QUETTA: It is a cloudy, windy evening here. The flow of traffic around the sleepy Hazara Town is thin. Located about 30 minutes from main Quetta city, the area looks almost like a mini-cantonment as Frontier Corps personnel are on guard all around, on all the entrance roads.

Non-residents are stopped and questioned by security personnel before they can enter, and I pass some small vehicles and water tractors that are being checked. Here in Hazara Town, where the residents are so easily identifiable by their Mongol features, it is easy to pick out the strangers.

At the main entrance to the strictly guarded locality, a paramilitary trooper asks me for details about where I am going and why. This area has repeatedly been subjected to deadly suicide bombings and other acts of terror against the Shia Hazara community. Thankfully, today I am not here to chronicle a tale of violence, but to meet the boy the world knows as Messi junior, the five-year-old Afghan who was photographed wearing a Lionel Messi soccer jersey made from a plastic bag, and who was in the headlines again recently upon his family’s relocation to Pakistan. Now, Murtaza Ahmedi practises Messi’s moves on a patch of grass in Hazara Town.

The family used to live in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, in Jaghouri district. But after Messi junior’s image went viral on the world media, threats and intimidation by the Afghan Taliban forced the family out. That has not dampened Murtaza’s love for soccer though, and he shows me the autographed shirt of Messi that he was sent by his hero. Talking in Persian with an Afghan Dari dialect, he tells me that “I love Messi and I want to meet him”. Playing soccer for my camera, he poses like the Argentine star.

Around him, about a dozen of his relatives sit on plastic chairs sipping cups of green tea. They are the ones who recount the nightmare his unexpected fame led to. The province in which they lived is one of the more troubled of the war-torn country.

“Suddenly, after all the publicity about my son, I started receiving threatening phone calls,” says 44-year-old Mohammad Arif Ahmedi, Murtaza’s father. After some 20 to 30 such calls, they decided to move. Initially, they went from Kabul to Islamabad; but the cost of living there made them uproot themselves again and come here.

Murtaza has four elder siblings, two brothers and two sisters. All four had been going to school in Afghanistan. But the sudden move to Pakistan has meant a disruption in their academic life; now, they have got admission to an English-language centre in Quetta.

Here, media interviews are handled for the family by Wahid Ahmedi, one of Murtaza’s cousins. He is extremely careful about taking calls, and he tells me that he tries to answer only calls from identified numbers. The house where the family lives, too, is guarded by paramilitary troops.

Murtaza’s father, Arif, used to be a grower by profession. Now, he lives in a rented house that costs Rs5,500 per month. “I sold everything I had to come here,” he says. “After my boy became an internet sensation, the constant phone calls made us fearful of kidnapping. One caller told me, ‘Teach your son religion and stop him from playing the game of the infidels.’ We had to leave Afghanistan.”

However, “we don’t feel safe even here”, says Arif. The family has submitted an application with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees seeking asylum abroad.

As we chat, Murtaza, who has been kicking the ball around all this while, comes over and kisses his father’s cheek. “I am very tired now,” he mumbles.

No doubt, his dreams will be filled with the hope of one day meeting the star he adores.

The writer is a correspondent of DawnNews in Quetta

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2016