“Sitara, what is it?” my mother asked. She smoothed her hair, betraying a flash of insecurity. “Is something wrong?”
“No, Madar-jan. Not at all. I was just thinking.”
“About what?” she asked.
I stole a kiss from my mother’s cheek. According to my father, the Qur’an teaches us that heaven lies at the feet of mothers. I roamed the palace feeling anchored by my mother’s presence nearby.
“When are we going home?” I asked, missing the indulgent mornings when Faheem and I would sit on our parents’ laps in our pajamas. We came to the palace too often to feel like guests, but that still did not make our room here feel like home. “I think Faheem’s grown homesick.”
“After the weekend,” my mother assured me. “Your father’s been so tied up in meetings the past few weeks, but things will get better soon.”
“Is it very bad?” I asked. The meetings had been getting longer and longer for a time. Then they became very short, and some ended with the slamming of a door and feet pounding down a hall.
Mother cupped my face in her hands.
“Everything will be fine. Tonight is about celebrating our country’s past with people important for our country’s future.”
“The Russians will be here?”
“And the Americans, the Indians, and the French too. And maybe some others.”
“But our tutor taught us that the Americans and Russians do not like one another. Will there not be fighting?”
“No, my love,” Mother replied, smoothing my hair. “Food and art are very capable peacekeepers. And besides, they should know better than to have their schoolyard scuffle in our home. Our people have seen enough. We finally have the peace we deserve.”
I knew the history to which she was alluding. I could recite Afghanistan’s record of fighting off conquerors and knew that every changing of the guard came with turbulence. Most people in my world adored President Daoud Khan. But out in the public gardens one day, I had heard a man singing a popular song. He’d replaced the lyrics with ones that haunted me and lodged in a corner of my brain with the power of rhyme:
My brother turned martyr by your dark night,
Sleep lightly, dear President, sleep light.
“Perhaps I should join the event? I might be able to write about it for the newspaper,” I suggested in my most erudite voice.
Mother pursed her lips.
At the end of the last school year, our principal had announced a writing contest for the graduating eighth-graders in our school.
How can the people of Afghanistan best celebrate our nation’s Independence Day?
Though I was only in the fourth-year class and not much of a writer, my brain churned with discussions I’d had with my parents over dinner about the three times Afghans had to fight off the British. I penned an essay that began with a verse by the British poet Rudyard Kipling.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
The world read Kipling’s poem, I explained, and saw Afghan women as butchers, whereas these women were defending their homes and families from invaders. Afghans could best celebrate Independence Day by recording our history in our own words.
I had slipped my carefully written paper into the principal’s box. On the final day of classes, the principal called me into her office. I was terrified that a teacher had reported me for daydreaming or poor penmanship.
Ask your parents to pick up this Thursday’s newspaper, Sitara. Your essay won the contest and will run in the paper.
My father came home with half a dozen copies, and my parents beamed to see my byline. President Daoud even joked that I might have a place in his cabinet before I graduated from school.
“It’s far too late for you to be up,” Mother said. “Ask your father for a personal debriefing another day. He’ll certainly oblige.”
I could tell from the tone of her voice that she would not be swayed.
“I’m too tired anyway. Go on and have fun. I’ll rest with Faheem now.”
My mother closed the doors of the library behind us and followed me into our guest room across the hall, a room I could find with my eyes closed from anywhere in the palace. I knew the wallpaper patterns by heart, including where the paper was starting to lift at the corners. I knew how many bulbs were in each chandelier and which windows to open to invite a fragrant breeze.
Our own home on the other side of the Kabul River was a fraction of the palace in size but warmer in every way that mattered. I shared a bedroom with my brother, an arrangement that suited me fine. Because I was seven years older than him, I was usually responsible for him when Madar was tied up in the kitchen or with guests.
I changed into the pajamas my mother had laid out for me. Faheem’s small foot tapped against the mattress in a steady, restless rhythm. Sliding into the low bed and kissing his temple, I pulled the bedsheet over my shoulder and lay facing Faheem. His legs grew still, and he exhaled deeply.
“Sleep well, my sweets.”
“Good night, Madar-jan.”
I feigned a yawn, careful not to overdo it. I listened to the fading click of her heels, imagining her moving down the hallway, past my father’s office and Kaka Daoud’s office. The president’s living quarters were on the opposite side of the second floor. That was where Neelab slept, so there was little chance of bumping into her in the middle of the night by accident.
Before she’d left the room, I heard my mother whisper one word of thanks under her breath—shukur.
My mother was ever grateful. People who had suffered generally were. When my parents were first married, my father was one of eighteen students granted a scholarship to study engineering in the United States in a place called Oklahoma. A handful of universities wanted Afghans to study engineering and agriculture so they could go back and work alongside the American companies building dams and towns in Afghanistan.
I wished I knew more about Oklahoma, but they never spoke much about their time there. I only knew that the land was so flat that they thought the sun could take a seat on the horizon. Roads seemed to stretch into forever, and the city looked like it could swallow Kabul whole. Though few people they met in town could have found Afghanistan on a map, they were friendly. One neighbor welcomed them with a pie and a jar of pork sausages that my father passed along to an American classmate. He immersed himself in his studies, determined to become valuable to Afghanistan’s future. Though my mother wasn’t there for her studies, she learned to drive and became fluent in English by taking classes at a library and watching television shows and repeating the lines aloud.
She also gave birth to my sister, who lived and died before I took my first breath. Everything I knew of my sister fit in the palm of my hand: one photograph of my mother holding her swaddled in a blanket and one of her propped on my father’s knee, an American birth certificate, and a beaded silver bracelet with an evil eye charm.
The charm had failed to protect her, though. Shortly after my parents returned to Afghanistan and introduced my sister to cooing aunts and uncles, she was struck by an unrelenting fever. She was gone in a matter of days, leaving my parents’ arms empty and their hearts broken.