Mariam and Jalil's father-daughter relationship

Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami, spat at her by her mother Nana after she broke a cherished Chinese tea set. The word meant bastard, and though she did not yet understand its full weight, she understood it was an ugly, loathsome thing to be, like an insect. Jalil, her father, never called her this name. He called her his little flower, and his weekly Thursday visits to the kolba where she lived with Nana were the radiant center of her world. He would sit her on his lap and tell her stories of Herat's glorious past, of Queen Gauhar Shad and the poet Jami buried beneath a pistachio tree, filling her with enchantment and pride. For an hour or two every Thursday, Mariam did not feel like a harami; she felt deserving of all the beauty and bounty life had to give, and for this, she loved him.

Identity and the Shadow of Shame

Jalil was one of Herat's wealthiest men, owning a cinema, land, and stores, and he had three wives and nine legitimate children who were strangers to Mariam. Nana had been one of his housekeepers until her belly began to swell. When that happened, Jalil made a face-saving deal behind closed doors, sending Nana away and building the kolba as a form of penance. Nana insisted that Jalil had betrayed them, casting them out of his big fancy house like they were nothing. She told Mariam that Jalil had claimed she forced herself on him, and she taught her daughter a bitter lesson: "Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always." Despite this, Mariam worshipped Jalil, believing his version of her birth—that he had arranged for a hospital and a doctor—over Nana's story of a lonely, knife-assisted delivery on the kolba's cold floor. She dreamed of living with him in Herat, of handing him a towel as he shaved, of people pointing and saying, "There goes Jalil Khan with his daughter."

The Betrayal and the Broken Promise

When Mariam turned fifteen, she asked Jalil to take her to his cinema to see a cartoon, a special film about a puppet boy. He demurred, citing poor picture quality and a malfunctioning projector, but she pressed him, insisting he take her and invite her siblings. He reluctantly agreed to meet her at the stream the next day. When he did not come, Mariam, for the first time in her life, walked down the hill to Herat to find him. She found his house, but the driver told her Jalil was away on urgent business. She spent the night on the street outside his gates. In the morning, as she was being carried away, she caught a fleeting glimpse of his face in an upstairs window—the eyes widening, the mouth opening—before a hand frantically pulled the curtains shut. He had let her sleep on the street. When she returned to the kolba, she found Nana had hanged herself from a weeping willow tree.

Exile and Erasure

After Nana's funeral, Jalil took Mariam to his house, but she could now hear him with Nana's ears, detecting the insincerity that had always lurked beneath his hollow assurances. She stayed in her room, watching the comings and goings of his daily life, and knew she did not belong. A week later, Jalil and his wives summoned her to the long, brown table. They told her she had a suitor, a Pashtun shoemaker from Kabul named Rasheed, who was forty or forty-five years old. Mariam pleaded with Jalil, begging him not to let them do this. He would not look at her. He only said, "Goddamn it, Mariam, don't do this to me," as though he were the one being wronged. The next morning, she was married to Rasheed in a hasty nikka ceremony. At the bus station, as she was about to leave for Kabul, Mariam confronted Jalil. She told him she used to worship him, that she had worried herself sick that he wouldn't show up on Thursdays, that she had prayed he would live to be a hundred years old. "I didn't know that you were ashamed of me," she said. She told him not to come to Kabul, that she never wanted to hear from him again. "It ends here for you and me," she said, and she did not look back as the bus pulled away.

A Belated Reckoning

Thirteen years later, in the spring of 1987, a blue Benz with Herat license plates appeared on the street outside Mariam's house in Kabul. An elderly man in a brown suit, leaning on a cane, stood by the hood, looking up at the house. It was Jalil. He stood there for hours, calling her name, just as she had once called his outside his house. Mariam parted the curtain and caught a glimpse of him—his hair had turned fluffy white, he stooped, he was much thinner. Their eyes met briefly through a part in the curtains, as they had many years earlier through a part in another pair of curtains. But Mariam quickly closed the curtains. She sat on the bed and waited for him to leave. He left a letter at her door, which she kept for days beneath her pillow, turning it over in her hands. In the end, she shredded it unopened. Years later, during the terrible drought, Mariam called the mayor's office in Herat, hoping to reach Jalil for help. She learned that he had died in 1987, the same year he had come to see her. He was dying then. He had driven all the way from Herat to say good-bye, and she had refused to see him. She wept soundlessly into the phone, remembering him waving to her, skipping from stone to stone as he crossed the stream, his pockets swollen with gifts, and all the times she had held her breath for him, for God to grant her more time with him.

The Legacy of a Father's Love and Failure

Jalil's letter, which Laila later opened, revealed the depth of his regret. He wrote of the sorrow he had known since they last spoke—the death of his wife Afsoon and his daughter Niloufar in the 1979 uprising, the death of his son Farhad in the jihad. He dreamed of his dead children, and he dreamed of Mariam. He confessed his shame and regret for not opening the door the day she came to Herat, for letting her live in that place for all those years, all for fear of losing face. "How little those things matter to me now after all the loss," he wrote. "Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me." He enclosed her share of his inheritance, the money from the sale of what little land the communists had left him. He also left her a videocassette of Walt Disney's Pinocchio—the cartoon she had wanted to see with him on her fifteenth birthday, the day that had set in motion the chain of events that destroyed her world. The letter and the tape were a final, desperate attempt to give her what was rightfully hers, to be a dutiful father in death as he had failed to be in life. Mariam never read the letter, never saw the tape. But Laila did, and she understood that Jalil's love, however flawed and belated, had been real.