Parvana's Journey Read Online Free PDF Page A

boiling it first.
    She dipped in her pan. “Here’s some lovely cool water to drink, Hassan,” she said. “Tastes good, doesn’t it? Drink it all down, and we’ll have a hot tasty supper.” She gave him a piece of stale nan to keep him quiet until the meal was ready.
    Parvana heard a little shuffling noise. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a small boy peering out from the cave. He was sitting on the ground. She took him some water.
    Dirt covered every inch of him, and he stank like the open sewers that ran through the camp where she had spent the winter. One of his pant legs lay flat against the ground, empty where his leg should have been. He was, Parvana thought, nine or ten years old.
    She put the water down where he could reach it, then went back to her work. She heard him gulping the water.
    “Bring me some food,” the boy ordered, tossing the pot at her.
    “I don’t like having things thrown at me,” Parvana said. “If you want food, come and get it yourself.”
    “I can’t walk!” he yelled. “How stupid you are, not to notice that. Now bring me some food!”
    Parvana walked over with some stale nan. The boy glowered at her with hatred and rage. And fear, she thought. His hair was matted with dirt. His face was scratched and his clothes were torn. She kept the bread out of his reach.
    “Have you really got a gun?” she asked.
    “I’m not telling you.” He reached for the bread.
    “You give me an answer and I’ll give you some food.”
    The boy flew into a furious burst of temper. He cursed and yelled and threw fistfuls of rocks and dust at Parvana. The fit left him panting and coughing. His cough was deep and used up his whole chest, just like her father’s cough had done. Parvana wondered how someone so scrawny found the strength to be so unpleasant.
    I could blow on him and he’d fall over, she thought.
    “No, I don’t have a gun,” the boy finally admitted, “but I can get one any time I want, so just watch what you do!”
    Parvana gave him the bread. It disappeared in a flash. She fetched more water and put it to boil over the little fire. When the rice was cooked, she put some on a flat rock and took it to the boy.
    “What’s your name?”
    The boy frowned and stared at the rice. “Asif.” Parvana gave him the rice. Then she fed Hassan.
    “My name is Parvana,” she said, putting fingerfuls of rice into Hassan’s mouth. “I’m looking for my family. I found this baby in a village that had been bombed. I call him Hassan.” She ate some rice herself.
    “Why do you have a girl’s name?” Asif asked.
    Parvana turned suddenly cold. How could she have made such a mistake? Quickly she tried to think of something to say to cover up, but she was suddenly too tired to lie.
    “I am a girl,” she said. “I pretended to be a boy in Kabul so I could work. When my father and I started out on this journey, it was easier to keep pretending to be a boy.”
    “Why didn’t your father work? Was he lazy?”
    “No, my father was not lazy, and don’t you dare say another word about him!” Parvana slammed the ground with a rock. The noise startled Hassan and made him cry.
    “I’ll say what I please. I don’t take orders from a girl,” Asif taunted.
    “You’ll take orders from me if you want to eat any more of my food,” Parvana yelled. “Oh, be quiet, Hassan!”
    Yelling at the baby to stop crying only made him cry louder and longer.
    Parvana turned her back on both of them. She tried to ignore them as she watched the flames of her smoky little fire dwindle into embers.
    Finally she was calm. Hassan’s cry had faded to a thin whimper. Parvana picked him up and held him in her lap until he fell asleep. Then she spread out a blanket and wrapped him up against the night chill.
    She had almost forgotten about the cave boy, when he asked her another question.
    “So where is your father now?”
    Parvana put a few stray strands of camel-grass on the coals and watched as they burst