In time Omar won the coveted prize, but what he had experienced during his two years of training with his uncle in Kabul had changed him forever. He had seen more food in the city’s markets in one day than he had seen in his entire lifetime. He had smelled smells and his eyes had seen sights that he had found both thrilling and frightening but also hard to understand. The exoticism and sheer size of Kabul had made the young Omar’s head spin. There were more people in that great city than he had thought possible in the entire world. He saw women and young girls walking the streets in short skirts with painted faces and their hair hanging free. When one of these beauties smiled at Omar he would often stumble, unable to find the appropriate response, for nothing in his village had taught him how to react to such wanton seduction.
After returning to his village Omar had been restless. The place was too small and the people backward, and yet he had no choice but to wait until his uncle summoned him back to Kabul, or the man died, at which time the apothecary shop would become his. The villagers quietly noted these changes in the once carefree young man and began to speculate about what terrible things must have happened to him in the city until he became a cautionary tale for their children, a warning of the dangers lurking in the streets of Kabul and the modern world. In 1976, five years after he had left Shaahir Square, Omar’s uncle had died and he had returned.
As the square’s apothecary for more than four decades, Omar took pride in moving with the times by stocking over-the-counter Western drugs, although his heart of hearts belonged to the ancient art of the apothecary. His uncle’s beautiful old cabinets, made from the magnificent cedars of Lebanon nearly a century before, and the exquisitely crafted timber drawers lining the shop’s walls were still crammed full of all manner of herbs, spices and mysterious tonics and potions, some of which dated from before his uncle’s time, and while they were mostly a mystery to him, he could not bring himself to throw them out.
There were those in the square who swore that Omar’s concoctions were better than Western drugs and could cure any disease known to man. As was to be expected, the true believers tended to be the older residents of the square and its nearby alleyways, while the younger generation, and those with more formal education, generally dismissed these claims as quackery. Omar was aware that Dr Jabril and Dr Sofia were not always happy when he talked their patients out of the Western painkiller, cough medication or antibiotic they had suggested in favour of one of his potions. It was, in Omar’s mind, a bit of a game to see who had the most influence in the square. So far he believed it was split fifty-fifty, which afforded him a certain amount of pride.
With regard to the perceived magic or otherwise of his own wizardry, Omar was a true believer up to a point. Of late he had felt death’s hot breath on his burning skin and was wise enough to know there was no miracle potion to be found in his beautiful cabinets for the creeping sickness destroying his body. He also knew that if Dr Jabril or Dr Sofia knew what ailed him they would be greatly concerned and most certainly would prescribe a concoction of Western drugs, which happened to be the main reason he hadn’t mentioned his illness to anyone.
It was not so much that Omar wanted to die but that he acknowledged death’s inevitability. The thing he found hard to accept, though, was that it had arrived a little too soon for his liking. Sometimes the thought of his imminent demise saddened Omar a great deal, but whenever he felt that sadness in his heart he would take a little more of his special ‘draught’ and force himself to smile. While it eased the pain, Omar had long ago understood that a smile lit your heart. It was an even stranger thing to discover that the great men of science in the West supported Omar’s self-evident truth. Smiling rewires your brain’s circuitry to override its natural tendency to think negatively, they proclaimed in their learned journals, as if they alone had discovered a new truth. It made Omar chuckle. All those years of learning when all anyone needed to do was sit in the middle of Shaahir Square and watch their friends. For the square had become Omar’s university, an ever-changing tableau he watched with equal measures of amusement, confusion and enlightenment, and at times great joy and great sadness, but always with eternal interest. He would miss it when he was gone.
Just as Omar was beginning to think about how he wished he could find a way of bottling some of this truth found in a smile, his eyes flew open. Had he been dreaming? He blinked and blinked again to know he was truly awake before looking around the square, reassuring
