LITMIR.BIZ

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she’ll drown.

      Ellen pulled a bottle of water from her bag and drank. The mountains in the distance were stark but beautiful, a row of teeth biting into the landscape. They seemed more dignified than the dirty mudflats in front of them which were already filling with tents and makeshift shelters. The air rang with the toc-toc-toc of men banging in stakes for tent ropes and sticks which could form a rough frame for stretched sheets of plastic. The dry air crackled with static. Soon the torrent of the monsoon would break. When it did, this whole basin would flood. Disease would spread quickly. Including typhoid.

      Britta turned to face Ellen. She wore a falsely cheerful smile. ‘Because of the Taliban, we couldn’t reach these people in the mountains. Now we can give vaccinations.’

      She paused and the smile faltered. She’s still young, Ellen thought. She needs to harden if she’s going to survive in a place like this.

      Britta tried again. ‘And maybe the girls can go back to school.’

      Ellen thought about the crowded ward and the exhausted new arrivals sitting patiently outside the gates, waiting for help.

      ‘At the moment,’ she said, ‘what are you short of?’

      Britta spread her hands. ‘For so many people?’ she said. ‘Everything.’

      Chapter 5

      After the day of the picnic, Baba and the Uncles didn’t let any of us, girls or women, leave the compound at all. Not even to go to school or to fetch water. The boys were ordered to take the pails instead. No one would tell me what was going on outside.

      Baba still went to teach at the school each day but when he came back, his face was drawn and his mouth hard and when I sat beside him with my school books and asked him questions, he looked past me into the empty air.

      In the evenings, all the women, young and old, were sent off to bed and the men dragged the low wooden charpoys across the yard and sat together, talking in low voices. I heard the scrape of matches and smelt bitter smoke as the men lit hand-rolled cigarettes. The tips glowed red in the darkness. A hunting bird out on the mountainside gave a low cry. Cicadas screeched in the grass. Somewhere, far away, a man’s voice spluttered and whistled on a badly tuned radio set.

      Before all this, I liked to listen to the men’s voices when they gathered to talk. Even when I lay on my cot away from the window, falling backwards into sleep, I could hear them as they made plans for the planting season or for harvest.

      But now their voices were barely more than murmurs and I couldn’t catch a word. Some nights, I knelt at the sill, looking out at their hunched shoulders and tight faces, watching the bobbing red of their cigarettes, and prayed to Allah, not for the first time, that He in His Wisdom might finally turn me into a boy so I could sit there beside Baba on a charpoy and take part in important talking and be always at his side in the day too and not stuck here in our suffocating compound, surrounded by giggling girls and empty-headed Aunties.

      One evening, Hamid Uncle came home carrying a parcel and told everyone to gather round. When he tore off the paper, two bundles of material fell out. They were off-white in colour and shiny. He took one and held it up to show us. It hung in tightly pleated folds which bulged shapelessly like a vast cloak. The top part was rounded and shaped like a head. A tight grid of cotton strands lay where the face should be.

      ‘A burqa.’ Jamila Auntie was the first to speak. ‘So, has it come to this? You want to make us disappear altogether?’

      She turned to Baba and he looked down, embarrassed.

      ‘It’s for your own safety,’ said Hamid Uncle. ‘I’m the head of this family and if it is needful for any woman to leave this compound, this is what she must wear.’

      The Aunties stared at each other. We had always covered our heads in public but this burqa was something new. Jamila Auntie crossed her arms over her chest. Finally one of the Aunties put out a hand to take the burqa from Hamid Uncle and look at it more closely. She opened it out and pulled it over her head, disappearing from view, then walked carefully round the yard. When she pulled it off again, her hair was untidy and her face flushed.

      ‘So hot.’ She fanned at her face with her free hand. ‘Like an oven.’

      The other Aunties crowded round to try. One by one, they were turned into anonymous blobs by the cloth, as formless as the snow people the boys built on the mountain in winter. Only the toes of their sandals were visible, poking out as they stepped forwards.

      Baba asked us once in school what special powers we’d each like to have, if it be the will of Allah. I said I should like very much to fly, but my classmate said she’d like an invisible cloak, so she could go anywhere and do anything and no one would ever know. Now, watching the Aunties as they were swallowed whole by the burqa, I thought of her wish.

      Finally the Aunties finished playing with the burqa and it was my turn. I pulled the great bundle of cloth over my head. The narrow cap tightened round my skull, then its folds tumbled to the ground, almost covering my feet. The compound fell away from me and, peering through the squared grid over my eyes, I felt as if I’d disappeared into a separate world and was looking out at the familiar scene from a faraway place. The grid was narrow. I could only see things directly in front of me. Now the compound gates. Now, as I turned my head, the charpoys where the boys sat, fidgeting and fighting. Now, as I twisted my body further round, the faces of the Aunties, Mama and Baba and finally Jamila Auntie’s cross face.

      I walked up and down carefully, not tripping as some of the girls had done. I imagined all the places I could visit in secret inside this burqa and all the conversations I could overhear, without anyone knowing it was me. I was tall for my age. I could easily be taken for a grown woman.

      I turned and started to walk back across the yard, pleased with myself, until I saw Mama and Baba’s faces. Mama’s eyes were full of pain and she was wringing her hands, squeezing out an invisible rope of washing. Baba was watching me with the same look of sorrow I’d seen on the day of the picnic.

      ‘What?’ I tore off the burqa as fast as I could as if it might burn into me like a second skin. ‘What’s wrong?’

      Mama’s stomach grew huge. Then her birthing pains came. She lay groaning on her back on the cot while the Auntie who knew how to deliver babies fussed round her and wiped sweat from her face. On the third day, the moans rose to screams and when I helped Auntie wash Mama down with a wet cloth, it came away from between her legs sodden with blood. When I rinsed it out, the water in the pail made red clouds.

      Auntie looked worried. I followed her outside. Something was wrong, she told the women there. The baby was coming out badly and Baba should take Mama to the clinic in town as soon as possible.

      Jamila Auntie slowly shook her head. ‘She can’t go there.’

      ‘But the baby’s stuck.’ Auntie pulled a face behind Jamila Auntie’s back and spat into the dust. The spittle hung there for some time, in the shape of a silver fish, as if the ground were reluctant to receive it.

      Jamila Auntie leant forwards and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s not safe.’

      Auntie called over a boy and sent him to fetch Baba from school.

      Mama was so weak that she could barely walk. The Aunties packed cloths between her legs to hide the bleeding, then hoisted her from the charpoy onto her feet. Her eyes were closed and she was panting with short, hard breaths. When they pulled a burqa over her head, her belly pushed out the loose folds into a ball.

      Baba came breathlessly through the compound gate. I thanked Allah for getting him home quickly. He helped the Aunties move Mama to the door and lower her backwards into a wheelbarrow. She sat there, her head lolled forwards onto her chest, her legs hanging limp over the front. He picked up the handles and pushed her, accompanied by the rumble and squeak of the wheels and the low animal moan emerging from beneath the burqa.

      One of the Aunties picked up the second burqa and pushed it at me.

      ‘Go

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