A Thousand Splendid Suns, Passage Thirteen (Chapter 36 – pages 258-259)

In the backseat of the taxi, they did not speak. Aziza sat on Mariam's lap, clutching her doll, looking with wide eyedpuzzlement at the city speeding by. 

"Ona!" she cried, pointing to a group of little girls skipping rope. "Mayam! Ona"

Everywhere she looked, Laila saw Rasheed. She spotted him coming out of barbershops with windows the color of coal dust, from tiny booths that sold partridges, from battered, open fronted stores packed with old tires piled from floor to ceiling.

She sank lower in her seat.

Beside her, Mariam was muttering a prayer. Laila wished she could see her face, but Mariam was in burqa they both were and all she could see was the glitter of her eyes through the grid.

This was Laila's first time out of the house in weeks, discounting the short trip to the pawnshop the day before where she had pushed her wedding ring across a glass counter, where she'd walked out thrilled by the finality ofit, knowing there was no going back.

All around her now, Laila saw the consequences of the recent fighting whose sounds she'd heard from the house. Homes that layin roofless ruins of brick and jagged stone, gouged buildings with fallen beamspoking through the holes, the charred, mangled husks of cars, upended,sometimes stacked on top of each other, walls pocked by holes of every conceivable caliber, shattered glass everywhere. She saw a funeral procession marching toward a mosque, a black clad old woman at the rear tearing at her hair. They passed a cemetery littered with rock piled graves and ragged shaheed flags fluttering in the breeze.

Laila reached across thesuitcase, wrapped her fingers around the softness of her daughter's arm.