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A Thousand Splendid Suns

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

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KHALED HOSSEINI

This eBook was produced by: Lynn Feng

A Thousand Splendid Suns

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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

KHALED HOSSEINI

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

RIVEKHEAD BOOKS

A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2007

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This book is dedicated to Haris and Farah, both the noor of my eyes,

and to the women of Afghanistan.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

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PART ONE

1.

ariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.

It happened on a Thursday. It must have, because Mariam remembered that she had been restless and

preoccupied that day, the way she was only on Thursdays, the day when Jalil visited her at the kolba. To

pass the time until the moment that she would see him at last, crossing the knee-high grass in the clearing

and waving, Mariam had climbed a chair and taken down her mother's Chinese tea set. The tea set was

the sole relic that Mariam's mother, Nana, had of her own mother, who had died when Nana was two.

Nana cherished each blue-and-white porcelain piece, the graceful curve of the pot's spout, the

hand-painted finches and chrysanthemums, the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil.It was

this last piece that slipped from Mariam's fingers, that fell to the wooden floor boards of the kolba and

shattered.When Nana saw the bowl, her face flushed red and her upper lip shivered, and her eyes, both

the lazy one and the good, settled on Mariam in a flat, unblinking way. Nana looked so mad that Mariam

feared the jinn would enter her mother's body again. But the jinn didn't come, not that time. Instead,

Nana grabbed Mariam by the wrists, pulled her close, and, through gritted teeth, said, "You are a clumsy

little harami This is my reward for everything I've endured An heirloom-breaking, clumsy little

harami."At the time, Mariam did not understand. She did not know what this word

harami--bastard--meant Nor was she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of

the harami who are culpable, not the harami, whose only sin is being born. Mariam did surmise, by the

way Nana said the word, that it was an ugly, loathsome thing to be a harami, like an insect, like the

scurrying cockroaches Nana was always cursing and sweeping out of the kolba.Later, when she was

older, Mariam did understand. It was the way Nana uttered the word not so much saying it as spitting it at

her that made Mariam feel the full sting of it. She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was

an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim

to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.Jalil never called Mariam

this name. Jalil said she was his little flower. He was fond of sitting her on his lap and telling her stories,

like the time he told her that Herat, the city where Mariam was born, in 1959, had once been the cradle of

Persian culture, the home of writers, painters, and Sufis."You couldn't stretch a leg here without poking a

poet in the ass," he laughed.

Jalil told her the story of Queen Gauhar Shad, who had raised the famous minarets as her loving ode to

Herat back in the fifteenth century. He described to her the green wheat fields of Herat, the orchards, the

vines pregnant with plump grapes, the city's crowded, vaulted bazaars."There is a pistachio tree," Jalil

said one day, "and beneath it, Mariam jo, is buried none other than the great poet Jami." He leaned in and

whispered, "Jami lived over five hundred years ago. He did. I took you there once, to the tree. You were

little. You wouldn't remember."It was true. Mariam didn't remember. And though she would live the first

fifteen years of her life within walking distance of Herat, Mariam would never see this storied tree. She

would never see the famous minarets up close, and she would never pick fruit from Herat's orchards or

stroll in its fields of wheat. But whenever Jalil talked like this, Mariam would listen with enchantment.

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She would admire Jalil for his vast and worldly knowledge. She would quiver with pride to have a father

who knew such things."What rich lies!" Nana said after Jalil left. "Rich man telling rich lies. He never

took you to any tree. And don't let him charm you. He betrayed us, your beloved father. He cast us out.

