Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul Read Free Page A

the day when her daughter Najama was born—of concealing the truth from almost everyone around. That her husband was gone, killed by a land mine while walking his goats, was no protection from the shame, or worse, that would have been inflicted upon her had her secret come out. When no husband was present, everyone was a suspect, and the pregnant woman considered a whore.
    How things had changed for her since then, how different she was from that scared mountain girl, on the run from the men who had taken her from her home as payment for a debt owed by her uncle. The girl she was then would have never dared dream of all this; the coffeehouse, a home filled with laughter and joy, a new husband whose heart had grown large enough to allow him to see past the old ways and embrace her dead husband’s child as his own. Even Kabul had come to feel likehome, the staggered muezzin’s call to prayer that was broadcast from the highest minaret of every mosque now a welcome background to the sounds of daily life, instead of a noise that made her jump right out of her skin, and the crowds of people of all colors and clothing now as familiar a sight as the goats that brayed on the hillside back home.
    â€œNajama! Pay attention, qandom , my sweet one. Don’t you want to learn to read?” Across the room, Halajan struggled with the fidgety little girl squirming on her lap. Yazmina smiled at her mother-in-law’s wrinkled brown face, remembering how eager the old woman had once been to learn to read herself, and how grateful she had been to Yazmina for her help.
    â€œListen to your nana,” she said, using the name Sunny had given Halajan after Yazmina had married her son Ahmet. How fortunate she was to have this woman as her mother-in-law, so unlike those she had heard of who beat and scarred their sons’ wives for bearing girls instead of boys, or those who starved and abused the young girls sold into marriage with their sons.
    Yet she had not always held so much love in her heart for Halajan, whom she had at first seen only as a stubborn busybody with a tongue as quick as a serpent and an attitude to match. How shocked she had been by the thoughts the woman stubbornly held onto, and shared with the world so unashamedly. Of course, she was still all those things, but now Yazmina understood better. Halajan, as well as her husband Rashif, came from a different time, a time that she and Ahmet had never witnessed, a time when ideas were not cause for punishment, and when women could be doctors or lawyers without being considered immoral. Yazmina had also come to admire her strength and her fierce loyalty. Halajan would do anything to protect her family, the café, her home. And hidden underneath that grey chador,along with the baggy denim pants and defiantly short grey hair she kept concealed from the outside world, Yazmina knew there was a heart that was softer than the baby-fine pelts used to make President Karzai’s sheepskin hats. Just to observe the way she looked into the eyes of her husband Rashif was enough proof of that. How lucky she felt to have this new family to fill the dark hole left by the loss of her own parents, so many years ago now.
    Yazmina placed a fresh kettle of water on the bokhaari , pausing to savor the heat from the burning wood inside as it softened her limbs one by one. If only Layla were here. It had been one month since she had tearfully kissed her little sister goodbye, with equal measures of hope and fear. Sunny’s friend Candace had convinced them that a stay in America would be good for the girl, and had generously called upon her connections to obtain a student visa. How could Yazmina say no? She longed for the world for Layla, so who was she to keep it from her? Yet she counted the days until her sister’s safe return to Kabul.
    Across the room she saw Halajan’s eyes light up as the door to the coffeehouse opened. In came Rashif, accompanied by a blast of