Born Under a Million Shadows Read Online Free

mate,” explained Georgie. “This is May; she’s an engineer.”
    May greeted us with handshakes. She was short, with yellow hair escaping from a green headscarf. She had spots on her face, and she also looked nothing like the woman from
Titanic
. The man called James gave her his beer, and she seemed happy with this. And although I tried not to look, I could see that under her blue shirt she had the most enormous breasts I’d ever come across. I wondered whether James had seen them.
    “We are all quite friendly here and very relaxed, so please treat this place as your home for as long as you need it,” said Georgie.
    My mother then thanked her and led me back to our rooms—away from the foreigners who had invited us into their home and away from the sight of May’s chest.
    Over the next few days, as my mother washed and cooked and basically did everything the foreigners seemed incapable of, I kept a careful eye on my new landlords. Although I was glad to be there, I had to protect my mother, and to do that I needed to know just who and what I was dealing with. My main concern was the naked journalist.
    Thankfully, the layout of the place gave me the chance to observe pretty much everything, unseen. The passageway behind the house allowed me to watch the garden unnoticed; the big windows gave me a grand view of what was happening downstairs, when it was dark outside and the lights were on; and the high walls and balconies gave me a way in to some of the sights above. Now and again my mother would catch me spying on the foreigners and shake her head, but although her eyes looked puzzled they seemed fairly unconcerned. She’d also taken to laughing more—and mainly when one of the guards, Shir Ahmad, came from his hut to refill his teapot.
    I made a mental note to investigate Shir Ahmad as soon as I’d finished with the foreigners.
     
    With so much spying to do, for the first few weeks after we moved to Wazir Akbar Khan I kept away from Chicken Street, despite the almost unbearable ache to tell Jahid about our television, and fill Jamilla’s head with the sights and sounds of my new home. Instead, I would return from school, sit in the doorway of the kitchen, chat with my mother as she did her chores, and wait for Georgie, James, and May to come back from wherever they had been.
    “How does Georgie know our Dari language?” I asked my mother as she peeled potatoes for that night’s dinner.
    “From her friends, I think.”
    “She has Afghan friends?”
    “Apparently so. Pass me that pan, will you, Fawad?”
    I reached for the metal container, tipped a dead fly out of it, and handed it over.
    “So, have you seen these friends?” I asked, settling back onto the kitchen step.
    “Once, yes.”
    “Who are they?”
    “Afghans.”
    “I know
that
!”
    My mother laughed, throwing the naked potatoes in the pan as she did so. “They are Pashtuns,” she finally offered. “From Jalalabad.”
    “Oh, she’s got some taste then.”
    “Yes.” My mother smiled before adding somewhat mysteriously, “Sort of.”
    “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
    “They’re not . . . how should I put it? They’re not the kind of friends I might choose for you.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’re my boy and I love you. Now that’s enough, Fawad. Go and finish your homework.”
    Dismissed, and left dangling once again by my mother’s riddles, I returned to my room to practice the multiplication tables we had been given at school that day. I guessed that in the same way I’d found out about the Taliban shadow, the reason Georgie had sort-of friends would become clear at some later stage of my life. However, I was glad they were Pashtun, like me. If they had been Hazaras, they would have cut off her breasts by now.
     
    As we actually had water connected to the house, I no longer had to make the backbreaking trip to the nearest tap to fight with other kids and dirty dogs for a bucketful of liquid that lasted five