Our Afghan Neighbours

In which is told the story of a refugee family from Afghanistan that lives on the knife edge of destitution.

About six months after we’d settled into 786 Hilal and familiarized ourselves with the neighbourhood, I realised that there was in fact an Afghan refugee family residing on the empty plot in front of our home. Not just a couple of men, but a whole family, minus its head. The plot in which they had made their encampment has an intriguing topography of pits and rock formations, affording ample nooks and crannies for homeless people to bed down in relative safety for the night or, indeed, build makeshift shelters out of thorny bushes and discarded bath tubs, as they had done.

This family caught my attention because it was not the usual motley crew of adolescent scavengers busily providing Defence with its unofficial recycling service: it comprised a burqa-clad mother, a teenage adolescent boy, a strikingly handsome beanpole of a younger lad and a cute little girl with raggedy-muffin sun-bleached hair.

Every day we’d come across this family doing something or other in our neighbourhood or  street. Concern for their welfare caused me to engage. We started by letting the kids come to our house every day for water. Food and money would occasionally come their way from 786 Hilal. They started storing some of their stuff down at the servants’ quarters. The mother never ever emerged from her black burqa, nor could she speak Urdu. The oldest son was clearly mentally disturbed in some way. He was by no means dysfunctional, but it seemed unlikely that he would ever be capable of an independent life.  The mother’s spokesperson was the handsome, smiling young lad who spoke plausible Urdu.

After several conversations with him, I realised that 'he' was in fact a short-cropped girl. Yagana* was beautiful, with fine chiseled features and green eyes, her skin slowly accumulating scars from life on the street, her coltish frame muffled in a boys’ loose shalvar qameez. But for how long, I wondered. Puberty was bound to set in sooner or later, and then what? Given that they were prey to all manner of unscrupulous opportunists, it was too gruesome to think about. The youngest, Sholah, was a sparkly happy-go-lucky creature who seemed to think that life was a big adventure and grinned incessantly.

Gradually I managed to get their story. The woman’s husband had been a traffic cop in Kabul before he had fled to Pakistan with his family, probably towards the late 90’s. Like many de-racinated Afghans he fell into scavenging the garbage heaps of Karachi to sustain his family from selling recyclable garbage.  Misfortune greater than what had already befallen them then struck and he was forced to endure an amputation of half a leg due, it seems, to bone cancer (or was it gangrene?). He died shortly thereafter, leaving his family adrift and homeless. How they came to settle in our area I never found out, but they made a life for themselves here, managing to avoid harassment by the police, for periods of time at least; every now and then the police would come and turf them out of their temporary shelter and then they would mooch about forlornly outside a local mosque.

In spite of living on the streets, the mother never once abandoned her burqa. One day, while sitting on my lawn, I managed to persuade her to pull it up to let me see her. As she gathered the cloth up I noticed her fingernails were painted a crimson red, though chipped. Her fair face was careworn but beautiful. She was probably in her mid-thirties but her delicate features had been prematurely wrinkled by the toll of this hand to mouth existence and she looked more like 60. She seemed unable to maintain eye-contact, looking far away, but not seeing anything at all other than, perhaps, the tragedy of her life.

Naturally their plight affected me greatly and, as you might expect, I thought that there ought to be a solution to this problem. Problems exist to be solved, right? Proper shelter was the obvious starting point. With board and lodging sorted, the children might be able to attend school. Through my capable sister-in-law we arranged something with the Edhi Foundation. The mother and older son would work in the kitchens, the family would receive housing and food and the youngest two would go to school. It seemed perfect.

But not to the mother. She refused point blank.

I had suspected that living on the streets for too long a period can actually make one afraid of settling back into society. Her behaviour often betrayed a functional level of paranoia. In spite of the hardships, I also recognised that there was a certain perverse freedom associated with existing beyond the fringes of normal society. Then there’s also a point beyond which it becomes almost impossible to be rehabilitated into regular society, and maybe this woman had reached this point.

