A thousand Splendid Suns

* * * 
 
  Tariqasked ifhecould smoke. 
 
  They had stayed awhile at theNasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, Tariq said, tap-
ping ash into a saucer. There were sixty thousand Afghans living there already when he 
and his parents arrived. 

---

 
  "It wasn't as bad as some of the other camps like, God forbid, Jalozai," he said. "I gu-
ess at one point it was even 
 
  some kind of model camp, back during the Cold War, a place the West could point to 
and prove to the world they weren't just funnel ing arms into Afghanistan." 
  But that had been during the Soviet war, Tariq said, the days of jihad and worldwide 
interest and generous funding and visits from Margaret Thatcher. 
 
  "You know the rest, Laila. After the war, the Soviets fell apart, and the West moved 
on. There was nothing at stake for them in Afghanistan anymore and the money dried 
up. Now Nasir Bagh is tents, dust, and open sewers. When we got there, they handed us 
a stick and a sheet of canvas and told us to build ourselves a tent." 
 
  Tariq said what he remembered most about Nasir Bagh, where they had stayed for a 
year, was the color brown. "Brown tents. Brown people. Brown dogs. Brown porridge." 
 
  There was a leafless tree he climbed every day, where he straddled a branch and watc-
hed the refugees lying about in the sun, their sores and stumps in plain view. He watc-
hed little emaciated boys carrying water in their jerry cans, gathering dog droppings to 
make fire, carving toy AK-47s out of wood with dull knives, lugging the sacks of wheat 
flour that no one could make bread from that held together. All around the refugee 
town, the wind made the tents flap. It hurled stubbles of weed everywhere, lifted kites 
flown from the roofs of mud hovels. 
 
  "A lot of kids died. Dysentery, TB, hunger-you name it. Mostly, that damn dysentery. 
God, Laila. I saw so many kids buried. There's nothing worse a person can see." 
 
  He crossed his legs. It grew quiet again between them for a while. 
 
  "My father didn't survive that first winter," he said. "He died in his sleep. I don't think 
there was any pain." 
 
  That same winter, he said, his mother caught pneumonia and almost died, would have 
died, if not for a camp doctor who worked out of a station wagon made into a mobile 
clinic. She would wake up all night long, feverish, coughing out thick, rust-colored 
phlegm. The queues were long to see the doctor, Tariq said. Everyone was shivering in 
line, moaning, coughing, some with shit running down their legs, others too tired or 
hungry or sick to make words. 
 
  "But he was a decent man, the doctor. He treated my mother, gave her some pills, sa-
ved her life that winter." 
 
  That same winter, Tariq had cornered a kid. 
 
  "Twelve, maybe thirteen years old," he said evenly. "I held a shard of glass to his thro-
at and took his blanket from him. I gave it to my mother." 
 
  He made a vow to himself, Tariq said, after his mother's illness, that they would not 
spend another winter in camp. He'd work, save, move them to an apartment in Peshawar 

---

with heating and clean water. When spring came, he looked for work. From time to ti-
me, a truck came to camp early in the morning and rounded up a couple of dozen boys, 
took them to a field to move stones or an orchard to pick apples in exchange for a little 
money, sometimes a blanket, a pair of shoes. But they never wanted him, Tariq said. 
 
  "One look at my leg and it was over." 
 
  There were other jobs. Ditches to dig, hovels to build, water to carry, feces to shovel 
from outhouses. But young men fought over these jobs, and Tariq never stood a chance-
Then he met a shopkeeper one day, that fall of 1993. 
 
  "He offered me money to take a leather coat to Lahore. Not a lot but enough, enough 
for one or maybe two months' apartment rent." 
 
  The shopkeeper gave him a bus ticket, Tariq said, and the address of a street corner ne-
ar the Lahore Rail Station where he was to deliver the coat to a friend of the shopke-
eper's. 
 
  "I knew already. Of course I knew," Tariq said. "He said that if I got caught, I was on 
my own, that I should remember that he knew where my mother lived. But the money 
was too good to pass up. And winter was coming again." 
 
  "How far did you get?" Laila asked. 
 
  "Not far," he said and laughed, sounding apologetic, ashamed. "Never even got on the 
bus. But I thought I was immune, you know, safe. As though there was some accountant 
up there somewhere, a guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear who kept track of these 
things, who tallied things up, and he'd look down and say, 'Yes, yes, he can have this, 
we'll let it go. He's paid some dues already, this one.'" 
  It was in the seams, the hashish, and it spilled all over the street when the police took a 
knife to the coat. 
 
  Tariq laughed again when he said this, a climbing, shaky kind of laugh, and Laila re-
membered how he used to laugh like this when they were little, to cloak embarrassment, 
to make light of things he'd done that were foolhardy or scandalous. 
 
* * * 
 
  "He has A limp," Zalmai said. "Is this who Ithink it is?" 
 
  "He was only visiting," Mariam said. 
 
