lay on the mattress beside Grandmother, and they cried together for days. She turned her face away from me, and would not speak to me. I wondered if she would ever speak to me again.
It wasn’t long after this that the dog first came to our cave – a dog just like your dog in that photo you showed me.
But when I saw her that first evening, she was thin and dirty and covered in sores. I was just crouching over the fire warming myself, when I looked up and saw her sitting there, staring at me. She wasn’t like any dog I had seen before – small, with short legs and long ears, and nut-brown eyes.
I shouted at her to go away – you understand, we do not have dogs inside our homes in Afghanistan. Dogs have to live outside with the other animals. Of course, I have lived here a long time now, and I know that in England it is different. Some people here like dogs better than they like children. Actually, I think if I was a dog, they would not shut me up in here like this.
So anyway, I threw a stone at this dog to shoo her away. But she stayed right where she was, and would not move. She just sat there.
I saw then that she was shivering. You could see her hipbones sticking out – she was that thin. She had sores all over her, and you could tell she was starving. So instead of throwing another stone at her, I threw her a piece of stale bread. She snapped it up at once, chewed on it, swallowed it, and then licked her lips, waiting for more.
I chucked her another piece. Then, before I knew it, she had come right into the cave, and was lying down there beside me, close to the fire, making herself at home, as if she belonged there. I noticed then that there was a wound on her leg, like she’d been in a dog-fight or something. She kept worrying at it, and licking it.
Mother and Grandmother were both fast asleep. I knew they’d chase the dog out as soon as they saw her there. But I liked her with me. I wanted her to stay. She had kind eyes, friendly eyes. I knew she wouldn’t hurt me. So I lay down and slept beside her.
Early the next