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She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
And what would it be like to kiss him, to feel the fuzzy hair above his lip tickling her own lips?
She had fallen for Tariq. Hopelessly and desperately.
“Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”
“That I only have eyes for you.”
And when suddenly he leaned over and pressed his lips to hers, she let him again.
In the midst of all this killing and looting, all this ugliness, it was a harmless thing to sit here beneath a tree and kiss Tariq.
“I love you.” How long had she waited to hear those words from him? How many times had she dreamed them uttered? There they were, spoken at last, and the irony crushed her.
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
And in this fleeting, wordless exchange with Mariam, Laila knew that they were not enemies any longer.
Love had never been declared to her so guilelessly, so unreservedly.
She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
Laila stood perfectly still and looked at Tariq until her chest screamed for air and her eyes burned to blink.
“And I wrote you.” “You did?” “Oh, volumes,”
Because there was a bigger reason why I married him. There’s something you don’t know, Tariq. Someone. I have to tell you.”
Almost ten years. But, for a moment, standing there with Tariq in the sunlight, it was as though those years had never happened.
She thought, Volumes, and another shudder passed through her, a current of something sad and forlorn, but also something eager and recklessly hopeful.
He’d taken so much from her in twenty-seven years of marriage. She would not watch him take Laila too.
“Like you said. No. I’ll take care of you for a change.” “Oh, Laila jo.”
“For me, it ends here. There’s nothing more I want. Everything I’d ever wished for as a little girl you’ve already given me. You and your children have made me so very happy. It’s all right, Laila jo. This is all right. Don’t be sad.”
“Kiss Aziza for me,” she said. “Tell her she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart. Will you do that for me?”
Just before they turned the corner, Laila looked back and saw Mariam at the door. Mariam was wearing a white scarf over her head, a dark blue sweater buttoned in the front, and white cotton trousers. A crest of gray hair had fallen loose over her brow. Bars of sunlight slashed across her face and shoulders. Mariam waved amiably. They turned the corner, and Laila never saw Mariam again.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.
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.
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. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.
åhh aj mitt hjärta
In the middle of the night, when Laila woke up thirsty, she found their hands still clamped together, in the white-knuckle, anxious way of children clutching balloon strings.
Private smiles shoot between them across the dinner table as if they are not strangers at all but companions reunited after a lengthy separation.
“Me?” he says. “I’ll follow you to the end of the world, Laila.”
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
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. Already Laila sees something behind this
The film playing on the screen is Walt Disney’s Pinocchio.
hon skulle äntligen få se den
But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.
Mariam<3
