A thousand Splendid Suns

now, under the communists, and have more rights than they've ever had before,Babi sa-
id, always lowering his voice, aware of how intolerant Mammy was of even remotely 
positive talk of the communists.But it's true, Babi said,it'sagood time to be a woman in 
Afghanistan. And you can take advantage of that, Laila Of course, women's freedom - 
here, he shook his head ruefully-is also one of the reasons people out there took up 
arms in the first place. 
  By "out there," he didn't mean Kabul, which had always been relatively liberal and 
progressive. Here in Kabul, women taught at the university, ran schools, held office in 
the government- No, Babi meant the tribal areas, especially the Pashtun regions in the 
south or in the east near the Pakistani border, where women were rarely seen on the 
streets and only then in burqa and accompanied by men. He meant those regions where 
men who lived by ancient tribal laws had rebelled against the communists and their dec-
rees to liberate women, to abolish forced marriage, to raise the minimum marriage age 
to sixteen for girls. There, men saw it as an insult to their centuries-old tradition, Babi 
said, to be told by the government-and a godless one at that-that their daughters had to 
leave home, attend school, and work alongside men. 
 
  God forbid that should happen!Babi liked to say sarcastically. Then he would sigh, 
and say,Laila, my love, the only enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself 
  Babi took his seat at the table, dipped bread into his bowl ofaush. 
 
  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. 
 
19. 
 
  I need to speak to your parents,dokhiarjan" he said when Laila opened the door. He 
was a stocky man, with a sharp, weather-roughened face. He wore a potato-colored co-
at, and a brown woolpakol 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 toward 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 thepakol 
  Laila peeked from the top of the stairs. She watched the stranger sit down with her pa-
rents. He leaned toward them. Said a few muted words. Then Babi's face was white, and 
getting whiter, and he was looking at his hands, and Mammy was screaming, screaming, 
and tearing at her hair. 
 
* * * 
 
  The next morning, the day ofthefaiiha, a flock of neighborhood women descended on 
the house and took charge of preparations for thekhatm dinner that would take place af-
ter the funeral Mammy sat on the couch the whole morning, her fingers working a hand-
kerchief, her face bloated. She was tended to by a pair of sniffling women who took 
turns patting 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. 
  "We'll take care of her, Laila jan," one of the women said with an air of self-importan-
ce. Laila had been to funerals before where she had seen women like this, women who 
relished all things that had to do with death, official consolers who let no one trespass 
on their self-appointed duties. 
 
  "It's under control. You go on now, girl, and do something else. Leave your mother 
be." 
 
  Shooed away, Laila felt useless. She bounced from one room to the next. She puttered 
around the kitchen for a while. An uncharacteristically subdued Hasina and her mother 
came. So did Giti and her mother. When Giti saw Laila, she hurried over, threw her 
bony arms around her, and gave Laila a very long, and surprisingly strong, embrace. 
When she pulled back, tears had pooled in her eyes. "I am so sorry, Laila," she said. La-
ila thanked her. The three girls sat outside in the yard until one of the women assigned 
them the task of washing glasses and stacking plates on the table. 
 
  Babi too kept walking in and out of the house aimlessly, looking, it seemed, for somet-
hing to do. 
 
  "Keep him away from me." That was the only time Mammy said anything all morning. 
 
  Babi ended up sitting alone on a folding chair in the hallway, looking desolate and 
small Then one of the women told him he was in the way there. He apologized and di-
sappeared into his study. 
 
* * * 
 

---

  That apternoon, the men went to a hall in Karteh-Seh that Babi had rented for thefati-
ha. The women came to the house. Laila took her spot beside Mammy, next to the li-
ving-room entrance where it was customary for the family of the deceased to sit. Mour-
ners removed their shoes at the door, nodded at acquaintances as they crossed the room, 
and sat on folding chairs arranged along the walls. Laila saw Wajma, the elderly midwi-
fe who had delivered her. She saw Tariq's mother too, wearing a black scarf over the 
wig. She gave Laila a nod and a slow, sad, close-lipped smile. 
 
  From a cassette player, a man's nasal voice chanted verses from the Koran. In between, 
the women sighed and shifted and sniffled. There were muted coughs, murmurs, and, 
periodically, someone let out a theatrical, sorrow-drenched sob. 
  Rasheed's wife, Mariam, came in. She was wearing a blackhijab. 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. 
 
  "Do you want some water, Mammy?" Laila said in her ear. "Are you thirsty?" 
  But Mammy said nothing. She did nothing but sway back and forth and stare at the rug 
with a remote, spiritless look. 
 
  Now and then, sitting next to Mammy, seeing the drooping, woebegone looks around 
the room, the magnitude of the disaster that had struck her family would register with 
Laila. The possibilities denied. The hopes dashed. 
  But the feeling didn't last. It was hard to feel,really feel, Mammy's loss. Hard to sum-
mon 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 lore to her. Like characters in a 
fable. Kings in a history book. 
 
  It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who taught her cusswords in Pashto, 
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 he-
art, her true brother was alive and well. 
 
