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Pages 113 - 138 Go to the beginning Chapter 18. (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Two weeks pass, and Laila's friend Tariq still hasn't returned home. She misses him and worries about him. Apparently when he was five, he stepped on a land mine and lost his leg. He's had an artificial leg since then. Then Laila sees that Tariq has returned: he lives within sight of her house and they like to signal each other with flashlights at night. The next day, she goes to visit him, scurrying past the bully Khadim who hangs out on the corner with his friends, muttering things about her. Laila is glad to get to Tariq's house, which is more welcoming than her own. She likes his parents who are already jokingly calling her their daughter-in-law. They are Pashtun (the Pashto-speaking largest ethnic group in Afghanistan) and she is Tajik (a minority which speaks Farsi) but it doesn't matter. She and Tariq do their homework and decide to walk to the zoo. On the way there, she tells Tariq about the bully Khadim spraying urine on her from his squirt gun. Tariq is appalled. Just then, they see Khadim and his friends ahead on the street. Laila tries to stop Tariq, but he goes over and takes his artificial leg off. Then he beats the crap out of Khadim with the leg as Khadim's friends flee in all directions. Khadim never bothers Laila ever again. That night, Laila considers what her father says about how the Communists have improved the lives of the women of Afghanistan with their insistence on education for women. But Hakim doesn't dare say that around Laila's mother who is obsessed with the jihad against the Soviets. Chapter 19: An Afghan man comes to the door and asks to speak with Laila's parents. Fariba starts screaming when he tells her that both of her sons have perished in the jihad. The next day, the women of the neighborhood descend to manage the funeral for Fariba's sons. Laila and her father are shooed here and there and made to feel useless and in the way. Chapter 20: Fariba gets even worse psychologically, lying in bed all the time with various imaginary ailments. Laila takes over all the housework. Both Laila and her father worry that Fariba might attempt suicide. Chapter 21: Laila's father takes Laila and Tariq on a field trip to the Bamiyan Valley. There they see a rock cliff with two enormous Buddhas chiseled into the cliffside. These Buddhas are what remains of a two thousand year-old Buddhist center that thrived until the Muslims took the land back in the ninth century. The Buddhist monks carved a network of caves all through the cliffside and painted beautiful frescoes in the caves. The three of them climb the staircase to the top of the Buddhas and look around at the Shahr-e-Zohak (the Red City) ruins in the distance, and the snowcapped Hindu Kush. When Tariq wanders off to explore, Hakim tells Laila that he's lost his sons and often feels like he's lost Fariba. Some days he feels like Laila is all he has left in the world. He wishes he could take her and Fariba to the United States, perhaps to California, where they could run an Afghan restaurant and she could grow up safe and go to college. But Fariba would never leave Afghanistan, and Hakim can never leave Fariba. Laila thinks that she could never leave Afghanistan because it would mean leaving Tariq. |
