One day, a young Talib beat Laila with a radio antenna. When he was done, he gave a final whack to the back of her neck and
said, “I see you again, I’ll beat you until your mother’s milk leaks out of your bones.”
That time, Laila went home. She lay on her stomach, feeling like a stupid, pitiable animal, and hissed as Mariam arranged
damp cloths across her bloodied back and thighs. But, usually, Laila refused to cave in. She made as if she were going home,
then took a different route down side streets. Sometimes she was caught, questioned, scolded—two, three, even four times in
a single day. Then the whips came down and the antennas sliced through the air, and she trudged home, bloodied, without so
much as a glimpse of Aziza. Soon Laila took to wearing extra layers, even in the heat, two, three sweaters beneath the burqa,
for padding against the beatings.
But for Laila, the reward, if she made it past the Taliban, was worth it. She could spend as much time as she liked then—
hours,
even—with Aziza. They sat in the courtyard, near the swing set, among other children and visiting mothers, and talked about
what Aziza had learned that week.
Aziza said Kaka Zaman made it a point to teach them something every day, reading and writing most days, sometimes geography,
a bit of history or science, something about plants, animals.
“But we have to pull the curtains,” Aziza said, “so the Taliban don’t see us.” Kaka Zaman had knitting needles and balls of
yarn ready, she said, in case of a Taliban inspection. “We put the books away and pretend to knit.”
One day, during a visit with Aziza, Laila saw a middle-aged woman, her burqa pushed back, visiting with three boys and a girl.
Laila recognized the sharp face, the heavy eyebrows, if not the sunken mouth and gray hair. She remembered the shawls, the
black skirts, the curt voice, how she used to wear her jet-black hair tied in a bun so that you could see the dark bristles
on the back of her neck. Laila remembered this woman once forbidding the female students from covering, saying women and men
were equal, that there was no reason women should cover if men didn’t.
At one point, Khala Rangmaal looked up and caught her gaze, but Laila saw no lingering, no light of recognition, in her old
teacher’s eyes.
“THEY’RE FRACTURES along the earth’s crust,” said Aziza. “They’re called faults.”
It was a warm afternoon, a Friday, in June of 2001. They were sitting in the orphanage’s back lot, the four of them, Laila,
Zalmai, Mariam, and Aziza. Rasheed had relented this time—as he infrequently did—and accompanied the four of them. He was
waiting down the street, by the bus stop.
Barefoot kids scampered about around them. A flat soccer ball was kicked around, chased after listlessly.
“And, on either side of the faults, there are these sheets of rock that make up the earth’s crust,” Aziza was saying.
Someone had pulled the hair back from Aziza’s face, braided it, and pinned it neatly on top of her head. Laila begrudged whoever
had gotten to sit behind her daughter, to flip sections of her hair one over the other, had asked her to sit still.
Aziza was demonstrating by opening her hands, palms up, and rubbing them against each other. Zalmai watched this with intense
interest.
“Kectonic plates, they’re called?”
“
Tectonic,”
Laila said. It hurt to talk. Her jaw was still sore, her back and neck ached. Her lip was swollen, and her tongue kept poking
the empty pocket of the lower incisor Rasheed had knocked loose two days before. Before Mammy and Babi had died and her life
turned upside down, Laila never would have believed that a human body could withstand this much beating, this viciously, this
regularly, and keep functioning.
“Right. And when they slide past each other, they catch and slip—see, Mammy?—and it releases energy, which travels to the
earth’s surface and makes it shake.”
“You’re getting so smart,” Mariam said. “So much smarter than your dumb
khala.
”
Aziza’s face glowed, broadened. “You’re not dumb, Khala Mariam. And Kaka Zaman says that, sometimes, the shifting of rocks
is deep, deep below, and it’s powerful and scary down there, but all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight
tremor.”
The visit before this one, it was oxygen atoms in the atmosphere scattering the blue light from the sun.
If the
earth had no atmosphere
, Aziza had said a little breathlessly,
the sky
wouldn’t
be blue at all but a pitch-black sea and the sun a
big bright star in the dark.
“Is Aziza coming home with us this time?” Zalmai said.
