Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.

The reputation of a girl … is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies.

War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.” – Baba

She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn’t have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood...

and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.

Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand…

On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.

Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

Durante un par de horas cada jueves, cuando Yalil la visitaba, entre sonrisas y regalos y palabras cariñosas, Mariam se sentía merecedora de toda la belleza y los obsequios que podía ofrecer la vida. Y...

The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet – they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting...

That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped...

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, Rob his children of a father.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way...

He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can’t lie now and say my eyes didn’t scan it for any rips.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land… it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home...

A man’s plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand…well, God put a lot of thought in making you.

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed...

Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.Laila...

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

He scarcely knew who was battling whom, who was winning, who was losing, as though he hoped that by doggedly ignoring the war it would return the favor

Give sustenance, Allah.Give sustenance to me.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of...

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

There is only one sin, only one, and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right of a...

I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.

Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man, ahesta boro.

It’s often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It’s what writing comes down to–worrying that things aren’t going to work out.

I’ve crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they’re all the same,...

Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one. 

She lived to see him turn four, and then, one morning, she just did not wake up. She looked calm, at peace, like she did not mind dying now. We buried her in the cemetery...

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that...

Many years later when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. I learned...

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

There is a way to be good again…

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at...

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the...

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: ‘Avoid them like the plague.’ Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought...

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?

Kau masih matahari pagi yang mengakhiri yelda-ku.

A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose.

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come...