Chapter Nineteen Everyone in the dimly lit basement shushed as the extended BBC Pashto Service broadcast the night news: This is London. This is the Pashto programme. Agha told mothers to keep their children’s noise down, asking my sisters, and even some adults, to stop flying paper airplanes. I knew the introductory words for…

Chapter Eighteen I excitedly told Agha and Mour how the pakoled mujahideen came across as friendly, and how the worries about the mujahideen were unfounded. Agha, with a smouldering cigarette in his hand, hung on my words but made no comment. Mour passed me a plate of scalding ashak, pasta dumplings filled with leeks…

Chapter Seventeen Agha reassured Mour not to worry because the mujahideen had promised not to harm the pro-Communists, as he took off his right sock in the hallway. It was midday and Agha had just returned home; he’d been away overnight to officially hand over power to Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the head of the mujahideen…

Chapter Sixteen The wooden door, crumbling with age, had no chink to peek inside.Should I knock, or jump over the wall into the house? If I knocked and someone answered, what was I supposed to say? If that person was Shafih, I’d thrust Mour’s kitchen knife into his stomach. But then I wouldn’t catch…

Chapter Fifteen Baktash cheered when he found me waiting in the bright morning under the acacia tree. I thanked Khudai for giving me such a loyal friend, and wished Wazir was also there. *** STUDENTS PEEKED AT ME, whispered, or shook their heads in the assembly. I must learn to face my new, embarrassing…

Chapter Fourteen It’d been two and a half hours since Frishta had entered a mud house. The day had turned into a moonful night, and, like a fearful shepherd standing on guard for the wolf’s arrival, I waited impatiently by the corner of a dirt alleyway with a thin stream dug along it. Open,…