Laila
FALL 1999t was Mariam's idea to dig the hole. One morning, she pointed to a patch of soil behind
the toolshed. "We can do it here," she said. "This is a good spot"
They took turns striking the ground with a spade, then shoveling the loose dirt aside. They
hadn't planned on a big hole, or a deep one, so the work of digging shouldn't have been as
demanding as it turned out. It was the drought, started in 1998, in its second year now, that
was wreaking havoc everywhere. It had hardly snowed that past winter and didn't rain at all
that spring. All over the country, farmers were leaving behind their parched lands, selling
off their goods, roaming from village to village looking for water. They moved to Pakistan
or Iran. They settled in Kabul. But water tables were low in the city too, and the shallow
wells had dried up. The lines at the deep wells were so long, Laila and Mariam would
spend hours waiting their turn. The Kabul River, without its yearly spring floods, had
turned bone dry. It was a public toilet now, nothing in it but human waste and rubble.
So they kept swinging the spade and striking, but the sun blistered ground had hardened
like a rock, the dirt unyielding, compressed, almost petrified.
Mariam was forty now. Her hair, rolled up above her face, had a few stripes of gray in it.
Pouches sagged beneath her eyes, brown and crescent shaped. She'd lost two front teeth.
One fell out, the other Rasheed knocked out when she'd accidentally dropped Zalmai. Her
skin had coarsened, tanned from all the time they were spending in the yard sitting beneath
the brazen sun. They would sit and watch Zalmai chase Aziza.
When it was done, when the hole was dug, they stood over it and looked down.
"It should do," Mariam said.
Zalmai was two now. He was a plump little boy with curly hair. He had small brownish
eyes, and a rosy tint to his cheeks, like Rasheed, no matter the weather. He had his father's
hairline too, thick and half moon shaped, set low on his brow.
When Laila was alone with him, Zalmai was sweet, good humored, and playful. He liked
to climb Laila's shoulders, play hide and seek in the yard with her and Aziza. Sometimes, in
his calmer moments, he liked to sit on Laila's lap and have her sing to him. His favorite
song was "Mullah Mohammad Jan." He swung his meaty little feet as she sang into his
curly hair and joined in when she got to the chorus, singing what words he could make with
his raspy voice:
Come and lei's go to Mazar, Mullah Mohammadjan, To see the fields of tulips, o beloved
companion.
Laila loved the moist kisses Zalmai planted on her cheeks, loved his dimpled elbows and
stout little toes. She loved tickling him, building tunnels with cushions and pillows for him
to crawl through, watching him fall asleep in her arms with one of his hands always