  "Shut up, you," Rasheed snapped, raising a finger. He turned back to Laila. "Well, 
what do you know? Laili and Majnoon reunited. Just like old times." His face turned 
stony. "So you let him in. Here. In my house. You let him in. He was in here with my 
son." 
  "You duped me. You lied to me," Laila said, gritting her teeth. "You had that man sit 
across from me and… You knew I would leave if I thought he was alive." 
 

---

  "AND YOU DIDN'T LIE TO ME?" Rasheed roared. "You think I didn't figure it out? 
About yourharamil You take me for a fool, you whore?" 
 
* * * 
 
  The more Tariq talked, the more Laila dreaded the moment when he would stop. The 
silence that would follow, the signal that it was her turn to give account, to provide the 
why and how and when, to make official what he surely already knew. She felt a faint 
nausea whenever he paused. She averted his eyes. She looked down at his hands, at the 
coarse, dark hairs that had sprouted on the back of them in the intervening years. 
 
  Tariq wouldn't say much about his years in prison save that he'd learned to speak Urdu 
there. When Laila asked, he gave an impatient shake of his head. In this gesture, Laila 
saw rusty bars and unwashed bodies, violent men and crowded halls, and ceilings rot-
ting with moldy deposits. She read in his face that it had been a place of abasement, of 
degradation and despair. 
 
  Tariq said his mother tried to visit him after his arrest. 
 
  "Three times she came. But I never got to see her," he said. 
 
  He wrote her a letter, and a few more after that, even though he doubted that she would 
receive them. 
 
  "And I wrote you." 
 
  "You did?" 
 
  "Oh,volumes," he said. "Your friend Rumi would have envied my production." Then 
he laughed again, uproariously this time, as though he was both startled at his own bold-
ness and embarrassed by what he had let on. 
 
  Zalmai began bawling upstairs. 
 
* * * 
 
  "Just like old times, then," Rasheed said. "The two of you. I suppose you let him see 
your face." 
 
  "She did," said Zalmai. Then, to Laila, "You did, Mammy. I saw you." 
 
* * * 
 
  "Your son doesn't care for me much," Tariq said when Laila returned downstairs. 
  "I'm sorry," she said. "It's not that. He just…Don't mind him." Then quickly she chan-
ged the subject because it made her feel perverse and guilty to feel that about Zalmai, 
who was a child, a little boy who loved his father, whose instinctive aversion to this 
stranger was understandable and legitimate. 
 
  And I wrote you. 

---

  Volumes. Volumes. 
 
  "How long have you been in Murree?" 
 
  "Less than a year," Tariq said-He befriended an older man in prison, he said, a fellow 
named Salim, a Pakistani, a former field hockey player who had been in and out of pri-
son for years and who was serving ten years for stabbing an undercover policeman. 
Every prison has a man like Salim, Tariq said. There was always someone who was 
cunning and connected, who worked the system and found you things, someone around 
whom the air buzzed with both opportunity and danger-It was Salim who had sent out 
Tariq's queries about his mother, Salim who had sat him down and told him, in a soft, 
fatherly voice, that she had died of exposure. 
  Tariq spent seven years in the Pakistani prison. "I got off easy," he said. "I was lucky. 
The judge sitting on my case, it turned out, had a brother who'd married an Afghan wo-
man. Maybe he showed mercy. I don't know." 
 
  When Tariq's sentence was up, early in the winter of 2000, Salim gave him his brot-
her's address and phone number. The brother's name was Sayeed. 
 
  "He said Sayeed owned a small hotel in Murree," Tariq said. "Twenty rooms and a lo-
unge, a little place to cater to tourists. He said tell him I sent you." 
 
  Tariq had liked Murree as soon as he'd stepped off the bus: the snow-laden pines; the 
cold, crisp air; the shuttered wooden cottages, smoke curling up from chimneys. 
  Here was a place, Tariq had thought, knocking on Sayeed's door, a place not only 
worlds removed from the wretchedness he'd known but one that made even the notion 
of hardship and sorrow somehow obscene, unimaginable. 
 
  "I said to myself, here is a place where a man can get on." 
 
  Tariq was hired as a janitor and handyman. He did well, he said, during the one-month 
trial period, at half pay, that Sayeed granted him. As Tariq spoke, Laila saw Sayeed, 
whom she imagined narrow-eyed and ruddy-faced, standing at the reception office win-
dow watching Tariq chop wood and shovel snow off the driveway. She saw him sto-
oping over Tariq's legs, observing, as Tariq lay beneath the sink fixing a leaky pipe. She 
pictured him checking the register for missing cash. 
 
  Tariq's shack was beside the cook's little bungalow, he said. The cook was a matronly 
old widow named Adiba. Both shacks were detached from the hotel itself, separated 
from the main building by a scattering of almond trees, a park bench, and a pyramid-
shaped stone fountain that, in the summer, gurgled water all day. Laila pictured Tariq in 
his shack, sitting up in bed, watching the leafy world outside his window. 
 
  At the end of the grace period, Sayeed raised Tariq's pay to full, told him his lunches 
were free, gave him a wool coat, and fitted him for a new leg. Tariq said he'd wept at 
the man's kindness. 
 
  With his first month's full salary in his pocket, Tariq had gone to town and bought Al-
yona. 
 

