Eid-ul-Fitr

Eid-ul-Fitr, the three-day celebration that follows the month of Ramadan, punctuates Mariam's life at key moments, each time revealing the distance between the festivity she imagines and the reality she endures.

Childhood Eid: Exclusion and Longing

During Mariam's years in the kolba outside Gul Daman, Eid-ul-Fitr was a day of ritual visits that underscored her illegitimacy. On the first day of the three-day celebration, her father Jalil would arrive dressed in a suit and tie, bearing Eid presents—one year a wool scarf—and sit for tea before excusing himself to celebrate with his "real family," as Mariam's mother Nana bitterly observed. Mullah Faizullah would also come, bringing chocolate candy wrapped in foil, a basketful of dyed boiled eggs, and cookies. After he left, Mariam would climb one of the weeping willows with her treats, eating the chocolates and dropping the foil wrappers until they lay scattered around the trunk like silver blossoms, then starting on the cookies and drawing faces on the eggs. But there was little pleasure in this solitary ritual. Mariam dreaded Eid, this time of hospitality and ceremony when families dressed in their best and visited each other. She would imagine the air in Herat crackling with merriness, high-spirited and bright-eyed people showering each other with endearments and goodwill, and a forlornness would descend on her like a shroud, lifting only when Eid had passed.

First Eid in Kabul: A Glimpse of Belonging

In 1974, the year of her marriage to Rasheed, Mariam experienced Eid-ul-Fitr for the first time with her own eyes as the celebration she had only imagined. Undaunted by the chilly weather, families flooded the city on their frenetic rounds to visit relatives. On their own street, Mariam saw her neighbor Fariba and her son Noor, dressed in a suit, and Fariba's older son Ahmad, who wore a glittering Allah pendant. From inside her burqa, Mariam gave Fariba only a ghost of a nod when Fariba called out "Eid mubarak!" Rasheed warned her to stay away from Fariba, calling her a nosy gossiper and dismissing her husband Hakim as a mouse who fancied himself an intellectual. They went to Shar-e-Nau, where children romped in new shirts and beaded, brightly colored vests and compared Eid gifts, women brandished platters of sweets, festive lanterns hung from shopwindows, and music blared from loudspeakers. Strangers called out "Eid mubarak" to her as they passed. That night they went to Chaman, and standing behind Rasheed, Mariam watched fireworks light up the sky in flashes of green, pink, and yellow. She missed sitting with Mullah Faizullah outside the kolba, watching the fireworks explode over Herat in the distance, the sudden bursts of color reflected in her tutor's soft, cataract-riddled eyes. But mostly she missed Nana. Mariam wished her mother were alive to see this—to see her, amid all of it—to see at last that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things, even for the likes of them.

Eid Visitors and the Sanctity of Marriage

During that same Eid, Rasheed's friends came to the house. All were men. When a knock came, Mariam knew to go upstairs to her room and close the door, staying there as the men sipped tea downstairs with Rasheed, smoked, and chatted. Rasheed had told her she was not to come down until the visitors had left. Mariam did not mind; in truth, she was even flattered. She felt that Rasheed saw sanctity in what they had together, that her honor, her namoos, was something worth guarding to him. She felt prized by his protectiveness, treasured and significant. This sense of being valued would not survive the years of disappointment and abuse that followed, but at that moment, Eid-ul-Fitr gave Mariam a fleeting taste of the acceptance she had craved since childhood.