Chicken Street

Chicken Street is a narrow, crowded bazaar in one of Kabul's wealthier neighborhoods, a place where foreign diplomats, rich businessmen, and members of the royal family live—a world apart from the poorer districts like Deh-Mazang where Rasheed's house is located. Rasheed himself tells Mariam that the street is lined with shops and little stalls selling lambskin hats and rainbow-colored chapans, and that it is the one place in Kabul where you cannot find chickens. During their first outing together, Rasheed stops to look at an engraved silver dagger in one shop and an old rifle in another, muttering to the shopkeeper who claims it is a relic from the first war against the British, "And I'm Moshe Dayan." He half smiles, and Mariam senses that this is a private, married smile meant only for her. They stroll past carpet shops, handicraft shops, pastry shops, flower shops, and shops that sell suits for men and dresses for women, where behind lace curtains Mariam sees young girls sewing buttons and ironing collars. From time to time, Rasheed greets a shopkeeper he knows, sometimes in Farsi, other times in Pashto, but he never waves Mariam over or introduces her. He asks her to wait outside an embroidery shop while he goes in to say his salaam, and she stands on the crowded sidewalk, watching the cars crawl up Chicken Street, threading through the horde of hawkers and pedestrians, honking at children and donkeys who will not move. She watches the bored-looking merchants inside their tiny stalls, smoking or spitting into brass spittoons, their faces emerging from the shadows now and then to peddle textiles and fur-collared poostin coats to passersby. It is the women who draw Mariam's eyes the most. The women in this part of Kabul are a different breed from the women in the poorer neighborhoods like Deh-Mazang, where so many of the women cover fully. These women are "modern"—modern Afghan women married to modern Afghan men who do not mind that their wives walk among strangers with makeup on their faces and nothing on their heads. Mariam watches them cantering uninhibited down the street, sometimes with a man, sometimes alone, sometimes with rosy-cheeked children who wear shiny shoes and watches with leather bands, who walk bicycles with high-rise handlebars and gold-colored spokes—unlike the children in Deh-Mazang, who bear sand-fly scars on their cheeks and roll old bicycle tires with sticks. These women are all swinging handbags and rustling skirts. Mariam even spots one smoking behind the wheel of a car. Their nails are long, polished pink or orange, their lips red as tulips. They walk in high heels, and quickly, as if on perpetually urgent business. They wear dark sunglasses, and when they breeze by, Mariam catches a whiff of their perfume. She imagines that they all have university degrees, that they work in office buildings, behind desks of their own, where they type and smoke and make important telephone calls to important people. These women mystify Mariam. They make her aware of her own lowliness, her plain looks, her lack of aspirations, her ignorance of so many things. Then Rasheed taps her on the shoulder and hands her a dark maroon silk shawl with beaded fringes and edges embroidered with gold thread, a true gift that Mariam recognizes as different from the halfhearted tokens of penance Jalil used to give her. Later, Laila and Hasina walk to Chicken Street with Giti and Giti's mother, Nila, to fill the time while Tariq is away in Ghazni. Under the Taliban, the street's cinemas are shut down, and Laila remembers all the times she and Tariq sat in those theaters and watched Hindi films, all those melodramatic tales of lovers separated by some tragic turn of fate. The Taliban also go to the grave of Tariq's favorite singer, Ahmad Zahir, and fire bullets into it. The Walayat women's prison, where Mariam is held after killing Rasheed, is a drab, square-shaped building in Shar-e-Nau near Chicken Street, sitting in the center of a larger complex that houses male inmates.