He cast us out of his big fancy house like we were nothing to him. He did it happily."Mariam would

listen dutifully to this. She never dared say to Nana how much she disliked her talking this way about

Jalil. The truth was that around Jalil, Mariam did not feel at all like a harami. For an hour or two every

Thursday, when Jalil came to see her, all smiles and gifts and endearments, Mariam felt deserving of all

the beauty and bounty that life had to give. And, for this, Mariam loved Jalil. Even if she had to share

him. Jalil had three wives and nine children, nine legitimate children, all of whom were strangers to

Mariam. He was one of Herat's wealthiest men. He owned a cinema, which Mariam had never seen, but

at her insistence Jalil had described it to her, and so she knew that the fa9ade was made of blue-and-tan

terra-cotta tiles, that it had private balcony seats and a trellised ceiling. Double swinging doors opened

into a tiled lobby, where posters of Hindi films were encased in glass displays. On Tuesdays, Jalil said

one day, kids got free ice cream at the concession stand Nana smiled demurely when he said this. She

waited until he had left the kolba, before snickering and saying, "The children of strangers get ice cream.

What do you get, Mariam? Stories of ice cream."In addition to the cinema, Jalil owned land in Karokh,

land in Farah, three carpet stores, a clothing shop, and a black 1956 Buick Roadmaster. He was one of

Herat's best-connected men, friend of the mayor and the provincial governor. He had a cook, a driver,

and three housekeepers.

Nana had been one of the housekeepers. Until her belly began to swell. When that happened, Nana said,

the collective gasp of Jalil's family sucked the air out of Herat. His in laws swore blood would flow. The

wives demanded that he throw her out. Nana's own father, who was a lowly stone carver in the nearby

village of Gul Daman, disowned her. Disgraced, he packed his things and boarded a bus to Bran, never to

be seen or heard from again."Sometimes," Nana said early one morning, as she was feeding the chickens

outside the kolba, "I wish my father had had the stomach to sharpen one of his knives and do the

honorable thing. It might have been better for me." She tossed another handful of seeds into the coop,

paused, and looked at Mariam. "Better for you too, maybe. It would have spared you the grief of

knowing that you are what you are. But he was a coward, my father. He didn't have the dil, the heart, for

it."Jalil didn't have the dil either, Nana said, to do the honorable thing. To stand up to his family, to his

wives and in-laws, and accept responsibility for what he had done. Instead, behind closed doors, a face

saving deal had quickly been struck. The next day, he had made her gather her few things from the

servants' quarters, where she'd been living, and sent her off. "You know what he told his wives by way of

defense? That I forced myself on him. That it was my fault. Didi? You see? This is what it means to be a

woman in this world."

Nana put down the bowl of chicken feed. She lifted Mariam's chin with a finger.

"Look at me, Mariam."

Reluctantly, Mariam did.

Nana said, "Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a

man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam."

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o Jalil and his wives, I was a pokeroot. A mugwort. You too. And you weren't even born yet."

"What's a mugwort?" Mariam asked

"A weed," Nana said. "Something you rip out and toss aside."

Mariam frowned internally. Jalil didn't treat her as a weed. He never had. But Mariam thought it wise

to suppress this protest."Unlike weeds, I had to be replanted, you see, given food and water. On account

of you. That was the deal Jalil made with his family."

Nana said she had refused to live in Herat.

"For what? To watch him drive his kinchini wives around town all day?"

She said she wouldn't live in her father's empty house either, in the village of Gul Daman, which sat

on a steep hill two kilometers north of Herat. She said she wanted to live somewhere removed, detached,

where neighbors wouldn't stare at her belly, point at her, snicker, or, worse yet, assault her with insincere

kindnesses."And, believe me," Nana said, "it was a relief to your father having me out of sight. It suited

him just fine." It was Muhsin, Jalil's eldest son by his first wife, Khadija, who suggested the clearing. It

was on the outskirts of Gul Daman. To get to it, one took a rutted, uphill dirt track that branched off the

main road between Herat and Gul Daman. The track was flanked on either side by knee high grass and

speckles of white and bright yellow flowers. The track snaked uphill and led to a flat field where poplars

and cottonwoods soared and wild bushes grew in clusters. From up there, one could make out the tips of

the rusted blades of Gul Daman's windmill, on the left, and, on the right, all of Herat spread below. The

path ended perpendicular to a wide, trout-filled stream, which rolled down from the Safid-koh mountains

surrounding Gul Daman. Two hundred yards upstream, toward the mountains, there was a circular grove

of weeping willow trees. In the center, in the shade of the willows, was the clearing.Jalil went there to

have a look. When he came back, Nana said, he sounded like a warden bragging about the clean walls

and shiny floors of his prison. "And so, your father built us this rathole."

