In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read online

  Give it back.

  Give him back the packet.

  Out of nowhere, a group of Hazara boys suddenly materialized. First one, then two, then three, there seemed no end to them. Some were younger than me. They dropped from the roofs, sprang out from the back alleys. After a few minutes, there were more of us than there were of them. Seeing how things were shaping up, some of the Baluchi boys slunk away. Their leader stayed put, along with two of his followers, one on his right and one on his left, but a step behind him because they were scared. I felt as powerful as a snow leopard. With that small army behind me I approached the leader to try and get the packet of chewing gum back, but he suddenly started running. Or at least tried to. I grabbed him, and we rolled on the ground, with our boxes of merchandise and everything. I could feel his muscles under the cloth of his pirhan. He landed a couple of punches. As we fought I managed to grab a pair of socks from his box. Then he gave me a kick in the stomach that took my breath away, grabbed hold of his box and ran away. He still had the chewing gum. But I had the socks, which were worth more.

  One of the Hazaras helped me up.

  You could have joined in, I said. I wouldn’t have minded.

  Yes, we could, but it would have been worse for you next time. This way, you showed you could defend yourself.

  Do you think so?

  Yes, I do.

  I shook his hand. Thanks, anyway. My name’s Enaiatollah.

  Sufi.

  ———

  I made friends with the Hazara boys, and with Sufi in particular. His real name was Gioma, but he was known as Sufi because he liked to keep himself to himself, and was as calm and silent as a Sufi monk, even though there were times when he caused more trouble than anyone else.

  For instance, as we were walking through the streets one evening, he went up to a vagrant lying half asleep on the ground, a dirty, smelly fellow, and dropped a handful of little stones into his metal bowl. The poor man immediately got up to see who’d given him all that money, and I’m willing to bet he was already under the illusion that he was rich and could afford a meal in the best restaurant in the city or buy himself as much opium as he wanted. That must have been why, when he realized they were only stones and saw us laughing behind the wall of a mosque, he started running after us, shouting that he’d fry us in chip oil. But we sped off, and he was too weak to catch up with us.

  Another time, Sufi saw a motorbike tied to a pole and got on it. Not to steal it, just to know how it felt to be on it: he’d always dreamed of having a motorbike. But as soon as he gripped the throttle and pressed the clutch lever, for some reason the motorbike started up. It jerked forward, turning around the post it was tied to, and Sufi was thrown off and fell onto a fruit stall, hurting his back and one of his legs. For quite a while after that, he had difficulty kneeling in prayer.

  Every day we went to the market with the other Hazara boys, and at lunchtime we pooled our money for a bit of Greek yogurt and chives, a few loaves of naan tandoori, which is a flat, round bread baked in a clay oven, and some fruit or vegetables, if there were any.

  That’s how it was.

  I kept working at the Liaqat Bazaar because I had nothing better to do—and I would never have gone back to the samavat Qgazi because I’d have lost Sufi and my other friends—but I didn’t like it. It wasn’t like having a shop where people come in and ask you for things, and you just have to be there to welcome them and be nice. No, here you had to go up to them, stand in front of them or next to them while they were doing or thinking about other things, and say, Buy, please buy. You had to bother them like a fly, and obviously that made them angry and they treated you badly.

  I didn’t like bothering people. I didn’t like being treated badly. But everyone (including me) is interested in staying alive, and in order to stay alive we’re willing to do things we don’t like.

  I had even come up with a few original ideas to force people to buy, and they seemed to work. One was that I would go up to those who had a child in their arms, bite into a snack without opening it, leaving a mark on the wrapper, and while they weren’t looking I would give it to the child, then say to the parents, Look, he took a bite out of this snack. He’s ruined it and now you have to pay for it. Another trick was to give the child a little pinch on the arm, lightly enough not to leave a mark, so that they started crying, then I would hold out a snack and say to their parents, Here’s something that’ll calm your child down.

