Help!

Short story by Naseer Ahmad Ahmadi
Translator: Ismat Khan

The mother sat down beside her fatherless daughter and put a wet cloth upon her hot forehead. The little girl opened her dying eyes.

"How are you feeling, daughter?” the mother asked quietly. "How is your headache now?"



The girl, whose withered lips started moving in her long and yellow-skinned face, said: "I’m hungry, it is cold."

The mother opened the tablecloth while breathing deeply and said to her daughter: "Sweetie, please wait a little more. Someone had told me that the foreigners are coming to the camp today, they may help us a little bit."

Suddenly, some sounds rang and the woman pulled down her veil and got out of the tent quickly. It was chilly outside. Two red men, followed by some residents of the camp, got closer to her. A foreigner handed her a large poster and left shortly with his group.

The woman looked at the poster; it had pictures of different dishes and fruits and there was also something written in black ink at the bottom of the poster. The woman hurriedly showed the poster to a passerby, “Hello brother, please read this; what they have written to me?”

The man took the poster, looked at the writing and said: "If you want to have strong and healthy children, feed them with nutritious and useful foods."


Nasir Ahmad Ahmadi is an Pashtun novelist and short story writer. He works at BBS AEP and lives in Kabul, Afghanistan.