‘They’re for water,’ Sofia explained, wiping the sweat off her forehead under the scarf. ‘The only taps are down there.’ Sofia pointed back down to the bottom of the slum. As the man and his donkey disappeared around the corner they saw Tawfiq labouring up the hill. ‘Are you okay?’ she called to him, pulling the top she was wearing in and out to let air circulate over her wet skin.
‘Tell Taban that I’ll be requiring oxygen and a stretcher when I arrive,’ he called back.
‘Me first,’ she said under her breath as they continued up the hill. Within fifteen minutes they had reached an outcrop of boulders with a rough path carved through them. Above the boulders sat Taban’s clinic, painted a dirty shade of pale blue that had been created by Taban after combining a large can of tan paint some American soldiers had given her with a small can of deep blue she already owned. It definitely made the clinic stand out from the raw stone and whitewashed buildings surrounding it. It didn’t make it attractive. Taban was standing in the doorway of clinic, her hand shading her eyes as she watched their approach.
Taban had a beautiful round face, high cheekbones, a flat nose and the almond-shaped eyes of the Hazara, but the scar of a harelip ‘fixed’ badly by a Russian military doctor marred her natural beauty. Wearing a long grey skirt, a large shapeless shirt and a thick woollen vest over her thin body, Taban’s only concession to femininity was the soft unruly curls escaping from her chador. As a modern woman living in a conservative society, Taban bowed to most of the rules with the exception of her hair, which she regularly cut short, something that was almost unheard of among Afghan women.
It had been four years since Taban had left her job with an international NGO to set up a clinic for the poor in her parents’ home near Jamal Mina. When they had become unhappy with the constant stream of strangers knocking on their door, Taban had secured a little bit of money from her former employers and moved her clinic to the only suitable building she could afford in the slum, which happened to be near the top.
Jabril and Sofia had followed Taban’s efforts with the clinic from the outset, watching as it quickly expanded from addressing the purely medical needs of the community to meeting all manner of social and economic emergencies, until they could see she was drowning under the increasing demands on her time and meagre funds. With Jabril and Sofia donating medical supplies and each spending a day a month in the slum, some of the burden on Taban had been eased, but it was only when her brothers began to help financially, and Jabril found Parsa, that Taban was truly able to breathe again.
Jabril had met Parsa when the young man had come into the square begging. Jabril, who Zahra said with some affection would talk to a wall if it would listen, had bought Parsa lunch at Babur’s chaikhana in exchange for his life story. This was a new experience for Parsa; no one wanted to know about beggars. When it became obvious to Jabril that Taban needed help beyond what he and Sofia could give he had immediately thought of Parsa, who he judged to be an honest and intelligent young man who would thrive with work. Parsa had quickly learned nursing skills from Taban, proved to be exceptionally good with the people who came to the clinic, and was soon flourishing in the job. Only recently he had proudly informed Sofia that the wage Jabril was paying him allowed him to support his family so that his brother and sisters could go to school rather than beg on the streets. It had made Sofia smile. Exactly how much was Jabril paying Parsa?
It was obvious to Sofia that Parsa was in love with Taban, but the shy young man was too much in awe of his boss to say anything. When Sofia had suggested to Jabril that she might mention her suspicions to Taban he had cautioned against it.
‘Love has a way of seeping through the cracks. It’s not up to you and me to point this thing out to Taban. It’s there for everyone to see, and if she can’t see it then either she’s not ready or she doesn’t want to.’
Sofia had looked at him with a smirk. ‘When did you turn into such a love guru?’
The idea of a love guru had tickled Jabril. ‘I’ve always been a love guru, didn’t you know?’
‘Oh no,’ said Sofia, the smile leaving her face as she waved him away, ‘too much information, way too much information. I don’t need to hear that!’
With five brothers, all married and living prosperous lives as entrepreneurs in Kabul and Pakistan, Taban’s parents had been content to have their only daughter return home at the end of each day to tend to their needs, as long as she didn’t bring half the slum with her.
‘It’s Allah’s will that my daughter is so deformed and no man wants to marry her,’ Taban’s mother had once confided to Sofia, who had to control an overwhelming urge to hit the woman. ‘She can look after us in our old age, but she must stop this nonsense clinic.’
Adopting their mother’s mantra that no one would want to marry their sister, her entrepreneurial brothers were horrified to learn that Taban had left the security of the NGO job to work for no money in the slums. Once reconciled to the fact that she would continue on this path no matter what they said, their entrepreneur genes kicked in and the
