Mariam had never before worn a burqa. Rasheed had to help her put it on.
The padded headpiece felt tight and heavy on her skull, and it was strange seeing the world through a mesh screen.
She practiced walking around her room in it and kept stepping on the hem and stumbling.
The loss of peripheral vision was unnerving, and she did not like the suffocating way the pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth.
“You'll get used to it,” Rasheed said. “With time, I bet you'll even like it.”
They took a bus to a place Rasheed called the Shar-e-Nau Park,
where children pushed each other on swings and slapped volleyballs over ragged nets tied to tree trunks.
They strolled together and watched boys fly kites, Mariam walking beside Rasheed, tripping now and then on the burqa's hem.
For lunch, Rasheed took her to eat in a small kebab house near a mosque he called the Haji Yaghoub.
The floor was sticky and the air smoky. The walls smelled faintly of raw meat and the music, which Rasheed described to her as logari, was loud.
The cooks were thin boys who fanned skewers with one hand and swatted gnats with the other.
Mariam, who had never been inside a restaurant, found it odd at first to sit in a crowded room with so many strangers,
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