One day I asked Zia and Laila, who were smart about these things, what Mother was upset about. Laila explained that just before Shahnaz was married, the government had changed. The people who took over from President Daoud Khan didn’t like democracy. The new president was a communist. I had no idea what that meant, but my sisters’ schools had new books they wanted the students to read, so I knew it was different from the way things had been up till then. “It means they don’t like freedom,” Zia told me one night. Later, Ahmad Shah, my oldest brother, who had a real taste for gory stories, told
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