  But all that went against the third thing Mother had told me not to do: don’t cheat.

  Apart from that, the big problem was where to sleep. When it got dark the boys and I would hole up in one of the more squalid neighborhoods on the outskirts of Quetta. Abandoned houses about to collapse. Drug addicts behind the cars. Fires. Garbage. I was very dirty, but every morning, even before looking for something to eat, I would go to a mosque to wash myself, and then walk past the same school as before.

  I didn’t skip a day. As if I felt I’d be playing truant if I did.

  One afternoon I talked to osta sahib, the shopkeeper I’d gone into business with, and told him I wanted to quit and that I’d rather look for other work, because I couldn’t stand sleeping in the street anymore.

  Without saying a word, he took a piece of paper and did the accounts. Then he told me how much I’d earned so far. I couldn’t believe it. He took the coins and notes and put them into my hand. It was quite a bit of money. I’d never had so much money in my life.

  Then he said, If the problem is where to sleep, come to the shop in the evening, before I close up. I’ll let you sleep here.

  In the shop?

  In the shop.

  I looked around. It was a clean place, with rugs on the floor and cushions propped up against the wall. There was no water and no toilet, but there was a mosque nearby where I could go in the morning.

  I accepted. In the evening, I would arrive at the shop before seven, and he would pull down the shutter. He wouldn’t leave me the keys, so I had to stay in there all night until he came to open up the next day, and sometimes he didn’t come until ten or later. Waiting for him to come and let me out, and having nothing else to do, I remember I tried to read the newspapers he left on the counter, but I never managed to learn Urdu well. I’d have to read slowly, so slowly that by the time I got halfway down the page, I couldn’t remember what it had said at the beginning. I was looking for news about Afghanistan.

  Why don’t you tell me a bit more about Afghanistan before we go on?

  What kind of thing?

  Something about your mother, or your friends. Your relatives. Your village.

  I don’t want to talk about people, I don’t want to talk about places. They aren’t important.

  Why?

  Facts are important. The story is important. It’s what happens to you that changes your life, not where or who with.

  One winter morning—every day in winter I would look up at the sky hoping it would snow, the way it did in Nava, but although winter in Quetta was so cold it could take your skin off, it was the worst thing possible, a winter without snow: when I realized it wasn’t going to snow I cried as I’d never cried up to that point—anyway, one winter morning, I went into a shop that sold plates and glasses and asked the shopkeeper for a drop of water. He looked me up and down as if I was an insect, then said, First tell me who you are. Are you Shia or Muslim? Theoretically, they’re the same thing, so it was a really stupid question. I got angry. Patience has its limits even when you’re a child no taller than a goat.

  First I’m a Shia, I said, then I’m a Muslim. Or rather, I added, first I’m a Hazara, then a Shia, then a Muslim.

  I could easily have told him I was a Muslim and left it at that, but I said what I said just to spite him. He took a broom and started beating me with the stick, very hard, without mercy. He hit me on my head and back. I ran out of the shop screaming, partly from anger and partly from pain, and the people who were there just stood around and did nothing. I bent
down and picked up a stone and threw it into the shop, such a well-aimed, accurate shot that if an American had seen me he’d have immediately hired me to play on a baseball team. I didn’t want to hit the shopkeeper, just break a few plates and glasses. He hid under the counter to dodge the stone and the stone shattered all the things displayed in a wooden cabinet behind him. I ran off, and never once went back to that street.

  On the afternoon of the same day—I don’t know where Sufi was, sometimes he went off on his own—I went to an Indian place to buy some ash. Ash is a bean soup with long thin noodles, a bit like minestrone. Anyway, I’d gone to buy ash—I’d earned a bit of extra money and wanted to treat myself, because I was really fed up with naan tandoori and Greek yogurt—and I’d just taken the bowl when one of the usual longbeards came up to me and said, Why are you eating ash bought from an Indian?

