A Thousand Splendid Suns

windows. Everywhere, the Beard Patrol roamed the streets in Toyota
trucks on the lookout for clean-shaven faces to bloody.
They shut down the cinemas too. Cinema Park. Ariana. Aryub.
Projection rooms were ransacked and reels of films set to fire. Laila
remembered all the times she and Tariq had sat in those theaters and
watched Hindi films, all those melodramatic tales of lovers separated by
some tragic turn of fate, one adrift in some faraway land, the other
forced into marriage, the weeping, the singing in fields of marigolds, the
longing for reunions. She remembered how Tariq would laugh at her for
crying at those films.
"I wonder what they've done to my father's cinema," Mariam said to her
one day. "If it's still there, that is. Or if he still owns it."
Kharabat, Kabul's ancient music ghetto, was silenced. Musicians were
beaten and imprisoned, their rubab% ›
iamboura% ›
and harmoniums
trampled upon. The Taliban went to the grave of Tariq's favorite singer,
Ahmad Zahir, and fired bullets into it.
"He's been dead for almost twenty years," Laila said to Mariam. "Isn't
dying once enough?"
* * *
Rasheed wasnt bothered much by the Taliban. All he had to do was
grow a beard, which he did, and visit the mosque, which he also did.
Rasheed regarded the Taliban with a forgiving, affectionate kind of
bemusement, as one might regard an erratic cousin prone to
unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal.
Every Wednesday night, Rasheed listened to the Voice of Shari'a when
the
Taliban would announce the names of those scheduled for