I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.
Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.
At times, he didn’t understand the meaning of the Koran’s words. But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart. “They’ll comfort you to. Mariam jo,” he said. “You can summon then in your time of your need, and they won’t fail you. God’s words will never betray you, my girl.
I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing... and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.
I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.
I know. I know. But he’s always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he’s lost in some dream.” “And?” “I wasn’t like that.” Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t colouring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favourite colours.
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing.
How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.
For you, a thousand times over.” Then I turned and ran. It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything alright. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.
Entering my childhood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I’d started, then abandoned, long ago.
I see you’ve confused what you’re learning in school with actual education.
With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.
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.
I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.
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.
You have to do it now. If you wait until morning, you’ll lose heart.
Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres.
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.