Page 92 - Leadership in the Indian Army

dinner to celebrate. All morning, Mariam cleaned lentils and moistened

rice. She sliced eggplants for borani, and cooked leeks and ground beef
for aushak. She swept the floor, beat the curtains, aired the house,

despite the snow that had started up again. She arranged mattresses and

cushions along the walls of the living room, placed bowls of candy and

roasted almonds on the table.

She was in her room by early evening before the first of the men

arrived. She lay in bed as the hoots and laughter and bantering voices

downstairs began to mushroom. She couldn't keep her hands from
drifting to her belly. She thought of what was growing there, and

happiness rushed in like a gust of wind blowing a door wide open. Her

eyes watered.

Mariam thought of her six-hundred-and-fifty-kilometer bus trip with

Rasheed, from Herat in the west, near the border with Iran, to Kabul in
the east. They had passed small towns and big towns, and knots of little

villages that kept springing up one after another. They had gone over

mountains and across raw-burned deserts, from one province to the next.

And here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a
home of her own, a husband of her own, heading toward one final,

cherished province: Motherhood. How delectable it was to think of

this baby, her baby, their baby. How glorious it was to know that her

love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being,
to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games.

Downstairs, someone was tuning a harmonium. Then the clanging of a
hammer tuning a tabla. Someone cleared his throat. And then there was

whistling and clapping and yipping and singing.