Page 187 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

a match, inhaled contentedly, and offered it to Adel. Adel was tempted to take it,

if only to impress Gholam, but he passed, worried Kabir or his mother would
smell it on him.
“Wise,” Gholam said, leaning his head back.
They talked idly about soccer for a while, and, to Adel’s pleasant surprise,
Gholam’s knowledge turned out to be solid. They exchanged favorite match and
favorite goal stories. They each offered a top-five-players list; mostly it was the
same except Gholam’s included Ronaldo the Brazilian and Adel’s had Ronaldo
the Portuguese. Inevitably, they got around to the 2006 Finals and the painful
memory, for Adel, of the head-butting incident. Gholam said he watched the
whole match standing with a crowd outside the window of a TV shop not far
from the camp.

“‘The camp’?”
“The one where I grew up. In Pakistan.”
He told Adel that this was his first time in Afghanistan. He had lived his
whole life in Pakistan in the Jalozai refugee camp where he’d been born. He said
Jalozai had been like a city, a huge maze of tents and mud huts and homes built

from plastic and aluminum siding in a labyrinth of narrow passageways littered
with dirt and shit. It was a city in the belly of a yet greater city. He and his
brothers—he was the eldest by three years—were raised in the camp. He had
lived in a small mud house there with his brothers, his mother, his father, whose
name was Iqbal, and his paternal grandmother, Parwana. In its alleyways, he and
his brothers had learned to walk and talk. They had gone to school there. He had
played with sticks and rusty old bicycle wheels on its dirt streets, running around
with other refugee kids, until the sun dipped and his grandmother called him
home.
“I liked it there,” he said. “I had friends. I knew everybody. We were doing
all right too. I have an uncle in America, my father’s half brother, Uncle
Abdullah. I’ve never met him. But he was sending us money every few months.
It helped. It helped a lot.”

“Why did you leave?”
“Had to. The Pakistanis shut down the camp. They said Afghans belong in
Afghanistan. And then my uncle’s money stopped coming. So my father said we
might as well go home and restart, now that the Taliban had run to the Pakistani
side of the border anyway. He said we were guests in Pakistan who’d outstayed
their welcome. I was really depressed. This place”—he waved his hand—“this is
a foreign country to me. And the kids in the camp, the ones who’d actually been
to Afghanistan? None of them had a good thing to say about it.”