In the Sea There are Crocodiles (5 page)

———

Osta sahib
and I went to a place called Sar Ab (two words that mean “head” and “water”) on the outskirts of the city, to buy the merchandise.

Sar Ab is a big square filled with rusty cars and vans with their boots wide open and their owners standing next to them, each selling different things. We wandered around for a while, choosing what to buy, looking at which wholesaler was the cheapest and which had the most interesting merchandise.
Osta sahib
haggled over everything. Every single packet. He was a born trader. He bought a few snacks, some chewing gum, socks and cigarette lighters. We put everything in a cardboard box, with a string attached to it so it could be carried over your shoulder, and left.
Osta sahib
gave me quite a lot of advice. He told me who I should speak to and who I shouldn’t speak to, which were the best places for selling and which weren’t, what to do if the police showed up, and so on. Among all these pieces of advice, the most important was: don’t let anyone steal your things.

We said goodbye and
osta sahib
raised his hand in the air and wished me good luck. It struck me that, unless there was a reserve of different pieces of good luck somewhere, to suit each occasion, this was the same good luck I had been wished by my father’s old friend after he had taken us as far as Kandahar. I turned quickly and ran
down the street. If I ran fast enough, I thought, someone else might get that good luck. I preferred to avoid it.

It was almost time for afternoon break at the school, and I didn’t want to change my routine. I deliberately made a detour so I could stand outside the playground and hear the ball bouncing against the wall and the voices of the children chasing each other. I sat down on a low wall. When the teachers took the children back inside, I stood up and walked toward the bazaar, keeping close to the houses in order to be protected on that side, and holding the cardboard box tightly in my arms because I was really scared that something would be stolen.

The bazaar where
osta sahib
had told me to go was called the Liaqat Bazaar and it was in the center of the city.

The main street of the Liaqat Bazaar is called Shar Liaqat, and the color of that street is a combination of all the colors on the posters and signs, green, red, white, yellow, a yellow one with the words
Call Point Pco
and the telephone symbol on it, a blue one with
Rizwan Jewellers
on it, and so on, and under the English words, the Arabic words, and under the Arabic words, the dust swirling in the sunlight, and in among the dust swirling in the sunlight a swarm of people and bicycles and cars and voices and noise and smoke and smells.

In keeping with tradition, the first day was really bad, almost worse than the first day at the
samavat
Qgazi. The kind of day you want to pretend never happened, the kind of day you’d like to leave on a stone and walk away from and never see again. Obviously, I hadn’t run fast enough and good luck had caught up with me.

It was evening and I hadn’t yet sold anything. That could mean I wasn’t any good at selling, or that nobody was interested in my things, or that everyone had already stocked up with snacks, socks and handkerchiefs, or that there was a knack to getting rid of the merchandise that I didn’t know about. At that point, feeling discouraged, I leaned on a lamppost and looked at what was showing on a television in the window of a household appliance shop. I was so spellbound by some program or other—a news broadcast, a soap opera, a nature documentary, whatever it was—that I didn’t notice what was happening, I swear, all I saw was a hand reach into my cardboard box, grab a packet of chewing gum and disappear.

I turned. A group of boys—six or seven of them, speaking Pashtun, probably Baluchis—were standing in the middle of the street, looking at me and laughing. One of them, who seemed to be the leader, was playing with a packet of chewing gum—my packet of chewing gum—balancing it on the back of his hand.

We started arguing, me in my language, they in theirs.

I really needed some chewing gum, the leader said.

Give it back to me, I said.

Come and get it. He made a gesture with his hand.

Should I try and get it from him? I should point out that I was a lot smaller than them and there were more of them than me and they all looked quite tough and not to be trusted. If I’d thrown myself on their leader, I’m ready to bet I would have ended up with broken bones and all my merchandise in their boxes. And what would it be like to tell
osta sahib
that everything had been stolen from me on the very first day? So, not out of fear, but rather because I’m the kind of person who thinks before doing something important, I had almost decided that it was better to lose a packet of chewing gum than my teeth, and was about to leave when—

Give it back.

