‘You’re happy this morning,’ he said.
‘I’m always happy, aren’t I?’
‘Mostly.’
Sofia laughed. ‘There will be no patients this morning because a man from the UN is coming to see me. Can you please send him up as soon as he arrives?’
‘Of course, Dr Sofia, but I’m sorry, Farahnaz is already waiting for you.’
Sofia looked at Rashid in confusion. ‘Upstairs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’ Sofia considered this. ‘If the man from the United Nations comes while Farahnaz is still here, can you please ask him to wait?’
‘Of course.’
She was about to go up the stairs when she hesitated. ‘I’ve never asked you before but is that gun of yours loaded?’
Rashid looked at his gun as if the answer might be lurking there. ‘Of course. Do you think I might need to shoot Farahnaz or this man from the UN for you?’
Sofia looked at him in horror until she saw the smile Rashid was trying to hide. In the years she had known him she had never seen him smile, nor had she ever known him to make a joke.
‘That was funny, Rashid,’ she said, nodding her head in appreciation as she disappeared up the stairs two at a time. ‘Really funny.’
The reception area was a long thin room, accommodating Iman’s desk at one end and the stairs at the other. Behind Iman’s desk were two banks of filing cabinets, while six chairs lined one of the walls in front of the desk. Iman quite liked this formation, which gave her and the waiting patients ample opportunity to gossip. On the opposite wall to the chairs were two photos: the village in the Hindu Kush and the Sydney Opera House. Two doors directly opposite each other led to Sofia’s and Jabril’s surgeries, but because it would not do to have men and women sitting together the reception area was only for the women, while the men accessed Jabril’s surgery by a separate set of stairs on the other side of the building.
With Jabril not having a secretary, or reception, the men generally wandered in whenever they liked. If his surgery door was closed it was a sign they should wait, but if their need was not immediate they might come back later, otherwise they would knock to let Dr Jabril know someone had arrived. The system was ruled by happenstance and a little too chaotic for Sofia’s liking, but it seemed to work well for Jabril and the men of the square.
When Sofia saw Farahnaz sitting on the end seat closest to Iman’s desk her good humour disappeared. The young woman had aged twenty years since she had last seen her. Pulling off her scarf, Sofia led Farahnaz into her surgery, but instead of taking her seat on the opposite side of the desk she sat down next to Farahnaz and took her hand.
‘Please tell me what’s wrong.’
Through a veil of tears, Farahnaz poured out the story of Rayi, her ten-year-old brother who lived with her parents in the Kabul slum of Jamal Mina and had been missing for two days. As Sofia listened, her blood ran cold. This was the fourth boy to go missing from the area in the last two months. The first two had disappeared within a few days of each other, and then last week she had been told by her friend Taban, who ran a clinic in the slum, that a third little boy had disappeared. Farahnaz’s brother made the fourth.
‘I’m sure he’ll show up soon,’ Sofia had said, forcing a smile as she squeezed Farahnaz’s cold hands. ‘People don’t just disappear. In the meantime, let’s see what we can do for you.’
When Farahnaz left, Sofia stood by her window watching the young woman walk back across the square. With her shoulders slumped and her head down, Sofia guessed she was crying and hoped the anti-anxiety tablets she had prescribed would kick in faster than normal. She leaned her forehead up against the window. All she had been able to give Farahnaz was sympathy, medication and lies. People did just disappear and Farahnaz knew it. The lie had left a bad taste in her mouth, but what else could she do? Sofia shook her head. It was Jamal Mina. Poverty offered ripe pickings for those who preyed on the weak and vulnerable.
During the civil war, many of the inhabitants of Kabul who had lost their homes in the fighting had begun building makeshift shelters on the barren hills ringing the city. After the Taliban secured Kabul and the fighting intensified in the countryside, they were joined by their country cousins. When the West pushed the Taliban back, Afghan refugees – some of whom had lived their entire lives in the camps of neighbouring Pakistan and Iran – had been forcibly repatriated and they too joined the relentless drive upward in what would eventually become the slum of Jamal Mina. The final ingredient in this potent mix of misery and despair was those who had seen opportunity with the flood of Western aid dollars and had willingly abandoned the uncertain perils of living and working on the land in Afghanistan for the uncertain promise of living in a capital city bulging with opportunity. When their dreams of a better life in the city failed, they too were trapped in the pitiless slums with their magnificent views. Life in Jamal Mina was not for the faint-hearted.
Like everyone else in Afghanistan, Sofia and Jabril knew about bacha bazi or ‘boy play’, but neither had been directly confronted by it until a couple of weeks after the first two boys went missing from Jamal Mina. Walid, a young man who worked with street kids and those at risk, had arrived in Jabril’s surgery to tell him about a young boy who had started hanging around with the street kids. Walid soon learned that the boy had been part of a stable of young boys owned by a moderately wealthy merchant from Jalalabad. The boy had eventually escaped the merchant by hitching rides to Kabul, offering to pay the fare with his body along the way. Luckily for him, bacha bazi was generally a class phenomenon seen in some quarters as giving wealthy men status. Poor truck drivers, like those who stopped to give the boy a lift, frowned on the practice.
If an owner became ‘besotted’ by a child, Walid had explained to Jabril, he might become the man’s ashna, his beloved, and be lavished with presents and special treats, but as far as Walid could tell this boy had only ever been a commodity. He described how the child continually lived in fear of being found and taken back to the merchant, but was also riddled with shame for what had been done to him and guilt that the merchant would take retribution on his family for his disappearance. The boy was now marked for life as bacha bereesh and vulnerable, excluded from society and probably selling himself on the streets to survive. A little confused about why Walid was telling him the story, Jabril had asked Walid what he thought he could do.
‘Help these boys,’ Walid had said. ‘You’re a good man, Dr Jabril. I was hoping you could help these boys.’
Later that evening, as he sat on the lounge with Sofia and Zahra enjoying an after-dinner tea, Jabril had told them about the boy before asking what they thought he should do.
‘You already spread yourself too thin,’ was Zahra’s response. ‘There are other people dealing with bacha bazi. Leave it to them.’
Jabril had turned to Sofia.
It was an inflammatory issue, an open secret that no one wanted to touch because you never knew what powerful person might be involved. She shook her head slowly. ‘I’ve no idea what we can do.’
‘No,’ Zahra had said, seizing on her words immediately. ‘There is no “we” here. You definitely are not getting involved in this issue, even if Jabril does.’