Page 252 - Leadership in the Indian Army

short trip to the pawnshop the day before-where she had pushed her

wedding ring across a glass counter, where she'd walked out thrilled by
the finality of it, knowing there was no going back.

All around her now, Laila saw the consequences of the recent fighting

whose sounds she'd heard from the house. Homes that lay in roofless

ruins of brick and jagged stone, gouged buildings with fallen beams
poking through the holes, the charred, mangled husks of cars, upended,

sometimes stacked on top of each other, walls pocked by holes of every

conceivable caliber, shattered glass everywhere. She saw a funeral

procession marching toward a mosque, a black-clad old woman at the
rear tearing at her hair. They passed a cemetery littered with rock-piled

graves and ragged shaheed flags fluttering in the breeze.

Laila reached across the suitcase, wrapped her fingers around the
softness of her daughter's arm.

* * *

At the Lahore Gate bus station, near Pol Mahmood Khan in East Kabul, a

row of buses sat idling along the curbside. Men in turbans were busy

heaving bundles and crates onto bus tops, securing suitcases down with
ropes. Inside the station, men stood in a long line at the ticket booth.

Burqa-clad women stood in groups and chatted, their belongings piled at

their feet. Babies were bounced, children scolded for straying too far.

Mujahideen militiamen patrolled the station and the curbside, barking
curt orders here and there. They wore boots, pakols, dusty green

fatigues. They all carried Kalashnikovs.

Laila felt watched. She looked no one in the face, but she felt as though
every person in this place knew, that they were looking on with
disapproval at what she and Mariam were doing.

"Do you see anybody?" Laila asked.