Felicitous Fates is the third volume of a trilogy about Masoud and the Crawford families. The patriarch of the Masoud family, Pamir, was a physician who trained in England before return- ing to Afghanistan to aid his homeland and raise his children. Pamir's wife, Madeena, was a mathematician who taught at uni- versity level in the pre-Taliban era. We tend to forget that this beleaguered country once had a substantial secular population