The Lightless Sky Read online

  Gulwali Passarlay

  with Nadene Ghouri

  THE

  LIGHTLESS

  SKY

  AN AFGHAN REFUGEE BOY’S JOURNEY

  OF ESCAPE TO A NEW LIFE IN BRITAIN

  Atlantic Books

  london

  For my Mother.

  And for the 60 million refugees and internally

  displaced people who are out there somewhere in

  the world today, risking their lives to reach safety.

  Illustrations

  Map: Gulwali’s Journey. Credit: Jamie Whyte

  Images

  1: Gulwali, aged 8, selling tailor supplies

  2:Gulwali, aged 10, and his younger brother Nasir in Afghanistan

  3: Laghman Province, Afghanistan. Credit: Naveed Yousafzai

  4: Gulwali, aged 10, with his family in Afghanistan

  5: Gulwali’s Afghan passport photo, 2008

  6: Gulwali with his foster father, Sean

  7: Gulwali’s proudest moment so far: carrying the Olympic torch in 2012. Credit: Capture the Event

  Map

  Prologue

  Before I died, I contemplated how drowning would feel.

  It was clear to me now; this was how I would go: away from my mother’s warmth, my father’s strength and my family’s love. The white waves were going to devour me, swallow me whole in their terrifying jaws and cast my young body aside to drift down into the cold, black depths.

  ‘Morya, Morya,’ I screamed, imploring my mother to come and snatch up her twelve-year-old son and lift him to safety.

  The journey was supposed to be the beginning of my life, not the end of it.

  I have heard somewhere that drowning is a peaceful death. Who­ever said that hasn’t watched grown men soil themselves with fear aboard an overcrowded, broken-down boat in the middle of a raging Mediterranean storm.

  We’d eaten what little food and water the captain had on the boat within the first few hours. That had been more than a day ago. Now, fear, nausea and human filth were the only things in abundance. Hope had sunk some time during the endless night, dragging courage down with it. Despair filled my pockets like stones.

  When we had set sail from Turkey, the white-haired Kurdish smuggler had promised we would reach Greece in a couple of hours. The man worked for a powerful, national-level agent, one of the shadowy businessmen who own and control the trade flow of desperate migrants moving through their countries. Money exchanges hands and deals are struck through a series of regional agents and local middle men. A powerful agent might have several junior agents and hundreds of local-level smugglers, drivers and guides in his employ, dealing with hundreds or even thousands of migrants and refugees at any time.

  Yet, despite the Kurdish man’s promises, it had been two days since we had set sail and we were still at sea.

  On the morning of the second day, far out to sea, the captain changed the boat’s flag from Turkish to Greek. This should have been a good sign, but something felt wrong. If we were in Greek waters, why hadn’t we docked yet?

  Everyone guessed that something had gone awry and the majority of the men, many of whom were locked below in the hull, began to panic. These were the men who had been first to board, the ones who had shoved weaker men aside so that they might be guaranteed a place on the boat. As they had got on, the captain had instructed them to go below. How could they have known that they would then be locked in behind a metal door? They hadn’t expected to be trapped in a floating coffin, and had been screaming half the night, desperate to get out. I thanked the Creator I wasn’t in there with them.

  I had been one of the last to get on and I had been worried that I wouldn’t get a space. By the time I was aboard, the hull had been already full and I was placed on the open deck – a lucky stroke of fate. As the only child on the boat, my chances of survival weren’t great even at the best of times, but at least being on the open top deck allowed me a fighting chance.

  There was no toilet anywhere on board. Men had soiled their clothes; others urinated into empty water bottles – some even saving the yellow liquid to drink. Desperation can be a great motivator. A foul mix of sea water, urine and faeces constantly lapped at our feet and, even in the open air, the stench burned my nose. Added to this, my bottom ached from sleeping and sitting on the hard wooden bench that ran around the edge of the deck. It was impossible to snatch more than a couple of minutes’ sleep at a time. We were wedged so tightly together the only way to sleep was sitting up.

  Hamid, a youth in his early twenties I had met just six days earlier, as we had hidden in a forest waiting for this boat journey, was sitting next to me. We took it in turns to rest our heads on each other’s shoulders. My only other friend, Mehran, was one of the unfortunates trapped below deck. During the nights I heard him screaming in terror: ‘Allah, please help us. Allah.’

  The only reprieve came on the second night, when the captain allowed me and Hamid to go on to the roof of the boat. I don’t know why I was chosen – maybe he felt a bit sorry for me because I was a small boy travelling alone.

  Big waves rocked the boat incessantly, but being high up felt safer, somehow. It was such a relief to get fresh air and to be able to stretch my arms and legs, but at the same time I was terrifyingly conscious that even the slightest wrong movement could see me topple over the side and into the waves. I had no idea how to swim: if I fell in I’d be dead. I didn’t expect that anyone would jump in to save me.

  By dawn of our third day at sea our captain had become extremely agitated, constantly shouting into his radio in Turkish. I suppose he knew we couldn’t stay out there for much longer without food or water.

  I overheard a couple of the passengers, both Afghans like me, discussing whether it made sense to take control of the boat.

