compassionate. "But I cannot help but be disturbed by the brutality of your action,
hamshira I am troubled by what you have done; I am troubled that his little boy was crying
for him upstairs when you did it.
"I am tired and dying, and I want to be merciful. I want to forgive you. But when God
summons me and says, But it wasn't for you to forgive, Mullah, what shall I say?"
His companions nodded and looked at him with admiration.
"Something tells me you are not a wicked woman, hamshira But you have done a wicked
thing. And you must pay for this thing you have done. Shari'a is not vague on this matter. It
says I must send you where I will soon join you myself.
"Do you understand, hamshira?"
Mariam looked down at her hands. She said she did.
"May Allah forgive you."
Before they led her out, Mariam was given a document, told to sign beneath her statement
and the mullah's sentence. As the three Taliban watched, Mariam wrote it out, her name the
meem, the reh, the yah, and the meem remembering the last time she'd signed her name to a
document, twenty seven years before, at Jalil's table, beneath the watchful gaze of another
mullah.
Mariam spent ten days in prison. She sat by the window of the cell, watched the prison life
in the courtyard. When the summer winds blew, she watched bits of scrap paper ride the
currents in a frenzied, corkscrew motion, as they were hurled this way and that, high above
the prison walls. She watched the winds stir mutiny in the dust, whipping it into violent
spirals that ripped through the courtyard. Everyone the guards, the inmates, the children,
Mariam burrowed their faces in the hook of their elbows, but the dust would not be denied.
It made homes of ear canals and nostrils, of eyelashes and skin folds, of the space between
molars. Only at dusk did the winds die down. And then if a night breeze blew, it did so
timidly, as if to atone for the excesses of its daytime sibling.
On Mariam's last day at Walayat, Naghma gave her a tangerine. She put it in Mariam's
palm and closed her fingers around it. Then she burst into tears.
"You're the best friend I ever had," she said.
Mariam spent the rest of the day by the barred window watching the inmates below.
Someone was cooking a meal, and a stream of cumin scented smoke and warm air wafted
through the window. Mariam could see the children playing a blindfolded game. Two little
girls were singing a rhyme, and Mariam remembered it from her childhood, remembered
Jalil singing it to her as they'd sat on a rock, fishing in the stream:
Lili lili birdbath, Sitting on a dirt path, Minnow sat on the rim and drank, Slipped, and in