In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read Free

soon
didn’t really go together. Why wish me good luck if we were going to meet again soon?
    The man left. Shaukat the Pakistani raised his hand and signaled to us to follow him. The lorry was parked in a dusty yard surrounded by a metal fence. In the back were dozens and dozens of wooden poles. Taking a closer look at them, I realized they were electricity poles.
    Why are you carrying electricity poles?
    Shaukat the Pakistani didn’t reply.
    This was something I only found out about later. Apparently, people came from Pakistan to Afghanistan to steal things: whatever there was to steal, which wasn’t much. Electricity poles, for example. They came in lorries, knocked down the poles and carried them across the border, to use them or sell them, I’m not sure which. But for the moment what mattered was that we were getting a good lift, in fact, more than good, an excellent lift, because at the border they didn’t check lorries from Pakistan so carefully.
    It was a long journey, I couldn’t tell you how long, hours and hours across the mountains, bumping along, past rocks and tents and markets. Clouds. At some point, when it was already dark, Shaukat the Pakistani got out to eat, but only him, because it was better for usif we didn’t get out. You never know, he said. He brought us some leftover meat and we set off again, with the wind whistling through the window, the pane lowered just a crack to let in a bit of air but as little dust as possible. Looking at all that land rushing past us, I remember thinking about my father, because he’d also driven a lorry for a long time.
    But that was different. He was forced to.
    My father I’ll just call
Father
. Even though he’s no longer around.
Because
he’s no longer around. I’ll tell you his story, even though I can only tell it the way it was told to me, so I can’t swear to it. What happened was that the Pashtun had forced him—not only him, but lots of Hazara men from our province—to drive to Iran and back by lorry, in order to get products to sell in their shops: blankets, fabrics, and a type of thin sponge mattress: I’m not sure what they were used for. This was because the inhabitants of Iran are Shia, like the Hazara, while the Pashtun are Sunni—it’s well known that brothers in religion treat each other better—and also because the Pashtun don’t speak Persian whereas we can understand it a bit.
    To force him to go, they said to my father, If you don’t go to Iran to get that merchandise for us, we’ll kill your family, if you run away with the merchandise, we’ll killyour family, if when you get back any of the merchandise is missing or spoiled, we’ll kill your family, if someone cheats you, we’ll kill your family. In other words, if anything at all goes wrong—we’ll kill your family. Which isn’t a nice way to do business, in my opinion.
    I was six—maybe—when my father died.
    Apparently, a gang of bandits attacked his lorry in the mountains and killed him. When the Pashtun found out that my father’s lorry had been attacked and the merchandise stolen, they came to my family’s house and said he’d made a mess of things, their merchandise had got lost and we had to pay them back for it.
    First of all they went to see my uncle, my father’s brother. They told him he was responsible now and he had to do something to compensate them. For a time, my uncle tried to find a solution, like sharing his land, or selling it, but nothing worked. Then one day he told them he didn’t know what he could do to compensate them and it wasn’t his business anyway, because he had his own family to think about. I don’t blame him for that, because it was true.
    So one evening the Pashtun came to see my mother, and said that if we didn’t have money, instead of the money they would take me and my brother away with them and use us as slaves, which is something that’s banned all over the world, even in Afghanistan, but thatwas what it amounted to.