More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
God, in His wisdom, has given us each weaknesses, and foremost among my many is that I am powerless to refuse you, Mariam jo,”
She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, 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.
“You know.” “Know what?” “That I only have eyes for you.”
The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other.
“But, mostly, he talked about you, hamshira. He said you were—how did he put it—his earliest memory.
Was this her penalty, then, her punishment for being aloof to her own mother’s suffering?
But, miraculously, something of her former life remained, her last link to the person that she had been before she had become so utterly alone. A part of Tariq still alive inside her, sprouting tiny arms, growing translucent hands. How could she jeopardize the only thing she had left of him, of her old life?
And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.
The years had not been kind to Mariam. But perhaps, she thought, there were kinder years waiting still.
Rasheed regarded the Taliban with a forgiving, affectionate kind of bemusement, as one might regard an erratic cousin prone to unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal.
She turned it so the sharp edge was vertical, and, as she did, it occurred to her that this was the first time that she was deciding the course of her own life. And, with that, Mariam brought down the shovel. This time, she gave it everything she had.
They turned the corner, and Laila never saw Mariam again.
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.
“Me?” he says. “I’ll follow you to the end of the world, Laila.”
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.
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.
But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
