‘I haven’t told them.’
Sofia raised an eyebrow. ‘They might like to be forewarned. There could be repercussions for them.’
‘I know. I will.’
For the first time Sofia noticed that Iman was wearing her best clothes. ‘You look especially beautiful today. Something happening?’ Sofia had given Iman the morning off because Daniel was coming and there would be no patients.
‘Khalif ’s taking me to breakfast.’
‘Somewhere nice, I hope.’
‘He says it’s a surprise. By the way, I saw the photo in the paper of the man from the UN you’re seeing this morning. He’s veeeery handsome.’
‘Do you think so?’
Iman made a point of turning to watch her. ‘You think he’s handsome too, don’t you?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t have to. I can see it in the smile on your face. Okay, I’m going to be late,’ she said, as they were nearing Ahmad’s shop. ‘Don’t tell anyone about my protest yet.’
‘I won’t, but think about telling your parents.’
Iman laughed. ‘I might be modern but I’m not so modern that I wouldn’t tell them.’
* * *
BRIGHTLY COLOURED KITCHEN implements, faded bottles of shampoo, wooden rolling pins, brittle plastic storage jars, glasses, hand beaters and strainers of every imaginable size were sitting in their rightful places in front of Ahmad’s shop. On top of some crates was a new addition, a stack of girls’ woven hats made of pink plastic, while men’s sandals were sitting in a basket by the front door, paired together with string. Among Ahmad’s tin cans, kerosene lamps and beaten tin plates hanging from the wire strung under the awning at the front of the shop was now a used blue plastic bucket. If Ahmad sold two of the engraved tin plates they would pay for food for a week. Plates did well. Kerosene lamps did even better. Proceeds from a second-hand bucket probably wouldn’t spread very far.
As Sofia saw it, the problem for Ahmad, and all the other small shopkeepers of Kabul, was that they were all selling the same things. Liberated Kabul had become another dumping ground for the world’s cheap, mass-produced merchandise trucked in from Iran, Pakistan and China, and with everyone selling the same goods, no one was making a profit. It was a problem nobody in the square had been able to solve. Sofia’s suggestion that they might diversify had fallen on deaf ears. No one had the resources to find new and exciting items from overseas, and even if they had, who in the hidden backwater that was Shaahir Square would buy them?
‘As-salaam alaikum,’ she called as she walked past Ahmad, who returned her greeting.
‘Do you think I should paint my shop a different colour so I might have more customers?’ he added.
Sofia stopped and walked back to give serious consideration to the question, which, along with the second-hand blue bucket, probably reflected a new level of desperation. ‘Well, I’m not sure.’ She looked over to the neighbouring shop. ‘What do you think, Hadi?’
Hadi considered his answer. ‘Green is probably the best colour because it’s the colour of Allah.’
‘You’re right, my friend,’ Ahmad said, lifting the rolled, flat pakol off his head and scratching through the thick head of hair underneath. ‘If it’s His will that I don’t have enough customers then insha’Allah.’
Not for the first time, Sofia thought insha’Allah had a lot to answer for.
‘What to do? What to wish for?’ Ahmad said to no one in particular as he replaced his hat and drew on his cigarette again.
‘Better not to wish for anything,’ offered Hadi. ‘Better not to draw Allah’s attention.’ Ahmad nodded.
Ahmad, his wife, Badria, and their four small children lived in two cockroach-infested rooms in the alley behind his shop, and in six months’ time another baby would arrive. Sofia had known this before Ahmad because she was his wife’s doctor. She also knew Badria was happy with her new pregnancy: proud to be raising children, proud to be a good wife and mother, happy to be living in a world uncomplicated by godless possibilities. For Badria it had always been thus, and always would be. She didn’t believe in education for girls; it upset the natural order of things. ‘They want to leave home and work in a shop. Stupid girls. They dream all the time of a life they’ll never have,’ she had told Sofia. ‘It’s better that they have children and let their husbands work and not waste time on foolish dreams.’
Badria, who was not quite thirty, had her future written for her at the time of her conception back in her village. It was the same future that had waited for generations of women before Badria, and all those who would come after her, until someone in that long line of female history rebelled. As Sofia had delivered each of Badria’s daughters she had wondered whether this might be the one, whether this girl child would be history in the making.
Ahmad and Badria were cousins and had married because that was what was expected. From what Badria had told her one emotionally charged day in the sanctity of the surgery, Sofia was not sure Ahmad knew what love was but he would have known what right was, and it had been right to marry Badria. She also had not questioned her fate, but unlike her cousin, Badria knew what love was. When she was thirteen years old a young boy had come to work in the neighbour’s field. Watching him through the crack in the wall of her mudbrick home, Badria had experienced the first breathless quickening of love, but then, as mysteriously as the boy had arrived, he had disappeared, taking her heart along with him. Badria’s pain had been so cripplingly raw and all-consuming that she vowed she would never suffer such a thing again. Badria was very sure she knew what love was and it was not for her.
Sofia was aware that Ahmad had not been so happy with this new pregnancy. Another baby would mean another mouth
