"Do you fully understand what you're saying?" the bony faced Talib to the judge's right,
not the tea giver, said. This one was the youngest of the three. He spoke quickly and with
emphatic, arrogant confidence. He'd been irritated that Mariam could not speak Pashto. He
struck Mariam as the sort of quarrelsome young man who relished his authority, who saw
offenses everywhere, thought it his birthright to pass judgment.
"I do understand," Mariam said.
"I wonder," the young Talib said. "God has made us differently, you women and us men.
Our brains are different. You are not able to think like we can. Western doctors and their
science have proven this. This is why we require only one male witness but two female
ones."
"I admit to what I did, brother," Mariam said. "But, if I hadn't, he would have killed her.
He was strangling her."
"So you say. But, then, women swear to all sorts of things all the time."
"It's the truth."
"Do you have witnesses? Other than your ambagh?’'
"I do not," said Mariam.
"Well, then." He threw up his hands and snickered.
It was the sickly Talib who spoke next.
"I have a doctor in Peshawar," he said. "A fine, young Pakistani fellow. I saw him a month
ago, and then again last week. I said, tell me the truth, friend, and he said to me, three
months, Mullah sahib, maybe six at most all God's will, of course."
He nodded discreetly at the square shouldered man on his left and took another sip of the
tea he was offered. He wiped his mouth with the back of his tremulous hand. "It does not
frighten me to leave this life that my only son left five years ago, this life that insists we
bear sorrow upon sorrow long after we can bear no more. No, I believe I shall gladly take
my leave when the time comes.
"What frightens me, hamshira, is the day God summons me before Him and asks, Why did
you not do as I said, Mullah? Why did you not obey my laws? How shall I explain myself to
Him,hamshira1? What will be my defense for not heeding His commands? All I can do, all
any of us can do, in the time we are granted, is to go on abiding by the laws He has set for
us. The clearer I see my end, hamshira, the nearer I am to my day of reckoning, the more
determined I grow to carry out His word. However painful it may prove."
He shifted on his cushion and winced.
"I believe you when you say that your husband was a man of disagreeable temperament,"
he resumed, fixing Mariam with his bespectacled eyes, his gaze both stern and