I tried another tack: repatriation. Phone calls to the UN refugee commission yielded an arrangement to board one of the many buses that were then being organized for repatriation to Afghanistan. I was thrilled with the possibility for them to return home.

Yagana’s mother was not. ‘We have enemies in Kabul. They want to do away with us. Why would I want to go back?’

Enemies? I was nonplussed. No amount of reasoning made the idea appeal to her.

Through the servants’ grapevine I found out that she did in fact have relatives in Sohrab Goth, a suburb to the north-west of Karachi with a predominantly Afghan population. They were her husband’s relatives, but that they had turfed her out and warned her never to return else they would burn her alive. Since this destitute family had lived on the streets for so long, the relatives could not accept the possibility that their izzat (sense of honour) might have been compromised.

One day the mother turned up in a faint. She claimed that an Afghan man had tried to molest her and ripped her shalvar with a razor in an effort to gain access to her body. She was beside herself. Through the servant grapevine I’d come to learn that all the locally based Afghani scavengers held her in contempt and insisted she was mad. But clearly she and her children would remain vulnerable if they remained on the streets.

One day something happened in our relationship that put a huge distance between us. I’d set out a tablecloth in our driveway to feed the family – it was Ramadan. For some reason the girls were inside while the mother and her son ended up being locked out on the outside. The girls were beside themselves with fear that they might be separated from their mother and started to bawl and shriek. I told the guard to let them out and off they scarpered.

Things soured further: after demanding some money from our chowkidar (guard) – money he didn’t have for I had not left anything with him to give her – she pelted the gate with rocks, denting the panels. This sat very badly with our servants who took this as the last straw and withdrew their willingness to help this family out.

Gradually I let go of the idea of ‘solving’ this family’s problems. Clearly they had become accustomed to this life and clearly the mother was in charge. As long as the kids perceived her as the director of their affairs there was nothing we could do. I tried to plant some seeds of ambition for an education in Yagana, but I had no way of knowing when and how these would bear fruit. I’d sit the girls down and give them books to colour. I’d preach homilies about how reading and writing were essential to get on in life. They would smile and colour for a bit but then disappear off on errands.

Coming across them day after day was a constant reminder of my failure to ‘do good’. But I accepted this decree. Who was I to alter this particular part of the pattern of the universe? The mother was clearly deranged – who wouldn’t be after such loss, grief, fear and the sheer business of survival? As long as she led this family, they were condemned to remain on the streets which perversely felt safer to her than being among her compatriots.

Then they disappeared. Vanished. Days and months went by. My enquiries eventually yielded the following: their relatives had finally found them and taken them home to Sohrab Goth to look after them. They had apparently spent several years looking for them, always missing them. The stories we'd been told about them being ready to kill Yagana and her family had not been true after all. I was glad. At last the kids would have the nurture and protection they needed.

My relief was short-lived. Driving past a local mosque one day I noticed the family sitting outside. By now Yagana had indubitably become a woman and could no longer hide in men’s clothes. Furthermore, it transpired a young Afghan man had fallen in love with her and vowed to wed her. The mother resisted the idea but the man persisted. We helped him with the rent on a one room home which he had secured for their use. Yagana planned to take Sholah away with her. And so she did.

News came almost a year later that Yagana had given birth to a boy. Sholah was now living with her. And going to school!

Yagana’s mother and brother are back in Defence. Doing the same things as before, wandering around, picking things up, selling them, accepting sadaqah, visiting the local ‘hotels’ for food, and bedding down for the night between the thorny kheekar of empty plots. The last time I saw her, she’d finally pushed her burqa up onto her head, the better to free her arms to pick over refuse and carry things.

Sholah was not back with her. I can but hope and pray that with Yagana’s help they have managed to settle into a semblance of a safe family life.

Photo of a garden near Bam courtesy of Patricia Omidian, Medical Anthropologist & Focuser.

*Names have been changed.