  Now you need to know, Fabio, that eating ash is a sin—I don’t know why, but it is—but I had already tasted the ash, and it was very good, I swear. And if a food is as good as that, I don’t think it can be a sin to eat it, do you? So I replied, I like it, why can’t I eat it?

  I wasn’t in an indoor restaurant, that was why the longbeard had seen me. I was in a dusty little square and in the middle of the square was the Indian with the pot. Once you’d paid for your bowl of ash, the Indian gave you a bowl and a spoon, and you went into a corner and ate it standing up, then gave everything back to him. You couldn’t have a system like that in this country, Fabio, for hygiene reasons.

  I don’t know who that longbeard was exactly. He had a huge white turban on his head, so thick that even if you’d hit him a thousand times he wouldn’t have felt a thing, and his mouth was covered with his beard, so that when he spoke you couldn’t see his lips move, just his cheeks a little, as if he was a ventriloquist, but in all probability he was a Wahhabi, one of those fundamentalists who are always yelling about jihad and so on.

  So what does he do? He takes the bowl and turns it upside down. And I had paid for that soup: it was my soup. But all I could do was look at the soup drying on the ground and a cat eating my beans.

  That’s it, I thought.

  I was fed up with being treated badly. I was fed up with the fundamentalists, the police who stopped you and asked you for your passport and, when you said you didn’t have one, took your money and kept it for themselves. And you had to give them the money straightaway, otherwise they took you to the police station and punched and kicked you. I was fed up risking my life, like that time I was saved by a miracle from a fundamentalist attack because we boys from the Liaqat Bazaar hadn’t gone to pray in the biggest Shia mosque in Quetta, as we usually did, and I’m not even sure why we didn’t that day, but sometime later we heard a very loud explosion and ran to see. We were told that two suicide bombers had tried to get in. One had been stopped, but the other had succeeded. They’d both blown themselves up. Nineteen people had died inside and outside the mosque, or so I was told.

  I met a lot of boys who were going to Iran. Or who had come back from Iran. They said things were better in Iran than in Pakistan (which I didn’t doubt: I’d have sworn that anywhere on earth was better than Quetta) and that there was much more work in Iran. And apart from that, there was the question of religion. They were Shia—the Iranians, I mean—which was better for us Hazara, for the stupid reason that brothers in religion treat each other better, though as far as I’m concerned you should be kind to everyone and shouldn’t have to check their identity card or religious affiliation.

  I heard these voices in the air, as if broadcast through a loudspeaker like a muezzin’s prayer, I sensed them in the flight of birds, and I believed them, because I was small, and when you’re small what do you know of the world? Listening and believing were the same thing. I believed everything people told me.

  So when I heard those things—that the Iranians were Shia and they treated you well and there was work—and when I saw Afghan boys in the street who’d been in Teheran or Qom and now had money in their pockets, and clean hair, and new clothes and trainers instead of slippers, whereas we Hazaras who worked at the Liaqat Bazaar stank like goats, I swear to you, when I saw these boys stop for a night at the samavat Qgazi, and reflected that they’d been like me once whereas now they wore jeans and shirts, I made up my mind that I would go to Iran, too.

  I went back to kaka Rahim and asked his advice, because of all the people I knew he was the one who knew most about traveling. Unsmiling, smoking a cigarette as usual, the smoke clinging to his long lashes, he said I was doing the right thing, going to Iran, but he said it as if doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing were the two halves of a roll which had to be eaten together, without worrying about the filling.

  He wrote something on a piece of paper, a name, and handed it to me. Go and talk to him, he said. It was the name of a people trafficker and I had to introduce myself to him as a friend of kaka Rahim, so that he would treat me well and not be tempted to cheat me, which was something you always had to reckon with in that kind of situation. Then he went into the kitchen, put some roast chickpeas and raisins in a packet and gave it to me saying that he couldn’t give me anything else, except for his blessing, his wish that I arrive safe and sound.

  My mind was made up. There was no turning back.

