A thousand Splendid Suns

47. 
 
  Madam 
 
  Back in akolba, it seemed, after all these years. 
  The Walayat women's prison was a drab, square-shaped building in Shar-e-Nau near 
Chicken Street. It sat in the center of a larger complex that housed male inmates. A pad-
locked door separated Mariam and the other women from the surrounding men. Mariam 
counted five working cells. They were unfurnished rooms, with dirty, peeling walls, and 
small windows that looked into the courtyard. The windows were barred, even though 
the doors to the cells were unlocked and the women were free to come and go to the co-
urtyard as they pleased. The windows had no glass. There were no curtains either, 
which meant the Talib guards who roamed the courtyard had an eyeful of the interior of 
the cells. Some of the women complained that the guards smoked outside the window 
and leered in, with their inflamed eyes and wolfish smiles, that they muttered indecent 

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jokes to each other about them. Because of this, most of the women wore burqas all day 
and lifted them only after sundown, after the main gate was locked and the guards had 
gone to their posts. 
 
  At night, the cell Mariam shared with five women and four children was dark. On tho-
se nights when there was electrical power, they hoisted Naghma, a short, flat-chested 
girl with black frizzy hair, up to the ceiling. There was a wire there from which the co-
ating had been stripped. Naghma would hand-wrap the live wire around the base of the 
lightbulb then to make a circuit. 
 
  The toilets were closet-sized, the cement floor cracked There was a small, rectangular 
hole in the ground, at the bottom of which was a heap of feces. Flies buzzed in and out 
of the hole-In the middle of the prison was an open, rectangular courtyard, and, in the 
middle of that, a well The well had no drainage, meaning the courtyard was often a 
swamp and the water tasted rotten. Laundry lines, loaded with handwashed socks and 
diapers, slashed across each other in the courtyard. This was where inmates met visitors, 
where they boiled the rice their families brought them-the prison provided no food The 
courtyard was also the children's playground-Mariam had learned that many of the 
children had been born in Walayat, had never seen the world outside these walls. Mari-
am watched them chase each other around, watched their shoeless feet sling mud. All 
day, they ran around, making up lively games, unaware of the stench of feces and urine 
that permeated Walayat and their own bodies, unmindful of the Talib guards until one 
smacked them. 
 
  Mariam had no visitors. That was the first and only thing she had asked the Talib offi-
cials here. No visitors. 
 
* * * 
 
  None of the women in Mariam's cell were serving time for violent crime-they were all 
there for the common offense of "running away from home." As a result, Mariam ga-
ined some notoriety among them, became a kind of celebrity. The women eyed her with 
a reverent, almost awestruck, expression. They offered her their blankets. They compe-
ted to share their food with her. 
 
  The most avid was Naghma, who was always hugging her elbows and following Mari-
am everywhere she went. Naghma was the sort of person who found it entertaining to 
dispense news of misfortune, whether others' or her own. She said her father had promi-
sed her to a tailor some thirty years older than her. 
  "He smellslike goh, and has fewer teeth than fingers," Naghma said of the tailor. 
  She'd tried to elope to Gardez with a young man she'd fallen in love with, the son of a 
local mullah. They'd barely made it out of Kabul. When they were caught and sent back, 
the mullah's son was flogged before he repented and said that Naghma had seduced him 
with her feminine charms. She'd cast a spell on him, he said. He promised he would re-
dedicate himself to the study of the Koran. The mullah's son was freed. Naghma was 
sentenced to five years. 
 
  It was just as well, she said, her being here in prison. Her father had sworn that the day 
she was released he would take a knife to her throat. 
 

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  Listening to Naghma, Mariam remembered the dim glimmer of cold stars and the 
stringy pink clouds streaking over the Safid-koh mountains that long-ago morning when 
Nana had said to her,Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger