Pashtuns, who were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Tajiks have always felt
slighted, Babi had said. Pashiun kings ruled this country for almost two hundred and fifty
years, Laila, and Tajiks for all of nine months, back in 1929.
And you, Laila had asked, do you feel slighted, Babi?
Babi had wiped his eyeglasses clean with the hem of his shirt. To me, it's nonsense and
very dangerous nonsense at that all this talk of I'm Tajik and you 're Pashiun and he's
Hazara and she's Uzbek. We 're all Afghans, and that's all that should matter. But when
one group rules over the others for so long...There is contempt. Rivalry. There is. There
always has been.
Maybe so. But Laila never felt it in Tariq's house, where these matters never even came up.
Her time with Tariq's family always felt natural to Laila, effortless, uncomplicated by
differences in tribe or language, or by the personal spites and grudges that infected the air at
her own home.
"How about a game of cards?" Tariq said.
"Yes, go upstairs," his mother said, swiping disapprovingly at her husband's cloud of
smoke. "I'll get the shorwa going."
They lay on their stomachs in the middle of Tariq's room and took turns dealing for
panjpar. Pedaling air with his foot, Tariq told her about his trip. The peach saplings he had
helped his uncle plant. A garden snake he had captured.
This room was where Laila and Tariq did their homework, where they built playing card
towers and drew ridiculous portraits of each other. If it was raining, they leaned on the
windowsill, drinking warm, fizzy orange Fanta, and watched the swollen rain droplets
trickle down the glass.
"All right, here's one," Laila said, shuffling. "What goes around the world but stays in a
corner?"
"Wait." Tariq pushed himself up and swung his artificial left leg around. Wincing, he lay
on his side, leaning on his elbow. "Hand me that pillow." He placed it under his leg. "There.
That's better."
Laila remembered the first time he'd shown her his stump. She'd been six. With one finger,
she had poked the taut, shiny skin just below his left knee. Her finger had found little hard
lumps there, and Tariq had told her they were spurs of bone that sometimes grew after an
amputation. She'd asked him if his stump hurt, and he said it got sore at the end of the day,
when it swelled and didn't fit the prosthesis like it was supposed to, like a finger in a
thimble. And sometimes it gets rubbed Especially when it's hot. Then I get rashes and
blisters, but my mother has creams that help. It's not so bad.
Laila had burst into tears.