Under an Afghan Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

over my mouth but it was too late. I started coughing and looked up. That’s when it dawned on me that they were covering the hole withdirt. No one outside would ever suspect there was a room underneath. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps above us, then there was silence.
    I looked around. Everything was covered in a layer of dust. I tried brushing some of it off with my scarf but succeeded only in turning off the light bulb when I knocked the wires off the battery. Zahir turned on his flashlight and reattached the wires. The light came back on.
    I sat with my back to the wall facing the entrance. I took off the coat Khalid had given me on the mountain. The inside was covered in blood. Zahir crawled over to me and pointed to my wound.
    “Let me see,” he said. His English was as good as Abdulrahman’s and better than Khalid’s. I took off the smelly kameez, but the odour of stinky Afghan man stayed with me. I took a deep breath through my mouth. Zahir unwrapped the scarf that was tied around my shoulder. The sleeve of my own shirt was caked with blood. The blue-and-yellow flowered cloth was ripped, and I watched as Zahir lifted it from my shoulder. It was stuck to the wound, glued on with blood. I winced as he pulled it off. He reached for the white plastic bag and pulled out a roll of dark pink toilet paper. Ripping off a few sections, he wetted the paper with water from the red can and held it to my shoulder.
    “Does it hurt?” he asked. I hadn’t felt pain from the wound until that moment. I nodded, watching from the corner of my eye as he wiped the wound. I didn’t realize until now how deep the cut actually was. It was still oozing dark red blood. Zahir shook his head and continued to wipe the bloodstains off my shoulder. After he was satisfied it was clean, he ripped a few more pieces of toilet paper from the roll and pressed them into the wound to staunch the blood.
    “Let me see your hand,” he said next. I heldout my right hand and he examined the small stab wound. The blood had caked over, but the wound hurt when he touched it. My index and middle fingers were numb. Again, Zahir bandaged me with the pink toilet paper. Finished, he sat back.
    “It is better?” he asked.
    I stared at him and nodded. I was feeling a little dizzy, and realized I was still wearing just one contact lens, so everything looked blurry to me. Then I remembered that I always pack an extra set of disposable lenses when I travel, so I reached for my knapsack and opened the side pocket. I took out the package and peeled back the cover to take out the lens.
    “What is that?” Zahir asked.
    “It’s like glasses, in my eyes, to help me see.”
    He watched as I poked the lens into my left eye with my dirty index finger. Finally, I could see properly again. I looked at my captor and blinked.
    Zahir had dark eyes, set apart by a thin nose. He wore a beaded skullcap on the back of his head, like many Afghan men I’d met before. His kameez was a light green, with matching baggy pants. He’d left his brown leather sandals by the door.
    “Where is Khalid? Where did they go?” I asked. I wondered if they had homes in the village. If they had beds, bathrooms, electricity, lights.
    “They go home,” Zahir answered.
    “A house?”
    “Yes, a house.”
    “Do you live there too?” I asked.
    “I live there sometime,” he said. “I live in Pakistan. You know Peshawar?”
    I’d never been across the border. I had been close to it with the Canadian troops, and I knew that Peshawar was just the otherside of the Khyber Pass. At one time it was a major supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan. Over the last year, it had become more of a haven for insurgents. I remembered hearing that there had been a suicide bombing there just a few weeks before. I asked Zahir if his family was from there, and he told me they had a house in Peshawar.
    “How many of you are there? You, Khalid, do you have other brothers?” He told me he had three