More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When it was time for Jalil to leave, Mariam always stood in the doorway and watched him exit the clearing, deflated at the thought of the week that stood, like an immense, immovable object, between her and his next visit. Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn’t
breathe, God would grant her another day with Jalil.
because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. “For you,” he said. “I’d kill with it for you, Laila.”
And then she was crying, and when he went to wipe her cheek with the pad of his thumb she swiped his hand away. It was selfish and irrational, but she was furious with him for abandoning her, Tariq, who was like an extension of her, whose shadow sprung beside hers in every memory.
Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories.
Because it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk.
But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.
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.
she’d thought of her childhood friends Giti and Hasina, and Hasina saying, By the time we’re twenty, Giti and I, we’ll have pushed out four, five kids each. But you, Laila, you’ll make us two dummies proud. You’re going to be somebody. I know one day I’ll pick up a newspaper and find your picture on the front page. The photo hadn’t made the front page, but there it was nevertheless, as Hasina had predicted.
But the game involves only male names.
Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.