“Soon, my love,” Laila said. “Soon.”
Laila watched him wander away, walking like his father, stooping forward, toes turned in. He walked to the swing set, pushed
an empty seat, ended up sitting on the concrete, ripping weeds from a crack.
Water evaporates from the
leaves—
Mammy, did you
know?—
the way it does from laundry hanging from a line. And that
drives the flow of water up the tree. From the ground and through
the roots, then all the way up the tree trunk, through the branches
and into the leaves.
It’s
called transpiration.
More than once, Laila had wondered what the Taliban would do about Kaka Zaman’s clandestine lessons if they found out.
During visits, Aziza didn’t allow for much silence. She filled all the spaces with effusive speech, delivered in a high, ringing
voice. She was tangential with her topics, and her hands gesticulated wildly, flying up with a nervousness that wasn’t like
her at all. She had a new laugh, Aziza did. Not so much a laugh, really, as nervous punctuation, meant, Laila suspected, to
reassure.
And there were other changes. Laila would notice the dirt under Aziza’s fingernails, and Aziza would notice her noticing and
bury her hands under her thighs. Whenever a kid cried in their vicinity, snot oozing from his nose, or if a kid walked by
bare-assed, hair clumped with dirt, Aziza’s eyelids fluttered and she was quick to explain it away. She was like a hostess
embarrassed in front of her guests by the squalor of her home, the untidiness of her children.
Questions of how she was coping were met with vague but cheerful replies.
Doing fine, Khala.
I’m
fine.
Do kids pick on you?
They
don’t,
Mammy. Everyone is nice.
Are you eating? Sleeping all right?
Eating. Sleeping too. Yes. We had lamb last night. Maybe it
was last week.
When Aziza spoke like this, Laila saw more than a little of Mariam in her.
Aziza stammered now. Mariam noticed it first. It was subtle but perceptible, and more pronounced with words that began with
t
. Laila asked Zaman about it. He frowned and said, “I thought she’d always done that.”
They left the orphanage with Aziza that Friday afternoon for a short outing and met Rasheed, who was waiting for them by the
bus stop. When Zalmai spotted his father, he uttered an excited squeak and impatiently wriggled from Laila’s arms. Aziza’s
greeting to Rasheed was rigid but not hostile.
Rasheed said they should hurry, he had only two hours before he had to report back to work. This was his first week as a doorman
for the Intercontinental. From noon to eight, six days a week, Rasheed opened car doors, carried luggage, mopped up the occasional
spill. Sometimes, at day’s end, the cook at the buffet-style restaurant let Rasheed bring home a few leftovers—as long as
he was discreet about it—cold meatballs sloshing in oil; fried chicken wings, the crust gone hard and dry; stuffed pasta shells
turned chewy; stiff, gravelly rice. Rasheed had promised Laila that once he had some money saved up, Aziza could move back
home.
Rasheed was wearing his uniform, a burgundy red polyester suit, white shirt, clip-on tie, visor cap pressing down on his white
hair. In this uniform, Rasheed was transformed. He looked vulnerable, pitiably bewildered, almost harmless. Like someone who
had accepted without a sigh of protest the indignities life had doled out to him. Someone both pathetic and admirable in his
docility.
They rode the bus to Titanic City. They walked into the riverbed, flanked on either side by makeshift stalls clinging to the
dry banks. Near the bridge, as they were descending the steps, a barefoot man dangled dead from a crane, his ears cut off,
his neck bent at the end of a rope. In the river, they melted into the horde of shoppers milling about, the money changers
and bored-looking NGO workers, the cigarette vendors, the covered women who thrust fake antibiotic prescriptions at people
and begged for money to fill them. Whip-toting,
naswar
-chewing Talibs patrolled Titanic City on the lookout for the indiscreet laugh, the unveiled face.
From a toy kiosk, between a
poosteen
coat vendor and a fake-flower stand, Zalmai picked out a rubber basketball with yellow and blue swirls.
“Pick something,” Rasheed said to Aziza.
Aziza hedged, stiffened with embarrassment.
“Hurry. I have to be at work in an hour.”
Aziza chose a gum-ball machine—the same coin could be inserted to get candy, then retrieved from the flap-door coin return
below.
