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 that, with the American soldiers or the British, he wasn’t sure which.
“They use dogs like this to find the roadside bombs, to sniff them out,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Those soldiers, the foreign soldiers, they all look much the same in their helmets, and some of them are so young. Just boys most of them, far from home, and too young to die.” After that he stopped talking, and just hummed along with the music on his radio. We were asleep before we knew it.
I don’t know how many hours later, the driver woke us up. “Kandahar,” he said. He pointed out the way to the Iranian frontier on his map. “South and West. But you’ll need papers to get across. The Iranians are very strict. Have you got any papers? You haven’t, have you? Money?”
“No,” Mother told him.
“Papers I can’t help you with,” the driver said. “But I have a little money. It’s not much, but you are Hazara, you are like family, and your need is greater than mine.”
Mother didn’t like to take it, but he insisted. So thanks to this stranger, we were at least able to eat, and to find a room to stay, while we worked out what to do and where to go next. I don’t know how much money the driver gave us, but I do know that by the time Mother had paid for the meal and the room for the night, there was very little left, enough only to buy us the bus fare out of town the next morning. But as it turned out, that didn’t get us very far.
The bus that we had taken, that was supposed to take us all the way to the frontier, broke down out in the middle of the countryside. But it was now a countryside very different from the gentle valley of Bamiyan that I was used to. There were no orchards, no fields here, just desert and rocks, as far as you could see, so hot and dusty by day that you could hardly breathe; and cold at night, sometimes too cold to sleep.
But there were always the stars. Father used to tell me you only had to try counting the stars, and you always went to sleep in the end. He was right most nights. Night or day we were always thirsty, always hungry. And the blister on my heel was getting a lot worse all the time, and was hurting me more and more.
After walking for many days – I don’t know how many – we came at last to a small village, where we had a drink from the well, and rested for a bit while Mother bathed my foot. The people there stood at their doors and looked at us warily, almost