Nana had almost married once, when she was fifteen. The suitor had been a boy from Shindand, a

young parakeet seller. Mariam knew the story from Nana herself, and, though

Nana dismissed the episode, Mariam could tell by the wistful light in her eyes that she had been happy.

Perhaps for the only time in her life, during those days leading up to her wedding, Nana had been

genuinely happy.As Nana told the story, Mariam sat on her lap and pictured her mother being fitted for a

wedding dress. She imagined her on horseback, smiling shyly behind a veiled green gown, her palms

painted red with henna, her hair parted with silver dust, the braids held together by tree sap. She saw

musicians blowing the shahnai flute and banging on dohol drums, street children hooting and giving

chase. Then, a week before the wedding date, a jinn had entered Nana's body. This required no

description to Mariam. She had witnessed it enough times with her own eyes: Nana collapsing suddenly,

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her body tightening, becoming rigid, her eyes rolling back, her arms and legs shaking as if something

were throttling her from the inside, the froth at the corners of her mouth, white, sometimes pink with

blood. Then the drowsiness, the frightening disorientation, the incoherent mumbling. When the news

reached Shindand, the parakeet seller's family called off the wedding.

"They got spooked" was how Nana put it.

The wedding dress was stashed away. After that, there were no more suitors.

In the clearing, Jalil and two of his sons, Farhad and Muhsin, built the small kolba where Mariam

would live the first fifteen years of her life. They raised it with sun dried bricks and plastered it with mud

and handfuls of straw. It had two sleeping cots, a wooden table, two straight backed chairs, a window,

and shelves nailed to the walls where Nana placed clay pots and her beloved Chinese tea set. Jalil put in a

new cast iron stove for the winter and stacked logs of chopped wood behind the kolba He added a

tandoor outside for making bread and a chicken coop with a fence around it. He brought a few sheep,

built them a feeding trough. He had Farhad and Muhsin dig a deep hole a hundred yards outside the

circle of willows and built an outhouse over it. Jalil could have hired laborers to build the kolba. Nana

said, but he didn't. "His idea of penance." In Nana's account of the day that she gave birth to Mariam, no

one came to help. It happened on a damp, overcast day in the spring of 1959, she said, the twenty sixth

year of King Zahir Shah's mostly uneventful forty year reign. She said that Jalil hadn't bothered to

summon a doctor, or even a midwife, even though he knew that the jinn might enter her body and cause

her to have one of her fits in the act of delivering. She lay all alone on the kolba's floor, a knife by her

side, sweat drenching her body.

"When the pain got bad, I'd bite on a pillow and scream into it until I was hoarse. And still no one

came to wipe my face or give me a drink of water. And you, Mariam jo, you were in

no rush. Almost two days you made me lay on that cold, hard floor. I didn't eat or sleep, all I did was

push and pray that you would come out."

"I'm sorry, Nana."

"I cut the cord between us myself. That's why I had a knife."

"I'm sorry."

Nana always gave a slow, burdened smile here, one of lingering recrimination or reluctant

forgiveness, Mariam could never tell It did not occur to young Mariam to ponder the unfairness of

apologizing for the manner of her own birth. By the time it did occur to her, around the time she turned

ten, Mariam no longer believed this story of her birth. She believed Jalil’s version, that though he'd been

away he'd arranged for Nana to be taken to a hospital in Herat where she had been tended to by a doctor.

She had lain on a clean, proper bed in a well lit room. Jalil shook his head with sadness when Mariam

told him about the knife.

Mariam also came to doubt that she had made her mother suffer for two full days.

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"They told me it was all over within under an hour," Jalil said. "You were a good daughter, Mariam jo.

