by Khaled Hosseini
Rasheed's attitude changes after Mariam has six more miscarriages and cannot give him the son he so deeply desires. He becomes bitter and resentful, beating Mariam at the slightest mistake. Meanwhile, the 
author tells us the story of Laila, Fariba's youngest and only daughter who is friends with the neighbour's son Tariq. Her brothers have joined the Mujahideen in the fight against the Soviets. Tariq has gone to Ghazni for a few days. In his absence, while Laila was coming back from school, Khadim and his friends molest her knowing that there is no one to protect her.
Aweek passed, but there was still no sign of Tariq. Then another week came and went. Laila found herself caught in a net of terrible thoughts. He would never come back. His parents had moved away for good; the trip to Ghazni had been a ruse - an adult scheme to spare the two of them an upsetting farewell. A land mine had gotten to him again. The way it did in 1981, when he was five, the last time his parents took him south to Ghazni. That was shortly after Laila's third birthday. He'd been lucky that time, losing only a leg; lucky that he'd survived at all.
Her head rang and rang with these thoughts. Then one night Laila saw a tiny light flashing from down the street. A sound, something between a squeak and a gasp, escaped her lips. She quickly fished her own flashlight from under the bed, but it wouldn't work. Laila banged it against her palm, cursed the dead batteries. But it didn't matter. He was back. Laila sat on the edge of her bed, giddy with relief and watched that beautiful, yellow eye winking on and off.
On her way to Tariq's house the next day, Laila saw Khadim and a group of his friends across the street. Khadim was squatting, drawing something in the dirt with a stick. When he saw her, he dropped the stick and wiggled his fingers. He said something and there was a round of chuckles. Laila dropped her head and hurried past.
“What took you so long?” she said.
“My uncle was sick. Come on. Come inside.”
He led her down the hallway to the family room.
“Who is it?”
It was his mother calling from the kitchen.
“Laila,” he answered.
“You mean our aroos, our daughter-in-law,” his father announced, entering the room. He was a carpenter, a lean, white-haired man in his early sixties.
“You keep calling her that and she'll stop coming here,” Tariq's mother said, passing by them.
Laila didn't mean to tell him. She'd, in fact, decided that telling him would be a very bad idea. Someone would get hurt, because Tariq wouldn't be able to let it pass. But when they were on the street later, heading down to the bus stop, she saw Khadim again, leaning against a wall. He was surrounded by his friends, thumbs hooked in his belt loops. He grinned at her defiantly.
And so she told Tariq. The story spilled out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“He did what?”
She told him again.
He pointed to Khadim. “Him? He's the one? You're sure?'
“I am sure.”
Tariq clenched his teeth and muttered something to himself in Pashto that Laila didn't catch. “You wait here,” he said, in Farsi now.
“No, Tariq…”
He was already crossing the street.
Khadim was the first to see him. His grin faded, and he pushed himself off the wall. He unhooked his thumbs from the belt loops and made himself more upright, taking on a self-conscious air of menace. The others followed his gaze.
Laila wished she hadn't said anything. How many of them were there - ten? Eleven? Twelve? What if they hurt him?
Then Tariq stopped a few feet from Khadim and his band. There was a moment of consideration, Laila thought, maybe a change of heart and, when he bent down, she imagined he would pretend his shoelace had come undone and walk back to her. Then his hands went to work, and she understood.
The others understood too when Tariq straightened up, standing on one leg. When he began hopping towards Khadim, then charging him, his unstrapped leg raised high over his shoulder like a sword.
The boys stepped aside in a hurry. They gave him a clear path to Khadim. Then it was all dust and fists and kicks and yelps. Khadim never bothered Laila again.
That night, as most nights, Laila set the dinner table for two only. Mammy said she wasn't hungry. On those nights that she was, she made a point of taking a plate to her room before Babi even came home. She was usually asleep or lying awake in bed by the time Laila and Babi sat down to eat.
Babi came out of the bathroom, his hair - peppered white with flour when he'd come home - washed clean now and combed back.
“What are we having, Laila?”
“Leftover aush soup.”
“Sounds good,” he said, folding the towel with which he'd dried his hair. “So what are we working on tonight? Adding fractions?”
“Actually, converting fractions to mixed numbers.”
“Ah. Right.”
Every night after dinner, Babi helped Laila with her homework and gave her some of his own. This was only to keep Laila a step or two ahead of her class.
