A Thousand Splendid Suns

stores, in the muddy water flowing in the gutters. It was as though a
rainbow had melted into her eyes.
Rasheed was drumming his gloved fingers and humming a song. Every
time the bus bucked over a pothole and jerked forward, his hand shot
protectively over her belly.
"What about Zalmai?" he said. "It's a good Pashtun name."
"What if it's a girl?" Mariam said.
"I think it's a boy. Yes. A boy."
A murmur was passing through the bus. Some passengers were pointing
at something and other passengers were leaning across seats to see.
"Look," said Rasheed, tapping a knuckle on the glass. He was smiling.
"There. See?"
On the streets, Mariam saw people stopping in their tracks. At traffic
lights, faces emerged from the windows of cars, turned upward toward
the falling softness. What was it about a season's first snowfall, Mariam
wondered, that was so entrancing? Was it the chance to see something as
yet unsoiled, untrodden? To catch the fleeting grace of a new season, a
lovely beginning, before it was trampled and corrupted?
"If it's a girl," Rasheed said, "and it isn't, but, if it is a girl, then you can
choose whatever name you want."
* * *
Mahiam awoke the next morning to the sound of sawing and