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This is what it means to be a woman in this world.”
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.
As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
But Mariam’s grief wasn’t aimless or unspecific. Mariam grieved for this baby, this particular child, who had made her so happy for a while.
after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid. And Mariam was afraid.
She said that the Soviet Union was the best nation in the world, along with Afghanistan. It was kind to its workers, and its people were all equal.
Everyone in the Soviet Union was happy and friendly, unlike America, where crime made people afraid to leave their homes.
Marriage can wait, education cannot.
Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.
She would have taken offense if anyone else had said that about Tariq. But she knew that Hasina wasn’t malicious.
It would flood her, steal her breath. But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her deflated, feeling nothing but a vague restlessness.
I went to school here, got my first job here, became a father in this town. It’s strange to think that I’ll be sleeping beneath another city’s skies soon.”
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
“What happened to not speaking ill of the dead?” “I guess some people can’t be dead enough,” he said.
Love had never been declared to her so guilelessly, so unreservedly.
“I don’t recognize Kabul.” “Neither do I,” Laila said. “And I never left.”
They turned the corner, and Laila never saw Mariam again.
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.
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.
To strangers, she knows, they must appear like the most ordinary of families, free of secrets, lies, and regrets.
That you might find it in your heart to come and see your father. That you will knock on my door one more time and give me the chance to open it this time, to welcome you, to take you in my arms, my daughter, as I should have all those years ago.
But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.
