Seven

Summer 2009

“Your father is a great man.”

Adel looked up. It was the teacher Malalai who had leaned in and whispered this in his ear. A

plump, middle-aged woman wearing a violet beaded shawl around her shoulders, she smiled at

him now with her eyes shut.

“And you are a lucky boy.”

“I know,” he whispered back.

Good, she mouthed.

They were standing on the front steps of the town’s new school for girls, a rectangular light

green building with a flat roof and wide windows, as Adel’s father, his Baba jan, delivered a

brief prayer followed by an animated speech. Gathered before them in the blazing midday heat

was a large crowd of squinting children, parents, and elders, roughly a hundred or so locals

from the small town of Shadbagh-e-Nau, “New Shadbagh.”