“Someone on the street said why don’t you put the bag on the donkey? And he said, “That would be cruel, I’m heavy enough already for the poor thing.” We exchanged Mullah Nasruddin jokes until we ran out of them and we fell silent again.
“Amir agha?” Farid said, startling me from near sleep.
“Yes?”
“Why are you here? I mean, why are you really here?”
“I told you.”
“For the boy?”
“For the boy.”Farid shifted on the ground. “It’s hard to believe.”
“Sometimes I myself can hardly believe I’m here.”
“No... What I mean to ask is why that boy? You come all the way from America for... a Shi’a?”
That killed all the laughter in me. And the sleep. “I am tired,” I said. “Let’s just get some sleep.”
Farid’s snoring soon echoed through the empty room. I stayed awake, hands crossed on my chest, staring into the starlit night through the broken window, and thinking that maybe what people said about Afghanistan was true. Maybe it was a hopeless place.
A BUSTLING CROWD was filling Ghazi Stadium when we walked through the entrance tunnels. Thousands of people milled about the tightly packed concrete terraces. Children played in the aisles and chased each other up and down the steps. The scent of garbanzo beans in spicy sauce hung in the air, mixed with the smell of dung and sweat. Farid and I walked past street peddlers selling cigarettes, pine nuts, and biscuits.
A scrawny boy in a tweed jacket grabbed my elbow and spoke into my ear. Asked me if I wanted to buy some “sexy pictures.”
“Very sexy, Agha,” he said, his alert eyes darting side to side-- reminding me of a girl who, a few years earlier, had tried to sell me crack in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. The kid peeled one side of his jacket open and gave me a fleeting glance of his sexy pictures: postcards of Hindi movies showing doe-eyed sultry actresses, fully dressed, in the arms of their leading men. “So sexy,” he repeated.
“Nay, thanks,” I said, pushing past him.