Quarter 4: Week 6, Post B

"It was hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the first place[...]It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who taught her cusswords in Pashto, who liked salted clover leaves, who had a light pink birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped like an upside-down mandolin. So she sat beside Mammy and dutifully mourned Ahmad and Noor, but, in Laila's heart, her true brother was alive and well" (126).


In one of the chapters in my reading this week, Laila's family found out that her two older brothers, Ahmad and Noor, were dead. Her mother was grief-stricken and went into a state of listlessness and extreme grief. Her father, Babi, was also horribly upset. Laila, on the other hand, found it hard to mourn two brothers she'd never even met. Her brothers were not real people to her, more like characters in a story than her true siblings. I think it's really interesting how she considers Tariq a brother--she is 1,000 times closer to him than she was with her brothers. And now, she will never get a chance to get to know them. Clearly, she and Tariq are extremely close--they seem to know each other as well as they know themselves. I think Laila is very lucky that she has such a good friend in her life, especially because her own family life is so unstable right now. She needs someone to lean on, and Tariq is that person for her. Their close friendship brightens the mood of the novel during such a depressing event as the deaths of Laila's brothers.