  I went to say goodbye to Zaman and promised him I would always read a bit of the Qur’an, if I happened to find a copy. I went to osta sahib and thanked him for everything. Then I went to find the boys in the Liaqat Bazaar and told them I was about to leave.

  Where are you going?

  Iran.

  And how are you getting there?

  With a people trafficker. I got his name from kaka Rahim.

  If they catch you, you’ll end up in Telisia or Sang Safid. Like the old madman in the market, the one with the stones in his pocket, who spends all day rubbing them because he’s convinced there’s gold inside them.

  I was familiar with the stories circulating about Telisia and Sang Safid. Stories about beatings and abuse. I don’t care, I said, I don’t want to be here anymore.

  They say a whole lot of people die on the border because the Iranian police shoot at you, one person said.

  They say there’s a lot of work, said another.

  Rumors, I said. The only thing to do is go and see for myself.

  Sufi was eating dates, making big chewing movements with his mouth like a camel. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his pirhan, slipped the bag from his back and put it down on the ground. With a leap backward he jumped onto a low wall, scaring away a lizard that was enjoying the sun. He was silent for a few minutes, the way he usually was, with his arms folded and his legs crossed. Then he said, Are you sure it’s a good idea?

  I shrugged my shoulders. I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to leave.

  Ba omidi khoda. I don’t want to stay here either, said Sufi.

  I didn’t say anything, because I was hoping he’d be the one to say it.

  I’m coming with you, Enaiat.

  When we went to talk to the trafficker, in a dark room filled with taryak smoke and a whole lot of men drinking chay and heating opium on camping stoves, he asked us for the money immediately. But we didn’t have all the money he wanted. We emptied the pockets of our pirhans, turning the material inside out, gathered all the coins and crumpled notes we’d managed to save and heaped them on the table in front of him: a little hill of money.

  That’s all we can give you, I said. Not even half a rupee more.

  He looked us up and down for a long time, as if measuring us for a suit. Your little pile of money isn’t even enough to pay for a bus ticket as far as the border, he said.

  Sufi and I looked at each other.

  But there might be a solution, he went on, finishing cutting an apple and lifting a piece of it to his mouth with the knife. I’ll take you to Iran, all right, but in Iran you’ll have to work in a place I know.

  Work? I said. That’s fantastic. I couldn’t belie
ve my ears: not only was he taking us to Iran, he was also going to find us work.

  I’ll take your wages for three or four months, said the trafficker, depending on how much your journey is going to cost me. After that you’ll be able to consider yourselves free and do what you like. Stay there, if you like it. Or leave, if you don’t.

  Sufi was so calm and silent, I half expected him to close his eyes and kneel in prayer. As for me, I was dazed by the smoke and the darkness, and was trying to think what the catch might be, because there’s always a catch with traffickers, but the fact of the matter was, we didn’t have any more money, and he had to pay the Baluchis and the Iranians who would get us across the border, and that was the biggest expense, so he wasn’t completely wrong: we weren’t his children, he didn’t want to lose money on our journey. And besides, I’d introduced myself as not just anybody but a friend of kaka Rahim’s, and that reassured me more than anything else.

  Sufi and I said okay.

  Be here, outside the door, tomorrow morning at eight, he said. Khoda negahdar.

  At eight. Outside the door. But neither of us had a watch, or rather, neither of us had ever, and I mean ever, owned a watch in our lives. In Nava, to know what time it was, I measured the shadows with my steps and when there was no sun I had to guess. You woke up when it was light, and you heard the chanting of the muezzin and the crowing of the roosters. In Quetta, the noise of the city going to work would wake me, but never at a particular time. For this reason, Sufi and I had decided not to go to sleep that night.

  We walked around, saying goodbye to the city.

  In the morning the trafficker took us to a place about twenty minutes’ walk away, where we stayed until midday and ate yogurt and cucumbers: I remember it well because it was our last lunch in Pakistan. Then we left.