Page 66 - Leadership in the Indian Army

pedal away, saw his broad, thick-shouldered figure disappear around the

turn at the end of the street.

For most of the days, Mariam stayed in bed, feeling adrift and forlorn.

Sometimes she went downstairs to the kitchen, ran her hands over the

sticky, grease-stained counter, the vinyl, flowered curtains that smelled
like burned meals. She looked through the ill-fitting drawers, at the

mismatched spoons and knives, the colander and chipped, wooden

spatulas, these would-be instruments of her new daily life, all of it

reminding her of the havoc that had struck her life, making her feel
uprooted, displaced, like an intruder on someone else's life.

At the kolba, her appetite had been predictable. Here, her stomach
rarely growled for food. Sometimes she took a plate of leftover white

rice and a scrap of bread to the living room, by the window. From there,

she could see the roofs of the one-story houses on their street. She could
see into their yards too, the women working laundry lines and shooing

their children, chickens pecking at dirt, the shovels and spades, the cows

tethered to trees.

She thought longingly of all the summer nights that she and Nana had

slept on the flat roof of the kolba, looking at the moon glowing over Gul

Daman, the night so hot their shirts would cling to their chests like a wet

leaf to a window. She missed the winter afternoons of reading in the
kolba with Mullah Faizullah, the clink of icicles falling on her roof from

the trees, the crows cawing outside from snow-burdened branches.

Alone in the house, Mariam paced restlessly, from the kitchen to the
living room, up the steps to her room and down again. She ended up

back in her room, doing her prayers or sitting on the bed, missing her