Even in birth you were a good daughter.""He wasn't even there!" Nana spat. "He was in Takht-e-Safar,

horseback riding with his precious friends."When they informed him that he had a new daughter, Nana

said, Jalil had shrugged, kept brushing his horse's mane, and stayed in Takht-e-Safar another two

weeks."The truth is, he didn't even hold you until you were a month old. And then only to look down

once, comment on your longish face, and hand you back to me."Mariam came to disbelieve this part of

the story as well. Yes, Jalil admitted, he had been horseback riding in Takht-e-Safar, but, when they gave

him the news, he had not shrugged. He had hopped on the saddle and ridden back to Herat. He had

bounced her in his arms, run his thumb over her flaky eyebrows, and hummed a lullaby. Mariam did not

picture Jalil saying that her face was long, though it was true that it was long.Nana said she was the one

who'd picked the name Mariam because it had been the name of her mother. Jalil said he chose the name

because Mariam, the tuberose, was a lovely flower.

"Your favorite?" Mariam asked.

"Well, one of," he said and smiled.

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ne of Mariam's earliest memories was the sound of a wheelbarrow's squeaky iron wheels

bouncing over rocks. The wheelbarrow came once a month, filled with rice, flour, tea, sugar,

cooking oil, soap, toothpaste. It was pushed by two of Mariam's half brothers, usually Muhsin and Ramin,

sometimes Ramin and Farhad. Up the dirt track, over rocks and pebbles, around holes and bushes, the

boys took turns pushing until they reached the stream. There, the wheelbarrow had to be emptied and the

items hand carried across the water. Then the boys would transfer the wheelbarrow across the stream and

load it up again. Another two hundred yards of pushing followed, this time through tall, dense grass and

around thickets of shrubs. Frogs leaped out of their way. The brothers waved mosquitoes from their

sweaty faces.

"He has servants," Mariam said. "He could send a servant."

"His idea of penance," Nana said.

The sound of the wheelbarrow drew Mariam and Nana outside. Mariam would always remember

Nana the way she looked on Ration Day: a tall, bony, barefoot woman leaning in the doorway, her lazy

eye narrowed to a slit, arms crossed in a defiant and mocking way. Her short cropped, sunlit hair would

be uncovered and uncombed. She would wear an ill fitting gray shirt buttoned to the throat. The pockets

were filled with walnut sized rocks.The boys sat by the stream and waited as Mariam and Nana

transferred the rations to the kolba They knew better than to get any closer than thirty yards, even though

Nana's aim was poor and most of the rocks landed well short of their targets. Nana yelled at the boys as

she carried bags of rice inside, and called them names Mariam didn't understand. She cursed their

mothers, made hateful faces at them. The boys never returned the insults. Mariam felt sorry for the boys.

How tired their arms and legs must be, she thought pityingly, pushing that heavy load. She wished she

were allowed to offer them water. But she said nothing, and if they waved at her she didn't wave back.

Once, to please Nana, Mariam even yelled at Muhsin, told him he had a mouth shaped like a lizard's ass

and was consumed later with guilt, shame, and fear that they would tell Jalil. Nana, though, laughed so

hard, her rotting front tooth in full display, that Mariam thought she would lapse into one of her fits. She

looked at Mariam when she was done and said, "You're a good daughter." When the barrow was empty,

the boys scuffled back and pushed it away. Mariam would wait and watch them disappear into the tall

grass and flowering weeds.

"Are you coming?"

"Yes, Nana."

"They laugh at you. They do. I hear them." "I'm coming."

"You don't believe me?"

"Here I am."

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"You know I love you, Mariam jo."

In the mornings, they awoke to the distant bleating of sheep and the high pitched toot of a flute as Gul

