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But Abdullah could tell from the expression on Father’s face that there would be no story tonight.

“It’s late,” Father said again. He lifted the kettle with the edge of the shawl draping his shoulders and poured himself a cup of tea. He blew the steam and took a sip, his face glowing orange in the flames. “Time to sleep. Long day tomorrow.”

Abdullah pulled the blanket over their heads. Underneath, he sang into the nape of Pari’s neck:

I found a sad little fairy

Beneath the shade of a paper tree.

Pari, already sleepy, sluggishly sang her verse.

I know a sad little fairy

Who was blown away by the wind one night.

Almost instantly, she was snoring.

Abdullah awoke later and found Father gone. He sat up in a fright. The fire was all but dead, nothing left of it now but a few crimson speckles of ember. Abdullah’s gaze darted left, then right, but his eyes could penetrate nothing in the dark, at once vast and smothering. He felt his face going white. Heart sprinting, he c.o.c.ked his ear, held his breath.

“Father?” he whispered.

Silence.

Panic began to mushroom deep in his chest. He sat perfectly still, his body erect and tense, and listened for a long time. He heard nothing. They were alone, he and Pari, the dark closing in around them. They had been abandoned. Father had abandoned them. Abdullah felt the true vastness of the desert, and the world, for the first time. How easily a person could lose his way in it. No one to help, no one to show the way. Then a worse thought wormed its way into his head. Father was dead. Someone had slit his throat. Bandits. They had killed him, and now they were closing in on him and Pari, taking their time, relis.h.i.+ng it, making a game of it.

“Father?” he called out again, his voice shrill this time.

No reply came.

“Father?”

He called for his father again and again, a claw tightening itself around his windpipe. He lost track of how many times and for how long he called for his father but no answer came forth from the dark. He pictured faces, hidden in the mountains bulging from the earth, watching, grinning down at him and Pari with malice. Panic seized him, shriveled up his innards. He began to s.h.i.+ver, and mewl under his breath. He felt himself on the cusp of screaming.

Then, footsteps. A shape materialized from the dark.

“I thought you’d gone,” Abdullah said shakily.

Father sat down by the remains of the fire.

“Where did you go?”

“Go to sleep, boy.”

“You wouldn’t leave us. You wouldn’t do that, Father.”

Father looked at him, but in the dark his face dissolved into an expression Abdullah couldn’t make out. “You’re going to wake your sister.”

“Don’t leave us.”

“That’s enough of that now.”

Abdullah lay down again, his sister clutched tightly in his arms, his heart battering in his throat.

…

Abdullah had never been to Kabul. What he knew about Kabul came from stories Uncle Nabi had told him. He had visited a few smaller towns on jobs with Father, but never a real city, and certainly nothing Uncle Nabi had said could have prepared him for the hustle and bustle of the biggest and busiest city of them all. Everywhere, he saw traffic lights, and teahouses, and restaurants, and gla.s.s-fronted shops with bright multicolored signs. Cars rattling noisily down the crowded streets, hooting, darting narrowly among buses, pedestrians, and bicycles. Horse-drawn garis jingled up and down boulevards, their iron-rimmed wheels bouncing on the road. The sidewalks he walked with Pari and Father were crowded with cigarette and chewing-gum sellers, magazine stands, blacksmiths pounding horseshoes. At intersections, traffic policemen in ill-fitting uniforms blew their whistles and made authoritative gestures that no one seemed to heed.

Pari on his lap, Abdullah sat on a sidewalk bench near a butcher’s shop, sharing a tin plate of baked beans and cilantro chutney that Father had bought them from a street stall.

“Look, Abollah,” Pari said, pointing to a shop across the street. In its window stood a young woman dressed in a beautifully embroidered green dress with small mirrors and beads. She wore a long matching scarf, with silver jewelry and deep red trousers. She stood perfectly still, gazing indifferently at pa.s.sersby without once blinking. She didn’t move so much as a finger as Abdullah and Pari finished their beans, and remained motionless after that too. Up the block, Abdullah saw a huge poster hanging from the façade of a tall building. It showed a young, pretty Indian woman in a tulip field, standing in a downpour of rain, ducking playfully behind some kind of bungalow. She was grinning shyly, a wet sari hugging her curves. Abdullah wondered if this was what Uncle Nabi had called a cinema, where people went to watch films, and hoped that in the coming month Uncle Nabi would take him and Pari to see a film. He grinned at the thought.