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Why?

Facts are important. The story is important. It’s what happens to you that changes your life, not where or who with.

One winter morning—every day in winter I would look up at the sky hoping it would snow, the way it did in Nava, but although winter in Quetta was so cold it could take your skin off, it was the worst thing possible, a winter without snow: when I realized it wasn’t going to snow I cried as I’d never cried up to that point—anyway, one winter morning, I went into a shop that sold plates and glasses and asked the shopkeeper for a drop of water. He looked me up and down as if I was an insect, then said, First tell me who you are. Are you Shia or Muslim? Theoretically, they’re the same thing, so it was a really stupid question. I got angry. Patience has its limits even when you’re a child no taller than a goat.

First I’m a Shia, I said, then I’m a Muslim. Or rather, I added, first I’m a Hazara, then a Shia, then a Muslim.

I could easily have told him I was a Muslim and left it at that, but I said what I said just to spite him. He took a broom and started beating me with the stick, very hard, without mercy. He hit me on my head and back. I ran out of the shop screaming, partly from anger and partly from pain, and the people who were there just stood around and did nothing. I bent down and picked up a stone and threw it into the shop, such a well-aimed, accurate shot that if an American had seen me he’d have immediately hired me to play on a baseball team. I didn’t want to hit the shopkeeper, just break a few plates and glasses. He hid under the counter to dodge the stone and the stone shattered all the things displayed in a wooden cabinet behind him. I ran off, and never once went back to that street.

On the afternoon of the same day—I don’t know where Sufi was, sometimes he went off on his own—I went to an Indian place to buy some ash. Ash is a bean soup with long thin noodles, a bit like minestrone. Anyway, I’d gone to buy ash—I’d earned a bit of extra money and wanted to treat myself, because I was really fed up with naan tandoori and Greek yogurt—and I’d just taken the bowl when one of the usual longbeards came up to me and said, Why are you eating ash bought from an Indian?

Now you need to know, Fabio, that eating ash is a sin—I don’t know why, but it is—but I had already tasted the ash, and it was very good, I swear. And if a food is as good as that, I don’t think it can be a sin to eat it, do you? So I replied, I like it, why can’t I eat it?

I wasn’t in an indoor restaurant, that was why the longbeard had seen me. I was in a dusty little square and in the middle of the square was the Indian with the pot. Once you’d paid for your bowl of ash, the Indian gave you a bowl and a spoon, and you went into a corner and ate it standing up, then gave everything back to him. You couldn’t have a system like that in this country, Fabio, for hygiene reasons.

I don’t know who that longbeard was exactly. He had a huge white turban on his head, so thick that even if you’d hit him a thousand times he wouldn’t have felt a thing, and his mouth was covered with his beard, so that when he spoke you couldn’t see his lips move, just his cheeks a little, as if he was a ventriloquist, but in all probability he was a Wahhabi, one of those fundamentalists who are always yelling about jihad and so on.

So what does he do? He takes the bowl and turns it upside down. And I had paid for that soup: it was my soup. But all I could do was look at the soup drying on the ground and a cat eating my beans.

That’s it, I thought.

I was fed up with being treated badly. I was fed up with the fundamentalists, the police who stopped you and asked you for your passport and, when you said you didn’t have one, took your money and kept it for themselves. And you had to give them the money straightaway, otherwise they took you to the police station and punched and kicked you. I was fed up risking my life, like that time I was saved by a miracle from a fundamentalist attack