And the Mountains Echoed

turns Masooma onto her stomach. She soaks a washcloth in the water and rubs clean Masooma’s buttocks, wiping the waste off her back and the flaccid flesh of her legs.
    â€œWhy the warm water?” Masooma says into the pillow. “Why the trouble? You don’t have to. I won’t know the difference.”
    â€œMaybe. But I will,” Parwana says, grimacing against the stench. “Now, quit your talking and let me finish this.”
    From there, Parwana’s day unfolds as it always does, as it has for the four years since their parents’ deaths. She feeds the chickens. She chops wood and lugs buckets back and forth from the well. She makes dough and bakes the bread in the
tandoor
outside their mud house. She sweeps the floor. In the afternoon, she squats by the stream, alongside other village women, washing laundry against the rocks. Afterward, because it is a Friday, she visits her parents’ graves in the cemetery and says a brief prayer for each. And all day, in between these chores, she makes time to move Masooma, from side to side, tucking a pillow under one buttock, then the other.
    Twice that day, she spots Saboor.
    She finds him squatting outside his small mud house, fanning a fire in the cooking pit, eyes squeezed against the smoke, with his boy, Abdullah, beside him. She finds him later, talking to other men, men who, like Saboor, have families of their own now butwere once the village boys with whom Saboor feuded, flew kites, chased dogs, played hide-and-seek. There is a weight over Saboor these days, a pall of tragedy, a dead wife and two motherless children, one an infant. He speaks now in a tired, barely audible voice. He lumbers around the village a worn, shrunken version of himself.
    Parwana watches him from afar and with a longing that is nearly crippling. She tries to avert her eyes when she passes by him. And if by accident their gazes do meet, he simply nods at her, and the blood rushes to her face.
    That night, by the time Parwana lies down to sleep, she can barely lift her arms. Her head swims with exhaustion. She lies in her cot, waiting for sleep.
    Then, in the darkness:
    â€œParwana?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDo you remember that time, us riding the bicycle together?”
    â€œHmm.”
    â€œHow fast we went! Riding down the hill. The dogs chasing us.”
    â€œI remember.”
    â€œBoth of us screaming. And when we hit that rock …” Parwana can almost hear her sister smiling in the dark. “Mother was so angry with us. And Nabi too. We ruined his bicycle.”
    Parwana shuts her eyes.
    â€œParwana?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCan you sleep by me tonight?”
    Parwana kicks off her quilt, makes her way across the hut to Masooma, and slips under the blanket beside her. Masooma rests her cheek on Parwana’s shoulder, one arm draped across her sister’s chest.
    Masooma whispers, “You deserve better than me.”
    â€œDon’t start that again,” Parwana whispers back. She plays with Masooma’s hair in long, patient strokes, the way Masooma likes it.
    They chat idly for a while in hushed voices of small, inconsequential things, one’s breath warming the other’s face. These are relatively happy minutes for Parwana. They remind her of when they were little girls, curled up nose to nose beneath the blanket, whispering secrets and gossip, giggling soundlessly. Soon, Masooma is asleep, her tongue rolling noisily around some dream, and Parwana is staring out the window at a sky burnt black. Her mind bounces from one fragmented thought to another and eventually swims to a picture she saw in an old magazine once of a pair of grim-faced brothers from Siam joined at the torso by a thick band of flesh. Two creatures inextricably bound, blood formed in the marrow of one running in the veins of the other, their union permanent. Parwana feels a constriction, despair, like a hand tightening inside her chest. She takes a breath. She tries to direct her thoughts to Saboor once more and instead finds her mind drifting to the rumor she has heard around the village: that he is looking for a new wife. She forces his face from her head. She nips the foolish thought.
    Parwana was a surprise.
    Masooma was already out, wriggling quietly in the midwife’s arms, when their mother cried out and the crown of another head parted her a second time. Masooma’s arrival was uneventful.
She delivered herself, the angel
,