Jalil said yes, ten. “Eleven, if you count Mariam, of course.”
Later, after Jalil went home, Mariam and Nana had a small fight about this. Mariam said she had tricked him.
After tea with Nana, Mariam and Jalil always went fishing in the stream. He showed her how to cast her line, how to reel in the trout.
He taught her the proper way to gut a trout, to clean it, to lift the meat off the bone in one motion.
He drew pictures for her as they waited for a strike, showed her how to draw an elephant in one stroke without ever lifting the pen off the paper.
He taught her rhymes. Together they sang:
Lili lili birdbath, Sitting on a dirt path, Minnow sat on the rim and drank, Slipped, and in the water she sank.
Jalil brought clippings from Herat's newspaper, Ittifaq-i Islam, and read from them to her.
He was Mariam's link, her proof that there existed a world at large, beyond the kolba, beyond Gul Daman and Herat too,
a world of presidents with unpronounceable names, and trains and museums and soccer,
and rockets that orbited the earth and landed on the moon, and, every Thursday, Jalil brought a piece of that world with him to the kolba.
He was the one who told her in the summer of 1973, when Mariam was fourteen,
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