Khadim never bothered Laila again.
That night, as most nights, Laila set the dinner table for two only. Mammy said she wasn't
hungry. On those nights that she was, she made a point of taking a plate to her room before
Babi even came home. She was usually asleep or lying awake in bed by the time Laila and
Babi sat down to eat.
Babi came out of the bathroom, his hair peppered white with flour when he'd come home
washed clean now and combed back.
"What are we having, Laila?"
"Leftover aush soup."
"Sounds good," he said, folding the towel with which he'd dried his hair. "So what are we
working on tonight? Adding fractions?"
"Actually, converting fractions to mixed numbers."
"Ah. Right."
Every night after dinner, Babi helped Laila with her homework and gave her some of his
own. This was only to keep Laila a step or two ahead of her class, not because he
disapproved of the work assigned by the school the propaganda teaching notwithstanding.
In fact, Babi thought that the one thing the communists had done right or at least intended
to ironically, was in the field of education, the vocation from which they had fired him.
More specifically, the education of women. The government had sponsored literacy classes
for all women. Almost two thirds of the students at Kabul University were women now,
Babi said, women who were studying law, medicine, engineering.
Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but they're probably more free now,
under the communists, and have more rights than they've ever had before, Babi said,
always lowering his voice, aware of how intolerant Mammy was of even remotely positive
talk of the communists. But it's true, Babi said, it's a good time to be a woman in
Afghanistan. And you can take advantage of that, Laila Of course, women's freedom
here, he shook his head ruefully is also one of the reasons people out there took up arms in
the first place.
By "out there," he didn't mean Kabul, which had always been relatively liberal and
progressive. Here in Kabul, women taught at the university, ran schools, held office in the
government No, Babi meant the tribal areas, especially the Pashtun regions in the south or
in the east near the Pakistani border, where women were rarely seen on the streets and only
then in burqa and accompanied by men. He meant those regions where men who lived by
ancient tribal laws had rebelled against the communists and their decrees to liberate women,
to abolish forced marriage, to raise the minimum marriage age to sixteen for girls. There,
men saw it as an insult to their centuries old tradition, Babi said, to be told by the
government and a godless one at that that their daughters had to leave home, attend school,