The forbidden home
In Shah's experience, Afghanistan is home, but in the years with which this memoir is concerned, that region is far too unsafe to raise a family. His home is now war-torn. His goal is to establish his family in some kind of safe and pleasant home where they can spend their lives, but he is forbidden to go backward to the paradise of his own youth. Instead, he must push forward toward the unknown. He takes Morocco as a safe bet, because he knows that his family loved that area growing up, so it is a suitable replacement because his own family visited there often.
Morocco as paradise
Morocco ends up being a kind of promised land for the Shahs. The blissful imagery of Morocco is obviously a contender for paradise, and the adventure brings Tahir and his wife into passion relationship. They have to build a house together, literally, but that work is shown as a process of building paradise together through hard work and shared suffering. The Moroccan bliss is not automatically easy for either of them, but eventually, they begin feeling like they are permanently happy together.
The money pit
The symbol that best represents marriage in this fictional autobiography is the money pit mansion that the couple finds in Morocco. They radically underestimated the decrepit state of the property. Not only that, but they did not realize that by buying an estate, they also inherit the estate's property, including its employees. The employees are true locals who have been living in squalor without anyone to pay them. Now that there is an owner, they want payment, but that makes the house even harder to repair. This is a symbol for a marriage as a work-in-progress, always having to monitor social expectations while doing the hard work of establishing trust.
The jinn
A jinn (or jin, also djinn) is a spiritual personality in Arabic folklore. They are famously capricious and they have mischievous personalities. When they want to have fun, they mess up human lives. Symbolically, the jinn symbolizes two things. It symbolizes the personality of chaos which often leads people to believe that their seemingly-random life is actually too narratively organized to be random. The spirit also symbolizes the religious aspect of establishing a marriage, because Tahir has to exert his spiritual dominion in the home to evict the spirits who have moved in.
The exorcism
The symbolism of the exorcism is the role that it places on Tahir. Instead of just being a capitan of operations in the home, he is more like a shamanic priest now. He is officially in his cultural roots, as he wanted, and with the spiritual authority it will likely take to succeed in a marriage. Notice that he is not exerting authority against his wife but on her behalf. By clearing the spirits out of their home, the home becomes suitable for the goal of raising a family. This exorcism is a superstitious expression of something essential about marriage: marriage often has as one of its main goals the improvement of the parents for the benefit of future children. By exorcising jinn from his home, Shah establishes his dominion which is an improvement for the home.
