“In Your great wrath at we know not what sins of ours, You have doomed this dirt and turned it into a graveyard for the living and the dead. But even You—even You have no right to these children.”

This passage from the opening chapter establishes children as the ultimate reason for the Afghan immigrants’ pursuit of the “American dream.” This motivation informs Rahmat and Maryam’s arrival in Virginia, as well as the Afghan community’s assertion that they couldn’t have killed Zorah. Their devotion to their children’s survival and welfare is so strong that Qandi even frames it as a defiance of God’s will.

“They say, ‘Tell to us everything.’

I say, ‘What everything?’

They say, ‘What they did? What they said? Are they happy? Are they sad?’

I say, ‘My God, sirs, please. I don’t know all these things. How I can know all these things?’”

Kalyani’s anxiety over sharing her knowledge with the police helps establish The Subjectivity of Truth as one of the novel’s main themes. Her assertion that she doesn’t know the things that the police want to know stresses that the speakers in the novel only possess fragments of the truth (and fragments often shaded by opinion, bias, etc.).

“There’s nothing in it. A man gets in a taxi, and he never gets out. I need to do something for my family.”

This passage characterizes Rahmat as an ambitious man. The metaphorical framing of the taxi as a trap emphasizes the exhaustive yet unfulfilling nature of the work that his friends are encouraging him to take. His final statement underscores this by implying that taxi driving will do nothing for his family. He will not allow himself to settle for anything of that scale.