Page 44 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

older brother, Nabi, and escaped to sleep at his own brother’s house. Nighttime

was a misery of epic proportion for the girls’ mother, punctuated by only a few
moments of fitful rest. She bounced Parwana and walked her all night every
night. She rocked her and sang to her. She winced as Parwana ripped into her
chafed, swollen breast and gummed her nipple as though she was after the milk
in her very bones. But nursing was no antidote: Even with a full belly, Parwana
was flailing and shrieking, immune to her mother’s supplications.
Masooma watched from her corner of the room with a pensive, helpless
expression, as though she pitied her mother this predicament.
Nabi was nothing like this, their mother said one day to their father.

Every baby is different.
She’s killing me, that one.
It will pass, he said. The way bad weather does.
And it did pass. Colic, perhaps, or some other innocuous ailment. But it was
too late. Parwana had already made her mark.

One late-summer afternoon when the twins were ten months old, the villagers
gathered in Shadbagh after a wedding. Women worked with fevered focus to
pile onto platters pyramids of fluffy white rice speckled with bits of saffron.
They cut bread, scraped crusty rice from the bottom of pots, passed around
dishes of fried eggplant topped with yogurt and dried mint. Nabi was out playing
with some boys. The girls’ mother sat with neighbors on a rug spread beneath
the village’s giant oak tree. Every now and then, she glanced down at her
daughters as they slept side by side in the shade.
After the meal, over tea, the babies woke from their nap, and almost
immediately, someone snatched up Masooma. She was merrily passed around,

from cousin to aunt to uncle. Bounced on this lap, balanced on that knee. Many
hands tickled her soft belly. Many noses rubbed against hers. They rocked with
laughter when she playfully grabbed Mullah Shekib’s beard. They marveled at
her easy, sociable demeanor. They lifted her up and admired the pink flush of
her cheeks, her sapphire blue eyes, the graceful curve of her brow, harbingers of
the startling beauty that would mark her in a few years’ time.
Parwana was left in her mother’s lap. As Masooma performed, Parwana
watched quietly as though slightly bewildered, the one member of an otherwise
adoring audience who didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Every now
and then, her mother looked down at her, and reached to squeeze her tiny foot

softly, almost apologetically. When someone remarked that Masooma had two
new teeth coming in, Parwana’s mother said, feebly, that Parwana had three. But
no one took notice.