And dreamed
They are on a ribbon of beach, sitting on a quilt. It's a chilly, overcast day, but it's warm
next to Tariq under the blanket draped over their shoulders. She can see cars parked behind
a low fence of chipped white paint beneath a row of windswept palm trees. The wind
makes her eyes water and buries their shoes in sand, hurls knots of dead grass from the
curved ridges of one dune to another. They're watching sailboats bob in the distance.
Around them, seagulls squawk and shiver in the wind. The wind whips up another spray of
sand off the shallow, windward slopes. There is a noise then like a chant, and she tells him
something Babi had taught her years before about singing sand.
He rubs at her eyebrow, wipes grains of sand from it. She catches a flicker of the band on
his finger. It's identical to hers gold with a sort of maze pattern etched all the way around.
It's true, she tells him. It's the friction, of grain against grain. Listen. He does. He frowns.
They wait. They hear it again. A groaning sound, when the wind is soft, when it blows hard,
a mewling, high pitched chorus.
- Babi said they should take only what was absolutely necessary. They would sell the
rest.
"That should hold us in Peshawar until I find work."
- Babi said they should take only what was absolutely necessary. They would sell the
For the next two days, they gathered items to be sold. They put them in big piles.
In her room, Laila set aside old blouses, old shoes, books, toys. Looking under her bed,
she found a tiny yellow glass cow Hasina had passed to her during recess in fifth grade. A
miniature soccer ball key chain, a gift from Giti. A little wooden zebra on wheels. A
ceramic astronaut she and Tariq had found one day in a gutter. She'd been six and he eight.
They'd had a minor row, Laila remembered, over which one of them had found it.
Mammy too gathered her things. There was a reluctance in her movements, and her eyes
had a lethargic, faraway look in them. She did away with her good plates, her napkins, all
her jewelry save for her wedding band and most of her old clothes.
"You're not selling this, are you?" Laila said, lifting Mammy's wedding dress. It cascaded
open onto her lap. She touched the lace and ribbon along the neckline, the hand sewn seed
pearls on the sleeves.
Mammy shrugged and took it from her. She tossed it brusquely on a pile of clothes. Like
ripping off a Band Aid in one stroke, Laila thought.
It was Babi who had the most painful task.
Laila found him standing in his study, a rueful expression on his face as he surveyed his
shelves. He was wearing a secondhand T shirt with a picture of San Francisco's red bridge
on it. Thick fog rose from the white capped waters and engulfed the bridge's towers.
"You know the old bit," he said. "You're on a deserted island. You can have five books.
Which do you choose? I never thought I'd actually have to."
"We'll have to start you a new collection, Babi."
"Mm." He smiled sadly. "I can't believe I'm leaving Kabul. I went to school here, got my
first job here, became a father in this town. It's strange to think that I'll be sleeping beneath
another city's skies soon."
"It's strange for me too."
"All day, this poem about Kabul has been bouncing around in my head. Saib-e-Tabrizi
wrote it back in the seventeenth century, I think. I used to know the whole poem, but all I