When the children come outside, it isn’t to play, at least not with Boy. It’s cold, but they have coats that are fat like sheep. Boy has a good coat, too, but it’s his only one and Mother doesn’t want him to get holes in it, so he doesn’t wear it all the time. He hears her say it is the worst winter she can remember. He knows she is telling the gardener or the housekeeper or the lady of the house or the man who comes and goes in his big car. Sometimes those people come to the little tent in the garden to see Boy and Mother. She says thank you, God bless you for your kindness, when they give her a pair of shoes, toothpaste, soap, a towel. Warmer socks. The good oil that burns a little longer. The cook comes by in the evenings and gives them a pot of soup, naan, rice and meat, and chocolate. Boy likes the chocolate and dreams of it.
His mother tells him the story at night when he cannot sleep. He loves the story. She says that long before this house was built, she used to be very poor, begging from people on this street. This was before Boy existed. He nods when Mother says this, although he does not understand how there could have been such a time. Mother says she lived in the shadows of the big houses then, sleeping beside a tall hedge. On a cold night with quiet snow and a loud wind, a rich man came out of his house and gave her a tent, a mattress, and two blankets.
That tent changed her life, because she could light a fire and cook, even when it was raining or snowing. But mostly, it changed her life because it’s where Boy was made. A man with a donkey cart used to come to the street every afternoon to sell vegetables to the rich. When the evening came and the light faded, he would stop at her tent and give her what he had left. Onions, lettuce heads, radishes. He told her he’d sold vegetables all over the country, moving from city to city, and told her about the red tulips of Jalalabad, the shimmering mosque in Herat, and the great statues in Bamyan. He had seen so much. One day, she invited him inside and he stayed late. He left her with a wondrous gift: the seed that would become Boy. Then the man stopped coming by, disappearing like a djinn, a magical spirit. When Mother tells this part of the story, she makes a whooshing sound and opens her arms toward the sky.
When the seed was big in her stomach, a wealthy family arrived on the street and wanted to build a home near the hedge. There was so much room, and so few houses. At first the builders left Mother alone, but after a while, they told her she would have to leave. They were going to pour the foundation for the house and sow seeds for grass. The wife, a beautiful lady with henna hair and a waist like a wasp, stopped them. Let her stay here, she said. And so the house was built around the tent, and the garden, trees, and walls all came up around Mother. When Boy was born, a special doctor came, and the house-dwellers brought candy and clothes. Mother kept some of the candy, although it had turned so hard you couldn’t eat it anymore, and a lock of his baby hair, a single curl in a metal tin. She painted the lid with swirls of green and blue, using watercolors that the rich man’s children had thrown away. She told Boy she envied the people in the house not for what they had, but for what they could give away. They are so generous, she said. She would really never know if she was generous, because she would never have anything she could give away.
The tent is near the rosebushes in the garden. In the spring and summer, Boy wakes up to the smell of flowers and goes to sleep to the smell of freshly cut grass. He lies on the ground at night and looks at a sky full of golden things. But now it is winter. Boy hates the winter.
The house-dwellers have two daughters, and they are in the garden tonight, wearing their sheeplike coats. They’re throwing snowballs and chasing each other in circles around the man they made out of snow. Boy’s mother pulls him into the tent and tightens his coat over his chest, and they warm themselves by the small fire. A pot of lentils is cooking on a rack.
The girls sneak up to the tent. Boy hears the crunch of their steps, their muffled giggles. All of a sudden, chunks of snow come through the opening, one after another. They land on the blankets, his coat, the flames. The fire dies.
Mother runs outside and shouts after the girls. Boy is five or six years old, old enough to start a new fire by himself. But the snow melts faster than he can remove it. Everything is wet. He leaves the tent and calls after Mother, who comes back crying, and he pulls her back inside. They curl up together. After she stops crying, she tells him to remember that he is lucky to be living in a garden with walls because many people do not have them at all, and Boy thinks of the people he sees living in tents in fields, people called Kochis, and he thinks they must be walking across the whole country looking for a big garden with walls. Yes, Boy is lucky.