You with me - California

The smell of cumin and turmeric never left my skin.

I scrubbed my hands at the restaurant sink again and again but the smell remained in my hands. They had seeped into my pores over the three years I had worked at the Kabul Star.

It was past midnight and the restaurant was empty. Javed was in the back counting the money three times. He thought all of us were thieves. He counted every single night even though none of us would dare steal from him.

I tightened my apron around my waist. It was too big for me because I was too thin. At twenty-five years old, I looked like a girl who had never eaten a full meal in her life. This was what years of not having enough food did to a person. I was all sharp angles and visible bones, and my clothes hung off me like they belonged to someone else.

There were ten tables to wipe down before I could leave and forty-seven chairs to unstack and wipe and restack. Then floors to sweep and mop. Then trash to haul to the dumpster in the alley behind the building. By the time I was done, my back would be screaming at me like Javed did when someone dropped a plate.

By one in the morning, I reached my apartment , where I lived with my mother barely able to hold my body from tiredness and same routine again kept waiting for me for next day before i closed my eyes.

The restaurant, where I worked was called Kabul Star but there were no stars here and Kabul was just a memory now.

It sat on a narrow street in Fremont, California, in a neighborhood they called Little Kabul because so many of us had ended up here after the war and the collapse and the long, terrible journey across oceans and borders.

We were like debris from a shipwreck, washed up on this foreign shore with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the names of dead relatives in our mouths.

The owner, Javed, was a scary man from Mazar-i-Sharif who had reached US before us and acted like master to us.

He hired only Afghans because he could pay us less and we could not complain. Complaints required papers and most of us had none. We existed in the shadows, in the spaces between legal and invisible, between a home we could not return to and a country that did not want us to stay. Javed knew this and didn't leave a chance to exploit us.

My name was Mehtab Gul. Mehtab meant moonlight. My father had named me that because I was born at full moon night. He had held me in his arms on that night, a night that was supposed to be the beginning of everything good, and he had told my mother, "She will be light in the darkness." That was before the darkness swallowed everything. That was before home became a word that meant nothing at all.

I was twenty-five years old. I had been in America for more than six years now. I had been undocumented for all of them. I had worked as a cleaner and a babysitter and a translator and now as a dishwasher at Kabul Star. I worked sixteen hours on some days and made almost nothing after Javed deducted the cost of broken plates and late arrivals and the mysterious fees he invented whenever business was slow.

But this job kept us alive. It kept my mother's medicine in the cabinet and food in our plates.

What I wanted was to be a chef. I wanted this with a desperation that frightened me sometimes, the kind of wanting that lived in my chest like a second heart beating out of rhythm. I wanted to stand in a real kitchen and create something beautiful out of nothing. I wanted to take the flavors of my childhood, the cardamom and saffron and dried limes, and turn them into food that told a story. I wanted to prove that I had been here, that my life had meant something, that Mehtab Gul was not just another refugee who came and disappeared without a trace.

There was a culinary school in San Francisco but the tuition had made my stomach drop like a stone in deep water. The application required a social security number, which i didn't have. The dream of becoming a chef had died in a single moment

I was a dishwasher. I would always be a dishwasher. And one day, when my mother could no longer protect me, when the money ran out or the wrong man noticed me or the government finally caught up with our expired paperwork, I would become something else.

Sold. Traded. Sent back to a country I barely remembered, to relatives who would treat me like a burden or a bargaining chip.

My mother had told me when I was twelve years old and was living in Turkey at that time. "Afghani women are always sold off across the borders. They trade us like livestock and like property and like we are nothing at all." I had not believed her then because I was twelve and still believed in fairy tales. But I believed her now.

I was beautiful. I did not say this to be vain because vanity was a luxury for women who had the freedom to be seen. I said it because it was a fact and because it was dangerous, like holding a knife by the blade. My mother told me this too, every time she looked at me with worry not admiration to my beauty ,

"You have my cheekbones and your father's eyes," she would say, touching my face with her both palms"Large and dark and green. The kind of eyes men write poetry about."

My skin was the color of warm tea with milk, smooth except for a small scar on my chin where I had fallen as a child. My hair, when I took down my hijab at night, fell past my shoulders in waves so black they looked blue in certain light, like a raven's wing or a winter sky just before snow. My body was slender but curved in ways I could not hide no matter how many baggy shirts I wore.

Last month, a man had come into the restaurant. American, probably in his fifties, with a heavy gold watch around his wrist and a more heavy belly and a very heavy gaze that had crawled over me like fingers. He had spoken to Javed in broken English with an accent I could not place, and then he had pointed at me with one thick finger. "Her, How much?"

Javed had laughed that time and said something about me being just a dishwasher and not for sale. The man had laughed too, but gave me a look that made my skin crawl.

Rashid was sixty years old Afghani cook. He did not speak much to me, and when he did, his voice was soft and calm not like any other man. But when he cooked, he transformed simple things into magic. I didn't know much anything about him except he was from Kandhar.

"Rashid uncle," I said softly, stepping into the kitchen. "Will you teach me these recipes?"

He looked at me for a long moment, assessing me with something in his eyes. The kindest eyes in this restaurant, I thought. Maybe the kindest eyes I had seen in years. Then he shook his head slowly, like a man delivering bad news to someone he loved.

"Not for you, daughter," he said again working with dough. "This life is hard and thankless. You want something better than this."

"I want to cook."

"You want to survive." He turned back to the stove, stirring a pot of korma. "That is different."

