Mud City (5 page)

She wondered what they were searching for among the garbage, and picked up
one of their sacks to take a look.

“That’s mine! Are you trying to steal?” One of the older
boys pushed her hard away from his bag. Shauzia fell back against the ground, grinding
bits of gravel into her palms.

Jasper was beside her in an instant, barking at the boy.

“I wasn’t stealing,” Shauzia insisted. “I just
wanted to see what kinds of things you were collecting.” She patted Jasper with
long, slow strokes to calm him down.

She got to her feet. Jasper stopped barking. The little girl came up to
pet him, and he wagged his tail again.

“You’ve never picked junk before?” asked the boy who had
pushed her.

“Do I look like a junk picker?” Shauzia retorted, brushing
herself off. “I work.”

“At what?”

“At proper jobs.”

“So why don’t you go and do your job, and
quit trying to steal our stuff?”

Shauzia kicked at the boy’s junk bag. “There’s nothing
in there worth stealing.”

“You call this nothing?” He grabbed the bag and pulled out
items, waving them under Shauzia’s nose.

“Three plastic bottles, a whole newspaper, and two empty tin cans.
That’s better than you could find!”

“We’ll see about that,” Shauzia replied.

“This is our junk pile,” another boy said. “Why should
we share it with you?”

“My dog is a watch dog,” Shauzia said. “He’ll
attack anyone who tries to bother us.”

The boy who had pushed Shauzia had bruises on his face, as though he had
been in other fights recently.

“Some watch dog,” he said. “He doesn’t look so
fierce.” He hung back, though.

“If you’re not afraid of him, go ahead and pat him,”
Shauzia said.

“All right, I will.” The boy bent down and reached out a hand.
Jasper growled, and the boy backed away.

“It’s all right, Jasper,” Shauzia said, putting
her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go ahead and pat
him,” she said. “Now that he knows you’re my friend, he won’t
hurt you.”

The boy held out his hand. Jasper sniffed it, then pushed at the hand with
his snout.

“I was sleeping in the alley last night,” Shauzia told them.
“Some men tried to get at me. Jasper scared them away.”

“Would your dog protect us, too?” the little girl asked.

“Sure he would. He’d love to, wouldn’t you,
Jasper?” Jasper was already wagging his tail so hard he couldn’t wag it any
harder.

“My name is Zahir,” the boy with the bruised face said. The
other boys were Azam, Yousef and Gulam, and the little girl’s name was Looli.

“I’m Shafiq,” Shauzia said, giving them her boy
name.

“A boy I know was taken by men like that,” Zahir said.
“They kept him and they cut something out of his belly before they let him
go.”

“Was he still alive?” Shauzia asked.

“He was alive for a little while,” Zahir replied.

“Then he died,” Yousef added.

“Go ahead,” Zahir said. “Look in my
bag.”

Shauzia looked at the collection of cardboard, newspaper, bottles and
cans.

“We sell it to a junk dealer,” Zahir said.

“Not all of it,” Gulam said. “The things that burn, we
take home to cook our meals.”

“Do you have families?” Shauzia asked.

“Gulam and Looli live with their uncle’s family,” Yousef
said. “The rest of us are on our own.”

“So am I,” Shauzia said. “How much money do you
make?”

“Maybe five roupees. Maybe ten. You can come with us if you
like,” Zahir said.

The children drifted back to work. Shauzia realized how lucky she’d
been to find the jobs she had. She joined them as they sifted through the junk that
other people had thrown away.

She started off rooting through the garbage with her foot.

“Not that way,” Looli said. She was munching on some dry cones
an ice-cream shop had thrown away. “You have to use your hands.” She showed
Shauzia how to dig right into the pile of garbage to get at whatever might be buried
there.

The trash smelled bad, but the smell didn’t
bother Shauzia. After all, she had lived with sheep for months. The flies were familiar,
too. She dug right into the trash, opening plastic bags and dumping the contents onto
the ground. She put the paper and rags she found into the little girl’s bag.

She would go back to looking for proper jobs tomorrow, she decided, but
for today, she just wanted to stay with other children.

