A Thousand Splendid Suns

(Nancy Kaufman) #1

There was a leafless tree he climbed every day, where he straddled a branch and watched
the refugees lying about in the sun, their sores and stumps in plain view. He watched little
emaciated boys carrying water in their jerry cans, gathering dog droppings to make fire,
carving toy AK 47s out of wood with dull knives, lugging the sacks of wheat flour that no
one could make bread from that held together. All around the refugee town, the wind made
the tents flap. It hurled stubbles of weed everywhere, lifted kites flown from the roofs of
mud hovels.


"A lot of kids died. Dysentery, TB, hunger you name it. Mostly, that damn dysentery. God,
Laila. I saw so many kids buried. There's nothing worse a person can see."


He crossed his legs. It grew quiet again between them for a while.


"My father didn't survive that first winter," he said. "He died in his sleep. I don't think
there was any pain."


That same winter, he said, his mother caught pneumonia and almost died, would have died,
if not for a camp doctor who worked out of a station wagon made into a mobile clinic. She
would wake up all night long, feverish, coughing out thick, rust colored phlegm. The
queues were long to see the doctor, Tariq said. Everyone was shivering in line, moaning,
coughing, some with shit running down their legs, others too tired or hungry or sick to
make words.


"But he was a decent man, the doctor. He treated my mother, gave her some pills, saved
her life that winter."


That same winter, Tariq had cornered a kid.


"Twelve, maybe thirteen years old," he said evenly. "I held a shard of glass to his throat
and took his blanket from him. I gave it to my mother."


He made a vow to himself, Tariq said, after his mother's illness, that they would not spend
another winter in camp. He'd work, save, move them to an apartment in Peshawar with
heating and clean water. When spring came, he looked for work. From time to time, a truck
came to camp early in the morning and rounded up a couple of dozen boys, took them to a
field to move stones or an orchard to pick apples in exchange for a little money, sometimes
a blanket, a pair of shoes. But they never wanted him, Tariq said.


"One look at my leg and it was over."


There were other jobs. Ditches to dig, hovels to build, water to carry, feces to shovel from
outhouses. But young men fought over these jobs, and Tariq never stood a chance Then he
met a shopkeeper one day, that fall of 1993.


"He offered me money to take a leather coat to Lahore. Not a lot but enough, enough for

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