A
Thousand Splendid Suns, Passage Ten (Chapter 32: pages 230-231)
That winter, everywhere Laila turned, wallsblocked her way. She thought longingly of the wide open skies of her childhood,of her days of going to buzkashi tournaments with Babi and shopping at Mandaii with Mammy, of herdays of running free in the streets and gossiping about boys with Giti andHasina. Her days of sitting with Tariq in a bed of clover on the banks of a
stream somewhere, trading riddles and candy, watching the sun go down.
But thinking of Tariq was treacherous because,
before she could stop, she saw him lying on a bed, far from home, tubes
piercing his burned body. Like the bile that kept burning her throat these
days, a deep, paralyzing grief would come rising up Laila's chest. Her legs
would turn to water. She would have to hold on to something.
Laila passed that winter of 1992 sweeping the
house, scrubbing the pumpkin colored walls of the bedroom she shared with
Rasheed, washing clothes outside in a big copper lagoon. Sometimes she saw herself as if hovering above her own body, saw
herself squatting over the rim of the logoon, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, pink hands wringing soapy water
from one of Rasheed's undershirts. She felt lost then, casting about, like ashipwreck survivor, no shore in sight, only miles and miles of water.
When it was too cold to go
outside, Laila ambled around the house. She walked, dragging a fingernail along the wall, down the hallway, then back, down the steps, then up, her face unwashed, hair uncombed. She walked until she ran into Mariam, who shot her a
cheerless glance and went back to slicing the stem off a bell pepper and
trimming strips of fat from meat. A hurtful silence would fill the room, and
Laila could almost see the wordless hostility radiating from Mariam like waves
of heat rising from asphalt. She would retreat back to her room, sit on the
bed, and watch the snow falling.
