Khyber Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

through the long, hot morning. My mother squatted in the shade, brushing flies from Sorrow's face, while I kept Omar and Mohammed from bothering the madrassa pupils kneeling in the shade of the next building. I whispered the tajweed along with the students, teaching my brothers as was my duty, comforting myself with familiar chanted lines of scripture, prayer, and proverb.
    At noon the border opened with great fanfare and high-stepping soldiers in glittering uniforms on both sides. When they finished stamping and dancing, and raising the flags, we waited a few more hours.
    Finally, the Pakistani guards took a break, leaving behind only one man to bribe. At my mother's tense instructions, I gave the gatekeeper her rings in lieu of a passport or identity papers. He scraped one ring and then the next along a black stone and told me they were worthless.
    He had eyes like a snake, if a snake could be considered covetous. I told him to give them back if he found them without value. He said if he gave them back, he would need to arrest us for attempting to bribe an official.
    My mother raised an ululating wail that stiffened the hair on my arms. She howled for divine justice, demanding to know how she could take her sons to their father's brother now that this evil man had stolen her jewelry and traveling papers—see, the marks of the rings still on her fingers? He was a thief, a robber of widows and orphans, and doubtless an apostate!
    Sorrow shrieked in her arms. Mohammed clutched fistfuls of her travel-stained burqa. Omar sucked his fingers anxiously. I stood aghast, knowing we'd never had any traveling papers. She yowled on.
    As she drew her third deep breath, the mullah's students surrounded us all, shaking their hands at the border guard, chanting, “Shame, shame! Have you no mother?"
    The man eyed me with respect, as if I'd engineered all this, gave me the first bow I'd ever received, and let us through.
    When challenged on the Indian side, my mother shed the burqa and became an American citizen in distress. We were rushed away from the border and tucked into a tiny, white-tiled room with too many very bright lights set within wire cages.
    The voice of a man echoed off the walls. He shouted in a language I could not make out. I looked at my mother, who knew so many strange things, but she shook her head.
    We smelled rich fried foods, but were given not so much as a bowl of pilau to share. Omar, known as Fat Boy to the cousins, sucked his fingers annoyingly, but to his credit did not whine. Little Mohammed whined. In the next room, the shouting man switched to English.
    Hearing English disoriented me as much as anything else on that trip. My older brother Hamid and I had speculated English was a secret code my parents invented, an elaborate ruse to keep the rest of the family from knowing what nonsense we were taught. Now, I heard a stranger speaking English in this foreign place.
    My mother handed me Sorrow, who whimpered unceasingly in my lap. Mohammed slanted his peculiar blue eyes sidelong at Sorrow and ceased whining. I held out my arm to him, and he leaned in under it. Omar, trying not to be a child, stared wide-eyed at me. I beckoned him close. He stood at my back, his fingertips picking at my shoulder. I didn't know what to tell them.
    We had passed several shrines without asking more than a night's sanctuary. If this were a kind of hujra, where unlimited hospitality could be expected without asking, they would not have shut us in this painfully bright room.
    All I knew truly was that we were among men so foreign they must be Punjabi, or even feranghi . Men who used English.
    My mother paced, gnawing her knuckle, her eyes fixed on the door however she walked. Her taut face echoed the rising tones of the shouting man.
    I gnawed my own knuckle, wondering how to get us all home when she had accomplished whatever she had set out to do. We had no horses to sell. No goats. I would have to find work, driving sheep or goats