A Thousand Splendid Suns

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 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 those 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 coating 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. Mariam
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,