---

  "Her fur is perfectly white," Tariq said, smiling. "Some mornings, when it's snowed all 
night, you look out the window and all you see of her is two eyes and a muzzle." 
 
  Laila nodded Another silence ensued Upstairs, Zalmai had begun bouncing his ball 
again against the wall. 
 
  "I thought you were dead," Laila said. 
 
  "I know. You told me." 
 
  Laila's voice broke. She had to clear her throat, collect herself. "The man who came to 
give the news, he was so earnest…Ibelieved him, Tariq. I wish I hadn't, but I did. And 
then I felt so alone and scared. Otherwise, I wouldn't have agreed to marry Rasheed. I 
wouldn't have…" 
 
  "You don't have to do this," he said softly, avoiding her eyes. There was no hidden 
reproach, no recrimination, in the way he had said this. No suggestion of blame. 
 
  "But I do. Because there was a bigger reason why I married him. There's something 
you don't know, Tariq.Someone. I have to tell you." 
 
* * * 
 
  "Did you srr and talk with him too?" Rasheed asked Zalmai. 
  Zalmai said nothing. Laila saw hesitation and uncertainty in his eyes now, as if he had 
just realized that what he'd disclosed had turned out to be far bigger than he'd thought. 
 
  "I asked you a question, boy." 
 
  Zalmai swallowed. His gaze kept shifting. "I was upstairs, playing with Mariam." 
  "And your mother?" 
 
  Zalmai looked at Laila apologetically, on the verge of tears. 
 
  "It's all right, Zalmai," Laila said. "Tell the truth." 
 
  "She was…She was downstairs, talking to that man," he said in a thin voice hardly lo-
uder than a whisper. 
 
  "I see," said Rasheed. "Teamwork." 
 
* * * 
 
  As he was leaving, Tariq said, "I want to meet her. I want to see her." 
 
  "I'll arrange it," Laila said. 
 
  "Aziza. Aziza." He smiled, tasting the word. Whenever Rasheed uttered her daughter's 
name, it came out sounding unwholesome to Laila, almost vulgar. 
  "Aziza. It's lovely." 

---

 
  "So is she. You'll see." 
 
  "I'll count the minutes." 
 
  Almost ten years had passed since they had last seen each other. Laila's mind flashed 
to all the times they'd met in the alley, kissing in secret. She wondered how she must se-
em to him now. Did he still find her pretty? Or did she seem withered to him, reduced, 
pitiable, like a fearful, shuffling old woman? Almost ten years. But, for a moment, stan-
ding there with Tariq in the sunlight, it was as though those years had never happened. 
Her parents' deaths, her marriage to Rasheed, the killings, the rockets, the Taliban, the 
beatings, the hunger, even her children, all of it seemed like a dream, a bizarre detour, a 
mere interlude between that last afternoon together and this moment. 
 
  Then Tariq's face changed, turned grave. She knew this expression. It was the same lo-
ok he'd had on his face that day, all those years ago when they'd both been children, 
when he'd unstrapped his leg and gone after Khadim. He reached with one hand now 
and touched the comer of her lower lip. 
 
  "He did this to you," he said coldly. 
 
  At his touch, Laila remembered the frenzy of that afternoon again when they'd conce-
ived Aziza. His breath on her neck, the muscles of his hips flexing, his chest pressing 
against her breasts, their hands interlocked. 
 
  "I wish I'd taken you with me," Tariq nearly whispered. 
 
  Laila had to lower her gaze, try not to cry. 
 
  "I know you're a married woman and a mother now. And here I am, after all these ye-
ars, after all that's happened, showing up at your doorstep. Probably, it isn't proper, or 
fair, but I've come such a long way to see you, and… Oh, Laila, I wish I'd never left 
you." 
 
  "Don't," she croaked. 
 
  "I should have tried harder. I should have married you when I had the chance. Everyt-
hing would have been different, then." 
  "Don't talk this way. Please. It hurts." 
 
  He nodded, started to take a step toward her, then stopped himself. "I don't want to as-
sume anything. And I don't mean to turn your life upside down, appearing like this out 
of nowhere. If you want me to leave, if you want me to go back to Pakistan, say the 
word, Laila. I mean it. Say it and I'll go. I'll never trouble you again. I'll-" 
 
  "No!" Laila said more sharply than she'd intended to. She saw that she'd reached for 
his arm, that she was clutchingit. She dropped her hand. "No. Don't leave, Tariq. No. 
Please stay." 
 
  Tariq nodded. 

---

 
  "He works from noon to eight. Come back tomorrow afternoon. I'll take you to Aziza." 
 
  "I'm not afraid of him, you know." 
 
  "I know. Come back tomorrow afternoon." 
 
  "And then?" 
 
  "And then…Idon't know. I have to think. This is…" 
 
  "I know it is," he said. "I understand. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for a lot of things." 
 
  "Don't be. You promised you'd come back. And you did." 
 
  His eyes watered. "It's good to see you, Laila." 
  She watched him walk away, shivering where she stood. She thought,Volumes, and 
another shudder passed through her, a current of something sad and forlorn, but also so-
mething eager and recklessly hopeful.