Daman's shepherds led their flock to graze on the grassy hillside. Mariam and Nana milked the goats, fed

the hens, and collected eggs. They made bread together. Nana showed her how to knead dough, how to

kindle the tandoor and slap the flattened dough onto its inner walls. Nana taught her to sew too, and to

cook rice and all the different toppings: shalqam stew with turnip, spinach sabzi, cauliflower with

ginger.Nana made no secret of her dislike for visitors and, in fact, people in general but she made

exceptions for a select few. And so there was Gul Daman's leader, the village arbab, Habib Khan, a small

headed, bearded man with a large belly who came by once a month or so, tailed by a servant, who carried

a chicken, sometimes a pot of kichiri rice, or a basket of dyed eggs, for Mariam.Then there was a rotund,

old woman that Nana called Bibi jo, whose late husband had been a stone carver and friends with Nana's

father. Bibi jo was invariably accompanied by one of her six brides and a grandchild or two. She limped

and huffed her way across the clearing and made a great show of rubbing her hip and lowering herself,

with a pained sigh, onto the chair that Nana pulled up for her. Bibi jo too always brought Mariam

something, a box of dishlemeh candy, a basket of quinces. For Nana, she first brought complaints about

her failing health, and then gossip from Herat and Gul Daman, delivered at length and with gusto, as her

daughter-in-law sat listening quietly and dutifully behind her. But Mariam's favorite, other than Jalil of

course, was Mullah Faizullah, the elderly village Koran tutor, its akhund He came by once or twice a

week from Gul Daman to teach Mariam the five daily namaz prayers and tutor her in Koran recitation,

just as he had taught Nana when she'd been a little girl It was Mullah Faizullah who had taught Mariam

to read, who had patiently looked over her shoulder as her lips worked the words soundlessly, her index

finger lingering beneath each word, pressing until the nail bed went white, as though she could squeeze

the meaning out of the symbols. It was Mullah Faizullah who had held her hand, guided the pencil in it

along the rise of each alef, the curve of each beh, the three dots of each seh.

He was a gaunt, stooping old man with a toothless smile and a white beard that dropped to his navel.

Usually, he came alone to the kolba, though sometimes with his russet haired son Hamza, who was a few

years older than Mariam. When he showed up at the kolba, Mariam kissed Mullah Faizullah's

hand-which felt like kissing a set of twigs covered with a thin layer of skin-and he kissed the top of her

brow before they sat inside for the day's lesson. After, the two of them sat outside the kolba, ate pine nuts

and sipped green tea, watched the bulbul birds darting from tree to tree. Sometimes they went for walks

among the bronze fallen leaves and alder bushes, along the stream and toward the mountains. Mullah

Faizullah twirled the beads of his tasbeh rosary as they strolled, and, in his quivering voice, told

Mariam stories of all the things he'd seen in his youth, like the two headed snake he'd found in Iran, on

Isfahan's Thirty three Arch Bridge, or the watermelon he had split once outside the Blue Mosque in

Mazar, to find the seeds forming the words Allah on one half, Akbar on the other.Mullah Faizullah

admitted to Mariam that, at times, he did not understand the meaning of the Koran's words. But he said

he liked the enchanting sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they

comforted him, eased his heart. "They'll comfort you too, Mariam jo," he said. "You can summon them

in your time of need, and they won't fail you. God's words will never betray you, my girl" Mullah

Faizullah listened to stories as well as he told them. When Mariam spoke, his attention never wavered He

nodded slowly and smiled with a look of gratitude, as if he had been granted a coveted privilege. It was

easy to tell Mullah Faizullah things that Mariam didn't dare tell Nana.One day, as they were walking,

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Mariam told him that she wished she would be allowed to go to school.

"I mean a real school, akhund sahib. Like in a classroom. Like my father's other kids."

Mullah Faizullah stopped. The week before, Bibi jo had brought news that Jalil's daughters Saideh

and Naheed were going to the Mehri School for girls in Herat. Since then, thoughts of classrooms and

teachers had rattled around Mariam's head, images of notebooks with lined pages, columns of numbers,

and pens that made dark, heavy marks. She pictured herself in a classroom with other girls her age.

Mariam longed to place a ruler on a page and draw important looking lines. "Is that what you want?"

Mullah Faizullah said, looking at her with his soft, watery eyes, his hands behind his stooping back, the

shadow of his turban falling on a patch of bristling buttercups.

"Yes. "

"And you want me to ask your mother for permission."

