Laila
Tariq 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?” “Less than a year,” Tariq said.
He befriended an older man in prison, he said, a fellow named Salim, a Pakistani, a former field hockey player who had been in and out of prison for years and who was serving ten years for stabbing an undercover policeman. Every prison has a man like Salim, Tariq said.
There was always someone who was cunning and connected, who worked the system and found you things, someone around whom the air buzzed with both opportunity and danger. It was Salim who had sent out Tariq’s queries about his mother, Salim who had sat him down and told him, in a soft, fatherly voice, that she had died of exposure.
Tariq spent seven years in the Pakistani prison. “I got off easy,” he said. “I was lucky. The judge sitting on my case, it turned out, had a brother who’d married an Afghan woman. Maybe he showed mercy. I don’t know.”
When Tariq’s sentence was up, early in the winter of 2000, Salim gave him his brother’s address and phone number. The brother’s name was Sayeed.
“He said Sayeed owned a small hotel in Murree,” Tariq said. “Twenty rooms and a lounge, a little place to cater to tourists. He said tell him I sent you.”
Tariq had liked Murree as soon as he’d stepped off the bus: the snow-laden pines; the cold, crisp air; the shuttered wooden cottages, smoke curling up from chimneys.
Here was a place, Tariq had thought, knocking on Sayeed’s door, a place not only worlds removed from the wretchedness he’d known but one that made even the notion of hardship and sorrow somehow obscene, unimaginable.
“I said to myself, here is a place where a man can get on.” Tariq was hired as a janitor and handyman. He did well, he said,
during the one-month trial period, at half pay, that Sayeed granted him. As Tariq spoke, Laila saw Sayeed, whom she imagined narrow-eyed and ruddy-faced, standing at the reception office window watching Tariq chop wood and shovel snow off the driveway. She saw him stooping over Tariq’s legs, observing, as Tariq lay beneath the sink fixing a leaky pipe. She pictured him checking the register for missing cash.
Tariq’s shack was beside the cook’s little bungalow, he said. The cook was a matronly old widow named Adiba. Both shacks were detached from the hotel itself, separated from the main building by a scattering of almond trees, a park bench, and a pyramid-shaped stone fountain that, in the summer, gurgled water all day. Laila pictured Tariq in his shack, sitting up in bed, watching the leafy world outside his window.
At the end of the grace period, Sayeed raised Tariq’s pay to full, told him his lunches were free, gave him a wool coat, and fitted him for a new leg. Tariq said he’d wept at the man’s kindness.
With his first month’s full salary in his pocket, Tariq had gone to town and bought Alyona.
“Her fur is perfectly white,” Tariq said, smiling. “Some mornings, when it’s snowed all night, you look out the window and all you see of her is two eyes and a muzzle.”
Laila nodded. Another silence ensued. Upstairs, Zalmai had begun bouncing his ball again against the wall.
“I thought you were dead,” Laila said. “I know. You told me.”
Laila’s voice broke. She had to clear her throat, collect herself. “The man who came to give the news, he was so earnest . . . I believed him, Tariq. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. And then I felt so alone and scared.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t have agreed to marry Rasheed. I wouldn’t have . .
.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he said softly, avoiding her eyes. There was no hidden reproach, no recrimination, in the way he had said this. No suggestion of blame.
“But I do. Because there was a bigger reason why I married him.
There’s something you don’t know, Tariq. Someone. I have to tell you.” “DID YOU SIT and talk with him too?” Rasheed asked Zalmai.
Zalmai said nothing. Laila saw hesitation and uncertainty in his eyes now, as if he had just realized that what he’d disclosed had turned out to be far bigger than he’d thought.
“I asked you a question, boy.”
Zalmai swallowed. His gaze kept shifting. “I was upstairs, playing with
Mariam.”
“And your mother?”
Zalmai looked at Laila apologetically, on the verge of tears. “It’s all right, Zalmai,” Laila said. “Tell the truth.”
“She was . . . She was downstairs, talking to that man,” he said in a thin voice hardly louder than a whisper.
“I see,” said Rasheed. “Teamwork.”
AS HE WAS LEAVING, Tariq said, “I want to meet her. I want to see her.”
“I’ll arrange it,” Laila said.
“Aziza. Aziza.” He smiled, tasting the word. Whenever Rasheed uttered her daughter’s name, it came out sounding unwholesome to Laila, almost vulgar. “Aziza. It’s lovely.”
“So is she. You’ll see.” “I’ll count the minutes.”
Almost ten years had passed since they had last seen each other. Laila’s mind flashed to all the times they’d met in the alley, kissing in secret.
She wondered how she must seem to him now. Did he still find her pretty? Or did she seem withered to him, reduced, pitiable, like a fearful, shuffling old woman? Almost ten years. But, for a moment, standing there with Tariq in the sunlight, it was as though those years had never happened. Her parents’ deaths, her marriage to Rasheed, the killings, the rockets, the Taliban, the beatings, the hunger, even her children, all of it seemed like a dream, a bizarre detour, a mere interlude between that last afternoon together and this moment.
Then Tariq’s face changed, turned grave. She knew this expression. It was the same look he’d had on his face that day, all those years ago when they’d both been children, when he’d unstrapped his leg and gone after Khadim. He reached with one hand now and touched the corner of her lower lip.
“He did this to you,” he said coldly.
At his touch, Laila remembered the frenzy of that afternoon again when they’d conceived Aziza. His breath on her neck, the muscles of his hips flexing, his chest pressing against her breasts, their hands interlocked.
“I wish I’d taken you with me,” Tariq nearly whispered. Laila had to lower her gaze, try not to cry.
“I know you’re a married woman and a mother now. And here I am, after all these years, after all that’s happened, showing up at your doorstep. Probably, it isn’t proper, or fair, but I’ve come such a long way
to see you, and . . . Oh, Laila, I wish I’d never left you.” “Don’t,” she croaked.
“I should have tried harder. I should have married you when I had the chance. Everything would have been different, then.”
“Don’t talk this way. Please. It hurts.”
He nodded, started to take a step toward her, then stopped himself. “I don’t want to assume anything. And I don’t mean to turn your life upside down, appearing like this out of nowhere. If you want me to leave, if you want me to go back to Pakistan, say the word, Laila. I mean it. Say it and I’ll go. I’ll never trouble you again. I’ll—”
“No!” Laila said more sharply than she’d intended to. She saw that she’d reached for his arm, that she was clutching it. She dropped her hand. “No. Don’t leave, Tariq. No. Please stay.”
Tariq nodded.
“He works from noon to eight. Come back tomorrow afternoon. I’ll take you to Aziza.”
“I’m not afraid of him, you know.”
“I know. Come back tomorrow afternoon.” “And then?”
“And then . . . I don’t know. I have to think. This is . . .”
“I know it is,” he said. “I understand. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for a lot of things.”
“Don’t be. You promised you’d come back. And you did.” His eyes watered. “It’s good to see you, Laila.”
She watched him walk away, shivering where she stood. She thought, Volumes, and another shudder passed through her, a current of something sad and forlorn, but also something eager and recklessly hopeful.