  ‘Let’s attack him and tie him up,’ said one.

  His friend shook his head. ‘You fool. Who would get us into Greece if we did?’

  The second man was right.

  Like it or not, we were at the captain’s, and the sea’s, mercy.

  By this point, I was beginning to feel delirious from lack of food and fresh water, and had started to hallucinate. My throat was so parched with thirst I was unable to breathe through my dry mouth. I kept thinking how nice it would be in Greece – just to wash my body, and not stink of piss and vomit. It sounds so stupid but rather than food, I began to fantasize about new clothes and how good they would feel on clean skin.

  I was too focused on trying to stay alive to think much about the family I had left behind. Remembering them made me so unbearably sad, especially when I thought about my thirteen-year-old older brother, Hazrat. We had fled Afghanistan together, in fear for our lives, but he had been ripped away from me by the smugglers just days after we’d escaped.

  It helped to try and focus on my mother’s steely determination and imagine her voice urging me not to give up: ‘Be safe, and do not come back.’ They had been her last words to me and my brother before she had sent us both away to find sanctuary in strange lands. She had done it to try and save our lives, to help us escape from men who had wanted us dead.

  But so many times I wished she hadn’t.

  Sometime in the afternoon of the third day, the engine started to choke and splutter, and then it cut out completely. The captain pretended for a while that everything was OK, but as time wore on he became even angrier, sweating and swearing as he tried to restart the ancient diesel motor. Eventually he got on to his radio again and started shouting at someone, this time in a language I didn’t recognize.

  Finally, after one part
icularly heated conversation, he asked a Turkish speaker to translate to us all.

  ‘They are sending a new boat to get you. Don’t worry.’

  The captain smiled around at us all, displaying black, decaying teeth, but the look in his eyes gave the truth away, filling me with intense dread. Not all of us were going to survive, of this I was certain. I felt rage swell inside me at the slippery lies that had come so easily from him.

  My fears were confirmed when the weather worsened. Curling tails of wind whipped the waves into frenzy, wailing like demonic beasts.

  ‘Morya, Morya. I want Morya.’ I screamed for my mother, the mother who was far away in Afghanistan. I was a lost little boy, about to meet his death in a cold, foreign sea.

  Before getting on this boat, I had never even seen the sea before; the only knowledge I had had of it was from pictures in school text books. The reality was beyond the wildest reaches of my imagination. For me, those waves were truly the entrance to the gates of hell.

  I managed to get into a higher position – on the roof of the wheel house. The move gave me air and space, but now each rushing wave swung me back and forth like a rag doll. My skinny fingers gripped the railings, my knuckles white and bloodless.

  After a couple of hours of this, the boat began taking in water. Everyone started screaming, the people trapped below frantically pummelling at the locked door with fists and shoes.

  ‘We are going to drown, let us out. For God’s sake, let us out. We will die here.’

  The captain waved a pistol and fired in the air, but no one paid him any attention. It seemed sure that the boat would overturn.

  For a brief, strange moment I was calm, resigned: ‘So, Gulwali, this is how you will die.’ I imagined it – drowning – in explicit detail: the clean coolness of the water as darkness closed overhead, my life starting to flash before my eyes: my grandparents’ wizened, wise faces; me at four years of age tending sheep by a mountain brook; walking proudly beside my father through the bazaar, him with his doctor’s microscope tucked underneath his arm; sheltering from the baking sun under the grape vines with my brothers; the scent of hot steam as I helped to iron the clothes in my family’s tailor shop; my mother’s humming as she swept the yard.

  No.

  I wasn’t giving up.

  I had been travelling for almost a year. In that time, any childhood innocence had long since left me. I had suffered unspeakable indignities and dangers, watched men get beaten to a pulp, jumped from a speeding train, been left to suffocate for days on end in boiling-hot trucks, trekked over treacherous, mountainous border crossings, been imprisoned twice, and had bullets fired at me by border guards. There had rarely been a day when I hadn’t witnessed man’s inhumanity to man.

  But, if I’d made it this far, I could make it now. A survival instinct deep within me spurred me on. I didn’t want to die, not here, not like this, not gasping and choking for breath in the cold depths of the sea. How would anyone find my body?

  My mother’s face flashed before me again. ‘It’s not safe for you here, Gulwali. I’m sending you away for your own safety.’

  How would she feel if she could see me now? Would she ever know what had happened to me?

  That thought was enough to give me strength. I knew the captain had lied to us again – there was no other boat coming to get us, and this one was sinking fast. There was no way I was going to follow his orders to stay down and hide.

  I searched in my bag and pulled out the red shirt I’d managed to buy in Istanbul, the one I was saving to wear as celebration for getting to Greece. I started waving and screaming: ‘Help, help. Somebody help us.’

  I hadn’t realized it, but the captain was behind me. As I turned, he kicked me full in the face, sending me tumbling down to the deck and almost over the side. Dazed and in agony, I clung on to the railing for dear life. The boat rocked back and forth but still I held my hand as high I could, waving my shirt. The captain came for me again. I think he may have intended to push me overboard but by then others had followed my lead and had started screaming for help too, waving whatever they could to attract attention.

