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on a tray: lamb kebab, sabzi, aush soup. Most of it went uneaten. Jalil came by several times a day, sat on the bed beside her, asked her if she was all right.
    â€œYou could eat downstairs with the rest of us,” he said, but without much conviction. He understood a little too readily when Mariam said she preferred to eat alone.
    From the window, Mariam watched impassively what she had wondered about and longed to see for most of her life: the comings and goings of Jalil’s daily life. Servants rushed in and out of the front gates. A gardener was always trimming bushes, watering plants in the greenhouse. Cars with long, sleek hoods pulled up on the street. From them emerged men in suits, in chapans and caracul hats, women in hijabs, children with neatly combed hair. And as Mariam watched Jalil shake these strangers’ hands, as she saw him cross his palms on his chest and nod to their wives, she knew that Nana had spoken the truth. She did not belong here.
    But where do I belong? What am I going to do now?
    I’m all you have in this world, Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You’ll have nothing. You are nothing!
    Like the wind through the willows around the kolba, gusts of an inexpressible blackness kept passing through Mariam.
    On Mariam’s second full day at Jalil’s house, a little girl came into the room.
    â€œI have to get something,” she said.
    Mariam sat up on the bed and crossed her legs, pulled the blanket on her lap.
    The girl hurried across the room and opened the closet door. She fetched a square-shaped gray box.
    â€œYou know what this is?” she said. She opened the box. “It’s called a gramophone. Gramo. Phone. It plays records. You know, music. A gramophone.”
    â€œYou’re Niloufar. You’re eight.”
    The little girl smiled. She had Jalil’s smile and his dimpled chin. “How did you know?”
    Mariam shrugged. She didn’t say to this girl that she’d once named a pebble after her.
    â€œDo you want to hear a song?”
    Mariam shrugged again.
    Niloufar plugged in the gramophone. She fished a small record from a pouch beneath the box’s lid. She put it on, lowered the needle. Music began to play.
    I will use a flower petal for paper,
    And write you the sweetest letter,
    You are the sultan of my heart,
    the sultan of my heart.
    â€œDo you know it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt’s from an Iranian film. I saw it at my father’s cinema. Hey, do you want to see something?”
    Before Mariam could answer, Niloufar had put her palms and forehead to the ground. She pushed with her soles and then she was standing upside down, on her head, in a three-point stance.
    â€œCan you do that?” she said thickly.
    â€œNo.”
    Niloufar dropped her legs and pulled her blouse back down. “I could teach you,” she said, pushing hair from her flushed brow. “So how long will you stay here?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œMy mother says you’re not really my sister like you say you are.”
    â€œI never said I was,” Mariam lied.
    â€œShe says you did. I don’t care. What I mean is, I don’t mind if you did say it, or if you are my sister. I don’t mind.”
    Mariam lay down. “I’m tired now.”
    â€œMy mother says a jinn made your mother hang herself.”
    â€œYou can stop that now,” Mariam said, turning to her side. “The music, I mean.”
    Bibi jo came to see her that day too. It was raining by the time she came. She lowered her large body onto the chair beside the bed, grimacing.
    â€œThis rain, Mariam jo, it’s murder on my hips. Just murder, I tell you. I hope…Oh, now, come here, child. Come here to Bibi jo. Don’t cry. There, now. You poor thing. Tsk. You poor, poor thing.”
    That night, Mariam couldn’t sleep for a long time. She lay in bed looking at the sky, listening to the footsteps