Page 39 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

someone would tap on a tambourine. There would be tea and warm, freshly

baked bread, and shorwa soup with potatoes. Afterward, Mullah Shekib would
dip his finger in a bowl of sweetened water and let the baby suckle it. He would
produce his shiny black stone and his double-edged razor, lift the cloth from the
boy’s midriff. An ordinary ritual. Life rolling on in Shadbagh.
Abdullah turned the feather over in his hand.
I won’t have any crying, Father had said. No crying. I won’t have it.
And there hadn’t been any. No one in the village asked after Pari. No one
even spoke her name. It astonished Abdullah how thoroughly she had vanished
from their lives.

Only in Shuja did Abdullah find a reflection of his own grief. The dog turned
up at their door every day. Parwana threw rocks at him. Father went at him with
a stick. But he kept returning. Every night he could be heard whimpering
mournfully and every morning they found him lying by the door, chin on his
front paws, blinking up at his assailants with melancholy, unaccusing eyes. This
went on for weeks until one morning Abdullah saw him hobbling toward the
hills, head hung low. No one in Shadbagh had seen him since.

Abdullah pocketed the yellow feather and began walking toward the
windmill.
Sometimes, in unguarded moments, he caught Father’s face clouding over,
drawn into confusing shades of emotion. Father looked diminished to him now,
stripped of something essential. He loped sluggishly about the house or else sat
in the heat of their big new cast-iron stove, little Iqbal on his lap, and stared
unseeingly into the flames. His voice dragged now in a way that Abdullah did
not remember, as though something weighed on each word he spoke. He shrank
into long silences, his face closed off. He didn’t tell stories anymore, had not
told one since he and Abdullah had returned from Kabul. Maybe, Abdullah
thought, Father had sold the Wahdatis his muse as well.

Gone.
Vanished.
Nothing left.
Nothing said.

Other than these words from Parwana: It had to be her. I am sorry, Abdullah.
She had to be the one.
The finger cut, to save the hand.
He knelt on the ground behind the windmill, at the base of the decaying stone
tower. He took off his gloves and dug at the ground. He thought of her heavy
eyebrows and her wide rounded forehead, her gap-toothed smile. He heard in his