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the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil. It was this last piece that slipped from Mariam’s fingers, that fell to the wooden floorboards of the kolba and shattered.
Nor was she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of the harami who are culpable, not the harami, whose only sin is being born.
like the scurrying cockroaches Nana was always cursing and sweeping out of the kolba.
“You couldn’t stretch a leg here without poking a poet in the ass,” he laughed.
the vines pregnant with plump grapes,
“Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
Two hundred yards upstream, toward the mountains, there was a circular grove of weeping willow trees. In the center, in the shade of the willows, was the clearing.
shelves nailed to the walls where Nana placed clay pots and her beloved Chinese tea set.
It did not occur to young Mariam to ponder the unfairness of apologizing for the manner of her own birth.
Nana said she was the one who’d picked the name Mariam because it had been the name of her mother. Jalil said he chose the name because Mariam, the tuberose, was a lovely flower. “Your favorite?” Mariam asked. “Well, one of,” he said and smiled.
Frogs leaped out of their way.
Mariam felt sorry for the boys. How tired their arms and legs must be, she thought pityingly, pushing that heavy load.
It was Mullah Faizullah who had taught Mariam to read, who had patiently looked over her shoulder as her lips worked the words soundlessly, her index finger lingering beneath each word, pressing until the nail bed went white, as though she could squeeze the meaning out of the symbols.
She believed that she would always land safely into her father’s clean, well-manicured hands.
Lili lili birdbath, Sitting on a dirt path, Minnow sat on the rim and drank, Slipped, and in the water she sank.
She pretended that for each second that she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day with Jalil.
A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed, it won’t stretch to make room for you.
You’re afraid that I might find the happiness you never had. And you don’t want me to be happy. You don’t want a good life for me.
She agonized a bit over the hijab, its being green and not matching the dress, but it would have to do—moths had eaten holes into her white one.
She gave herself over to the new life that awaited her in this city,
a life in which she would love and be loved back, without reservation or agenda, without shame.
Mariam steadied herself against the waves of dismay passing through her.
You’d be a burden to his family.” As you are now to us. Mariam almost saw the unspoken words exit Khadija’s mouth, like foggy breath on a cold day.
She looked through the ill-fitting drawers, at the mismatched spoons and knives, the colander and chipped, wooden spatulas, these would-be instruments of her new daily life, all of it reminding her of the havoc that had struck her life, making her feel uprooted, displaced, like an intruder on someone else’s life.
Mariam wondered how so many women could suffer the same miserable luck, to have married, all of them, such dreadful men. Or was this a wifely game that she did not know about, a daily ritual, like soaking rice or making dough? Would they expect her soon to join in?
On every page were women, beautiful women, who wore no shirts, no trousers, no socks or underpants. They wore nothing at all. They lay in beds amid tumbled sheets and gazed back at Mariam with half-lidded eyes. In most of the pictures, their legs were apart, and Mariam had a full view of the dark place between. In some, the women were prostrated as if—God forbid this thought—in sujda for prayer. They looked back over their shoulders with a look of bored contempt.
If so, why did Rasheed insist that she cover when he thought nothing of looking at the private areas of other men’s wives and sisters?
For her, all these months later, their coupling was still an exercise in tolerating pain. His appetite, on the other hand, was fierce, sometimes bordering on the violent. The way he pinned her down, his hard squeezes at her breasts, how furiously his hips worked. He was a man. All those years without a woman. Could she fault him for being the way God had created him?
And what entitled her anyway, a villager, a harami, to pass judgment?
Her eyes had read meaning into what was random body posture captured in a single moment of time.
And she felt for the first time a kinship with her husband. She told herself that they would make good companions after all.
Was it the chance to see something as yet unsoiled, untrodden? To catch the fleeting grace of a new season, a lovely beginning, before it was trampled and corrupted?
How glorious it was to know that her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being, to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games.
Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
Mariam was dumbfounded that she could miss in such a crippling manner a being she had never even seen.
Wasn’t it true that she might as well have slipped that noose around her mother’s neck herself? Treacherous daughters did not deserve to be mothers, and this was just punishment. She had fitful dreams, of Nana’s jinn sneaking into her room at night, burrowing its claws into her womb, and stealing her baby. In these dreams, Nana cackled with delight and vindication.
She patted the dirt with the back of the shovel. She squatted by the mound, closed her eyes. Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.
Then he crossed his ankles on the table and mumbled that it was someone who believed in Karl Marxist.
He snatched her hand, opened it, and dropped a handful of pebbles into it.
His powerful hands clasped her jaw. He shoved two fingers into her mouth and pried it open, then forced the cold, hard pebbles into it. Mariam struggled against him, mumbling, but he kept pushing the pebbles in, his upper lip curled in a sneer. “Now chew,” he said.
Then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragments of two broken molars.
Laila remembered another fight, and, that time, Mammy had stood over Babi and said in a mincing way, That’s your business, isn’t it, cousin? To make nothing your business. Even your own sons going to war. How I pleaded with you. But you buried your nose in those cursed books and let our sons go like they were a pair of haramis.
The teacher’s name was Shanzai, but, behind her back, the students called her Khala Rangmaal, Auntie Painter, referring to the motion she favored when she slapped students—palm, then back of the hand, back and forth, like a painter working a brush.
Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.
Laila always felt excluded when the talk turned to her brothers, as though the women were discussing a beloved film that only she hadn’t seen.
The obligatory questions, the perfunctory answers. Both pretending. Unenthusiastic partners, the two of them, in this tired old dance.
“I should tell you that while you were dreaming, a boy shot piss out of a water gun on my hair.”
Laila stood up. “I have homework now.” “Of course you do. Shut the curtains before you go, my love,” Mammy said, her voice fading. She was already sinking beneath the sheets.
Her time with Tariq’s family always felt natural to Laila, effortless, uncomplicated by differences in tribe or language, or by the personal spites and grudges that infected the air at her own home.
Hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the first place. Ahmad and Noor had always been like lore to her. Like characters in a fable. Kings in a history book.
