The Pearl that Broke Its Shell Read Online Free PDF Page B

family’s compound. War pushed families together. Two of my uncles were killed in the fighting. My uncle’s wife died giving birth to her sixth child. Until he could remarry two months later, his children were cared for by my mother and my other aunts. We should have felt like one big family. We should have been kind to each other. But there was resentment. There was anger. There was jealousy. There was, as there would be in the rest of the country, civil war.
    Madar- jan ’s family lived a few kilometers away, but they might as well have been on the other side of the Hindu Kush mountains. They had given their daughter to Padar- jan and did not want to interfere in her relationship with her new family. Madar jan ’s deformed sister, Shaima, was the exception.
    Deformities were not easily forgiven, so Khala Shaima steeled herself to resist the name-calling, the ridiculing, the gawking. Older than Madar- jan by nearly ten years, our aunt would tell us things that no one else would say. She would tell us about the war, how the warlords controlled everything and conquered without mercy, even attacking women in the most shameful way of all. Usually Madar- jan hushed her older sister with a pleading look. We were young, after all, and it wasn’t Khala Shaima who would have to quiet our night terrors. Sometimes Khala Shaima forgot we were children and told us so much that we sat wide-eyed, frightened of our own father.
    When Padar- jan came home, we cowered. His moods ranged from jubilant to foul but there was no predicting where on the spectrum he would be or when he would make an appearance. Madar- jan was lonely and welcomed her sister’s visits, even if her mother-in-law griped about them. My grandmother made sure to report to her son just how many times Khala Shaima had come to visit while he was away, clucking her tongue in disapproval and inciting his wrath. It was her way of showing Madar- jan that she was in control of our home, even if it sat fifty feet away from the main house.
    Everyone wanted control but it was hard to get. The only one who seemed to have any was Abdul Khaliq Khan, the warlord. He and his militia were able to gain control of our town and the neighboring towns, having pushed back their rivals. We were north of Kabul and hadn’t seen any fighting in about four years but from what we heard, Kabul was besieged. People in our town shook their heads in dismay at the news but our homes were already pockmarked and turned to rubble. It was time for the privileged in Kabul to taste what we had survived.
    Those were ugly times. I can only imagine what my father must have seen from the time he was just a teenage boy. Like so many others, he numbed himself to the ugliness with the “medicine” that Madar- jan referred to. He clouded his mind with the opium that Abdul Khaliq kept around, as crucial to his men’s ability to wage war as the ammunition strapped to their backs.
    Madar- jan grew weary of our father but all she could do was look after us girls. Khala Shaima brought her some concoction that she took so she wouldn’t have any more children after me. I don’t know what the medicine was, but it worked for six years. When Madar- jan felt her belly stretch again, she prayed and prayed and did all the things that Khala Shaima told her to do. Nothing worked. Disappointed and fearful, she named our youngest sister Sitara and dreaded the day that Padar- jan would come home to find out she had brought yet another daughter into his home.
    Then came the Taliban. They were just another faction in the civil war but they gained in strength and their regime crept across the country. It didn’t affect us much until we were pulled out of school, windows were blackened and music was banned. Madar- jan sighed but carried on, her daily routine largely unaffected by the new codes.
    When word got out that our town had fallen to the Taliban, Abdul Khaliq brought his men home to fight back—and to defend his honor as a