Rasheed’s eyebrows shot up when the seller quoted him the price. A round of haggling ensued, at the end of which Rasheed said
to Aziza contentiously, as if it were
she
who’d haggled him, “Give it back. I can’t afford both.”
On the way back, Aziza’s high-spirited façade waned the closer they got to the orphanage. The hands stopped flying up. Her
face turned heavy. It happened every time. It was Laila’s turn now, with Mariam pitching in, to take up the chattering, to
laugh nervously, to fill the melancholy quiet with breathless, aimless banter.
Later, after Rasheed had dropped them off and taken a bus to work, Laila watched Aziza wave good-bye and scuff along the wall
in the orphanage back lot. She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful
collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
“GET AWAY, YOU!” Zalmai cried.
“Hush,” Mariam said. “Who are you yelling at?”
He pointed. “There. That man.”
Laila followed his finger. There
was
a man at the front door of the house, leaning against it. His head turned when he saw them approaching. He uncrossed his arms.
Limped a few steps toward them.
Laila stopped.
A choking noise came up her throat. Her knees weakened. Laila suddenly wanted,
needed,
to grope for Mariam’s arm, her shoulder, her wrist, something, anything, to lean on. But she didn’t. She didn’t dare. She
didn’t dare move a muscle. She didn’t dare breathe, or blink even, for fear that he was nothing but a mirage shimmering in
the distance, a brittle illusion that would vanish at the slightest provocation. Laila stood perfectly still and looked at
Tariq until her chest screamed for air and her eyes burned to blink. And, somehow, miraculously, after she took a breath,
closed and opened her eyes, he was still standing there. Tariq was still standing there.
Laila allowed herself to take a step toward him. Then another. And another. And then she was running.
Mariam
U
pstairs, in Mariam’s room, Zalmai was wound up. He bounced his new rubber basketball around for a while, on the floor,
against the walls. Mariam asked him not to, but he knew that she had no authority to exert over him and so he went on bouncing
his ball, his eyes holding hers defiantly. For a while, they pushed his toy car, an ambulance with bold red lettering on the
sides, sending it back and forth between them across the room.
Earlier, when they had met Tariq at the door, Zalmai had clutched the basketball close to his chest and stuck a thumb in his
mouth—something he didn’t do anymore except when he was apprehensive. He had eyed Tariq with suspicion.
“Who is that man?” he said now. “I don’t like him.”
Mariam was going to explain, say something about him and Laila growing up together, but Zalmai cut her off and said to turn
the ambulance around, so the front grille faced him, and, when she did, he said he wanted his basketball again.
“Where is it?” he said. “Where is the ball Baba jan got me? Where is it? I want it! I want it!” his voice rising and becoming
more shrill with each word.
“It was just here,” Mariam said, and he cried, “No, it’s lost, I know it. I just know it’s lost! Where is it? Where is it?”
“Here,” she said, fetching the ball from the closet where it had rolled to. But Zalmai was bawling now and pounding his fists,
crying that it wasn’t the same ball, it couldn’t be, because his ball was lost, and this was a fake one, where had his real
ball gone? Where? Where where where?
He screamed until Laila had to come upstairs to hold him, to rock him and run her fingers through his tight, dark curls, to
dry his moist cheeks and cluck her tongue in his ear.
Mariam waited outside the room. From atop the staircase, all she could see of Tariq were his long legs, the real one and the
artificial one, in khaki pants, stretched out on the uncarpeted living-room floor. It was then that she realized why the doorman
at the Continental had looked familiar the day she and Rasheed had gone there to place the call to Jalil. He’d been wearing
a cap and sunglasses, that was why it hadn’t come to her earlier. But Mariam remembered now, from nine years before, remembered
him sitting downstairs, patting his brow with a handkerchief and asking for water. Now all manner of questions raced through
her mind: Had the sulfa pills too been part of the ruse? Which one of them had plotted the lie, provided the convincing details?
And how much had Rasheed paid Abdul Sharif—if that was even his name—to come and crush Laila with the story of Tariq’s death?
Laila
T
ariq said that one of the men who shared his cell had a cousin who’d been publicly flogged once for painting flamingos.