Mariam smiled. Other than Jalil, she thought there was no one in the world who understood her better

than her old tutor."Then what can I do? God, in His wisdom, has given us each weaknesses, and foremost

among my many is that I am powerless to refuse you, Mariam jo," he said, tapping her cheek with one

arthritic finger.But later, when he broached Nana, she dropped the knife with which she was slicing

onions. "What for?"

"If the girl wants to learn, let her, my dear. Let the girl have an education."

"Learn? Learn what, Mullah sahib?" Nana said sharply. "What is there to learn?"

She snapped her eyes toward Mariam.

Mariam looked down at her hands.

"What's the sense schooling a girl like you? It's like shining a spittoon. And you'll learn nothing of

value in those schools. There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they

don't teach it in school. Look at me."

"You should not speak like this to her, my child," Mullah Faizullah said.

"Look at me."

Mariam did.

"Only one skill And it's this: tahamul. Endure."

"Endure what, Nana?"

"Oh, don't you fret about that, " Nana said. "There won't be any shortage of things." She went on to

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say how Mil's wives had called her an ugly, lowly stone carver's daughter. How they'd made her wash

laundry outside in the cold until her face went numb and her fingertips burned."It's our lot in life, Mariam.

Women like us. We endure. It's all we have. Do you understand? Besides, they'll laugh at you in school.

They will. They'll call you harami. They'll say the most terrible things about you. I won't have it."

Mariam nodded."And no more talk about school. You're all I have. I won't lose you to them. Look at me.

No more talk about school."

"Be reasonableCome now. If the girl wants " Mullah Faizullah began.

"And you, akhund sahib, with all due respect, you should know better than to encourage these foolish

ideas of hers. If you really care about her, then you make her see that she belongs here at home with her

mother. There is nothing out there for her. Nothing but rejection and heartache. I know, akhund sahib. I

know. "

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4.

ariam loved having visitors at the kolba. The villagearbab and his gifts, Bibi jo and her

aching hip and endless gossiping, and, of course, Mullah Faizullah. But there was no one,

no one, that Mariam longed to see more than Jalil.The anxiety set in on Tuesday nights. Mariam

would sleep poorly, fretting that some business entanglement would prevent Jalil from coming on

Thursday, that she would have to wait a whole other week to see him. On Wednesdays, she paced

outside, around the kolba, tossed chicken feed absentmindedly into the coop. She went for aimless

walks, picking petals from flowers and batting at the mosquitoes nibbling on her arms. Finally, on

Thursdays, all she could do was sit against a wall, eyes glued to the stream, and wait. If Jalil was

running late, a terrible dread filled her bit by bit. Her knees would weaken, and she would have to go

somewhere and lie down.Then Nana would call, "And there he is, your father. In all his glory."

Mariam would leap to her feet when she spotted him hopping stones across the stream, all smiles

and hearty waves. Mariam knew that Nana was watching her, gauging her reaction, and it always

took effort to stay in the doorway, to wait, to watch him slowly make his way to her, to not run to

him. She restrained herself, patiently watched him walk through the tall grass, his suit jacket slung

over his shoulder, the breeze lifting his red necktie.When Jalil entered the clearing, he would throw

his jacket on the tandoor and open his arms. Mariam would walk, then finally run, to him, and he

would catch her under the arms and toss her up high. Mariam would squeal.Suspended in the air,

Mariam would see Jalil's upturned face below her, his wide, crooked smile, his widow's peak, his

cleft chin a perfect pocket for the tip of her pinkie his teeth, the whitest in a town of rotting molars.

She liked his trimmed mustache, and she liked that no matter the weather he always wore a suit on

his visits dark brown, his favorite color, with the white triangle of a handkerchief in the breast

pocket and cuff links too, and a tie, usually red, which he left loosened Mariam could see herself too,

reflected in the brown of Jalil's eyes: her hair billowing, her face blazing with excitement, the sky

behind her.Nana said that one of these days he would miss, that she, Mariam, would slip through his

fingers, hit the ground, and break a bone. But Mariam did not believe that Jalil would drop her. She

believed that she would always land safely into her father's clean, well manicured hands.They sat

outside the kolba, in the shade, and Nana served them tea. Jalil and she acknowledged each other