Laila decided that she would tell him about what Tariq had done to Khadim, over the meal, before they started in on fractions. But she never got the chance. Because, right then, there was a knock at the door, and, on the other side of the door, a stranger with news.
“I need to speak to your parents, dokhtar jan,” he said when Laila opened the door. He was a stocky man, with a sharp, weather-roughened face. He wore a potato-coloured coat and a brown wool pakol on his head.
“Can I tell them who's here?”
Then Babi's hand was on Laila's shoulder, and he gently pulled her from the door.
“Why don't you go upstairs, Laila. Go on.”
As she moved towards the steps, Laila heard the visitor say to Babi that he had news from Panjshir. Mammy was in the room now too. She had one hand clamped over her mouth, and her eyes were skipping from Babi to the man in the pakol.
Laila peeked from the top of the stairs. She watched the stranger sit down with her parents. He leaned towards them. Said a few muted words. Then Babi's face was white, and getting whiter, and he was looking as his hands, and Mammy was screaming, screaming and tearing at her hair.
The next morning, the day of the fatiha, a flock of neighborhood women descended on the house and took charge of preparations for the khatam dinner that would take place after the funeral. Mammy sat on the couch the whole morning, her fingers working a handkerchief, her face bloated. She was tended to by a pair of sniffling women who took turns taking Mammy's hand gingerly, like she was the rarest and most fragile doll in the world. Mammy did not seem aware of their presence.
Laila kneeled before her mother and took her hands. “Mammy.”
Mammy's eyes drifted down. She blinked.
That afternoon, the men went to a hall in Karteh that Babi had rented for the fatiha. The women came to the house. Laila took her spot beside Mammy, next to the living room entrance where it was customary for the family of the deceased to sit. Mourners removed their shoes at the door, nodded at acquaintances as they crossed the room, and sat on folding chairs arranged along the walls.
Rasheed's wife, Mariam, came in. She was wearing a black hijab. Strands of her hair strayed from it onto her brow. She took a seat along the wall across from Laila.
Next to Laila, Mammy kept rocking back and forth. Laila drew Mammy's hand into her lap and cradled it with both of hers, but Mammy did not seem to notice.
It was hard to feel, really feel, Mammy's loss. Hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the first place. Ahmad and Noor had always been like a lore to her. Like characters in a fable. Kings in a history book.
It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who liked salted clover leaves, who frowned and made a low, moaning sound when he chewed, who had a light pink birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped like an upside down mandolin.
So she sat beside Mammy and dutifully mourned Ahmad and Noor, but in Laila's heart, her true brother was alive and well.
The ailments that would hound Mammy for the rest of her days began. Chest pains and headaches, joint aches and night sweats, paralysing pains in her ears, lumps no one else could feel. Babi took her to a doctor, who took blood and urine, shot X-ray of Mammy's body, but found no physical illness.
The only task Mammy never neglected was her five daily namaz prayers. She ended each namaz with her head hung low, hands held before her face, palms up, muttering a prayer for God to bring victory to the Mujahideen.
Six months later, in April 1988, Babi came home with the big news. “They signed a treaty!” he said. “In Geneva. It's official! They're leaving. Within nine months, there won't be any more Soviets in Afghanistan!”
Mammy was sitting up in bed. She shrugged.
“But the communist regime is staying,” she said. “Najibullah is the Soviets' puppet president. He's not going anywhere. No, the war will go on. This is not the end.”
“Najibullah won't last,” said Babi.
“They're leaving, Mammy! They're actually leaving!”
“You two celebrate if you want to. But I won't rest until the Mujahideen hold a victory parade right here in Kabul.”
And, with that, she lay down again and pulled up the blanket.
APRIL 1992
Three years passed. In that time, Tariq's father had a series of strokes. They left him with a clumsy left hand and a slight slur to his speech. When he was agitated, which happened frequently, the slurring got worse.
Tariq outgrew his leg again and was issued a new leg by the Red Cross, though he had to wait six months for it.
As Hasina had feared, her family took her to Lahore, where she was made to marry the cousin who owned the auto shop. The morning that they took her, Laila and Giti went to Hasina's house to say good-bye. Hasina told them that the cousin, her husband-to-be, had already started the process to move them to Germany, where his brothers lived. Within a year, she thought, they would be in Frankfurt.
