all over me, and then all over Mother too, wagging everything.
To my surprise, Mother did not seem to mind at all. In fact she was laughing now through her tears. “At least,” said Mother, “at least, we have one friend left in this world. She has great courage, this dog. I was wrong about her. I think maybe this dog is not like other dogs. She may be a stranger, but as such we should welcome her, and look after her. She may be a dog, but I think she is more like a friend than a dog, like a friendly shadow that does not want to leave us. You never lose your shadow.”
“That is what we should call her then,” I told her. “Shadow. We’ll call her Shadow.” The dog seemed pleased with that as she looked up at me. She was smiling. She was really smiling. Soon she was bounding on ahead of us, sniffing along the side of the road, her tail waving us on.
It was strange. We had just lost all we had in the world, and only minutes before everything had seemed completely hopeless, but now that waving tail of hers gave us new hope. And I could see Mother felt the same. I knew at that moment, that somehow we were going find a way to get to England. Shadow was going to get us there. I had no idea how. But together, we were going to do it. Some way, somehow.
Somehow
Aman
We had to sit there for a long while, until it was dark. We had only the stars for company. Every truck that went by covered us in dust. But we got a lift in the end, in the back of a pick-up truck full of melons, hundreds of them.
We were so hungry by now that we ate several of them between us, chucking the melon skins out of the back as we went along so that the driver wouldn’t find out. Then we slept. It wasn’t comfortable. But we were too tired to care. It was morning before we reached Kabul.
Mother had never in her life been to Kabul, and neither had I. We were pinning all our hopes now on the contact telephone numbers Uncle Mir had written on the back of that envelope.
The first thing we had to do was to look for a public phone. The driver dropped us off in the marketplace. It was the first time in my life I had ever been into a city. There were so many people, so many streets and shops and buildings, so many cars and trucks and carts and bicycles, and there were police and soldiers everywhere. They all had rifles, but there was nothing new or frightening for me about that. Everyone back home in Bamiyan had rifles too. I think just about every man in Afghanistan has a rifle. It was their eyes I was frightened of. Every policeman or soldier seemed to be looking right at us and only at us as we passed.
But then I did notice that it wasn’t us they were interested in so much. It was Shadow. She was skulking along beside us, much closer to us than usual, her nose touching my leg from time to time. I could tell she wasn’t liking all the noise and bustle of the place any more than we were.
It took a while to find a public phone. Mother arranged to meet Uncle Mir’s contact, and at first he was quite welcoming. He gave us a hot meal, and I thought everything was going to be fine now. But when Mother told him we had lost all the money Uncle Mir had sent us for the journey to England, that it had been stolen from us, he was suddenly no longer so friendly.
Mother pleaded with him to help. She told him we had nowhere to go, nowhere to spend the night. That was when I began to notice that, like the police and the soldiers in the street, he too seemed to be more interested in Shadow than in us. He agreed then to let us have a room to stay in, but only for one night. It was a bare room with a bed and a carpet, but after living my whole life in a cave, this was like a palace to me.
All we wanted was to sleep, but this man hung around and wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept asking questions about Shadow, about where we had got her from, about what sort of dog she was. “This dog,” he said, “she is a foreign-looking dog, I think. Does she bite? Is she a good guard dog?”
The more I saw of the man, the more I did not trust him. Shadow didn’t much like him either, and kept her distance. He had darting eyes, and a mean and treacherous look about him. That’s why I said what I did. “Yes, she bites,” I told him. “And if anyone attacks us, she goes mad, like a wolf.”
“A good fighter then?” he asked.
“The best,” I said. “Once she bites, she never lets go.”
“Good, that’s good,” he said. The man thought for a moment or two, never taking his eye off Shadow. “Tell you what, I’ll do you a deal,” he went on. “You give me the dog, and I’ll arrange everything for you. I’ll give you enough money to get you over the border into Iran and all the way to Turkey. You won’t have to worry yourselves about anything. How’s that?”
It was Mother who understood at once what this man was after. “You want her for a fighting dog, don’t you?” she asked him.
“That’s right,” he told her. “She’s a bit on the small side. And a proper Afghan fighting dog will tear a foreign dog like her to bits. But so long as she puts up a good fight, that’s all that counts. It’s not just about size. It’s the show they come to see. Have we got a deal?”
“No, no deal. We are not selling her, are we, Aman?” Mother replied, crouching down, and putting her arm around Shadow. “Not for anything. She’s stuck by us, and we’re going to stick by her.”
That’s when the man lost his temper. He started yelling at us. “Who do you think you are? You Hazara, you’re all the same, so high and mighty. You’d better think about it. You sell me that dog, or else! I’ll be back in the morning.”
He slammed the door behind him as he left, and we heard the key turn in the lock. When I tried the door moments later, it wouldn’t budge. We were prisoners.
Counting the Stars
Aman
The window was high up, but Mother thought if we turned the bed on its side, and climbed up, we might just be able to get out. So that’s what we did. It was a small window, and there’d be a big drop on the other side, but we had no choice, we had to try. It was our only hope.
I went first, and Mother handed Shadow up to me. I dropped Shadow to the ground, saw her land safely, and then followed her. It was more difficult for Mother, and it took some time, but in the end she managed to squeeze herself out of the window and jump down.
We were in an alleyway. No one was about. I wanted us to run, but Mother said that would attract attention. So we walked out of the alley, and into the crowded streets of Kabul.
With lots of other people about, I thought we were safe enough, but Mother said we’d be better off out of Kabul altogether, as far away from that man as we could get. We had no money for food, no money for a bus fare. So we started walking, Shadow leading the way again. We just followed her through the city streets, weaving our way through the bustle of people and traffic, too exhausted to care which way she was taking us. North, south, east or west, it really did not bother us. We were leaving danger behind us, and that was all that mattered.
By the time it got dark, we were already well outside the city. The stars and the moon were out over the mountains, but it was a cold night, and we knew we’d have to find shelter soon.
We had been trying to hitch a ride for hours, but nothing had stopped. Then we got lucky. A lorry was parked up ahead of us, at the side of the road. I knocked on the window of the cab and asked the driver if we could have a ride. He asked where we came from. When I told him we were from Bamiyan and we were going to England, he laughed, and told us he was from a village down the valley, that he was Hazara like us. He wasn’t going as far as England, only to Kandahar, but he was happy to take us if that would help. Mother said we would go wherever he was going, that we were hungry and tired, and just needed to rest.
He turned out to be the kindest man we could have hoped to meet. He gave us water to drink and shared his supper with us. In the warm fug of his cab, we soon shivered the cold out of us. He asked us a few questions, mostly about Shadow. He said he had only once before seen a foreign-looking dog like