Page 40 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

head the tinkle of her laughter rolling around the house like it used to. He

thought of the scuffle that had broken out when they had come back from the
bazaar. Pari panicking. Shrieking. Uncle Nabi quickly whisking her away.
Abdullah dug until his fingers struck metal. Then he maneuvered his hands
underneath and lifted the tin tea box from the hole. He swiped cold dirt off the
lid.
Lately, he thought a lot about the story Father had told them the night before
the trip to Kabul, the old peasant Baba Ayub and the div. Abdullah would find
himself on a spot where Pari had once stood, her absence like a smell pushing up
from the earth beneath his feet, and his legs would buckle, and his heart would
collapse in on itself, and he would long for a swig of the magic potion the div
had given Baba Ayub so he too could forget.

But there was no forgetting. Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of
Abdullah’s vision everywhere he went. She was like the dust that clung to his
shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences
that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes
pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.
Some nights he dreamed that he was in the desert again, alone, surrounded by
the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off,
on, off, like a message.
He opened the tea box. They were all there, Pari’s feathers, shed from
roosters, ducks, pigeons; the peacock feather too. He tossed the yellow feather

into the box. One day, he thought.
Hoped.
His days in Shadbagh were numbered, like Shuja’s. He knew this now. There
was nothing left for him here. He had no home here. He would wait until winter
passed and the spring thaw set in, and he would rise one morning before dawn
and he would step out the door. He would choose a direction and he would begin
to walk. He would walk as far from Shadbagh as his feet would take him. And if
one day, trekking across some vast open field, despair should take hold of him,
he would stop in his tracks and shut his eyes and he would think of the falcon
feather Pari had found in the desert. He would picture the feather coming loose
from the bird, up in the clouds, half a mile above the world, twirling and

spinning in violent currents, hurled by gusts of blustering wind across miles and
miles of desert and mountains, to finally land, of all places and against all odds,
at the foot of that one boulder for his sister to find. It would strike him with
wonder, then, and hope too, that such things happened. And though he would
know better, he would take heart, and he would open his eyes, and walk.