My name is Parvana

TWO

Parvana looked around at the little room where she had landed.

It wasn't bad. It was clean. It had a narrow metal bed with a thin mattress on it. A gray blanket was folded at the end. Next to the bed was a metal table attached to a wall. Underneath was a stool that folded under the table.

The walls were smooth gray and made of metal. Parvana's eyes traveled across them and rested on a small sticker down near the floor by the bed. She knelt down for a closer look. Port-A-Prison, she read. The Creative Containment Specialists, for all containment needs.

The words were in English, which she could read. She kept reading and learned that the prison had been built in North America, in a place called Fort Wayne, Indiana. They must have folded it up like a cardboard box and packed it into a big plane to Afghanistan, then unfolded it here, on this patch of dirt in her country.

Parvana looked at the screws and bolt holding it together. The label also said the cell had been inspected by Inspector 247. Inspector 247 must have found everything correct, because here it was.

Parvana wondered about Inspector 247. Was it a man or woman? Did they think about who would be held inside the gray walls they inspected? Did they have a family they went home to at night? A family who was all there because no one had been shot or had stepped on a land mine or just got too tired to keep on living? When they were younger, did they dream about becoming a portable-prison inspector?

It must be a good job, one with some authority. They got to say, "This cell is good, send it off," or "This cell has problems. Back to the factory."

At the other end of the room was a toilet with a sink on top. Parvana gently touched the tap. Water was coming out! She had running water! She let it flow over her fingertips.

A piece of paper above the sink told her that wasting water would result in further punishment. She quickly shut off the tap and waited for the boots in the hallway. None came.

"What more can they do to me?" she whispered to herself.

She turned the tap back on and splashed water on her face. She turned if off again when she was done. Not because she was afraid of being punished, but because this was a dry part of the country, and water was never a thing to be wasted. And while the prison may have come from America, the water came from Afghanistan. It belonged to her.

The bed looked inviting. Oh, to stretch out on a bed that belonged just to her, in a room with a closed door and running water! But she could not allow herself to sleep, not yet. Not until she knew what was going on.

She stood for a while beside the door, looking for any opening that might let her peer out into the hallway. There was none. There was a metal screen, but the covering to it slid open on the other side of the door. Her captors could slide it back and look at her whenever they wanted, but she could not look at them.

When she finally permitted herself to sit down on the bed, she perched on the edge, half sitting and half ready to spring into action if the situation called for it. The bed had a metal ledge to hold the mattress in place. 

She was tired and scared, but this was the first time in her life that she had a room of her own, and she wanted to enjoy it as much as possible.

If she had been asked to design this room - if Inspector 247 had known she was going to be put into it and had asked her opinion- Parvana would have had something to say about the colour.

Blue, she thought. A bright blue, the colour if the sky on a brilliant winter morning before the clouds rolled in from the mountains. She would add a few splashes of red here and there. A cheerful red, like the red of the fancy shalwar kameez she had to part with when she was a child because her family needed the money.

That was years ago, but she could still see it fluttering away through the market - a bright splash of colour in an otherwise dismal place. Her last splash of childhood, sold to a stranger.

She would have designed the bed in such a way that it could be folded against the wall, giving her room to walk or dance or do exercises. She was used to doing hard physical exercises at school, and would like to keep on doing them if she could.

And, of course, the window would be bigger. It would look out over an orchard and a river, and beside it would be a door that she could open and walk through whenever she wanted. But then it wouldn't be a jail cell.

The bed became a little too comfortable, and her chin started to drop to her chest. She thought it up with a jerk, then stood up. She stamped her feet a little to wake herself up. She needed to stay awake. She needed to be alert for whatever was coming.

Everyone had heard the stories. Everyone knew somebody who had disappeared behind the walls of one of these places. Sometimes they came out again, angry and vowing revenge. Sometimes they came out trembling and scuttled off into the corners to mumble to themselves. Everybody knew somebody who knew somebody. It was a secret that everyone knew.

What went on behin prison walls was bad. Parvana had seen the scars, the marks of torture. The peddlers who pushed his cart through the refugee camp each day would show his scars to anyone who tried to buy a pot or a brush from him.

"This is not the Taliban," he said. "This is from the ones who saved us from the Taliban. Who will save us from the saviors?"

Parvana had heard his story three times, since she was often tasked with taking care of the housekeeping for the family. On and on he went, showing his battered wrists and ankles over and over.

"I'm just a peddler," he would say. "I just push a cart. I don't know what is in the heart of the person I sell a shoelace to. When a man buys a bar of soap, I don't ask hime if he is the devil. Why did they arrest me? Why did they hurt me?"

The first time she heard the story, Parvana was fascinated, shocked, and sympathetic. She wanted to do something for the old man. All she could think of was to tell him to keep the change from her purchase, but she couldn't do that because her family had so little money. So she listened to his story until he was tired of telling it, picking up the handles of his cart, and went on his way.

The second time she heard his story she also felt sad and sympathetic, but she was conscious of the tongue-lashing she's gotten from her mother the last time for standing around and talking instead of working. So she kept looking for a spot in the man's story when she could politely back away.

The spot never came. He talked and talked, showing his scars, describing his pain, and demanding answers: "Why was this done to me? I am nobody. Why would they do this to such a nobody?" Parvana grew frustrated that she had no answers and could not help him. She finally backed away on her own, leaving him screaming at the sky.

The third time, she pretended not to know him. She chose the tea and thread that she needed, looked down at the dirt and paid without speaking. She could feel the loneliness coming off him in waves, and she shut herself against it.

She did not want to end up like the peddler. She did not want to end up angry and howling for revenge. Who would she get revenge from, anyway? How far back in time would she need to go before she was satisfied? Did a word like revenge have any real meaning in a country like Afghanistan?

Parvana doubted it.

To howl for revenge would be a waste of time. And enough of her time had been wasted already.

She didn't want to lose her mind behind these walls. Afghanistan already had plenty of lost minds, floating like invisible balloons in the air above the land, leaving behind empty-minded people moaning and lonely in the dirt.

"How do I come out of this?" she asked herself in a whisper. She had to believe they would one day let her out. She could not admit to herself that it was quite likely they would not.

After all she had been through, she knew only one thing for sure. She knew she could not trust them. 

All she could trust was herself.

- CHAPTER 3 COMING SOON (: -