“This place, the city, is not safe at night,” he reminded us as he stood by the door. “Stay in your room until it’s time to catch the early bus tomorrow morning.” He turned and closed the door behind him. We never saw him again, but he probably saved our lives.
The next morning we woke early, washed as best we could, and made our way to the bus stop. Laila kept a tight grip on the scrap of paper with the address of the hotel. We boarded the bus and were finally going to our meeting place. The bus ride gave me a strange feeling; a fear haunted me. None of us spoke of Padar, but we all must have harbored a silent hope he would eventually show up to meet us. But each of us had our own suspicions. He had rarely been sober for the last year. The night he woke us to send us on our journey, he’d been clear-eyed and solemn—the Padar I loved more than anything. But we all silently worried that he might have fallen back into drinking once he was alone. There were so many reasons to doubt I would ever see him again.
The sun blazed at high noon by the time we reached a train station, which the driver had told us was next door to the hotel. He pointed to a tall beige building on the other side of the station. We stepped off the bus into a crowd of people who had just disembarked an arriving train. One final obstacle to wade through before reaching our journey’s endpoint. Hesitating outside the wooden double doors we stared up at the building. It stood at least ten stories tall and it appeared quite old, but we were so excited finally to have reached our destination.
Inside the lobby, the hotel appeared even older and very traditional. To the right of the lobby was a small lounge full of chairs with pink, orange, and red pillows. Worn Persian carpets covered the floors, and dark tapestries covered the lobby walls. We all followed Zia to the front desk, where a plate of incense burned; it smelled like roses. There were two gentlemen behind the counter wearing shalwar kameez. One was younger, maybe in his thirties, and the other was an older man who seemed no longer able to smile.
“We need to rent a room,” Laila said, like she’d done this a hundred times before.
The older gentleman looked us up and down. “Is it just the four of you?”
“Yes,” Laila replied.
He shook his head. “Sorry, there must be an adult with you. We cannot rent you a room.”
Zulaikha shrank back; Zia glanced around as if searching for an answer. I sidled up to Laila at the front desk.
“There will be an adult with us soon,” Laila protested firmly but politely. “My dad is on the way. He’s coming from Afghanistan. He instructed us to stay here at this hotel. He’ll meet us here in a couple of days. So we have to be here.”
The older man continued to scrutinize us with darkened eyes as if he knew us to be the biggest liars. The young man bent down over the counter and looked at me directly. “What type of room would you like?”
“The cheapest one you got,” I replied, looking him right in the eye to show him—and the old man—that I wasn’t intimidated.
“We have money,” Laila added quickly. “But we’d still like the cheapest room because we don’t know when our dad will get here exactly, and we need what we have to last us awhile.”
The younger man smiled at us and nodded his head. He seemed sympathetic and understanding and continued to give us looks of reassurance that we would be okay as he checked us into a room.
The older man grumbled and fussed around the front desk before he reluctantly took us on a tour of the hotel and showed us to our room. It was close to the lobby, and the window opened onto the back alley. The walls at one time had been white but now were a putrid gray. A weird stench permeated the air, probably from the trash bins below the window that were piled high with garbage. As disgusting as it was, we were excited to have a room with a toilet, a shower, and beds with mattresses. No more bathing in rivers or relieving ourselves behind trees and in bushes and sleeping in our clothes on the hard dirt.
With two full-size beds in the room, there was plenty of sleeping space, but Zia wanted his own bed, so we asked for a third bed for him. The young man told us no extra beds were available at the time. Zia said he would sleep on the floor, but the rest of us wouldn’t have it. We decided to take turns for however long we had to stay.
That first night, we sat around the room. Laila wanted to count our money to see how long we could stay in the room. She pulled the money out of her backpack. She wanted us to pool our money to see how much we had together. I gave her all of mine. So did Zulaikha and Zia.
“We have plenty of money,” Zia said.
“Yes, if we are only here a week or two,” Laila responded as she stacked the cash on the bed.
“It won’t take him long to get here,” Zia said.
“How do you know?” Laila snapped back. “You heard what that man said last night. The streets here are dangerous. If we have to live on the streets, who knows what will happen to us.”
“What if he gets so drunk he never makes it at all?” Zulaikha said.
“He’ll come,” I said, not sure where my optimism came from. “You’ll see.” Just then I wouldn’t allow myself to think differently. “Let’s go out and eat one big dinner tonight, some rice and kabobs and tea,” I said.
“We have to be prepared to survive for as long as possible.” Laila stuffed all of the money in the backpack. “We have enough to stay here for about six months.” Laila scowled. “We’ll go to the market and try to make the food we buy last us.”
For the first month, we spent each day in the hotel lobby, watching all sorts of interesting people come and go. We wanted to be the first to recognize Padar when he came through the large double doors into the lobby.
When they grew tired of watching people come and go with no sign of Padar, my sisters and brother would go upstairs and play cards with a deck that Salman, the owner of the hotel, had given to us. But I would stay late in the lobby until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I wanted to be the first to greet Padar. And every night, when I could no longer keep my eyes open, the man behind the desk would tell me to go up to my room.
To further save money, we bought milk and bread at a corner bakery. We ate that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We drank water from the bathroom faucet. When we got tired of that and complained too much, Laila purchased a bit of sugar. We would stir it into our milk, then chop up the bread and soak the pieces in the sugar milk. It was pretty tasty. Sometimes I shared my ration of bread with Zulaikha. I liked the crust and she liked the insides, so we would split it that way. She often cut the crusts off so closely that I was left with meager strips of hard bread, while she ate the inside of the bread. After a while her habits began to bother me.
Once in a while, Laila would let us order food from the restaurant in the hotel. Normally she let us eat only enough to stave off our hunger, but every now and then, she knew she would have to give us special treats to keep us from rebelling against her iron hold on the money.
After another month of waiting, we couldn’t stand to sit inside anymore. We decided to do some sightseeing. We all agreed to stay together so as not to get lost in a foreign city. On one trip we found a big bazaar, and we walked around, smelling the restaurant food and running our fingers along the clothes and other goods the vendors were selling. The stalls were crowded with people and colorful merchandise piled high on tables and hanging from the awnings: fabrics and dolls, clothing and clocks, decorations for the home. This place seemed to have everything, and we walked around in awe.
One day I saw a young mother holding a little girl’s hand as the two worked their way around the bazaar. It made me think of Mommy and the times we used to shop for fabric in the bazaar in Kabul. I tried to remember what it was like to have her arms around me or what my father’s voice sounded like. I could vaguely remember her touch and the timbre of his voice. These shreds of family life tamped down the fears that he would never show up. That he had grown so drunk he’d been killed in a car wreck or taken away by the secret police. Other than Padar, no one had any idea where we were. Not even Mommy.