3
Ignore the noise, Hawa tells herself. Focus on the music.
She tries to keep her eyes glued to the page in front of her, but the slightest motion in the hallway pulls her gaze. When
she brings her attention back to the sheet of music before her, she might as well be looking at splattered ink. She has to
blink twice for the dots to reappear as musical notes.
The song calls to her, begs her to listen. Hawa wishes she could do just that.
Hawa spent her first year at the music institute getting to know the rubab, learning how to organize her hands and legs around
the instrument and familiarizing her fingers with the tensions of the strings. She learned how to pluck notes and speak and
read in a language new to her. She cannot recall when it happened, but somewhere in her journey, the notes turned into melodies
and songs in the same way that flour and water become warm bread.
She knows this part of the song well, and her fingers move without hesitation, as if she’s braiding hair. The music flows
for a few measures, until she remembers the news anchor’s reporting last night. The Taliban had taken another province and
were going from house to house searching for anyone with connections to the Afghan government or army. When they played a
video clip of a man suspended in air, his body taut as four Taliban each pulled a limb and a fifth whipped his back, Hawa’s
mother turned the television off and told her to forget what she had just seen.
Her mother has a habit of giving instructions impossible to follow.
Don’t think about it. Concentrate only on your studies. Go to sleep.
She’s lost her place in the music again; her fingers have frozen.
She considers, just briefly, throwing the plectrum across the room. Instead, she curses under her breath. This is the third
time she’s tripped up on the same note, and she’s not in a forgiving mood, especially toward herself.
She sets the rubab on the carpet and digs her elbows into her knees. When Layma notices she’s stopped playing, her strumming
slows and the melody peters out.
Ustad Rafiqi sits up, suddenly alert.
“Hawa, why is your instrument not in your hands?” he demands.
“I’m sorry, Ustad. I keep forgetting to play that last note open,” she says.
“And?”
“And it was the wrong note,” she repeats, then realizes how short she sounds with him. “I’m sorry, Ustad.”
Ustad Rafiqi nods.
“You are not as nimble on the frets with this song. I did warn you, Hawa, that it’s a more complicated piece but you insisted,”
he reminds her. “Never have I met such a stubborn . . .”
He does not finish his sentence. Seated on the floor opposite his students, he rocks back and forth until he has assumed the
proper cross-legged position, his right foot tucked into the angle of his left knee. He brings his rubab into his lap, holding
it the way he might have held an infant. The curved body of the instrument rests on his right thigh and the neck in his left
hand. He strums a long note—Sa—to begin the tuning process, turning the wooden pegs with his left hand while his right hand works the strings. He plucks
first the long drones, then the fan of sympathetic strings, bouncing from sympathetic to drone as he ascends the musical ladder.
Then he begins the folk song, a ballad of ruby red pomegranates and a tease of spring romance.
He plays it slowly, looking from Layma to Hawa to make sure the girls are paying attention to the finger movements.
He shouldn’t worry. Hawa would watch him for hours if it meant the songs would spill from her instrument as they do from his.
In the middle of a playful ripple of notes, he pauses and sets his instrument down.
“Ustad, why did you stop?” Hawa blurts.
“Does it bother you that I stopped?” he asks.
“Of course!” Hawa replies. She’s blinking rapidly and frowning, as she does when she grows frustrated. She can hear her mother’s
voice in her head.
You cannot always let people know how you feel. They can use that to hurt you.
Hawa has taken this to mean she should hide her feelings from everyone, which she does with varying success. She certainly
doesn’t want to seem disrespectful to Ustad Rafiqi, a teacher and an elder. He raises an eyebrow.
“You should be bothered. The only thing worse than a shoddy note is no note at all. Layma was still playing, but you made
her stop as well. Do not sacrifice an entire song for one wayward note. The music you are playing is older than our years
combined. It has survived wars and drought and fickle hearts. It will survive your choppy renditions as well.”
“I’m sorry, Ustad. I just wanted to play it correctly,” Hawa mumbles, her face hot with embarrassment she feels for having
given up so easily. She hasn’t been herself today.
“And you will. You have two teachers in this room, my young musicians. I am one. The song is the other. Play it again and
again, and it will guide you to the right notes. There is no higher professor of music than the song itself,” her teacher
promises, his eyelids fluttering.