He, the cousin, had a seemingly incurable thing for them.
“Entire sketchbooks,” Tariq said. “Dozens of oil paintings of them, wading in lagoons, sunbathing in marshlands. Flying into
sunsets too, I’m afraid.”
“Flamingos,” Laila said. She looked at him sitting against the wall, his good leg bent at the knee. She had an urge to touch
him again, as she had earlier by the front gate when she’d run to him. It embarrassed her now to think of how she’d thrown
her arms around his neck and wept into his chest, how she’d said his name over and over in a slurring, thick voice. Had she
acted too eagerly, she wondered, too desperately? Maybe so. But she hadn’t been able to help it. And now she longed to touch
him again, to prove to herself again that he was really here, that he was not a dream, an apparition.
“Indeed,” he said. “Flamingos.”
When the Taliban had found the paintings, Tariq said, they’d taken offense at the birds’ long, bare legs. After they’d tied
the cousin’s feet and flogged his soles bloody, they had presented him with a choice: Either destroy the paintings or make
the flamingos decent. So the cousin had picked up his brush and painted trousers on every last bird.
“And there you have it. Islamic flamingos,” Tariq said.
Laughter came up, but Laila pushed it back down. She was ashamed of her yellowing teeth, the missing incisor. Ashamed of her
withered looks and swollen lip. She wished she’d had the chance to wash her face, at least comb her hair.
“But he’ll have the last laugh, the cousin,” Tariq said. “He painted those trousers with watercolor. When the Taliban are
gone, he’ll just wash them off.” He smiled—Laila noticed that he had a missing tooth of his own—and looked down at his hands.
“Indeed.”
He was wearing a
pakol
on his head, hiking boots, and a black wool sweater tucked into the waist of khaki pants. He was half smiling, nodding slowly.
Laila didn’t remember him saying this before, this word
indeed,
and this pensive gesture, the fingers making a tent in his lap, the nodding, it was new too. Such an adult word, such an adult
gesture, and why should it be so startling? He
was
an adult now, Tariq, a twenty-five-year-old man with slow movements and a tiredness to his smile. Tall, bearded, slimmer than
in her dreams of him, but with strong-looking hands, workman’s hands, with tortuous, full veins. His face was still lean and
handsome but not fair-skinned any longer; his brow had a weathered look to it, sunburned, like his neck, the brow of a traveler
at the end of a long and wearying journey. His
pakol
was pushed back on his head, and she could see that he’d started to lose his hair. The hazel of his eyes was duller than she
remembered, paler, or perhaps it was merely the light in the room.
Laila thought of Tariq’s mother, her unhurried manners, the clever smiles, the dull purple wig. And his father, with his squinty
gaze, his wry humor. Earlier, at the door, with a voice full of tears, tripping over her own words, she’d told Tariq what
she thought had happened to him and his parents, and he had shaken his head. So now she asked him how they were doing, his
parents. But she regretted the question when Tariq looked down and said, a bit distractedly, “Passed on.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Well. Yes. Me too. Here.” He fished a small paper bag from his pocket and passed it to her. “Compliments of Alyona.” Inside
was a block of cheese in plastic wrap.
“Alyona. It’s a pretty name.” Laila tried to say this next without wavering. “Your wife?”
“My goat.” He was smiling at her expectantly, as though waiting for her to retrieve a memory.
Then Laila remembered. The Soviet film. Alyona had been the captain’s daughter, the girl in love with the first mate. That
was the day that she, Tariq, and Hasina had watched Soviet tanks and jeeps leave Kabul, the day Tariq had worn that ridiculous
Russian fur hat.
“I had to tie her to a stake in the ground,” Tariq was saying. “And build a fence. Because of the wolves. In the foothills
where I live, there’s a wooded area nearby, maybe a quarter of a mile away, pine trees mostly, some fir, deodars. They mostly
stick to the woods, the wolves do, but a bleating goat, one that likes to go wandering, that can draw them out. So the fence.
The stake.”
Laila asked him which foothills.
“Pir Panjal. Pakistan,” he said. “Where I live is called Murree; it’s a summer retreat, an hour from Islamabad. It’s hilly
and green, lots of trees, high above sea level. So it’s cool in the summer. Perfect for tourists.”
