A Thousand Splendid Suns

paint beneath a row of windswept palm trees. The wind makes her eyes
water and buries their shoes in sand, hurls knots of dead grass from the
curved ridges of one dune to another. They're watching sailboats bob in
the distance. Around them, seagulls squawk and shiver in the wind. The
wind whips up another spray of sand off the shallow, windward slopes.
There is a noise then like a chant, and she tells him something Babi
had taught her years before about singing sand.
He rubs at her eyebrow, wipes grains of sand from it. She catches a
flicker of the band on his finger. It's identical to hers-gold with a sort of
maze pattern etched all the way around.
It's true, she tells him. It's the friction, of grain against grain. Listen.
He does. He frowns. They wait. They hear it again. A groaning sound,
when the wind is soft, when it blows hard, a mewling, high-pitched
chorus.
* * * Babi said they should take only what was absolutely necessary.
They would sell the rest.
"That should hold us in Peshawar until I find work."
For the next two days, they gathered items to be sold. They put them in
big piles.
In her room, Laila set aside old blouses, old shoes, books, toys.
Looking under her bed, she found a tiny yellow glass cow Hasina had
passed to her during recess in fifth grade. A miniature-soccer-ball key
chain, a gift from Giti. A little wooden zebra on wheels. A ceramic
astronaut she and Tariq had found one day in a gutter. She'd been six
and he eight. They'd had a minor row, Laila remembered, over which
one of them had found it.
Mammy too gathered her things. There was a reluctance in her
movements, and her eyes had a lethargic, faraway look in them. She did
away with her good plates, her napkins, all her jewelry-save for her