Layma’s been notably cool toward Hawa since the incident, so Hawa is surprised to see Layma shoot her a knowing glance.
The girls both think it’s true what the other students say about Ustad Rafiqi—he is too whimsical for this world, like some part of him never bothered to grow up.
They’ve heard classmates imitate his way of speaking, closing their eyes and invoking metaphors involving the sun and the moon while lecturing on the importance of music.
Hawa is just as amused as anyone else by his quirks, but she also worries that if Ustad Rafiqi finds out about the teasing, he will become a flattened version of himself.
“And so. Unfurl your fist and make sure you haven’t crushed your shahbaz. Let’s take the song from the beginning,” he instructs
them.
Hawa opens her palm to find three red indentations, marks from the edges of her plectrum. She and Layma begin to play the
song. When Hawa reaches the same troublesome part, she focuses all her energies on the music.
Get it right, she tells herself. She opens and closes her fingers to shake the tension from her hand.
The second she realizes she’s made it through without butchering the run, she’s lost again. She can’t seem to concentrate
today and isn’t sure why. Layma, two years older than Hawa, gives her an encouraging nod, and Hawa feels something loosen
in her chest. Maybe Layma’s not so mad anymore? Layma has been gracious about Hawa surpassing her in musical prowess, even
though she’s been playing the rubab two years longer than Hawa. The tension between them is new, and Hawa hates it.
Hawa returns to the song but looks up just long enough to see Ustad Rafiqi strum invisible strings with his thumb and right
index finger, playing the song without the instrument. The melody twirls. It sounds like a ring of cheerful schoolgirls.
Hawa nails the note that tripped her up just a few moments ago but feels no relief. She wonders where she’ll trip up next
and questions the position of her fingers on the fret. She pushes to get to the end of the piece, but it’s a bumpy ride. She’s
surely bruised these pomegranates along the way.
After the last note, Ustad Rafiqi appears pensive.
“Good, both of you. A bit more practice for fluidity. Layma, watch your tempo. You sometimes get ahead of yourself. And, Hawa,”
he says. Hawa looks up. “Better. Control your temper. Do not give up. Remember, this song is new to you. You need to spend
time with it.”
In the courtyard of the school, Layma bends down to tie her laces, and Hawa notices her sneakers.
“Those shoes look so good on you!” Hawa says.
Layma’s sneakers are a pale blue with a thick white sole. She switches feet to retie her left laces, and Hawa spots the embroidered
heart on the side of her sneaker. Her own feet inch toward each other, trying to tuck themselves out of view. Hawa’s mother
has promised her new shoes for two months now, but they cannot seem to afford shoes, even though Hawa’s mother spends most
of her time working. If her job isn’t paying her, Hawa thinks, why does her mother continue to go? But of course her mother
goes. She’s always found work to be more compelling than time with Hawa. They’ve spent so much of Hawa’s life apart that she’s
always somewhat surprised when her mother is around.
Layma responds but mostly avoids Hawa’s gaze.
“My father just bought them for me. He told me I have to make sure my feet don’t grow anymore because he won’t be able to
spend this much on shoes again,” she says dryly. She has the cool demeanor of a teenager, someone with one foot in the world
of adults.
“Do you want to eat lunch?” Hawa asks, and braces herself for what Layma might say next. There was a time when she didn’t
have to ask, when she and Layma would exit class and walk toward the cafeteria together. Hawa reminded Layma of her younger
sister, she had said, and Hawa liked the idea of having a sibling, especially an older sister.
“I’m not really hungry,” Layma says.
Hawa isn’t hungry either. Her nerves are too rattled to have an appetite or to sit on what she’s been wanting to ask Layma.
She’s not been the same since the video they made circulated.
“Are you very mad at me?”
“Mad at you?” Layma seems surprised at Hawa’s question. “Why would you think I’m mad at you?”
“Because . . . you’ve not been talking with me much. I only see you in class and even there you don’t say anything past salaam.”
“I’m not mad at you. I’ve just been . . . thinking,” she says, but this makes no sense to Hawa. Is she thinking so much that
she can’t look Hawa in the eye or have a conversation with her?