he first few days, Mariam hardly left her room. She was awakened every dawn for
prayer by the distant cry of azan, after which she crawled back into bed. She was still
in bed when she heard Rasheed in the bathroom, washing up, when he came into her
room to check on her before he went to his shop. From her window, she watched him in the
yard, securing his lunch in the rear carrier pack of his bicycle, then walking his bicycle
across the yard and into the street. She watched him pedal away, saw his broad, thick
shouldered figure disappear around the turn at the end of the street.
For most of the days, Mariam stayed in bed, feeling adrift and forlorn. Sometimes she
went downstairs to the kitchen, ran her hands over the sticky, grease stained counter, the
vinyl, flowered curtains that smelled like burned meals. She looked through the ill fitting
drawers, at the mismatched spoons and knives, the colander and chipped, wooden spatulas,
these would be instruments of her new daily life, all of it reminding her of the havoc that
had struck her life, making her feel uprooted, displaced, like an intruder on someone else's
life.
At the kolba, her appetite had been predictable. Here, her stomach rarely growled for food.
Sometimes she took a plate of leftover white rice and a scrap of bread to the living room,
by the window. From there, she could see the roofs of the one story houses on their street.
She could see into their yards too, the women working laundry lines and shooing their
children, chickens pecking at dirt, the shovels and spades, the cows tethered to trees.
She thought longingly of all the summer nights that she and Nana had slept on the flat roof
of the kolba, looking at the moon glowing over Gul Daman, the night so hot their shirts
would cling to their chests like a wet leaf to a window. She missed the winter afternoons of
reading in the kolba with Mullah Faizullah, the clink of icicles falling on her roof from the
trees, the crows cawing outside from snow burdened branches.
Alone in the house, Mariam paced restlessly, from the kitchen to the living room, up the
steps to her room and down again. She ended up back in her room, doing her prayers or
sitting on the bed, missing her mother, feeling nauseated and homesick.
It was with the sun's westward crawl that Mariam's anxiety really ratcheted up. Her teeth
rattled when she thought of the night, the time when Rasheed might at last decide to do to
her what husbands did to their wives. She lay in bed, wracked with nerves, as he ate alone
downstairs.
He always stopped by her room and poked his head in.
"You can't be sleeping already. It's only seven. Are you awake? Answer me. Come, now."
He pressed on until, from the dark, Mariam said, "I'm here."
He slid down and sat in her doorway. From her bed, she could see his large framed body,
his long legs, the smoke swirling around his hook nosed profile, the amber tip of his
cigarette brightening and dimming.