I watched him for another minute, watched the way his hands moved without hesitation, with perfect expertise. Then I went back to my dishes, because he was right and wrong at the same time and I did not have the words to explain the difference.

One in the morning came like it always did, me washing the dishes. The restaurant was dark and quiet when I locked the back door behind me and started walking. Our apartment was twenty minutes away through streets that were empty at this hour.

I walked fast with my head down and my keys clutched between my knuckles the way my mother had taught me. The cold bit through my thin jacket and my back and my feet ached with my soul, if souls could ache, if I still had one left after all these years of surviving.

The building was a old four-story at the end of street. Home to maybe fifty refugees from maybe ten different countries. We were stacked on top of each other like birds in a too-small nest.

I climbed to the third floor, my legs burning from the day's work. Our door was the one with the duct tape holding the frame together and the scratch marks where someone had tried to break in last year.

I knocked softly. Three taps. Pause. Two taps. Our signal.

The door opened.

My mother stood there in her blue robe holding the door for me, her gray-streaked hair loose around her tired face. She was fifty-two years old but looked seventy, maybe older. The years had carved deep lines into her skin, lines made of grief and labor and the kind of fear that never fully went away. But her eyes were still sharp and calculating, still watching over me, still protecting me even when she had nothing left to protect me with.

"Jaanam," she whispered, pulling me inside with a soft hold on my forearm. "You are late."

"Slow night," I said, leaning into her for a moment before stepping away. "Javed made me reorganize everything."

She locked the door and wedged the chair under the handle and then turned to look at me with that expression I knew too well.

The apartment was one room, with a smile kitchen. A mattress in the corner with thin blankets that never quite kept out the cold. The bathroom was down the hall, shared with three other families who never cleaned it. We had been here three years now. It was the longest we had stayed anywhere since leaving Afghanistan.

"Sit here" my mother said serving a plate of food infront of me. "Eat."

I sat and started to eat although I was so tired that didn't even wanted to touch anything except my blanket and pillow.

My mother watched me eat. She had that expression again, the one she got when she was calculating and worrying and scheming all at once. She was always scheming because scheming was how we had survived when nothing else worked. She wrapped her hands around a cup of warm tea and waited until I had finished half the bowl before she spoke.

"How was work?" I asked, though I already knew she would not answer directly.

"Good," she said, but her voice was distracted. "He was home today."

I paused with the spoon halfway to my mouth. He. Always he now. For the past two months, there had been only one he in my mother's conversations.

Vishal. The man she cleaned for. The one she talked about like he was a character from a epic story, like he was the answer to a question I had never asked.

"He spoke to me," she continued, her eyes lighting up in a way that broke my heart. "Asked how I was. If I needed anything. Offered to adjust my hours because he knows the bus is unreliable at night."

"He sounds kind," I said carefully, because I did not want to encourage her but I also did not want to hurt her.

"He is kind." She met my eyes across the small table with a sweet smile on her face. "He is also wealthy and successful. He has a good job with computers, something that I do not understand. He lives alone in a beautiful apartment in a beautiful building. No wife. No girlfriend."

I put down the spoon and sat back on my thin cushion.

"Mama."

"He is our chance, Mehtab."

"Mama, please stop."

"You did not see his face when he spoke to me." Her voice was urgent and loud now, desperate in a way that made my chest hurt. "He is not like other men, he is so kind and nice."

She leaned forward across the table and took my hands in hers. She looked directly into my eyes.

"If he loved you, you would be safe," she said. "Married to an American citizen, you would have papers. You could go to school and study whatever you want. You could live freely, Mehtab. Really live."

I closed my eyes and listened to the drip of the sink and the distant sound of someone crying in another apartment. I had heard this before. Different versions and different men and different schemes. But never like this. Never with such desperate hope and intensity.

"And how would I make him love me?" I asked quietly, controlling my tounge to not say anything bitter to my mother.

"Should I seduce him? Throw myself at a stranger and hope he does not throw me out onto the street?"

She was silent for a long moment. Giving me the look that said, I had already hurted her and I closed my eyes for a moment to calm my frustration.

I opened my eyes.

The look on her face stopped my heart.

"Yes," she whispered with finality in her voice. "That is exactly what you will do."

I did not sleep that night.

I lay on the mattress beside my mother, listening to her breathe, watching the dark ceiling. The room was cold and my body was exhausted but my mind would not stop spinning like a wheel caught in mud.

You will make him see you, love you. Her words echoed in my skull. That was her plan, her terrible but according to her , a brilliant plan.

I should be angry and I was angry. This was not how a daughter should be used. This was not how a mother should scheme and plot and sell her own child like a piece of meat at market. But underneath the anger, i knew it was concern and love of my mother.

I understood because I had seen what happened to women like us. The women who were picked up by immigration in the middle of the night and never seen again. The women who were married to men who sold them across state lines to other men with other money and other hungers. The women who simply disappeared one day, and no one asked where they had gone because no one cared about debris.

My mother was trying to save me. She was trying to save me the only way she knew how, with the only tool she had ever been given, which was a daughter who was beautiful enough to attract a man who could change everything.

I thought about this man. Vishal. I had never seen his face but I had imagined it a hundred times in the past two months, since my mother started considering him for me, against my will but I had imagined him tall and soft-eyed. I had imagined him lonely in a way that matched my own loneliness.

I thought about walking into his world, about pretending to be something I was not, about using my beauty like a weapon and the only currency I had ever possessed. And underneath the shame, anger, and the sickness that churned in my stomach like spoiled milk, something flickered.

Hope.

Hope that maybe, just maybe, there was a way out of this darkness.