I talked to Shakila, and she told me that rape and murder are sins in Islam. I understood that well, but still everything I’d seen with my own eyes, the way Mina was treated, filled me with doubts. The way Islam was practiced in the countryside was very different than my father’s religion.
That night, my sisters and I hardly slept. We whispered to each other about the rapist. Every noise outside our hut became a potential danger. I began to wish I were a boy. Zulaikha and Laila were older, and so they were more of a target, and I became afraid for them, watching them every moment.
“Can you imagine,” I said under my breath to my sisters. “If he came, and I turned into a wolf. I would tear him to pieces.” We all laughed.
Masood must have known our fears, because soon afterward he began to teach us how to fire a gun. He’d purchased a BB gun from a villager and took us outside the mud walls to practice. He showed Zia first how to load and fire it. Zia did okay, hitting the target most of the time. Then he handed it to me. I loved the feel of the weapon in my hand. Zia set up some targets to hit in the distance. I sighted the barrel the way Masood had shown me, then squeezed off round after round—tat-tat-tat—I plunked all the rock piles he’d set up.
Shooting was exhilarating. Masood had a surprised look on his face. “You are a natural-born shooter,” he said. I glowed. Zia and I rose every morning, eager to begin our practice. Masood wouldn’t give us any more BBs to shoot, so we used chickpeas. We made targets out of mud and let them dry overnight so they’d be hard. We both got very good at hitting the bull’s-eye.
One day Zia asked me to hold up a matchbox. He convinced me he could shoot it out of my hand from a distance without touching me. He was good with the gun. I had seen it with my own eyes. Besides, a chickpea wouldn’t hurt if he hit me. So I grabbed the matchbox and held it up high over my head. He ran back and then turned to me, raised the gun and aimed it and fired.
The pain began with a spot of heat on my palm, then it radiated out into my fingers in a fiery sensation in flares of shooting pain. I bent over, holding my hand, trying to quench the sharp darts prickling my palm; tears of agony streamed down my face.
“Why’d you move?” he yelled.
“I didn’t,” I screamed, nearly breathless.
We didn’t return until the pain subsided a bit. I decided to tell Masood that I’d hurt my palm when I fell and scraped it. He looked at my wound closely but didn’t say anything more. I didn’t want him to take away Zia’s shooting privileges. It didn’t really matter anyway, because Zia didn’t want to do any more shooting after that. The black dot on my palm persisted for a long time. I went back to collecting scorpions, filling my jar until it was packed with them. I wanted to be ready to help the next time someone awoke in the night screaming.
The entire village was quiet, and only the sounds of the nearby war in the mountains interrupted my sleep. I thrashed awake from a deep slumber with a piercing pain, like I’d been shot with a bullet in my calf. Then I felt something scaly, like an insect crawling up the back of my leg. I flipped over and jumped up, pulled my pants away from my skin, and shook the scorpion off.
I went to Zia where he slept on a charpai—a handmade wooden frame with rope stretched across its width to form a tight mesh that worked as a mattress—on the other side of the hut. I didn’t want to wake everyone else, because it would make my sisters go crazy with fear. “Zia, I got bit.”
He wrestled awake and looked around for a moment. When he realized what I’d said, he leapt up. He grabbed a scarf and tied off my leg above the wound to stop the poison from traveling up my leg and to my heart. By this time, it felt as if someone had shot a needle into my calf. The stinging persisted and grew from intense to white-hot in seconds. Zia hurried to find my backpack and retrieved the jar. I slumped on his bed, doing everything I could not to yell out in pain. He knelt by me and unscrewed the top of the jar.
“Cut me,” I said. I began to shiver from pain.
“No, you do it,” he said.
I don’t know what he was thinking. Was he afraid, or didn’t he believe this would work? He handed me my knife. The shooting pain had coalesced into a chill that crept steadily up my leg. I had to do this, but I was shivering with either fear or cold, I couldn’t decide. I steadied myself with a breath and quickly made a small cut over the sting. He then poured the solution over the open wound.
In an instant, my leg went numb, though the wound itself stung. I didn’t know if this was supposed to happen, but it was as if my leg was dying. I didn’t know what to do. The nomad lady didn’t tell me what would happen once I used the solution. She hadn’t warned me about this. I hadn’t thought to ask. I gritted my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, hoping the stinging would pass soon.
“Enjeela, do you remember when Padar brought home your first bicycle?” Zia asked. I held back tears, but still my eyes were watering. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to wake my sisters or else there would be a lot of crying and blaming, Laila telling me what I should have done. “Do you remember when I was going to teach you to ride it?”
He spent the next half hour reminding me of how he would hold my bike by the seat to keep it steady. He would tell me to keep pedaling, and I remember my little feet turning the crank with all my might, then he flung me forward, and I pedaled on my own. A few seconds later I dived headfirst into a neighbor’s bush.
I laughed at the memory and he laughed too. The laughing made the pain ease a little. So we kept talking—about chasing kites together, jumping over the neighbor’s fence, running and playing and getting so dirty that we had to take extra-long baths to rid us of all the grime. We played soccer with our friends, and he even taught me to shoot a slingshot. We climbed trees, and whenever I got in trouble, we were always together. Zulaikha and Laila were older and more concerned with school and girlie activities. Zia and I were constant companions, and I became a tomboy. He taught me to be tough.
We talked for a while, and I began to relax. The sensations in my leg subsided to the point that I could hobble back to my bed and lie down. I eventually even went to sleep. I stayed in bed for several days. I lost my appetite and kept myself covered up. I told Laila and Zulaikha and Masood about the scorpion sting, and Masood looked at it carefully. I didn’t want to show it to my sisters, particularly Zulaikha, who was squeamish and sickened easily, so I kept it covered up. I didn’t tell anyone I’d used the Kuchi medicine except Masood. He was glad I had. He had heard of others using it and getting better.
Despite the medicine, I wasn’t doing very well. I was listless and weak and hardly ate anything. My heart raced all day, and the swelling around the wound on my calf itched painfully. The half-inch incision I had cut had turned all red. Through the night, my leg kept twitching and it wouldn’t stop. I kept covered up all day and lay as still as possible, trying to breathe slowly. Even Fatima, who kept to herself with her own sicknesses, noticed I wasn’t doing well, and she sent Shakila to check on me.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” she asked. I always turned down her offers for help. I didn’t want her to go out of her way to do things for me. She had her own worries, but it did make me feel much better that she was thinking of me. We weren’t just strangers thrown together on the road anymore. I knew she cared about me, and it made me believe we’d overcome our differences.
Lying in my bed for all those days gave me time to think about how much I missed the Afghanistan of my childhood. I was still a child, of course, but since we had left Kabul, the strenuousness of the journey had sharpened my wits. There had been so much walking and anxiety in the past six months. I had nearly forgotten what living on Shura Street had been like. It had been safe and private and filled with fun and love. I wasn’t much older, but I didn’t feel the same. I had no home; I moved from place to place like the nomads. I hunted and killed scorpions for fun. I’d seen enough death to last me a lifetime. I had found a shama, a place of peace and tranquility that war didn’t reach; maybe I could find another, a place to rest. I wished I could stay in this bed, pull the covers up over me, and just forget all the walking. I had no idea what lay ahead for us, over the mountain Masood said we must cross soon to make our way out of all this chaos.