  The boat gave a heavy belch and the bow dropped deeply into the water. Everyone screamed again and tried to move to the stern; I was still dazed from the captain’s kick so could only try to protect myself from the stampeding legs.

  The boat was finished, it was obvious. With a sickening wheeze, the stern settled heavily in the water too.

  Now, we truly were sinking.

  I closed my eyes and began to pray.

  Chapter One

  ‘I found you in a box floating down the river.’

  I eyed my grandmother suspiciously.

  Her deep brown eyes danced mischievously, set within a face that was deeply lined and etched by a lifetime’s toil in the harsh Afghan sun.

  I was four years old, and had just asked the classic question of where I’d come from. ‘You are joking with me, Zhoola Abhai.’

  Calling her ‘old mother’ always made her smile.

  ‘Why would an old woman lie? I found you in the river, and I made you mine.’ With that she gave a toothless chuckle and wrapped me in her strong arms – the one place in all the world where I felt most safe, loved and content. I was my grandparents’ second grandchild, born after my older brother, but I felt like I was their favourite, with a very special place in their hearts.

  We are from the Pashtun tribe, which is known for both its loyalty and its fierceness. Home was the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, the most populated province in Afghanistan, and also a place of vast deserts and towering mountains. It is also a very trad­itional place, where local power structures run along feudal and tribal lines.

  I was born in 1994, just as the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan. For many Afghans, and for my family, the ultra-­conservative Taliban were a good thing. They were seen as bringing peace and security to a country that for over fifteen years had suffered a Russian invasion, followed by a brutal civil war.

  For much of their marriage, my grandparents had lived in a refugee camp in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar. The refugee camp was also where my parents had met and been married. By the time I was born, Afghanistan was not at war, and relatively stable under Taliban rule.

  My earliest memory is of being four years old and running with my grandfather’s sheep high in the mountains. Grandfather, or Zoor aba (‘old father’), as I called him in my native language of Pashtu, was a nomadic farmer and shepherd. He was a short man, made taller by the traditional grey turban he always wore. His hazel-flecked green eyes shone with a vital energy that belied his years.

  Each spring he walked his flock of thickly fleeced sheep and spiral-horned cattle to the furthest reaches of the mountains in search of fresh and fertile pasture. My grandparents’ home, a traditional tent made from wooden poles and embroidered cloth, went with them. Two donkeys carried the tent on their backs, along with the drums of cooking oil, sacks of rice, and the flour my grandmother needed to bake naan bread.

  I would watch transfixed as my grandmother spread and kneaded sticky dough along a flat rock before baking it over the embers of an open fire. She cooked on a single metal pan which hung from chains slung over some branches balanced over the fire. I loved helping her gather armfuls of wild nettles which she boiled to make a delicately scented, delicious soup. I don’t know how she did it, but everything she created in that pan tasted of pure heaven to a constantly hungry little boy like me.

  Every year, as the leaves began to turn into autumn’s colours, they would head back down to lower ground, making sure to return to civilization before the harsh snows of winter descended and trapped them on the mountains’ slopes. There they joined the rest of their family, their six children and assorted grandchildren, in the rambling house that was home to our entire extended family. Our house then was a very simpl
e but lovely, single-storey stone-built structure perched above a clear, flowing river.

  I was my grandparents’ shadow so I was thrilled when, aged three, they took me with them the next time they returned to the mountains. Their youngest daughter, my auntie, Khosala (‘happy’), was also with us. She was fifteen and like a big sister to me.

  For the next three and a half years I shared my grandparents’ nomadic lifestyle, at night falling soundly asleep beneath a vast, star-filled mountain sky, safely tucked up inside the tent nestled between the pair of them.

  Grandfather loved his family with a fierce passion, and laughter came easily to both him and my grandmother. I don’t think I ever saw him angry. One time I accidentally almost took his eye out with a catapult. Blood was streaming down his cheek from where my badly aimed flying rock had cut it. It must have really hurt but he didn’t chastise me. Instead, with characteristic humour, he managed to make a joke of it: ‘Good shot, Gulwali.’

  My grandmother was sturdily built and bigger than my grandfather. She was definitely the boss, but I could see they adored each other. Love isn’t something people really discuss in Afghanistan. Families arrange marriage matches according to social structure, tribal structure or even to facilitate business deals; no one expects or even wants to be in love. You just do as your parents demand and make a marriage work the best you can – you have to, because divorce is forbidden for women.

  It was explained to me once – by my grandfather – that a woman is too flighty and unsure of her own mind to understand the ­consequences of leaving her marriage. Besides, who would look after her if she did? Men do have the right to divorce their wives, but it is still very frowned upon. I knew only of one woman whose husband had divorced her. She’d been taken in by her brother but this was a great shame to their family. She had been lucky that he had accepted her and hadn’t turned her away on to the streets.

  My grandparents would never have dreamt of breaking up, even if they could have done. They had married when she was fifteen and he eighteen, meeting for the first time on the day of their wedding, as is still often the norm. But anyone could see that their years together had given the pair a special bond.