He was in another pick-up – one with a covered rear compartment – though this one was decades and several evolutionary steps behind the gleaming blue desert racers; it bore a comforting resemblance to the pick-up in which the Pathan driver had ferried Raza and the other neighbourhood boys to and from school. Then he used to laugh at the other boys squeezed together on the two parallel benches that ran the length of the rear compartment while he was in the front end learning Pashto [pullquote_left]It was uljhan, he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and disquiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word.[/pullquote_left]from the driver, a tiny window between the driver and passenger seat allowing him to look back at the other boys who made obscene gestures in his direction without malice. If he’d only stayed in the back of the pick-up with them, he now thought, he would never have learnt Pashto, never have talked to Abdullah, never set off everything that led him to be sitting in a cardboard box at the back of a pick-up while young Pathan boys bowled cabbages towards him.
‘Vegetables can cross the border without paperwork, so you must become a vegetable,’ one of the men from the sand-coloured houses had explained to Raza. So here he was trying to contain his panic as the cabbages piled up in the back of the pick-up reaching his knees, his chest, his eyes…
‘I’ll suffocate in here,’ he called out.
‘You’ll be the first,’ replied a voice that seemed to find this notion intriguing.
For most of the journey he stood, stooped beneath the canopy, hemmed in by chest high cabbages. But as the border approached the driver rapped sharply on the partition that divided them and with long, deep breaths Raza lowered himself into the cardboard box. Within seconds, with the motion of the pick-up, the cabbages had rolled over him, cutting off light and air. And so, in the company of cabbages – breathing in cabbage air, pressed in by cabbage weight – Raza reached Iran.
Time had never moved so slowly as in the dark dankness of cabbages. The pick-up seemed to stop for a long time before the border guards approached. The cabbages muffled all sound except that of his heart.
When the pick-up moved again, Raza still dared not stand up. He had been firmly instructed to wait for the driver to signal an all-clear. But there was so little air.
Finally the driver stopped the pick-up and rapped again on the partition. Raza burst out of the cabbages, displacing the ones that were covering him with such energy they went thud-thudding against the canopy, and gulped in great mouthfuls of air. While the driver watched him, laughing, he clambered into the space between the cabbages and the canopy and, like a swimmer, propelled himself outward.
‘Had fun?’ the driver asked, taking Raza’s hand and helping him down to the ground. ‘Cabbage soup for dinner!’
After the guards in the pick-up, Ahmed the Driver was a joy to sit with. His family were nomads, he explained, as he drove Raza south toward the coast. But drought and war had brought an end to the lifestyle his family had known for centuries, and now they had grudgingly settled near the border and become drivers if they were lucky, stone-pickers if they weren’t. ‘The land mines are the worst,’ he said, while Raza was still trying to work out what ‘stone-pickers’ might mean. ‘Once we used to travel in large groups for protection. Then we started to move in groups or three or four so if anyone steps on a powerful mine it can only have so much impact and others following behind will see the bodies – or the birds swarming around – and know to avoid that place.’ He smiled jauntily as he said this, and Raza didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but was glad just for the camaraderie.
He wanted to ask Ahmed the Driver, where – or what – is home for your people? But though he knew how to ask where someone was from, or where they lived, the word for ‘home’ in Pashto eluded him. As he tried to think of ways to explain it, the meaning receded.