Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfa...
Laila imagines she sees little Mariam there in the hut as a woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but SHAPED by by the turbulence that washes o...
Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
Konopac koji te spasi od poplave može ti postati omča oko vrata.
Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.
It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
It always hurts more to have and loose than not to have in first place
In the passenger seat, Nahil is all questions. Was Kabul safe? How was the food? Did he [Idris] get sick? Did he take pictures and videos of everything? He does his best. He describes for her the shel...
In every corridor Parwana would see men’s eyes snapping to attention when Masooma passed by. She saw their efforts to behave matter-of-factly, but their gazes lingered, helpless to tear away. If Masoo...
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.
I was an only, and often lonely, child. After they’d had me, my parents, who’d met back in Pakistan when they were both around forty, had decided against tempting fate a second time. I remember how I...
I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life...
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
I promised myself that I would talk to her before the summer was over, but schools reopened, the leaves reddened, yellowed, and fell, the rains of winter swept in and wakened Baba's joints, baby leave...
I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our...
I cringed a little at the position of power i'd been granted, and all because I had won at the genetic lottery that had determined my sex.
Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life.