A Thousand Splendid Suns Read Free

veiled green gown, her palms painted red with henna, her hair parted with silver dust, the
     braids held together by tree sap. She saw musicians blowing the shahnai flute and banging on dohol drums, street children hooting and giving chase.
    Then, a week before the wedding date, a jinn had entered Nana’s body. This required no description to Mariam. She had witnessed it enough times with her own eyes: Nana
     collapsing suddenly, her body tightening, becoming rigid, her eyes rolling back, her arms and legs shaking as if something
     were throttling her from the inside, the froth at the corners of her mouth, white, sometimes pink with blood. Then the drowsiness,
     the frightening disorientation, the incoherent mumbling.
    When the news reached Shindand, the parakeet seller’s family called off the wedding.
    “They got spooked” was how Nana put it.
    The wedding dress was stashed away. After that, there were no more suitors.
    IN THE CLEARING, Jalil and two of his sons, Farhad and Muhsin, built the small kolba where Mariam would live the first fifteen
     years of her life. They raised it with sun-dried bricks and plastered it with mud and handfuls of straw. It had two sleeping
     cots, a wooden table, two straight-backed chairs, a window, and shelves nailed to the walls where Nana placed clay pots and
     her beloved Chinese tea set. Jalil put in a new cast-iron stove for the winter and stacked logs of chopped wood behind the kolba . He added a tandoor outside for making bread and a chicken coop with a fence around it. He brought a few sheep, built them
     a feeding trough. He had Farhad and Muhsin dig a deep hole a hundred yards outside the circle of willows and built an outhouse
     over it.
    Jalil could have hired laborers to build the kolba, Nana said, but he didn’t.
    “His idea of penance.”
    IN NANA’S ACCOUNT of the day that she gave birth to Mariam, no one came to help. It happened on a damp, overcast day in the
     spring of 1959, she said, the twenty-sixth year of King Zahir Shah’s mostly uneventful forty-year reign. She said that Jalil
     hadn’t bothered to summon a doctor, or even a midwife, even though he knew that the jinn might enter her body and cause her to have one of her fits in the act of delivering. She lay all alone on the kolba ’s floor, a knife by her side, sweat drenching her body.
    “When the pain got bad, I’d bite on a pillow and scream into it until I was hoarse. And still no one came to wipe my face
     or give me a drink of water. And you, Mariam jo, you were in no rush. Almost two days you made me lay on that cold, hard floor.
     I didn’t eat or sleep, all I did was push and pray that you would come out.”
    “I’m sorry, Nana.”
    “I cut the cord between us myself. That’s why I had a knife.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    Nana always gave a slow, burdened smile here, one of lingering recrimination or reluctant forgiveness, Mariam could never
     tell. It did not occur to young Mariam to ponder the unfairness of apologizing for the manner of her own birth.
    By the time it did occur to her, around the time she turned ten, Mariam no longer believed this story of her birth. She believed Jalil’s version,
     that though he’d been away he’d arranged for Nana to be taken to a hospital in Herat where she had been tended to by a doctor.
     She had lain on a clean, proper bed in a well-lit room. Jalil shook his head with sadness when Mariam told him about the knife.
    Mariam also came to doubt that she had made her mother suffer for two full days.
    “They told me it was all over within under an hour,” Jalil said. “You were a good daughter, Mariam jo. Even in birth you were
     a good daughter.”
    “He wasn’t even there!” Nana spat. “He was in Takht-e-Safar, horseback riding with his precious friends.”
    When they informed him that he had a new daughter, Nana said, Jalil had shrugged, kept brushing his horse’s mane, and stayed
     in Takht-e-Safar another two weeks.
    “The truth is, he