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if he also marries an English girl, no harm will be done. When he works in Kabul he’ll have a Muslim family and when he’s sent to Europe he’ll have an attractive English wife.’ I remember discussing the matter with Nazrullah’s parents. We promised, ‘We won’t allow the boys toleave home till they’ve had one or two Afghan babies.’ It worked very well.”
    “Did you explain that to the Baltimore girl?” I asked Moheb.
    “No,” he replied honestly, “but I suppose it was what drove me to describe so frankly the other drawbacks of life in Afghanistan.”
    I put my hands squarely on the leather folder and said, “All right, where can the Jaspar girl be?”
    Shah Khan ordered a glass of orangeade, a foul sweet drink which abstemious Afghans took in place of alcohol. It was brought, of course, by a befezzed man, for in a country adhering to the chaderi, men must do much of the work usually done by women.
    “I’ve been pondering this problem,” Shah Khan reflected. “It isn’t easy to obtain news from a city as far away as Kandahar, but we manage. We find that Nazrullah and his American wife … you understand that his Muslim wife stays here in Kabul with the children?”
    “More than one child?” I asked.
    “Yes, he had one before he went to the Wharton School and one after he got back.”
    I pondered this, then pointed out, “But he must have been living with the Jaspar girl when he had the second child?”
    “Of course. But he also had responsibilities to his Afghan wife. She merited consideration.”
    “So he gave her another baby?” I asked.
    “It’s difficult to comprehend our attitude toward women,” Shah Khan confessed. “We cherish them. We love them. We protect them. And we dedicate most of our poetry to them. But we don’t want them cluttering up our lives.”
    “I’d think that two wives would do just that,” I demurred.
    “My life is one of the most uncluttered I know,” Shah Khan assured me quietly, “yet I have four wives.”
    “Four?” I asked.
    Something in the way I looked at the old man amused him, for he said quietly, “You Americans picture a man with four wives as leaping from bed to bed till he drops of exhaustion. It isn’t like that … not at all. Fact is, in some ways I’m worse off than the average American businessman. He marries young, outgrows his wife and gets rid of her. I can’t. When a girl marries me, she leaves her home forever and I can’t send her back. I’ve got to support her in my home the rest of her life, unless I divorce her, which would be a public disgrace. So as the years go by I move these good women, one by one, into back bedrooms. In energy and money the American and the Afghan systems cost about the same.”
    Moheb interrupted, “The Muslim attitude toward women was a response to historical forces, and the interesting thing is that these same forces are acting now to make America polygamous.”
    Before I could challenge this surprising theory, Shah Khan observed, “Moheb’s right. Islam was born in a period when war and ambuscade killed off our men. Each family had a burdensome surplus of women, and Muhammad, with his superbly practical mind, saw there were only three ways of dealing with the matter. Either you converted the needless women into marketplace whores, or edged them into ritual celibacy, or portioned them out asextra wives. Muhammad, always the most moral of men, shuddered at prostitution and gave the women legal status as wives. He chose the flawless solution.”
    “How does this apply to America?” I asked.
    Shah Khan ignored my question. “So under our system I’ve had to take care of many women … wives, brothers’ wives, grandmothers. By the way, Miller Sahib, do you know anything of a Quaker school near Philadelphia called the George School? We’re thinking of sending my granddaughter Siddiqa there. The other girls have always gone to Paris.”
    Cautiously I asked, “How old is Siddiqa?”
    “How old