The British had built it as a hill station near their military headquarters in Rawalpindi, he said, for the Victorians to
escape the heat. You could still spot a few relics of the colonial times, Tariq said, the occasional tearoom, tin-roofed bungalows,
called cottages, that sort of thing. The town itself was small and pleasant. The main street was called the Mall, where there
was a post office, a bazaar, a few restaurants, shops that overcharged tourists for painted glass and hand-knotted carpets.
Curiously, the Mall’s one-way traffic flowed in one direction one week, the opposite direction the next week.
“The locals say that Ireland’s traffic is like that too in places,” Tariq said. “I wouldn’t know. Anyway, it’s nice. It’s
a plain life, but I like it. I like living there.”
“With your goat. With Alyona.”
Laila meant this less as a joke than as a surreptitious entry into another line of talk, such as who else was there with him
worrying about wolves eating goats. But Tariq only went on nodding.
“I’m sorry about your parents too,” he said.
“You heard.”
“I spoke to some neighbors earlier,” he said. A pause, during which Laila wondered what else the neighbors had told him. “I
don’t recognize anybody. From the old days, I mean.”
“They’re all gone. There’s no one left you’d know.”
“I don’t recognize Kabul.”
“Neither do I,” Laila said. “And I never left.”
“MAMMY HAS A new friend,” Zalmai said after dinner later that same night, after Tariq had left. “A man.”
Rasheed looked up. “
Does
she, now?”
* * *
TARIQ ASKED IF he could smoke.
They had stayed awhile at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, Tariq said, tapping ash into a saucer. There were sixty
thousand Afghans living there already when he and his parents arrived.
“It wasn’t as bad as some of the other camps like, God forbid, Jalozai,” he said. “I guess at one point it was even some kind
of model camp, back during the Cold War, a place the West could point to and prove to the world they weren’t just funneling
arms into Afghanistan.”
But that had been during the Soviet war, Tariq said, the days of jihad and worldwide interest and generous funding and visits
from Margaret Thatcher.
“You know the rest, Laila. After the war, the Soviets fell apart, and the West moved on. There was nothing at stake for them
in Afghanistan anymore and the money dried up. Now Nasir Bagh is tents, dust, and open sewers. When we got there, they handed
us a stick and a sheet of canvas and told us to build ourselves a tent.”
Tariq said what he remembered most about Nasir Bagh, where they had stayed for a year, was the color brown. “Brown tents.
Brown people. Brown dogs. Brown porridge.”
There was a leafless tree he climbed every day, where he straddled a branch and watched the refugees lying about in the sun,
their sores and stumps in plain view. He watched little emaciated boys carrying water in their jerry cans, gathering dog droppings
to make fire, carving toy AK-47s out of wood with dull knives, lugging the sacks of wheat flour that no one could make bread
from that held together. All around the refugee town, the wind made the tents flap. It hurled stubbles of weed everywhere,
lifted kites flown from the roofs of mud hovels.
“A lot of kids died. Dysentery, TB, hunger—you name it. Mostly, that damn dysentery. God, Laila. I saw so many kids buried.
There’s nothing worse a person can see.”
He crossed his legs. It grew quiet again between them for a while.
“My father didn’t survive that first winter,” he said. “He died in his sleep. I don’t think there was any pain.”
That same winter, he said, his mother caught pneumonia and almost died, would have died, if not for a camp doctor who worked
out of a station wagon made into a mobile clinic. She would wake up all night long, feverish, coughing out thick, rust-colored
phlegm. The queues were long to see the doctor, Tariq said. Everyone was shivering in line, moaning, coughing, some with shit
running down their legs, others too tired or hungry or sick to make words.
“But he was a decent man, the doctor. He treated my mother, gave her some pills, saved her life that winter.”
That same winter, Tariq had cornered a kid.
“Twelve, maybe thirteen years old,” he said evenly. “I held a shard of glass to his throat and took his blanket from him.
I gave it to my mother.”
