Born Under a Million Shadows Read Online Free Page B

surprised me the first time because I was a breath away from leaving. But it was one of those warm surprises that make your toes tingle and your heart feel like it’s bleeding inside, because, thinking I was asleep, she kissed me softly on the cheek before returning to her own room, satisfied I was safely locked up in my dreams. Which of course I wasn’t. As a result of that first sweet surprise, I quickly learned to wait a good hour until after my mother’s visit before pulling on my shoes and allowing my adventures to begin.
    Creeping along walls and crouching in bushes, I listened to magical, mysterious conversations that exploded withlaughter as Georgie, James, and May spoke with other white-faced friends around the table in the garden. Of course, I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but this simply meant I now had a code I would have to learn to decipher.
    Really, I felt like I’d been plucked from the flames of Hell and placed into Paradise. In those first few weeks I wasn’t simply Fawad from Paghman; I was Fawad the secret agent. In those days, Kabul was crawling with spies—British, Pakistani, French, Italian, Russian, Indian, and American men as big as giants who wore their beards long to try to look Afghan. My mission from the president was simple: to discover who in the house was working as a spy, and the identity of their masters.
    As I crept and crawled my way through the heavy heat of those Kabul summer nights, I wrapped layers of dreams and heroic tales around my adventures, and I plotted escape routes and hatched complicated plans to avoid detection so that I might hand over my carefully gathered information to my comrades at the palace. I lived in a world of hazy future glories, picturing myself as a national hero thanks to all the good work I had carried out as a mere boy.
    “He was so young!” the people would say as they listened to the story of my successes.
    “Yes, but he was a true Afghan,” President Karzai would tell them, smiling widely because he was the man who had appointed me.
    “So brave! So fearless!” they would marvel. “He must have had balls as big as Ahmad Shah Massoud’s.”
    “Bigger!” the president would correct. “The boy was a Pashtun!”
    In order to fulfill my mission, I kept a careful record of all the foreigners’ movements in a red notebook Georgie had given me to practice my writing. Because James was hardlyever there, and Georgie was too beautiful to work for the enemy, I decided to concentrate on May.
    Once my mother had gone to sleep, I would sneak out of my room and shimmy up the wall of the “secret” passageway. From there I could see the door to May’s bedroom, on which was hung a long woolen jacket. On the far wall there was a wooden board with a collection of photographs pinned on it. I guessed they were of her family because the people caught in various poses all seemed to be short and yellow, but in my imagination they were part of a terror network supported by the pigs of Pakistan. The ISI, the country’s secret service, knew that the Afghan government would never suspect a Western woman from America of carrying out their evil plans. In that way they were as cunning as the devil himself. But they weren’t clever enough for Fawad—Afghanistan’s silent protector.
    Unfortunately, though, May seemed to be going through some kind of trauma. Most of the time she just disappeared to her room. And if she wasn’t in her room, she would be shouting into her mobile phone. And if she wasn’t shouting into her phone, she would be downstairs picking at the food my mother had spent all day preparing for her, or even worse, she would be crying. Although it’s never good to see a woman cry, her face looked angry rather than sad, and I found it confusing. To be honest, I thought May was slightly mental, and by the end of the second week I decided to give up investigating her spying activity for the Pakistanis and dedicate my time to getting