Page 185 - Leadership in the Indian Army

One daY that same month of June, Giti was walking home from school

with two classmates. Only three blocks from Giti's house, a stray rocket
struck the girls. Later that terrible day, Laila learned that Nila, Giti's

mother, had run up and down the street where Giti was killed, collecting

pieces of her daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's

decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would
be found on a rooftop two weeks later.

At Giti'sfaiiha, the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful

of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila had

known, been close to, loved, had died. She couldn't get around the
unfathomable reality that Giti wasn't alive anymore. Giti, with whom

Laila had exchanged secret notes in class, whose fingernails she had

polished, whose chin hair she had plucked with tweezers. Giti, who was
going to marry Sabir the goalkeeper. Giti was dead. Dead. Blown to

pieces. At last, Laila began to weep for her friend. And all the tears that

she hadn't been able to shed at her brothers' funeral came pouring down.

25.

JLaila could hardly move, as though cement had solidified in every one
of her joints. There was a conversation going on, and Laila knew that she

was at one end of it, but she felt removed from it, as though she were

merely eavesdropping. As Tariq talked, Laila pictured her life as a rotted

rope, snapping, unraveling, the fibers detaching, falling away.
It was a hot, muggy afternoon that August of 1992, and they were in

the living room of Laila's house. Mammy had had a stomachache all day,
and, minutes before, despite the rockets that Hekmatyar was launching
from the south, Babi had taken her to see a doctor. And here was Tariq
now, seated beside Laila on the couch, looking at the ground, hands
between his knees.