Drought
The drought that began in 1998 and reached its third and worst year in the summer of 2000 was a slow-moving catastrophe that, more than any single battle or decree, stripped the last layers of resilience from Kabul's civilian population. It was not a sudden event but a gradual, inexorable tightening of a vise: the winter of 1999 brought hardly any snow, and the spring of 2000 delivered no rain at all. Across the country, farmers abandoned their parched lands, sold off their goods, and roamed from village to village in search of water, many eventually settling in the makeshift slums that sprang up on the Kareh-Ariana hillside, where fifteen or twenty people packed into huts. In Kabul, the water tables dropped, shallow wells dried up, and the lines at the deep wells stretched so long that Laila and Mariam would spend hours waiting their turn. The Kabul River, deprived of its yearly spring floods, turned bone-dry and became a public toilet, filled with nothing but human waste and rubble.
Impact on the Household
For the household of Rasheed, Laila, Mariam, and the children, the drought transformed the daily struggle for survival. The sun-blistered ground hardened like rock, making even the simple act of digging a hole for a buried television an exhausting ordeal that required both women to take turns striking the earth with a spade. Rice, boiled plain and white with no meat or sauce, became a rare treat. Meals were skipped with increasing and alarming regularity. Rasheed sometimes brought home sardines in a can and brittle, dried bread that tasted like sawdust, or a stolen bag of apples at the risk of having his hand sawed off. In grocery stores, he carefully pocketed canned ravioli, which was split five ways, with Zalmai getting the lion's share. The family ate raw turnips sprinkled with salt, limp leaves of lettuce, and blackened bananas for dinner. Death from starvation became a distinct possibility, and Mariam heard of a neighborhood widow who had ground dried bread, laced it with rat poison, and fed it to all seven of her children, saving the biggest portion for herself.
Physical and Emotional Toll
The physical deterioration was stark. Aziza's ribs began to push through her skin, the fat vanished from her cheeks, her calves thinned, and her complexion turned the color of weak tea. When Mariam picked her up, she could feel the girl's hip bone poking through taut skin. Zalmai lay around the house with dulled, half-closed eyes, limp as a rag, crying himself to sleep when he could muster the energy, but his sleep was fitful and sporadic. White dots leaped before Mariam's eyes whenever she got up, her head spun, and her ears rang constantly. She remembered Mullah Faizullah's saying about hunger during Ramadan: "Even the snakebitten man finds sleep, but not the hungry." Laila, facing the imminent death of her children, declared, "My children are going to die. Right before my eyes." It was this desperation, born of the drought's unrelenting pressure, that led directly to the decision to send Aziza to the orphanage, a choice that broke Laila's heart but was framed as the only way to ensure the child was fed.
Narrative Significance
The drought functions as a narrative device that strips away all pretense of normalcy and exposes the brutal calculus of survival under a regime that was indifferent to the suffering of its people. It is a form of slow violence that, unlike the dramatic rocket attacks, erodes life from within, making the characters' choices—from burying a television to giving up a child—seem not only rational but inevitable. The drought's end, signaled by the return of snow and rain in the winter of 2002-2003, coincides with the novel's turn toward hope and rebuilding, as the Kabul River flows once again, washing away the makeshift "Titanic City" that had sprung up in its dry bed, and the people declare, "We need Kabul to be green again."