20. 
 
  The ailments that would hound Mammy for the rest of her days began. Chest pains and 
headaches, joint aches and night sweats, paralyzing pains in her ears, lumps no one else 
could feel. Babi took her to a doctor, who took blood and urine, shot X-rays of 
Mammy's body, but found no physical illness. 
 
  Mammy lay in bed most days. She wore black. She picked at her hair and gnawed on 
the mole below her lip. When Mammy was awake, Laila found her staggering through 
the house. She always ended up in Laila's room, as though she would run into the boys 
sooner or later if she just kept walking into the room where they had once slept and far-
ted and fought with pillows. But all she ran into was their absence. And Laila. Which, 
Laila believed, had become one and the same to Mammy. 

---

 
  The only task Mammy never neglected was her five dailynamaz prayers. She ended 
eachnamaz with her head hung low, hands held before her face, palms up, muttering a 
prayer for God to bring victory to the Mujahideen. Laila had to shoulder more and more 
of the chores. If she didn't tend to the house, she was apt to find clothes, shoes, open ri-
ce bags, cans of beans, and dirty dishes strewn about everywhere. Laila washed 
Mammy's dresses and changed her sheets. She coaxed her out of bed for baths and me-
als. She was the one who ironed Babi's shirts and folded his pants. Increasingly, she was 
the cook. 
 
  Sometimes, after she was done with her chores, Laila crawled into bed next to 
Mammy. She wrapped her arms around her, laced her fingers with her mother's, buried 
her face in her hair. Mammy would stir, murmur something. Inevitably, she would start 
in on a story about the boys. 
 
  One day, as they were lying this way, Mammy said, "Ahmad was going to be a leader. 
He had the charisma for it-People three times his age listened to him with respect, Laila. 
It was something to see. And Noon Oh, my Noor. He was always making sketches of 
buildingsand bridges. He was going to be an architect, you know. He was going to 
transform Kabul with his designs. And now they're bothshaheed, my boys, both 
martyrs." 
 
  Laila lay there and listened, wishing Mammy would notice thatshe, Laila, hadn't beco-
meshaheed, that she was alive, here, in bed with her, that she had hopes and a future. 
But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers' past. They had overshado-
wed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of the-
ir lives' museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. Theparch-
ment on which Mammy meant to ink their legends. 
 
  "The messenger who came with the news, he said that when they brought the boys 
back to camp, Ahmad Shah Massoud personally oversaw the burial. He said a prayer for 
them at the gravesite. That's the kind of brave young men your brothers were, Laila, that 
Commander Massoud himself, the Lion of Panjshir, God bless him, would oversee their 
burial." 
 
  Mammy rolled onto her back. Laila shifted, rested her head on Mammy's chest. 
  "Some days," Mammy said in a hoarse voice, "I listen to that clock ticking in the hal-
lway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and 
months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like 
someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse 
somewhere." 
 
  "I wish there was something I could do," Laila said, meaning it. But it came out soun-
ding broad, perfunctory, like the token consolation of a kind stranger. 
 
  "You're a good daughter," Mammy said, after a deep sigh. "And I haven't been much 
of a mother to you." 
 
  "Don't say that." 
 

---

  "Oh, it's true. I know it and I'm sorry for it, my love." 
 
  "Mammy?" 
 
  "Mm." 
 
  Laila sat up, looking down at Mammy. There were gray strands in Mammy's hair now. 
And it startled Laila howmuch weight Mammy, who'd always been plump, had lost. 
Her cheeks had a sallow, drawn look. The blouseshe was wearing drooped over her sho-
ulders, and there was a gaping space between her neck and the collar. More than once 
Laila had seen the wedding bandslide off Mammy's finger. 
 
  "I've been meaning to ask you something." 
 
  "What is it?" 
 
  "You wouldn't…" Laila began. 
 
  She'd talked about it to Hasina. At Hasina's suggestion, the two of them had emptied 
the bottle of aspirin in the gutter, hidden the kitchen knives and the sharp kebab skewers 
beneath the rug under the couch. Hasina had found a rope in the yard. When Babi co-
uldn't find his razors, Laila had to tell him of her fears. He dropped on the edge of the 
couch, hands between his knees. Laila waited for some kind of reassurance from him. 
But all she got was a bewildered, hollow-eyed look. 
  "You wouldn't…Mammy I worry that-" 
  "I thought about it the night we got the news," Mammy said. "I won't lie to you, I've 
thought about it since too. But, no. Don't worry, Laila. I want to see my sons' dream co-
me true. I want to see the day the Soviets go home disgraced, the day the Mujahideen 
come to Kabul in victory. I want to be there when it happens, when Afghanistan is free, 
so the boys see it too. They'll see it through my eyes." 
  Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy 
meant to live on, stung thatshe was not the reason.She would never leave her mark on 
Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid be-
ach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that 
swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed. 
 
21. 
 
  The driver pulled his taxi over to let pass another long convoy of Soviet jeeps and ar-
mored vehicles. Tariq leaned across the front seat, over the driver, and yelled,"Pajal-