Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. For you, he said. I'd kill with it for you, Laila.
Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness...
Some days, I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without you. A...
She would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper, a moan - to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all .
Other Afghans from American, or from Europe, Amra says, they come and take picture of her. They take video. They make promises. Then they go home and show their families. LIke she is zoo animal. I all...
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories.
Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making...
Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn't breathe God would grant her another day w...
Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let o...
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...
It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing.
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...
If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.
I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.
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 think that everything he did, feeding the poor, giving money to friends in need, it was all a way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to...
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 see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great