A
Thousand Splendid Suns [Excerpt]
by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)
Mariam had never before worn a burqa. Rasheed had to help
her put it on. The padded headpiece felt tight and heavy on her skull, and it
was strange seeing the world through a mesh screen. She practiced walking
around her room in it and kept stepping on the hem and stumbling. The loss of
peripheral vision was unnerving, and she did not like the suffocating way the
pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth.
“You’ll get used to it,” Rasheed said. “With time, I bet
you’ll even like it.” They took a bus to a place Rasheed called the Shar-e-Nau
Park, where children pushed each other on swings and slapped volleyballs over
ragged nets tied to tree trunks. They strolled together and watched boys fly
kites, Mariam walking beside Rasheed, tripping now and then on the burqa’s hem.
For lunch, Rasheed took her to eat in a small kebab house near a mosque he called
the Haji Yaghoub. The floor was sticky and the air smoky. The walls smelled
faintly of raw meat and music, which Rasheed described to her as logari, was
loud. The cooks were thin boys who fanned skewers with one hand and swatted
gnats with the other. Mariam, who had never been inside a restaurant, found it
odd at first to sit in a crowded room with so many strangers, to lift her burqa
to put morsels of food into her mouth. A hint of the same anxiety as the day at
the tandoor stirred in her stomach, but Rasheed’s presence was of some comfort,
and, after a while, she did not mind so much the music, the smoke, even the
people. And the burqa, she learned to her surprise, was also comforting. It was
like a one-way window. Inside it, she was an observer, buffered from the
scrutinizing eyes of strangers. She no longer worried that people knew, with a
single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past.
__________
The women in this part of Kabul were a different breed
from the women in the poorer neighborhoods—like the one where she and Rasheed
lived, where so many of the women covered fully. These women were—what was the
word Rasheed had used?—“modern.” Yes, modern Afghan women married to modern
Afghan men who did not mind that their wives walked among strangers with makeup
on their faces and nothing of their heads. Mariam watched them cantering
uninhibited down the street, sometimes with a man, sometimes alone, sometimes
with rosy-cheeked children who wore shiny shoes and watches with leather bands,
who walked bicycles with high-rise handlebars and gold-colored spokes—unlike
the children in Deh-Mazang, who bore sand-fl y scars on their cheeks and rolled
old bicycle tires with sticks.
__________
The
women were all swinging handbags and rustling skirts. Mariam even spotted one
smoking behind the wheel of a car. Their nails were long, polished pink or
orange, their lips red as tulips. They walked in high heels, and quickly, as if
on perpetually urgent business. They wore dark sunglasses, and, when they
breezed by, Mariam caught a whiff of their perfume. She imagined that they all
had university degrees, that they worked in office buildings, behind desks of
their own, where they typed and smoked and made important phone calls to
important people. These women mystified Mariam. They made her aware of her own
lowliness, her plain looks, her lack of aspirations, her ignorance of so many
things.
