Page 62 - Leadership in the Indian Army

"There are valleys north of here. Rivers with lots offish. Maybe I'll take

you someday."

He unlocked the front door and let her into the house.

Rasheed's house was much smaller than Jalil's, but, compared to
Mariam and Nana's kolba, it was a mansion. There was a hallway, a

living room downstairs, and a kitchen in which he showed her pots and

pans and a pressure cooker and a kerosene Lshiop. The living room had
a pistachio green leather couch. It had a rip down its side that had been

clumsily sewn together. The walls were bare. There was a table, two

cane-seat chairs, two folding chairs, and, in the corner, a black, cast-iron

stove.

Mariam stood in the middle of the living room, looking around. At the

kolba, she could touch the ceiling with her fingertips. She could lie in her

cot and tell the time of day by the angle of sunlight pouring through the
window. She knew how far her door would open before its hinges

creaked. She knew every splinter and crack in each of the thirty wooden

floorboards. Now all those familiar things were gone. Nana was dead,
and she was here, in a strange city, separated from the life she'd known

by valleys and chains of snow-capped mountains and entire deserts. She

was in a stranger's house, with all its different rooms and its smell of

cigarette smoke, with its unfamiliar cupboards full of unfamiliar utensils,
its heavy, dark green curtains, and a ceiling she knew she could not

reach. The space of it suffocated Mariam. Pangs of longing bore into her,

for Nana, for Mullah Faizullah, for her old life.

Then she was crying.