He made a vow to himself, Tariq said, after his mother’s illness, that they would not spend another winter in camp. He’d work,
save, move them to an apartment in Peshawar with heating and clean water. When spring came, he looked for work. From time
to time, a truck came to camp early in the morning and rounded up a couple of dozen boys, took them to a field to move stones
or an orchard to pick apples in exchange for a little money, sometimes a blanket, a pair of shoes. But they never wanted him,
Tariq said.
“One look at my leg and it was over.”
There were other jobs. Ditches to dig, hovels to build, water to carry, feces to shovel from outhouses. But young men fought
over these jobs, and Tariq never stood a chance.
Then he met a shopkeeper one day, that fall of 1993.
“He offered me money to take a leather coat to Lahore. Not a lot but enough, enough for one or maybe two months’ apartment
rent.”
The shopkeeper gave him a bus ticket, Tariq said, and the address of a street corner near the Lahore Rail Station where he
was to deliver the coat to a friend of the shopkeeper’s.
“I knew already. Of course I knew,” Tariq said. “He said that if I got caught, I was on my own, that I should remember that
he knew where my mother lived. But the money was too good to pass up. And winter was coming again.”
“How far did you get?” Laila asked.
“Not far,” he said and laughed, sounding apologetic, ashamed. “Never even got on the bus. But I thought I was immune, you
know, safe. As though there was some accountant up there somewhere, a guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear who kept track
of these things, who tallied things up, and he’d look down and say, ‘Yes, yes, he can have this, we’ll let it go. He’s paid
some dues already, this one.’ ”
It was in the seams, the hashish, and it spilled all over the street when the police took a knife to the coat.
Tariq laughed again when he said this, a climbing, shaky kind of laugh, and Laila remembered how he used to laugh like this
when they were little, to cloak embarrassment, to make light of things he’d done that were foolhardy or scandalous.
“HE HAS A LIMP,” Zalmai said.
“Is this who I
think
it is?”
“He was only visiting,” Mariam said.
“Shut up, you,” Rasheed snapped, raising a finger. He turned back to Laila. “Well, what do you know? Laili and Majnoon reunited.
Just like old times.” His face turned stony. “So you let him in. Here. In my house. You let him in. He was in here with my
son.”
“You duped me. You lied to me,” Laila said, gritting her teeth. “You had that man sit across from me and . . . You knew I
would leave if I thought he was alive.”
“AND YOU DIDN’T LIE TO ME?” Rasheed roared.
“You think I didn’t figure it out? About your
harami
? You take me for a fool, you whore?”
THE MORE TARIQ TALKED, the more Laila dreaded the moment when he would stop. The silence that would follow, the signal that
it was her turn to give account, to provide the why and how and when, to make official what he surely already knew. She felt
a faint nausea whenever he paused. She averted his eyes. She looked down at his hands, at the coarse, dark hairs that had
sprouted on the back of them in the intervening years.
Tariq wouldn’t say much about his years in prison save that he’d learned to speak Urdu there. When Laila asked, he gave an
impatient shake of his head. In this gesture, Laila saw rusty bars and unwashed bodies, violent men and crowded halls, and
ceilings rotting with moldy deposits. She read in his face that it had been a place of abasement, of degradation and despair.
Tariq said his mother tried to visit him after his arrest.
“Three times she came. But I never got to see her,” he said.
He wrote her a letter, and a few more after that, even though he doubted that she would receive them.
“And I wrote you.”
“You did?”
“Oh,
volumes,
” he said. “Your friend Rumi would have envied my production.” Then he laughed again, uproariously this time, as though he
was both startled at his own boldness and embarrassed by what he had let on.
Zalmai began bawling upstairs.
* * *
“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES, then,” Rasheed said. “The two of you. I suppose you let him see your face.”
“She did,” said Zalmai. Then, to Laila, “You did, Mammy. I saw you.”
“YOUR SON DOESN’T care for me much,” Tariq said when Laila returned downstairs.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not that. He just . . . Don’t mind him.” Then quickly she changed the subject because it made
her feel perverse and guilty to feel that about Zalmai, who was a child, a little boy who loved his father, whose instinctive
aversion to this stranger was understandable and legitimate.
And I wrote you.
Volumes.
Volumes.
“How long have you been in Murree?”