Her voice was pleasant and inviting. “Yes, please.” I sat cross-legged on the ground in front of her.
She pulled out a black box and a small wooden stick. She sharpened the tip of the stick with her pocketknife until it was smooth and clean. She then dipped it in the black powder and delicately applied it around my eyes.
The powder began to tickle my eyelids. “I put it thicker on the outside corners,” she said. “When I’m done, if you smudge it with your fingers, it will look very nice and it will last longer.” She kept working until she leaned back to admire her work. She gave me a warm smile as she took in her handiwork. She then retrieved a small hand mirror, holding it up for me to see. “Take a look.”
I appeared a different person, more grown-up. She showed me how to smudge it to make my eyes smoky and exotic. She made me feel so peaceful here, applying makeup together. I liked her.
“Can I buy some of your chooris?” I pointed at the bangles on her arms. She nodded and dug into her bag again, pulling out a few and handing them to me.
“You must be very careful because they are made of glass.”
I held them in my palm. They seemed too small for my wrist.
“You’re very young, and your bones are flexible,” she said, noticing my reluctance. “You can get anything on your wrist if you do it correctly.”
I stretched out my hand. She grabbed it and squeezed my fingers together, then worked the bangles over my knuckles and onto my wrist one at time. She didn’t stop until my entire right arm was filled with colorful bangles. I lifted my wrist and jangled them in the air. I loved how they sounded.
“How do I get them off?”
“You have to break them,” she said. “If you wait till you get to your destination, they will bring you luck along the way.”
As she put her surma and chooris back in her bag, I noticed a scar on her forearm, a white spot on her olive skin, surrounded by pinkish wrinkled flesh. She followed my eyes to her arm, then ran an index finger over the spot.
“It’s a scorpion sting,” she said. “It never quite healed right. Have you been stung? They’re everywhere around here.”
It must have been so painful. I couldn’t stop staring. “No, I haven’t.”
“Then take this.” She reached in her bag and pulled out a jar half filled with liquid with a rusty lid. The glass was old and cloudy, yet the liquid was clear. “When you come across a scorpion, kill it and put it in here.” She handed me the jar. “This will make a medicine that you can apply to the sting. Never drink it. It’s not that kind of medicine. But put it on the sting itself. Do you understand?”
I nodded and thanked her, then gave her the five afghanis. All the way back to our camp, I held the jar out in front of me, trying to figure out what kind of special liquid was inside. I shook it hard, then watched it settle, imagining what it would look like with a scorpion inside. I wanted to start hunting them right then. The conversation made me wistful, and a sudden longing came over my heart for Mommy.
When I showed the jar to Laila and the others, they just shrugged. Scorpions weren’t that interesting to them. Not even to Zia. Masood seemed amused. He said he’d heard of the cure before and seemed glad I had purchased it. Laila perked up when I showed her my bangles, shaking them in front of her. She thought of buying some for herself but decided she couldn’t part with her money.
We rested at the camp for several more days, but everyone kept to themselves, and no one had talked to the Kuchi but me since we had arrived. I’d heard my whole life from Mommy and others that they would only steal from you, rob you of everything you had if you turned your backs on them for a moment. Yet the way that young Kuchi mother played with her children and loved them, I couldn’t believe for one moment that this woman was as cruel as people in the camp made her out to be. She made me think of how Mommy had cared for us, and I began to wonder about reaching our destination. Would she be there waiting for us, to hold out her hands in warm greeting when she saw me? Or would she turn away like she had that day in the driveway. I lingered on this thought as we waited to move on.
When we left a few days later, the woman waved to me. My bangles jangled in the air as I waved at her in return.
We climbed higher every day, working our way along the rocky trails, passing more villages where more families were burying their fathers, brothers, and sons. In every village we passed, many of them nothing but huts and a few animals, we saw only old men, women, and children. Even the boys Zia’s age, in their early teens, had disappeared into the mountains.
At one village, Masood bought each of us a knife with a beige leather sheath. Mine had a handmade woven belt with a buckle that I fastened around my waist. He told us not to play with them because they were sharp, and we’d get hurt. To just use them if we needed to defend ourselves or to kill a snake or a scorpion. I couldn’t wait to try mine out. I felt ready to defend myself and eager to use it on a dreaded scorpion.
Several other travelers had already been stung by scorpions, and I was determined not to go through that agony. Some became so sick that they couldn’t travel. I hoped I could help some of them with the medicine. With my knife and my jar of secret liquid as protection, I looked everywhere for them as we hiked along the mountain trails. Every time we stopped to rest, I went off to hunt scorpions. One day I sat on a rock resting, and I saw one close by, sunning itself on a flat rock. I slowly unsheathed my knife. I didn’t want to spook the critter and have it come at me. I held my knife in the stabbing position, blade down, firmly gripping the handle. At first I couldn’t bring myself to stab it. Then I took a breath and slashed at it, the blade crushing into its back. It swished its tail, trying to sting me. I lifted it and dropped it into the open jar, and then quickly screwed on the lid.
I held the jar up and watched it scrambling to rise out of the liquid. It fought a losing battle valiantly before steadily sinking into the fluid and drowning. My heart raced with victory. I had done it. Every fear I’d ever had of scorpions disappeared in that moment.
We spent several days on the road while Masood tried to find a village that could offer us hospitality. Every one we passed through was crowded with fleeing refugees. Every day on the road, I stalked scorpions whenever we stopped to rest. I learned to stay clear of their tails after I cut them off because they kept moving and could still sting. Before we reached the next village to rest, I had seven scorpions in my jar.
Now if someone got stung, I was confident I could help them. I had every reason to believe the medicine would heal a scorpion wound. At night I kept the jar right by my side. Often scorpions would crawl into the blankets of travelers sleeping on the ground. When someone was stung, their cries would wake us.
I dreamt often that my captured scorpions escaped and crawled all over me, stinging and causing me pain. When I awoke, I knew it was all a dream because the scorpions in the jar were dead.
Finally we reached a typical village of mud huts that was crowded with travelers. A villager told us about an event that troubled all of us: several months before, a young girl had been raped and killed. They had never caught the man who did it, and the village elder who told us about it was certain it wasn’t one of the residents, because they all knew each other very well. So many refugees fleeing the country had passed through over the last year that the man who did it could easily have slipped away in the night, unnoticed. He told us to watch out for ourselves.
This was very troubling. It made me think of Mina’s father, a supposed Muslim, selling his own daughter to another man to become a wife and slave. But Islam teaches that a man must not touch a woman without her consent. Mina didn’t consent to be a wife. None of this made any sense to me, the more I thought about it.