1973

In the summer of 1973, when Mariam was fourteen, her father Jalil brought news that reshaped her understanding of the world beyond the kolba. He told her that King Zahir Shah, who had ruled from Kabul for forty years, had been overthrown in a bloodless coup by his cousin Daoud Khan while the king was in Italy receiving medical treatment. Afghanistan was no longer a monarchy, Jalil explained; it was now a republic, and Daoud Khan was its president. He mentioned rumors that socialists in Kabul had helped Daoud Khan take power, though he clarified that Daoud Khan himself was not a socialist. Mariam asked what a socialist was, but she barely heard his explanation, her attention fixed on the bulge in his coat pocket. When he produced a small box containing a leaf-shaped pendant with tiny coins etched with moons and stars, she tried it on, and Jalil beamed, telling her she looked like a queen. After he left, Nana dismissed the gift as mere nomad jewelry, challenging Jalil to bring her gold next time. This year also deepened the ideological rift that would later define Mariam's life: Nana had long taught her that a man's accusing finger always finds a woman, a lesson she delivered when Mariam was still a child, and that a woman's only skill was to endure. These maxims, rooted in Nana's own experience of being cast out by Jalil and blamed for the affair, framed Mariam's understanding of her place in the world. The political upheaval of 1973, though distant from the kolba, signaled the beginning of the instability that would eventually sweep Mariam into a marriage with Rasheed, a man who would enforce Nana's grim prophecies with his own brutal code of honor, insisting that a woman's face was her husband's business only and that one wrong look could spill blood. The year thus stands as a threshold: the moment when Mariam's private longing for a different life first collided with the public forces of history and the patriarchal strictures that would confine her.