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Pasoon’s grip on Reshmina slipped, and she fell a few centimeters before he caught her again.
The American helicopter kept hovering right behind her— WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP . Reshmina knew that with just one squeeze of the pilot’s trigger finger, bullets would tear through her and her brother. Everything she had cared about, everything she had worked for and struggled for, would all be gone in an instant.
“Come on, Reshmina!” Pasoon cried over the roar of the helicopter. “Climb!”
Pasoon shifted his weight and pulled harder on her hand. Reshmina’s fear and panic gave her a desperate strength, and she wriggled her chest up onto the edge of the cliff and swung a leg up and over. Pasoon dragged her the rest of the way over the edge, and they collapsed in each other’s arms, weary but safe.
Except for the helicopter.
WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP.
Reshmina turned around again. The Apache’s blades swirled in the air, blowing Reshmina’s headscarf back from
her hair and face. Reshmina thought she saw the pilot talking into the mic at his mouth. Was somebody far away deciding her fate, the same way somebody far away, piloting a drone, had decided her sister Hila’s fate? Reshmina stared into the eyes of the helicopter pilot. Would those be the last eyes she ever saw?
The Apache hung in the air a moment longer, and then, as suddenly as it had come, it tilted and lifted away to the right, leaving Reshmina and Pasoon where they sat on the edge of the cliff.
Reshmina slumped against her brother. She wanted to flop back on the ground and pass out. But the pops and booms of the Americans and the Taliban still fighting behind them meant that she and Pasoon were still too exposed.
Pasoon knew it too. They helped each other up, and with a quick squeeze of Pasoon’s hand, Reshmina thanked him for saving her life. Pasoon nodded, and then they hurried along the cliff, putting as much mountain between themselves and the battle as they could.
They followed a goat path down and around the mountainside, where they ran into an old abandoned logging camp. It was a small plateau where people had once lived while they cut down Afghanistan’s towering cedars and pines and sold them across the border to Pakistan. The Americans had shut most of these logging camps down, convinced the money made there was being used to buy weapons for the Taliban. But the move had backfired, in a way: When the loggers were put out of work, many of them traded their chain saws for rifles and joined the very same insurgents the Americans were trying to stop.
An explosion boomed from the other side of the ridge, and a tall gray mushroom cloud spiraled up over the peak. Reshmina took Pasoon’s hand again, and they dove behind a pile of old cedars as bullets peppered the logs.
Reshmina wanted to scream, partly from fear and partly from anger. She had just gone looking for her brother! She hadn’t expected to end up in the middle of a battle. Why couldn’t everyone just leave them alone?
Reshmina stayed flat on her face for a moment, catching her breath. When she finally looked up, she was staring right into the eyes of a camel.
The sight of it was so silly, so surreal after what they’d just been through, that she wanted to laugh out loud.
Pasoon did laugh. “Ha!”
Plegh. The camel spit in Pasoon’s face.
“Gross!” Pasoon cried, and he wiped his face on his sleeve.
“Uh, Pasoon?” Reshmina said, putting a hand on his arm.
Pasoon froze. There were even more camels sitting behind the woodpile—and people too. Twenty or thirty of them, an entire tribe of men, women, and children, all cross- legged on the ground, staring at Reshmina and her brother. The men were white-bearded and wore trousers and turbans and long tunics like Reshmina’s father did. Most of the women wore tunics and pants like Reshmina, but a few wore dresses with full skirts and wide sleeves, decorated with metallic laces and pendants and amulets. Their children huddled among them, the boys wrapped in blankets, the girls wrapped in shawls, unblinking and unmoving.
These people were Kochi, Reshmina realized suddenly. She had seen them before, but only in the distance. The Kochi were nomads. They had no year-round home, instead traveling back and forth across the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan with the seasons, selling rugs they had made and trading the meat and cheese and wool from their goats and sheep and camels.
“Hi,” Reshmina said.
The Kochi stared at her and Pasoon.
Rock and dirt exploded from the mountaintop above them as the battle between the Taliban and the Americans raged on, but the Kochi and their animals didn’t even flinch.
“Let’s get out of here,” Pasoon whispered. He tried to get up and go, but Reshmina pulled him back down.
“Not with them still shooting!” Reshmina told him.
One by one, the Kochi unrolled prayer rugs. Reshmina couldn’t believe it—they were going to pray right here, with an American helicopter flying around shooting bullets every which way.
Reshmina and her brother felt obligated to join them. Ordinarily they would have done wudu—washed and cleaned themselves with water in preparation for praying. They made tayammum instead, using the dust of the ground to clean themselves. God was forgiving and merciful and would still accept their prayers if He willed it. Better to pray than to not pray, their father always told them.
