Rocket attack on Laila's house

On a hot August afternoon in 1992, Laila was moving piles of belongings to the yard in preparation for her family's long-planned departure from Kabul. Her father, Hakim, had finally convinced her mother, Fariba, to leave the city after a bullet had narrowly missed Laila, and the family was set to flee to Pakistan. Laila was filled with excitement at the prospect of reuniting with Tariq, who had left for Pakistan only weeks before. As she carried a stack of books, she heard a whistling sound, looked up, and saw a rocket descending. The explosion knocked her off her feet, lifted her into the air, and slammed her against a wall. When she regained consciousness, she saw a bloody chunk of something nearby—the tip of a red bridge printed on a T-shirt, which had belonged to her father. Both Hakim and Fariba were killed instantly. Laila was pulled from the rubble by Rasheed, the shoemaker who lived next door, who also salvaged a handful of Hakim's books. The attack left Laila with a perforated eardrum, permanent hearing loss in one ear, and deep cuts and bruises across her body. She was taken to a hospital, where she drifted in and out of consciousness, calling out for Tariq. The destruction of her home and the death of her parents left her utterly alone, with no family and no means of support. In the weeks that followed, as she recovered in Rasheed's house, she discovered she was pregnant with Tariq's child. Facing the impossibility of surviving as a single, pregnant woman in war-torn Kabul, she made the agonizing decision to accept Rasheed's proposal of marriage, a choice that would define the next decade of her life. The rocket attack thus marks the violent end of Laila's childhood and the beginning of her long, brutal entanglement with Rasheed.