Page 41 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Three

Spring 1949

Parwana smells it before she pulls back the quilt and sees it. It has smeared all
over Masooma’s buttocks, down her thighs, against the sheets and the mattress
and the quilt too. Masooma looks up at her over her shoulder with a timid plea

for forgiveness, and shame—still the shame after all this time, all these years.
“I’m sorry,” Masooma whispers.
Parwana wants to howl but she forces herself into a weak smile. It takes
strenuous effort at times like this to remember, to not lose sight of, one
unshakable truth: This is her own handiwork, this mess. Nothing that has
befallen her is unjust or undue. This is what she deserves. She sighs, surveying
the soiled linens, dreading the work that awaits her. “I’ll get you cleaned up,”
she says.
Masooma starts to weep without a sound, without even a shift in her

expression. Only tears, welling, trickling down.
Outside, in the early-morning chill, Parwana starts a fire in the cooking pit.
When the flames take hold, she fills a pail with water from Shadbagh’s
communal well and sets it to heat. She holds her palms to the fire. She can see
the windmill from here, and the village mosque where Mullah Shekib had taught
her and Masooma to read when they were little, and Mullah Shekib’s house too,
set at the foot at a mild slope. Later, when the sun is up, its roof will be a perfect,
strikingly red square against the dust because of the tomatoes his wife has set out
to dry in the sun. Parwana gazes up at the morning stars, fading, pale, blinking at
her indifferently. She gathers herself.

Inside, she turns Masooma onto her stomach. She soaks a washcloth in the
water and rubs clean Masooma’s buttocks, wiping the waste off her back and the
flaccid flesh of her legs.
“Why the warm water?” Masooma says into the pillow. “Why the trouble?
You don’t have to. I won’t know the difference.”
“Maybe. But I will,” Parwana says, grimacing against the stench. “Now, quit
your talking and let me finish this.”

From there, Parwana’s day unfolds as it always does, as it has for the four
years since their parents’ deaths. She feeds the chickens. She chops wood and