The Breadwinner

Parvana didn’t want to say goodbye. “When will we see each other again?” she asked in a panic. “How will we keep in touch?”

“I’ve got it all figured out,” Shauzia said. “We’ll meet again on the first day of spring, twenty years from now.”

“All right. Where?”

“The top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I told you I was going to France.”

but we have seen so much ugliness, we sometimes forget how wonderful a thing like a flower is.”

One thing in her life had been repaired. Her father was home now. Maybe the rest of the family would come back, too.

Parvana was filled with hope.

“Now you are both my daughter and my son,” Father said

Then, late one afternoon, Parvana came home from work to find two men gently helping her father up the steps to the apartment. He was alive. At least part of the nightmare was over.

When we’re rich old ladies, we’ll drink tea together and talk about this day.”

“Father, come back to us!” she whispered, looking up at the sky. The sun was shining. How could the sun be shining when her father was in jail?

The tea boy was a girl from her class.

“We have to remember this,” Parvana said. “When things get better and we grow up, we have to remember that there was a day when we were kids when we stood in a graveyard and dug up bones to sell so that our families could eat.”

Parvana took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Up until then, she had seen Talibs only as men who beat women and arrested her father. Could they have feelings of sorrow, like other human beings?