Jasper, with his superb dog nose, was good at sniffing out things to eat
in the garbage, but Shauzia didn’t do too badly, either. Along with the paper and
bits of wood from a broken crate, she found an empty spice jar and a cracker box –
with some crackers still in it!

“Hey! I found some food!” she exclaimed.

In the next second, she was flat on her back in the trash.

“All food comes to me,” Zahir said, holding the box of cracker
bits high in the air.

But Shauzia was hungry, and she was tired of being bullied. She sprang up
without thinking and threw herself at the boy. They rolled in the trash, trying to hit
each other. Jasper jumped around them, barking. The other children
picked the spilled cracker bits off the ground and ate them.

Shauzia and Zahir ran out of fight before there was a clear winner. They
sat in the trash, brushed themselves off and glared at each other.

“Don’t try taking anything away from me again,” Shauzia
snarled.

“Just remember who’s boss here,” Zahir snarled back.

Since the crackers were gone anyway, they called a truce and went back to
sorting through the junk pile.

Late in the afternoon, one of the smaller boys found a length of string.
He tied it to the handle of a plastic shopping bag and ran through the dump along the
wasteland beside the railway tracks. The bag fluttered behind him like a bird, high
above the garbage and the people making their homes in the dirt.

To Shauzia, it looked beautiful.

The sun was hanging low in the sky when Looli put her tiny arms around
Jasper’s neck and gave him a hug.

“We have to go now,” she said.

Shauzia watched the little girl take her
brother’s hand as he slung her junk bag and his own over his shoulder, and the two
of them walked away.

The other boys shouldered their junk bags and started walking in another
direction.

“Are you coming? Zahir called back. “Or do you have some
important job to go to?”

The other boys laughed. Shauzia thought about being offended, but decided
not to be. She looked at Jasper, shrugged and jogged to catch up to the boys.

For the first part of the evening, they roamed around Peshawar like a pack
of animals, tossing odd bits of junk into their bags. “Give us money!” they
yelled at everyone they met, laughing when the people looked scared and ran away.
Shauzia hung back a little, not yelling, but still very glad to have the company.

By nightfall they had reached a large modern hotel. It was so beautiful,
it took Shauzia’s breath away.

“Is that a palace?” she asked. She and the boys were scrunched
down among some bushes. Across the street a huge white building gleamed in the
spotlights. Cars drove slowly up
a long driveway lined with large
round flower pots overflowing with color. A man in a splendid uniform guarded the double
set of doors at the front.

“It’s a hotel,” Zahir said. “Don’t you know
what a hotel is?”

“Of course I do,” Shauzia lied. There hadn’t been such
places in Afghanistan. “What are we doing here?” The gravel she was kneeling
on pressed into her flesh.

“See the light in the hall?” Zahir pointed to a long, low
building that jutted out the side of the hotel. “That means there’s a big
party tonight.”

“I still don’t understand.”

Zahir sighed at her stupidity.

“We’re here for the leftovers. Aren’t you
hungry?”

Leaving their junk bags hidden among the trees, they scurried around to
the back of the hotel. Shauzia heard metal and glass banging and water running. She
smelled cooking smells from the open door of the kitchen. Her stomach lurched with
hunger.

In a little while, the kitchen staff brought bins out through the back
door. They carried
the bins over to the back fence and piled rocks
on top of them.

“Why are they doing that?” Shauzia asked.

“To keep us out of them. But we’re smarter than they
are.”

The kitchen workers went back inside. Shauzia and the boys crept over to
the bins. Shauzia limped a bit, her leg sore from kneeling on the pebbles. Jasper was
right in the middle of the children, but he was clever enough to keep quiet.

The boys silently lifted the rocks off the lids of the trash bins. Shauzia
helped. They gently tipped over the bins. Then they tore through the party leftovers,
tossing aside the balled-up paper napkins and other garbage to get to the cold rice and
chicken bones with bits of meat sticking to them.

Shauzia stripped the meat from the bones for Jasper, since chicken bones
were bad for him. His nose found him lots of other things to eat, too.