Reshmina fixed her headscarf and stood and bowed, stood and knelt. God knew Reshmina’s heart better than she knew her own, and when she sat to ask for forgiveness, she also said a prayer for Pasoon. Please help turn my brother’s heart from revenge, Reshmina prayed. Please show him another path.
Reshmina spied Pasoon’s toy airplane sticking out of his pocket, and she snatched it and tucked it away under her tunic while he had his eyes closed in prayer. She still hoped God would answer her prayers, but it didn’t hurt to have a backup plan.
When they were finished praying, an old Kochi woman stood and came over to Reshmina and Pasoon. “Come,” she said, and held out a hand.
Reshmina glanced at her brother. His scowl was back. Reshmina knew her brother wanted to be on his way to the Taliban, not playing nice with nomads. But they could still
hear the tung-tung-tung of Taliban rifles over the ridge. She and her brother weren’t going anywhere. Not yet.
Reshmina accepted the old woman’s invitation, and she and Pasoon crouched low as they followed her to a small blanket, where a mother and father sat with their two children. The old woman was their grandmother, Reshmina guessed. Chickens clucked quietly in wooden cages all around them, and a baby camel in a tightly bundled blanket twisted its long neck to sniff them. Three baby goats bleated and butted their heads against Reshmina and Pasoon as they sat down.
Naan, rice, cooked chicken, and pistachios were already laid out on the blanket in bowls, and the old woman offered the food to her guests. Pasoon dug in greedily, and Reshmina gave him a swift elbow to the ribs. They had to accept the act of hospitality—to refuse would be a grave insult—but they shouldn’t eat too much either. The Kochi were clearly poor, and the rice alone must be very precious to a tribe with no land of their own.
Reshmina took a small piece of naan and a pinch of rice, and nodded her thanks. Pasoon frowned, but he did the same.
Reshmina looked around at the Kochi as she ate. What would happen if the battle between the Americans and the Taliban spilled over the ridge? What would all these people do? There was nowhere for them go, nowhere else for them to hide.
Reshmina seemed to be the only one worried about it. The two little children giggled as the baby goats butted Pasoon for his food. The grandmother worked at weaving a carpet on a small, portable loom, and the father looped and knotted cloth into some kind of satchel. The mother cradled something under her shawl, and Reshmina was surprised to see a tiny baby, wrapped up so tightly in swaddling clothes
that it couldn’t move anything but its little mouth. Its eyes fluttered closed as it drifted off to sleep.
What must it be like to live this way? Reshmina wondered. To be born under the sky. To be raised on the move, and sleep around a softly crackling fire. There was a charming simplicity to it. The Kochi owned only what their camels could carry, did only what was necessary to survive. There was no walking three kilometers every day to go to school, no fitting in homework around housework. Reshmina doubted any of them could read, let alone do long division. They certainly didn’t know what a computer was, and didn’t care.
Pasoon appeared to be just as charmed, laughing with the children as a baby goat tried to climb their father’s back. Reshmina wished for a moment that she and her brother were both Kochi. It seemed like the nomads existed in their own world, one completely separate from the conflict between the Taliban and the Americans. She knew it couldn’t be that simple—that the Kochi had to have been drawn into the war and affected by it just like everyone else. But she loved the idea of climbing on a camel and leaving all of this behind.
The explosions on the other side of the mountain moved away down the valley, and Pasoon stood. “I have to go,” he said, and the spell was broken.
Reshmina bowed their thanks again to the old woman and her family, stood, and hurried to follow her brother. She caught up to him just outside the old logging camp and grabbed him by the arm.
“Oh no you don’t,” Reshmina said. “You’re not going to the Taliban, Pasoon!”
Pasoon pulled free. “Watch me,” he said, and he kept moving.
Reshmina seethed. Her brother could be so stupid sometimes. “You grew up in a jam bottle!” she told him, following on his heels.
“You’re the daughter of a sheep,” Pasoon fired back.
“May you be eaten by termites,” Reshmina told him. She could trade insults with her brother all day.
“Go home,” Pasoon told her. “You’re not even supposed to be out without a male chaperone.”
Reshmina caught up again and matched her brother step for step. “Well, I have one now,” she told him.
“You’re not coming with me,” Pasoon told her. “Watch me,” Reshmina said.
Pasoon stopped and turned on Reshmina. “There is nothing you can say or do to stop me from going to the Taliban,” he told her.
“Oh yeah?” Reshmina said. She pulled the toy airplane from inside her tunic and waggled it just out of his reach. “Then I suppose you don’t mind leaving without this.”
