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For an hour or two every Thursday, when Jalil came to see her, all smiles and gifts and endearments, Mariam felt deserving of all the beauty and bounty that life had to give. And, for this, Mariam loved Jalil.
“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.”
Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.
In Tariq’s grimace, Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn’t make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk. Laila imagined it had been this way for her brothers too. Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn’t that the truth, badar?”
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.
“Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
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.
In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