She could not stuff food in her mouth fast enough. Chunks of mutton
gristle, bits of ground-meat patties, potatoes slick with spiced oil – she
shoveled it all into her mouth, eating
with one hand while the other
spread out the trash, searching for more food. When a cigarette butt got mixed up with a
handful of rice and spinach, she separated it from the food with her teeth, spat it out
and kept on eating.

All around her was the sound of hungry boys chewing.

“Hey! Get away from there, or we’ll call the
police!”

The kitchen workers yelled at the children from the back door.

Shauzia started to leave, but the other kids shouted right back. They
heaved bones and other garbage at the workers. Jasper barked, and trash flew through the
air. Shauzia picked up a handful of old food and joined in. She laughed as the kitchen
workers raised their hands to protect themselves from the flying leftovers.

It felt great to be shouting and throwing. Shauzia couldn’t remember
when she had last yelled like that. She couldn’t raise her voice when she was a
shepherd because it would have scared the stupid sheep. She couldn’t yell in Kabul
because it would have been foolish to draw attention to herself – she didn’t
need the
Taliban looking closely enough at her to be able to tell
she was a girl.

But she could yell here, and she did, and she had a wonderful time.

The men disappeared for a moment, then came back waving frying pans and
pot lids. Shauzia saw security guards heading their way, too, their guns drawn.

The children scattered, and they were away from the area before the
grown-ups could reach them. When things were quiet again, they retrieved their bags of
junk and went looking for a place to sleep.

Shauzia stayed with the boys that night. They slept, huddled together, in
a smelly stairwell. Jasper was their watchdog, and he kept them safe.

Shauzia stood in the aisle of the rich people’s grocery store. She
ran her finger lightly along the rows of beautiful packages. The pictures on them
promised good things inside. Cakes, biscuits with chocolate on top, meat, cheese –
food more wonderful than she had ever seen before.

And there was so much of it! Who could possibly mind if she took a few
packages for herself and her dog? They had so many!

Her mouth filled with saliva as her fingers curled around a tin with a
picture of a fish on the outside. It could so easily move from the shelf to her bag.

“You again!”

A strong hand gripped her shoulder like a claw. She released the tin of
fish and was pushed through the shop.

“This is the fourth time today I’ve had to kick you out. If
you come in here again, I will call the police.”

The store clerk shoved Shauzia out the door with such
force that she hit the pavement at the same moment that the ferocious Peshawar heat hit
her. The store had been so lovely and cool, like being surrounded by snow.

She picked herself up off the ground, too angry to pay much attention to
the raw skin on her hands and ankles. She stood as close as she dared to the door of the
fancy store. At least she could catch a blast of refreshing coldness when the rich
people went in and out.

Jasper was stretched out in the bit of shade at the side of the store. He
was so hot he had barely managed to growl when she was tossed out.

Shauzia couldn’t stand in the shade because she would be out of the
way of the people she wanted to beg from.

“Spare any roupees?” she asked a man coming out of the shop.
He walked right by her outstretched hand. The woman who came out a short time after
handed her a rumpled tworoupee note. That made six roupees Shauzia had made all day.

“I hate this,” she said to Jasper. “I hate having to be
nice to these people who aren’t nice to
me. I hate having to
ask them for anything. The next person who comes by, I’m going to grab their money
and run. If they won’t give it to me, I’ll just take it.”

Jasper rolled his eyes, unimpressed. He had heard this speech before.

Inside the store, Shauzia had felt dizzy at the sight of all the pretty
packages of food lined up on the shelves. The people who shopped there had to have a lot
of money. Surely people with a lot of money wouldn’t mind giving her a bit of
it.

But rich people weren’t any more generous than poor people.

She asked people for a job as well as for money, but no one had a job for
her. She would rather be working than begging. Begging made her feel small.

A man and a woman in Western clothes got out of a white van with their two
small boys and crossed the parking lot, heading for the grocery store. Shauzia saw them
and held out her hand.

“Look at the dog!” The two boys ran over to Jasper. In an
instant he was on his feet, wagging his tail.

“Careful, boys. You don’t know this
dog,” the man said.