Nadia Hashimi: A House Without Windows

Something the mother said made the little girl look up and laugh, a bashful expression of cheer on her precious face. Zeba let out a soft cry, quiet enough that her own girls were not distracted from their play. But as if her breath crossed the open ground between them and tapped on the little girl’s shoulder, her head turned.

She looked in Zeba’s direction, and her mouth opened slightly. Zeba still could not bear to turn away, meeting the girl’s eyes and feeling her heart pound in her chest. Would she say something to her parents?

But she did not. She only blinked her eyes and smiled, a soft curve of her lips that felt to Zeba like tiny arms thrown around her neck. The many words left unsaid between them, the many questions each had about the other dissipated into the spring air, replaced by the sound of the babbling river, renewed with mountain water.

From this distance, Laylee looked distinctly unbroken. Her father’s hand absently touched the top of her head, as if to confirm her presence even as she walked beside him. She had lived over four thousand days but spent the recent months reliving the one day that had been infinitely worse than all the rest. While Fareed’s angry hands tried to wring the life from Zeba’s neck, Laylee’s mother had been bent over her daughter, her tears mixing with the ghastly crimson she was dabbing away from between Laylee’s tensed and bruised thighs. At the moment when Zeba had thrown her head back and screamed in the judge’s office, Laylee had begged her mother to end her misery. Kill me, she’d pleaded. In the next room, her father, Timur, had fallen to his knees to hear his daughter make such a quietly catastrophic plea. They had no other children. Laylee was everything.

You are a good, good girl, he’d whispered to her over and over again. Laylee’s mother had to turn away, broken a second time to see the way her husband cradled his daughter. His spirit was shattered but his honor intact.

Only because her father’s hand touched her head with pride and only because her mother had nursed her day and night back to health had Laylee survived to live these spring days. She would never be the little girl she’d once been, but her wounds would continue to heal.

Zeba lifted a hand and pressed it to her chest. Her eyes could have followed the girl forever, until she became nothing more than a purple dot against the sparse trees, but Zeba closed her eyes, burning the image of that timid smile into her memory.

“Madar, are you all right?” Shabnam asked, looking at her mother nervously. She and Kareema had paused their game, giving Rima a chance to scatter the jacks with one mischievous sweep of her hand.

Basir was on his way back to them, a glittering trout tied to the end of a stick, raised in the air like a triumphant scepter.

“I am more than fine,” she told her daughters, and for the first time in a long time, she believed those small, precious words to be true.

The time, motivation, and inspiration to write are gifts that my family so graciously gives me. Thank you to: my husband for keeping my stories (and our story) exciting; my parents for, as ineloquent as it sounds, everything; my children for making these stories important to tell and for their nascent love of books; my friends and family for sharing my stories with their own circles; and my colleagues for believing art and medicine are closer than they seem. I am indebted to and in awe of Heather Barr, whose Human Rights Watch report “I Had to Run Away”: The Imprisonment of Women and Girls for “Moral Crimes” in Afghanistan was a window into the inner workings of the women’s prison system there. Heather, you were generous with your time and wisdom of the penal and procedural codes of Afghanistan, and this book is more authentic for it. Any errors related to said topics are my own. I am grateful that the very dedicated Manizha Naderi put me in touch with Heather. Thanks to Dr. Esmael Darman, editor in chief of Rawan Online, for his insights into the stigma, prevalence, and treatment of mental illness in Afghanistan.

I am one lucky writer to have my work represented (and titled) by the sagacious Helen Heller. I am just as fortunate to be edited by Rachel Kahan. Your passion for purposeful books behooves us all. There are so many to thank at HarperCollins: Jeanie Lee and the sharp-eyed copy editors and proofreaders, Mumtaz Mustafa for a third wonderful cover, Virginia Stanley and the energetic library marketing team, Amanda Mulvihill and the international force (we’ve got lots of fun ahead of us), Camille Collins, Kate Schafer, Ashley Marudas and the marketing department, and the many, many others who help bring my stories to readers.

And of course, my gratitude to book clubs, coordinators of book festivals, librarians, booksellers, and all those who persist in celebrating stories and the transformative power of reading.

NADIA HASHIMIis an Afghan American pediatrician living in suburban Washington, D.C. She is the author of the international bestsellers The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and When the Moon Is Low .

nadiahashimi.com

/NadiaHashimiBooks

@NadiaHashimi

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