A thousand Splendid Suns

ways felt slighted, Babi had said.Pashiun kings ruled this country for almost two hund-
red and'fifty years, Laila, and Tajiks for all of nine months, back in 1929. 
 
  And you,Laila had asked,do you feel slighted, Babi? 

---

 
  Babi had wiped his eyeglasses clean with the hem of his shirt.To me, it's nonsense -and 
very dangerous nonsense at that-all this talk of I'm Tajik and you 're Pashiun and he's 
Hazara and she's Uzbek. We 're all Afghans, and that's all that should matter. But when 
one group rules over the others for so long…Theref s contempt. Rivalry. There is. There 
always has been. 
 
  Maybe so. But Laila never felt it in Tariq's house, where these matters never even ca-
me up. Her time with Tariq's family always felt natural to Laila, effortless, uncomplica-
ted by differences in tribe or language, or by the personal spites and grudges that infec-
ted the air at her own home. 
 
  "How about a game of cards?" Tariq said. 
 
  "Yes, go upstairs," his mother said, swiping disapprovingly at her husband's cloud of 
smoke. "I'll getthe shorwa going." 
 
  They lay on their stomachs in the middle of Tariq's room and took turns dealing forpa-
njpar. Pedaling air with his foot, Tariq told her about his trip. The peach saplings he had 
helped his uncle plant. A garden snake he had captured. 
  This room was where Laila and Tariq did their homework, where they built playing-
card towers and drew ridiculous portraits of each other. If it was raining, they leaned on 
the windowsill, drinking warm, fizzy orange Fanta, and watched the swollen rain drop-
lets trickle down the glass. 
 
  "All right, here's one," Laila said, shuffling. "What goes around the world but stays in 
a corner?" 
 
  "Wait." Tariq pushed himself up and swung his artificial left leg around. Wincing, he 
lay on his side, leaning on his elbow. "Hand me that pillow." He placed it under his leg. 
"There. That's better." 
 
  Laila remembered the first time he'd shown her his stump. She'd been six. With one 
finger, she had poked the taut. 
 
  shiny skin just below his left knee. Her finger had found little hard lumps there, and 
Tariq had told her they were spurs of bone that sometimes grew after an amputation. 
She'd asked him if his stump hurt, and he said it got sore at the end of the day, when it 
swelled and didn't fit the prosthesis like it was supposed to, like a finger in a thimb-
le.And sometimes it gets rubbed Especially when it's hot. Then I get rashes and blisters, 
but my mother has creams that help. It's not so bad. 
  Laila had burst into tears. 
 
  What are you crying for?He'd strapped his leg back on.You asked to see it, you girya-
nok,you crybaby! If I'd known you were going to bawl, I wouldn 'i have shown you. 
 
  "A stamp," he said. 
 
  "What?" 
 

---

  "The riddle. The answer is a stamp. We should go to the zoo after lunch." "You knew 
that one. Did you?" "Absolutely not." 
 
  "You're a cheat." 
 
  "And you're envious." "Of what?" 
 
  "My masculine smarts." 
 
  "Yourmasculine smarts? Really? Tell me, who always wins at chess?" 
 
  "I let you win." He laughed. They both knew that wasn't true. 
 
  "And who failed math? Who do you come to for help with your math homework even 
though you're a grade ahead?" 
 
  "I'd be two grades ahead if math didn't bore me." 
 
  "I suppose geography bores you too." 
 
  "How did you know? Now, shut up. So are we going to the zoo or not?" 
 
  Laila smiled. "We're going." 
 
  "Good." 
 
  "I missed you." 
 
  There was a pause. Then Tariq turned to her with a half-grinning, half-grimacing look 
of distaste. "What's thematter with you?" 
 
  How many times had she, Hasina, and Giti said those same three words to each other, 
Laila wondered, said it without hesitation, after only two or three days of not seeing 
each other? /missed you, Hasina Oh, I missed you too. In Tariq's grimace, Laila learned 
that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn't make a show of friendship. They 
felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk. Laila imagined it had been this way for her 
brothers too. Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its 
existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly. 
 
  "I was trying to annoy you," she said. 
 
  He gave her a sidelong glance. "It worked." 
 
  But she thought his grimace softened. And she thought that maybe the sunburn on his 
cheeks deepened momentarily. 
 
* * * 
 
  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 thebus stop, she saw Khadim aga-
in, 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'm 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. What if they banded together? 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 toward 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 ho-
me-washed clean now and combed back. 
  "What are we having, Laila?" 
 
  "Leftoveraush 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, not because he di-
sapproved of the work assigned by the school-the propaganda teaching notwithstanding. 
In fact, Babi thought that the one thing the communists had done right-or at least inten-
ded to-ironically, was in the field of education, the vocation from which they had fired 
him. More specifically, the education of women. The government had sponsored lite-
racy classes for all women. Almost two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were 
women now, Babi said, women who were studying law, medicine, engineering. 
 
  Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but they're probably more free