Chapter 4: A Son, a Brother, a Schoolboy - My Name Is Samim

The next day, I eat breakfast alone in the kitchen, as the other kids are already at school. The doorbell rings and I hear people walk inside the house.

I drop the toast on my plate, swallowing hard.

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Miss Brown walks into the kitchen. “Your solicitor and the caseworker are here, Samim. They are waiting for you in the study.”

I meet a woman in the corridor. Her skin is darker than mine, and her black hair is tied up in a bun. She wears a purple cardigan and purple earrings, and holds lots of papers.

“My name is Nadia, Samim. I’m your solicitor. Are you well?” She stretches her hand out.

She has a firm voice: the voice of a person who always knows what to say.

“Yes, I’m well.” I shake her hand.

I’m getting used to holding hands with women.

“Excellent.” She beams. “I know you’ve done a similar interview before, but I still want to make sure you understand what will happen. The man in that room is the caseworker. He will ask many questions about your life, family and journey here. He will do that because he needs to understand why and how you came to the UK. Once he knows your story, he will discuss it with his colleagues at the Home Office and they will decide whether you’ll be granted asylum and allowed to become a refugee in this country. Do you understand, Samim?”

I nod, loosening the knot of my bracelet, then tightening it again. Fidgeting with it comforts me.

“Good. I will be by your side, and if something feels difficult to talk about or you have questions, please tell me.”

I nod again, gazing at my shoes. I’m scared. And when I’m scared, I lose my voice and hide my eyes.

“You’ll do great, Samim. I can already tell we’ll be a good team.”

Miss Nadia pats me on the back, and we walk into the study together. Zayn walks in with us.

There are many bookshelves in the room, and a long table in the middle with two computers on each side. A man with a bald, shiny head is sitting at the table reading some documents, probably mine.

“His head looks as if my mother polished it along with my father’s shoes,” Zayn says, and I can’t help but chuckle. No one notices, thankfully.

The man has paper-white skin that blends with his white shirt. Small round glasses sit on the tip of his pink nose. Miss Nadia says the man’s name is Mr Higgins.

“Let me know if you need a break at any point,” she adds, sitting beside me.

I had a solicitor before, and he was nothing like Miss Nadia.

The man looks up from his papers, his glasses slipping slightly down his nose. “Hello, Samim,” he says. “How are you?”

I nod, my tongue suddenly tight.

“Good.” His fingers tap the papers. “Are you ready to start the interview?”

I nod again.

He adjusts his glasses and picks up a pen. “How old are you, Samim?”

“I am thirteen years, three months and one day,” I say, and out of the corner of my eye I notice Miss Nadia smile.

“And where are you from?” Mr Higgins writes everything down.

“Ghazni, in Afghanistan.”

“How old were you when you left Afghanistan?”

“Ten years, four months and seven days.”

Mr Higgins looks at me first, then Miss Nadia. She gives him a half nod.

“Can you tell me what happened to you, Samim?” he asks. “From the very beginning. Tell me about your family.”

I look at Miss Nadia, and she gives me a thumbs up. I take a deep breath and think back to the time when I was still a son, a brother and a schoolboy, not an orphan or a refugee.

Ghazni province, Afghanistan, 2019

We lived in a snake-shaped village hidden among the double-chinned mountains with snowy hats. Our narrow streets smelled like apricots and figs in summer, with overripe fruit lying under every tree spreading its honey scent everywhere.

Our house was the only two-storey building in the neighbourhood. My grandfather built it, turning the bottom floor into a pharmacy. My father worked there from early morning till late at night. His name was Imam, and he was very tall, just like me.

Some days, after he’d closed the pharmacy, he played football with me in the field. But he always told me that school was more important than any sport and that I’d get into trouble if I ever headed the ball.

“That head has a different purpose,” he’d say.

He was so proud that I was good at maths and chess. He hoped I’d someday become an engineer and rebuild all the parts of Ghazni that had been bombed. I think it was his dream.

My mother’s name was Zahra. She was the only teacher at the girls’ school and the only woman in our street who had a profession. She had a pale round face, big almond eyes and long black hair that she hid under her favourite blue scarf. My mother always worried about the kids in the village. If anyone didn’t have shoes or pencils at school, she would buy them with her own money.

My mother told me that as a baby I liked splitting things like sticks, leaves and stones into even piles. That’s how she knew that my brain liked counting, so she taught me maths and chess from a very early age. By the time I was five, no one in the village could beat me at chess.

I loved my family, school, home and village, but we weren’t always safe. Groups of Taliban fighters often raided our streets. They hate families like ours because we are Hazaras and Shia Muslims, but the Taliban are Sunni Muslims.

I remember asking my father once why the Taliban hated us so much. He told me that just like two branches of the same tree are rooted in the same soil and nurtured by the same sun, the Taliban and Hazaras belonged to the same land and believed in the same God. But our branches faced different ways and never intertwined. And the Taliban did everything they could to stop our branch from growing. They had weapons, they had power and they treated us like enemies.

Americans hate the Taliban for bullying everyone. They use airstrikes to fight them on our lands. Only airstrikes are not bullets. They don’t just kill one person, they kill many. And for one dead Taliban fighter, our neighbours had to bury their husbands, wives, sons and daughters.

It was as if we lived between the lairs of two dragons: the Taliban on one side and the Americans on the other. We never knew which dragon would burn our houses down tomorrow.

Four days before I lost my family, a car bomb detonated near the girls’ school that my mother ran. Everyone knew it was the Taliban. Many of our neighbours lost their daughters in that explosion, and my mother was lucky to survive. But for the next four days, she was ill with worry, crying and hugging us all the time. I thought it was because she was mourning her students, whom she loved like daughters, but now I know it wasn’t just that. She cried and hugged us because she knew something terrible would happen. She was saying her goodbyes to us.

My sister’s name was Fatima. She was only five but could easily beat my father at chess. She had my mother’s round face and my father’s curly hair, which struggled to stay under her scarf. Fatima loved singing; you could always hear her little voice in the house, humming lullabies to her dolls.

And Zayn… Zayn was my brother in all but blood. Our homes in Ghazni stood back to back, mine facing the dusty main road, his farmhouse overlooking a field where lambs and goats roamed from dawn to dusk. In the summer, when the windows were open, I could hear his mother’s shouts as she scolded him for his latest prank. His house was always bustling: parents, grandparents, two older sisters and his uncle’s family, all working at the farm. It’s the Afghan way; families often live together.

Zayn and I played football every day after school, and that cursed day was no different. We dropped our school bags at home and raced to the field. We passed the ball to each other and practised different kicks. We played and laughed, and for that little while, we didn’t think of the war and the bombings. When we played football, it was as if the world around us shrank to a dusty field where we had the ball and each other, and everything was perfect.

Until it wasn’t…