n the bus ride home from the doctor, the strangest thing was happening to Mariam.
Everywhere she looked, she saw bright colors: on the drab, gray concrete apartments,
on the tin roofed, open fronted stores, in the muddy water flowing in the gutters. It was as
though a rainbow had melted into her eyes.
Rasheed was drumming his gloved fingers and humming a song. Every time the bus
bucked over a pothole and jerked forward, his hand shot protectively over her belly.
"What about Zalmai?" he said. "It's a good Pashtun name."
"What if it's a girl?" Mariam said.
"I think it's a boy. Yes. A boy."
A murmur was passing through the bus. Some passengers were pointing at something and
other passengers were leaning across seats to see.
"Look," said Rasheed, tapping a knuckle on the glass. He was smiling. "There. See?"
On the streets, Mariam saw people stopping in their tracks. At traffic lights, faces emerged
from the windows of cars, turned upward toward the falling softness. What was it about a
season's first snowfall, Mariam wondered, that was so entrancing? Was it the chance to see
something as yet unsoiled, untrodden? To catch the fleeting grace of a new season, a lovely
beginning, before it was trampled and corrupted?
"If it's a girl," Rasheed said, "and it isn't, but, if itis a girl, then you can choose whatever
name you want."
Mahiam awoke the next morning to the sound of sawing and hammering She wrapped a
shawl around her and went out into the snow-blown yard. The heavy snowfall of the
previous night had stopped. Now only a scattering of light, swirling flakes tickled her
cheeks. The air was windless and smelled like burning coal. Kabul was eerily silent, quilted
in white, tendrils of smoke snaking up here and there.
She found Rasheed in the toolshed, pounding nails into a plank of wood. When he saw her,
he removed a nail from the corner of his mouth.
"It was going to be a surprise. He'll need a crib. You weren't supposed to see until it was
done."
Mariam wished he wouldn't do that, hitch his hopes to its being a boy. As happy as she
was about this pregnancy, his expectation weighed on her. Yesterday, Rasheed had gone
out and come home with a suede winter coat for a boy, lined inside with soft sheepskin, the
sleeves embroidered with fine red and yellow silk thread.