A Thousand Splendid Suns

she is alive and sitting in this taxi listening to this man's
story.
* * *
Gul Daman is a village of a few walled houses rising among flat kolbas
built with mud and straw. Outside the kolbas, Laila sees sunburned
women cooking, their faces sweating in steam rising from big blackened
pots set on makeshift firewood grills. Mules eat from troughs. Children
giving chase to chickens begin chasing the taxi. Laila sees men pushing
wheelbarrows filled with stones. They stop and watch the car pass by.
The driver takes a turn, and they pass a cemetery with a weather-worn
mausoleum in the center of it. The driver tells her that a village Sufi is
buried there.
There is a windmill too. In the shadow of its idle, rust-colored vanes,
three little boys are squatting, playing with mud. The driver pulls over
and leans out of the window. The oldest-looking of the three boys is the
one to answer. He points to a house farther up the road. The driver
thanks him, puts the car back in gear.
He parks outside the walled, one-story house. Laila sees the tops of fig
trees above the walls, some of the branches spilling over the side.
"I won't be long," she says to the driver.
* * *
The middle-aged man who opens the door is short, thin, russet-haired.
His beard is streaked with parallel stripes of gray. He is wearing a
chapan over his pirhan-tumban.
They exchange salaam alaykums.