My mother was always my best friend. We were so much alike, my mother and I: we had the same eyes, hazel like the color of warm nuts; the same hands, small and strong; the same laughter, the kind that makes anyone standing next to you start to laugh because it’s so infectious. My father used to say that if he heard one of us laughing in another room, he couldn’t tell which one of us it was. He said that we could have been twins, except that we had been born twenty years apart.
My mother always used to love the sound of birdsong in the morning, but her favorite was the far cry of doves. She would stop whatever she was doing, or if we were walking in a field, she would stand still and take me by the arm, tilting her head so that her ear was cocked in the direction of the gentle coos carried to us in the soughing wind. “Listen, Shahbano! Can you hear it? The doves, can you hear them? Aren’t they beautiful?”
I laughed at her, a grown woman, becoming rapturous at the sound of a few birds singing. There were birds with much more melodious voices: the koel, which sang in the summer, or the nightingale, whose song brought tears to many people’s eyes. But once the war started, the birds fell silent and the guns took their place.
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