Give him back the packet.

Out of nowhere, a group of Hazara boys suddenly materialized. First one, then two, then three, there seemed no end to them. Some were younger than me. They dropped from the roofs, sprang out from the back alleys. After a few minutes, there were more of us than there were of them. Seeing how things were shaping
up, some of the Baluchi boys slunk away. Their leader stayed put, along with two of his followers, one on his right and one on his left, but a step behind him because they were scared. I felt as powerful as a snow leopard. With that small army behind me I approached the leader to try and get the packet of chewing gum back, but he suddenly started running. Or at least tried to. I grabbed him, and we rolled on the ground, with our boxes of merchandise and everything. I could feel his muscles under the cloth of his
pirhan
. He landed a couple of punches. As we fought I managed to grab a pair of socks from his box. Then he gave me a kick in the stomach that took my breath away, grabbed hold of his box and ran away. He still had the chewing gum. But I had the socks, which were worth more.

One of the Hazaras helped me up.

You could have joined in, I said. I wouldn’t have minded.

Yes, we could, but it would have been worse for you next time. This way, you showed you could defend yourself.

Do you think so?

Yes, I do.

I shook his hand. Thanks, anyway. My name’s Enaiatollah.

Sufi.

———

I made friends with the Hazara boys, and with Sufi in particular. His real name was Gioma, but he was known as Sufi because he liked to keep himself to himself, and was as calm and silent as a Sufi monk, even though there were times when he caused more trouble than anyone else.

For instance, as we were walking through the streets one evening, he went up to a vagrant lying half asleep on the ground, a dirty, smelly fellow, and dropped a handful of little stones into his metal bowl. The poor man immediately got up to see who’d given him all that money, and I’m willing to bet he was already under the illusion that he was rich and could afford a meal in the best restaurant in the city or buy himself as much opium as he wanted. That must have been why, when he realized they were only stones and saw us laughing behind the wall of a mosque, he started running after us, shouting that he’d fry us in chip oil. But we sped off, and he was too weak to catch up with us.

Another time, Sufi saw a motorbike tied to a pole and got on it. Not to steal it, just to know how it felt to be on it: he’d always dreamed of having a motorbike. But as soon as he gripped the throttle and pressed the clutch lever, for some reason the motorbike started up. It jerked forward, turning around the post it was tied to, and Sufi
was thrown off and fell onto a fruit stall, hurting his back and one of his legs. For quite a while after that, he had difficulty kneeling in prayer.

Every day we went to the market with the other Hazara boys, and at lunchtime we pooled our money for a bit of Greek yogurt and chives, a few loaves of
naan tandoori
, which is a flat, round bread baked in a clay oven, and some fruit or vegetables, if there were any.

That’s how it was.

I kept working at the Liaqat Bazaar because I had nothing better to do—and I would never have gone back to the
samavat
Qgazi because I’d have lost Sufi and my other friends—but I didn’t like it. It wasn’t like having a shop where people come in and ask you for things, and you just have to be there to welcome them and be nice. No, here you had to go up to them, stand in front of them or next to them while they were doing or thinking about other things, and say, Buy, please buy. You had to bother them like a fly, and obviously that made them angry and they treated you badly.

I didn’t like bothering people. I didn’t like being treated badly. But everyone (including me) is interested in staying alive, and in order to stay alive we’re willing to do things we don’t like.

I had even come up with a few original ideas to force people to buy, and they seemed to work. One was that I would go up to those who had a child in their arms, bite into a snack without opening it, leaving a mark on the wrapper, and while they weren’t looking I would give it to the child, then say to the parents, Look, he took a bite out of this snack. He’s ruined it and now you have to pay for it. Another trick was to give the child a little pinch on the arm, lightly enough not to leave a mark, so that they started crying, then I would hold out a snack and say to their parents, Here’s something that’ll calm your child down.

But all that went against the third thing Mother had told me not to do:
don’t cheat
.

