This chapter focuses on Abdullah narrates this chapter, as our narrator and he makes note that his their father had never before hit Abdullahhit him before. Seeing Abdullah being struck about the ears quite forcefully by her father makes Pari (Abdullah’s little sister) cry. The father tells Abdullah to head home and walks away with Pari, but. Abdullah keeps following. TThey are walking to Kabul and Abdullah does not give in, so the father eventually allows him to come along with them to Kabul. Pari likes to collect feathers, and so when she spots one, her father dusts it off for her and gives it to her. Her most prized feather iwas a peacock feather that Abdullah traded his shoes for.

They have a stepmother (Parwana) that Abdullah wishes he “could love her as he had his own mother” (21). His mother died from while giving birth to Pari childbirth, when Pari arrived. Parwana and Saboor had lost a two-week-old baby Omar, due to the cold. She and Saboor have one child together, their youngest child, Iqbal. Abdullah believes that Parwana's kindness to him is more like obligation than real love, like she has for her biological son, Iqbal.