Under an Afghan Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

somewhere else,” he answered. “A better place. You will like it.”
    “What’s wrong with being here?” I asked.
    “It is not safe here. The windows, people will see you. There are a lot of Taliban in this area,” Abdulrahman said. I’d thought these men were Taliban, and showed my surprise.
    “We are Taliban, but we not all together. You don’t want other Taliban find us. We waiting here while other place getting ready,” he said. “Very close to here.” He then walked off to speak withKhalid. I noticed two other men were now in the room, but no one bothered to introduce them to me.
    “Cigarette,” I said out loud to the room. Khalid came over with his package.
    “You should not smoke much,” he told me. “Cigarette bad.” I pointed out that both he and Shafirgullah were also smoking.
    “It is bad—smoking,” he said as he took out a cigarette and lit it. He handed it to me and lit one for himself after licking the end.
    Abdulrahman came over. “The house is ready. Come.”
    “Where are we going?” I asked.
    “Don’t worry, Mellissa,” Khalid said. “I will stay with you tonight.”
    “I have to go to bathroom,” I said.
    “You go bathroom first. I take you.” He took my hand and led me out of the house and around a corner to what looked like a large open room with mud walls and some kind of corrugated roof over it. “In there,” Abdulrahman motioned. “Go there.” I went into the corner of the room. The hard ground smelled like dung. I undid the drawstring of my pants and squatted in the dark.
    “You finished?” Abdulrahman asked from outside.
    “Yes.”
    “Come. Hurry.”
    “Where are you taking me?” I asked.
    “I am not going to hurt you,” he said, not answering my question. “We are friends now.”
    “Friends?” I said, the anger rising like bile in my throat. “Friends don’t kidnap each other.”
    He laughed. “We are not going to hurt you. We are all friends. Mellissa and Abdulrahman are friends.” He took my arm and led me around the back of the house, up a small hill, and around a mud wall.
    “Sit here,” he ordered. We sat in a corner, with mud walls on either side. I could make out what looked like another abandoned house to the left of us, a few metres away. Was that where we were headed? I heard a noise coming from the ground. It was Zahir. His head popped out of a hole next to where we were sitting. The opening was about the size of a manhole cover, maybe slightly smaller. He had a flashlight and he spoke briefly to Abdulrahman in Pashto before disappearing back into the hole.
    “Okay, it is ready,” Abdulrahman said to me. He pointed into the ground from where Zahir had appeared. “That is your room.”
    I looked down at the hole. It was dark, except for a little glow from Zahir’s flashlight. My heart stopped for a moment, and for only the second time that day, I felt afraid. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that was quickly making its way up to my throat.
    “Go,” Abdulrahman ordered, taking my arm and pushing me toward the hole.
    I looked down into the darkness again. “No,” I said, “I am not going down there.”
     
    I have never been afraid of the dark. When I was a little girl and played hide and seek with my sister, Vanessa, and our friends, my favourite hiding place was the crawlspace in the basement of our house, in East Vancouver. It was a pretty large storage space, about four feet high, with my mother’s shoes scattered on the floor. My father stored boxes of oranges in the crawlspace because the temperature was much cooler there than anywhere else in the house.
    I would always crawl through the shoes and into the darkest corner of that dark little room, underneath the stairs. It was the best place to hide because everyone else was scared to go there. I was almost inevitably the last one to be “found.”
    Now, looking into this crude opening in the rocky ground, I realized that my kidnappers wanted to hide me in this