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Nana said, “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.”
As Jalil’s wives began a new—and more sprightly—round of reassuring, Mariam looked down at the table. Her eyes traced the sleek shape of the table’s legs, the sinuous curves of its corners, the gleam of its reflective, dark brown surface. She noticed that every time she breathed out, the surface fogged, and she disappeared from her father’s table.
Mariam set about cleaning up the mess, marveling at how energetically lazy men could be.
Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn’t understand. She didn’t understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
The baby’s hand balled into a fist. It rose, fell, found a spastic path to her mouth. Around a mouthful of her own hand, the baby gave Mariam a grin, little bubbles of spittle shining on her lips.
It was Laila’s turn now, with Mariam pitching in, to take up the chattering, to laugh nervously, to fill the melancholy quiet with breathless, aimless banter.
They would make new lives for themselves—peaceful, solitary lives—and there the weight of all that they’d endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.
Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a
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One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
