Mariam
n the summer of 2000, the drought reached its third and worst year.
In Helmand, Zabol, Kandahar, villages turned into herds of nomadic communities,
always moving, searching for water and green pastures for their livestock. When they found
neither, when their goats and sheep and cows died off, they came to Kabul They took to the
Kareh Ariana hillside, living in makeshift slums, packed in huts, fifteen or twenty at a time.
That was also the summer of Titanic, the summer that Mariam and Aziza were a tangle of
limbs, rolling and giggling, Aziza insisting she get to be Jack.
"Quiet, Aziza jo."
"Jack! Say my name, Khala Mariam. Say it. Jack!" "Your father will be angry if you wake
him."
"Jack! And you're Rose."
It would end with Mariam on her back, surrendering, agreeing again to be Rose. "Fine,
you be Jack," she relented "You die young, and I get to live to a ripe old age."
"Yes, but I die a hero," said Aziza, "while you, Rose, you spend your entire, miserable life
longing for me." Then, straddling Mariam's chest, she'd announce, "Now we must kiss!"
Mariam whipped her head side to side, and Aziza, delighted with her own scandalous
behavior, cackled through puckered lips.
Sometimes Zalmai would saunter in and watch this game. What didhe get to be, he asked
"You can be the iceberg," said Aziza.
That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film
from Pakistan sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors,
turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the
passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the
children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the
toolshed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.
At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sun
baked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged
in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic
pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic
Beggar."
"Titanic City" was born.
It's the song ,they said.
No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.
It's the sex ,they whispered
Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo.
"Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack
to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead."
Then, late that summer, a fabric merchant fell asleep and forgot to put out his cigarette. He