The Soviet Union crumbled with astonishing swiftness. Every few weeks, it seemed to Laila, Babi was coming home with news of the latest republic to declare independence. Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin. The Republic of Russia was born.
In Kabul, Najibullah changed tactics and tried to portray himself as a devout Muslim. “Too little and far too late,” said Babi. “You can't be the chief of KHAD one day and the next day pray in a mosque with people whose relatives you tortured and killed.” Feeling the noose tightening around Kabul, Najibullah tried to reach a settlement with the Mujahideen but the Mujahideen balked.
From her bed, Mammy said, “Good for them.” She kept her vigils for the Mujahideen and waited for her parade. Waited for her sons' enemies to fall.
And, eventually, they did. In April 1992, the year Laila turned fourteen. Najibullah surrendered at last and was given sanctuary in the UN compound near Darulaman Palace, south of the city.
The Jihad was over. The various communist regimes that had held power since the night Laila was born were all defeated. Mammy's heroes had won. And now, after more than a decade of sacrificing everything, of leaving behind their families to live in mountains and fight for Afghanistan's sovereignty, the Mujahideen were coming to Kabul, in flesh, blood and battle-weary bone.
The day after Najibullah surrendered, Mammy rose from bed a new woman. For the first time in the five years since Ahmad and Noor had become shaheed, she didn't wear black. She put on a cobalt blue linen dress with white polka dots. She washed the windows, swept the floor, aired the house and then took a long bath. Her voice was shrill with merriment.
“A party is in order,” she declared.
She sent Laila to invite the neighbours. “Tell them we're having a big lunch tomorrow!”
In the kitchen, Mammy stood looking around, hands on her hips, and said, with friendly reproach. “What have you done to my kitchen, Laila? Wooy. Everything is in a different place.”
She began moving pots and pans around, theatrically, as though she were laying claim to them anew, retaking her territory, now that she was back. Laila stayed out of her way. It was best. Mammy could be as indomitable in her fits of euphoria as in her attacks of rage. With unsettling energy, Mammy set about cooking: aush soup with kidney beans and dried dill, kofta, steaming hot mantu drenched with fresh yoghurt and topped with mint.
“You're plucking your eyebrows,” Mammy said, as she was opening a large burlap sack of rice by the kitchen counter.
“Only a little.”
Mammy poured rice from the sack into a large black pot of water. She rolled up her sleeves and began stirring.
“How is Tariq?”
“His father's been ill,” Laila said.
'”How old is he now anyway?”
“I don't know, Sixties, I guess.”
“I meant Tariq”
“Oh, Sixteen.”
“He's a nice boy. Don't you think?”
Laila shrugged.
“Not really a boy anymore, though, is he? Sixteen. Almost a man. Don't you think?”
“What are you getting at, Mammy?”
“Nothing,” Mammy said, smiling innocently. “Nothing. It's just that you …. Ah, nothing. I'd better not say anyway.”
“I see you want to.” Laila said, irritated by this circuitous, playful accusation.
“Well,” Mammy folded her hands on the rim of the pot. Laila spotted an unnatural, almost rehearsed, quality to the way she said “well” and to this folding of hands. She feared a speech was coming.
“He's a friend. A rafiq. It's not like that between us,” Laila said, sounding defensive, and not very convincing. “He's like a brother to me,” she added, misguidedly. And she knew, even before a cloud passed over Mammy's face and her features darkened, that she'd made a mistake.
“That he is not,” Mammy said flatly. “You will not liken that one-legged carpenter's boy to your brothers. There is no one like your brothers.”
“I didn't say he …. That's not how I meant it.”
Mammy sighed through the nose and clenched her teeth.
“Anyway,” she resumed, but without the coy lightheartedness of a few moments ago, “what I'm trying to say is that if you're not careful, people will talk.”
Laila opened her mouth to say something. It wasn't that Mammy didn't have a point. Laila knew that the days of innocent, unhindered frolicking in the streets with Tariq had passed. For some time now, Laila had begun to sense a new strangeness when the two of them were out in public. An awareness of being looked at, scrutinised, whispered about, that Laila had never felt before.
“I get your point,” she said.
“Good!” Mammy said. “That's resolved, then. Now, where is Hakim? Where, oh where, is that sweet little husband of mine?”
TO BE CONTINUED