Apart from that, the big problem was where to sleep. When it got dark the boys and I would hole up in one of the more squalid neighborhoods on the outskirts of Quetta. Abandoned houses about to collapse. Drug addicts behind the cars. Fires. Garbage. I was very dirty, but every morning, even before looking for something to eat, I would go to a mosque to wash myself, and then walk past the same school as before.

I didn’t skip a day. As if I felt I’d be playing truant if I did.

One afternoon I talked to
osta sahib
, the shopkeeper I’d gone into business with, and told him I wanted to quit
and that I’d rather look for other work, because I couldn’t stand sleeping in the street anymore.

Without saying a word, he took a piece of paper and did the accounts. Then he told me how much I’d earned so far. I couldn’t believe it. He took the coins and notes and put them into my hand. It was quite a bit of money. I’d never had so much money in my life.

Then he said, If the problem is where to sleep, come to the shop in the evening, before I close up. I’ll let you sleep here.

In the shop?

In the shop.

I looked around. It was a clean place, with rugs on the floor and cushions propped up against the wall. There was no water and no toilet, but there was a mosque nearby where I could go in the morning.

I accepted. In the evening, I would arrive at the shop before seven, and he would pull down the shutter. He wouldn’t leave me the keys, so I had to stay in there all night until he came to open up the next day, and sometimes he didn’t come until ten or later. Waiting for him to come and let me out, and having nothing else to do, I remember I tried to read the newspapers he left on the counter, but I never managed to learn Urdu well. I’d have to read slowly, so slowly that by the time I got halfway
down the page, I couldn’t remember what it had said at the beginning. I was looking for news about Afghanistan.

Why don’t you tell me a bit more about Afghanistan before we go on?

What kind of thing?

Something about your mother, or your friends. Your relatives. Your village
.

I don’t want to talk about people, I don’t want to talk about places. They aren’t important
.

Why?

Facts are important. The story is important. It’s what happens to you that changes your life, not where or who with
.

One winter morning—every day in winter I would look up at the sky hoping it would snow, the way it did in Nava, but although winter in Quetta was so cold it could take your skin off, it was the worst thing possible, a winter without snow: when I realized it wasn’t going to snow I cried as I’d never cried up to that point—anyway, one winter morning, I went into a shop that sold plates and glasses and asked the shopkeeper for a drop of water. He looked me up and down as if I was an insect, then said, First tell me who you are. Are you Shia or Muslim? Theoretically, they’re the same thing, so it was a really
stupid question. I got angry. Patience has its limits even when you’re a child no taller than a goat.

First I’m a Shia, I said, then I’m a Muslim. Or rather, I added, first I’m a Hazara, then a Shia, then a Muslim.

I could easily have told him I was a Muslim and left it at that, but I said what I said just to spite him. He took a broom and started beating me with the stick, very hard, without mercy. He hit me on my head and back. I ran out of the shop screaming, partly from anger and partly from pain, and the people who were there just stood around and did nothing. I bent down and picked up a stone and threw it into the shop, such a well-aimed, accurate shot that if an American had seen me he’d have immediately hired me to play on a baseball team. I didn’t want to hit the shopkeeper, just break a few plates and glasses. He hid under the counter to dodge the stone and the stone shattered all the things displayed in a wooden cabinet behind him. I ran off, and never once went back to that street.

On the afternoon of the same day—I don’t know where Sufi was, sometimes he went off on his own—I went to an Indian place to buy some
ash. Ash
is a bean soup with long thin noodles, a bit like minestrone. Anyway, I’d gone to buy
ash
—I’d earned a bit of extra money and wanted to treat myself, because I was really fed up with
naan tandoori
and Greek yogurt—and I’d just taken
the bowl when one of the usual longbeards came up to me and said, Why are you eating
ash
bought from an Indian?

Now you need to know, Fabio, that eating
ash
is a sin—I don’t know why, but it is—but I had already tasted the
ash
, and it was very good, I swear. And if a food is as good as that, I don’t think it can be a sin to eat it, do you? So I replied, I like it, why can’t I eat it?