A Thousand Splendid Suns

pedal away, saw his broad, thick-shouldered figure disappear around the
turn at the end of the street.
For most of the days, Mariam stayed in bed, feeling adrift and forlorn.
Sometimes she went downstairs to the kitchen, ran her hands over the
sticky, grease-stained counter, the vinyl, flowered curtains that smelled
like burned meals. She looked through the ill-fitting drawers, at the
mismatched spoons and knives, the colander and chipped, wooden
spatulas, these would-be instruments of her new daily life, all of it
reminding her of the havoc that had struck her life, making her feel
uprooted, displaced, like an intruder on someone else's life.
At the kolba, her appetite had been predictable. Here, her stomach
rarely growled for food. Sometimes she took a plate of leftover white
rice and a scrap of bread to the living room, by the window. From there,
she could see the roofs of the one-story houses on their street. She could
see into their yards too, the women working laundry lines and shooing
their children, chickens pecking at dirt, the shovels and spades, the cows
tethered to trees.
She thought longingly of all the summer nights that she and Nana had
slept on the flat roof of the kolba, looking at the moon glowing over Gul
Daman, the night so hot their shirts would cling to their chests like a wet
leaf to a window. She missed the winter afternoons of reading in the
kolba with Mullah Faizullah, the clink of icicles falling on her roof from
the trees, the crows cawing outside from snow-burdened branches.
Alone in the house, Mariam paced restlessly, from the kitchen to the
living room, up the steps to her room and down again. She ended up
back in her room, doing her prayers or sitting on the bed, missing her