To Jalil and his wives, I was a pokeroot. A mugwort. You too.
And you weren't even born yet.""What's a mugwort?" Mariam asked"A weed," Nana said. "Something you rip out and toss aside."Mariam frowned internally. Jalil didn't treat her as a weed. Henever had. But Mariam thought it wise to suppress this protest.
"Unlike weeds, I had to be replanted, you see, given food andwater. On account of you. That was the deal Jalil made withhis family."Nana said she had refused to live in Herat.
"For what? To watch him drive hiskinchini wives around townall day?"She said she wouldn't live in her father's empty house either,in the village of Gul Daman, which sat on a steep hill twokilometers north of Herat. She said she wanted to livesomewhere removed, detached, where neighbors wouldn't stareat her belly¹, point at her, snicker, or, worse yet, assault herwith insincere kindnesses.
"And, believe me," Nana said, "it was a relief to your fatherhaving me out of sight. It suited him just fine."It was Muhsin, Jalil's eldest² son by his first wife, Khadija, whosuggested the clearing- It was on the outskirts³ of Gul Daman.
To get to it, one took a rutted, uphill dirt track that branchedoff the main road between Herat and Gul Daman. The trackwas flanked on either side by knee-high grass and speckles ofwhite and bright yellow flowers. The track snaked uphill andled to a flat field where poplars and cottonwoods soared andwild bushes grew in clusters. From up there, one could makeout the tips of the rusted⁴ blades of Gul Daman's windmill, onthe left, and, on the right, all of Herat spread below. The pathended perpendicular⁵ to a wide, trout-filled stream, which rolleddown from the Safid-koh mountains surrounding Gul Daman.
Two hundred yards upstream, toward the mountains, there wasa circular grove⁶ of weeping willow⁷ trees. In the center, in theshade of the

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