A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam has never worn a burqa and needs Rasheed’s help to put it on:

The padded headpiece felt tight and heavy on her skull, and it was strange seeing the world through a mesh screen […] the loss of peripheral vision was unnerving and she did not like the suffocating way the pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth (71).

Already, just practicing wearing the burqa in her room, Mariam’s movements are limited. Rasheed tells her she will get used to it and even like it.

When Rasheed takes Mariam out to Shar-e-Nau Park, she trips on the burqa’s hem every now and then and finds it strange lifting the burqa “to put morsels of food into her mouth”(72). Still, she appreciates that the burqa, which is “like a one-way window” and buffers her from the eyes of strangers. She no longer worries “that people knew, with a single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past” (72).

Rasheed buys Mariam her first icecream and they walk around the wealthier neighborhoods. There is some friendly banter between them and then Rasheed asks her to wait while he speaks to an acquaintance. Mariam spies some of the “modern” women Rasheed warned her about, who “walked among strangers with makeup on their faces and nothing on their heads,” a sharp contrast from her poor neighborhood, Deh-Mazang, where some of the women wore burqas like her (74).