In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read Online Free PDF Page B

merchandise.
    Sar Ab is a big square filled with rusty cars and vans with their boots wide open and their owners standing next to them, each selling different things. We wandered around for a while, choosing what to buy, looking at which wholesaler was the cheapest and which had the most interesting merchandise.
Osta sahib
haggled over everything. Every single packet. He was a born trader. He bought a few snacks, some chewing gum, socks and cigarette lighters. We put everything in a cardboard box, with a string attached to it so it could be carried over your shoulder, and left.
Osta sahib
gave me quite a lot of advice. He told me who I should speak to and who I shouldn’t speak to, which were the best places for selling and which weren’t, what to do if the police showed up, and so on. Among all these pieces of advice, the most important was: don’t let anyone steal your things.
    We said goodbye and
osta sahib
raised his hand in the air and wished me good luck. It struck me that, unless there was a reserve of different pieces of good luck somewhere, to suit each occasion, this was the same good luck I had been wished by my father’s old friend after he had taken us as far as Kandahar. I turned quickly and randown the street. If I ran fast enough, I thought, someone else might get that good luck. I preferred to avoid it.
    It was almost time for afternoon break at the school, and I didn’t want to change my routine. I deliberately made a detour so I could stand outside the playground and hear the ball bouncing against the wall and the voices of the children chasing each other. I sat down on a low wall. When the teachers took the children back inside, I stood up and walked toward the bazaar, keeping close to the houses in order to be protected on that side, and holding the cardboard box tightly in my arms because I was really scared that something would be stolen.
    The bazaar where
osta sahib
had told me to go was called the Liaqat Bazaar and it was in the center of the city.
    The main street of the Liaqat Bazaar is called Shar Liaqat, and the color of that street is a combination of all the colors on the posters and signs, green, red, white, yellow, a yellow one with the words
Call Point Pco
and the telephone symbol on it, a blue one with
Rizwan Jewellers
on it, and so on, and under the English words, the Arabic words, and under the Arabic words, the dust swirling in the sunlight, and in among the dust swirling in the sunlight a swarm of people and bicycles and cars and voices and noise and smoke and smells.
    In keeping with tradition, the first day was really bad, almost worse than the first day at the
samavat
Qgazi. The kind of day you want to pretend never happened, the kind of day you’d like to leave on a stone and walk away from and never see again. Obviously, I hadn’t run fast enough and good luck had caught up with me.
    It was evening and I hadn’t yet sold anything. That could mean I wasn’t any good at selling, or that nobody was interested in my things, or that everyone had already stocked up with snacks, socks and handkerchiefs, or that there was a knack to getting rid of the merchandise that I didn’t know about. At that point, feeling discouraged, I leaned on a lamppost and looked at what was showing on a television in the window of a household appliance shop. I was so spellbound by some program or other—a news broadcast, a soap opera, a nature documentary, whatever it was—that I didn’t notice what was happening, I swear, all I saw was a hand reach into my cardboard box, grab a packet of chewing gum and disappear.
    I turned. A group of boys—six or seven of them, speaking Pashtun, probably Baluchis—were standing in the middle of the street, looking at me and laughing. One of them, who seemed to be the leader, was playing with a packet of chewing gum—my packet of chewing gum—balancing it on the back of his hand.
    We started arguing, me in my language, they in theirs.
    I really needed some