Army rangers patrolled the school’s perimeter, Kalashnikovs tight against chests. Nadeem had to fight his way through an assault of argument and barricades to the commotion within: parents jostling, wailing, demanding answers. But no one appeared in charge. Soldiers merely shook their heads. Journalists, their backs to the chaos, told cameras: today, this school belongs to all of us. These extremists have taken Karachi’s children hostage.
Desperation rising, Nadeem searched the crowd for his neighbor, Zubeida, who walked his daughter and her own younger brother to school every day. Just when he thought he would never find her, she touched his shoulder.
“I dropped them off this morning.” Zubeida didn’t meet his eyes as she spoke, her voice dull. “They’re inside.”
A kind of stillness descended on him, disconnecting him from the noise. He began walking toward the road but found himself back at the school instead. A soldier held out a hand. Nadeem retreated and stumbled the other way but was met by yet another soldier, another school wall. He spent minutes this way, like a blind man, clutching at fistfuls of air for support.
Zubeida finally caught up with him and led him across the street, where they both leaned against the back of a news van. She huddled into herself, crying, inches away from him. If only he could touch her, stroke her back, and stop that shaking. No one could shake like that without snapping in half. But touching her would be unseemly. Even at this most unseemly time, touching his neighbor was unthinkable.
He had to do something. He couldn’t just stand there, as if Marya, his daughter, would come running up any minute, trailing her school bag and laughing at their long faces. But minutes passed before he could convince his muscles to work again. “Come,” he gestured toward the gates. “We’ll make someone tell us what’s going on.”
Nadeem pressed through the crowd once more, Zubeida at his side, and this time, they spotted a man in a suit speaking to a reporter. Even from a distance, his expression was too measured for one whose child might be at stake. Not a parent, then; instead, someone who mattered.
They rushed up to the man, and Zubeida grabbed his jacket with both hands. “What’s happening to the children? Can you tell us anything?”
The man stared at her hands clutching his sleeve. “Yes, ma’am, I understand your concern. I am the army liaison for this crisis. We are telling the others also, the families must not come here like this. You are risking exciting the terrorists, you might be in the way of a necessary action against them. Kindly fill out the paperwork with my secretary over there, and then I must insist that you leave and await our instruction at home.”
Still, they waited for hours with the other families in the street, avoiding cable news reporters swooping in for sound bites. As the afternoon sun shone ever more vicious, an older man fainted, from exhaustion or the heat. The soldiers shepherded everyone behind the barricades, then, and roped off the whole length of the street. Nadeem could do nothing more.
Back at their apartment building, he led Zubeida to her flat, one story below his own, and they switched on the news. The familiar white-washed school was barely visible through uniforms and jeeps and skinny men with nothing to do but gawk at the cameras. Before long, neighbors came pouring in from the rest of the building. Mrs. Farzana and her coterie of old women crowded around, clicking their tongues, rubbing Zubeida’s back—”Koi nahin, beta, koi nahin”—never mind, child, as if she had stubbed her toe. The men shook Nadeem’s hand solemnly, squeezing his shoulder. He was reminded of his wife’s funeral, five years earlier. And Zubeida’s parents’ wake, only a year after that. Even the faces were the same.
Nadeem spent that first evening sitting up straight on one of Zubeida’s dining chairs, staring at images of the school flickering across her muted television. The neighbors had drifted home one by one, and news channels had switched to recorded footage from earlier in the day. As he sat there, Nadeem pushed with all his will against questions threatening to overwhelm him: what was happening to Marya, where were they keeping her. And unbidden images: her scraped knee from the playground, a pinprick of blood at the doctor’s. Because even then, when he’d been ready with a bandage, each moment of her pain was unbearable.
Neck sore and spittle running onto his shoulder, he woke to the blare of the television—Zubeida had just turned on the volume. Only then did the impropriety of spending the night in her flat occur to him. He sat up, embarrassed, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
Before Zubeida’s parents had died in the accident, Nadeem had only known the family vaguely as the downstairs neighbors. He, like the others in the building, had expected the orphaned brother and sister to go to live with relatives. But they’d stayed, Zubeida dropping out of college to work in an office and support her brother, Ali, on her own. Nadeem had felt a kinship toward the siblings after that, looked out for Ali whenever the boy was hanging about on the stairs. Then Zubeida offered to walk Marya to the school bus, and things started changing. Marya loved the warmth of their home and was mesmerized by their television. Nadeem couldn’t refuse the occasional invitation to come over for dinner and watch her favorite shows.
For two years their friendship drifted, unexamined, through television shows, cups of sugar, helping Ali with his homework for maths and chemistry, the subjects Nadeem taught at college. It was with a start that Nadeem realized one evening, watching Zubeidas round behind as she cleared the dishes after dinner, that she was a single young woman, barely ten years younger than he, living without her parents. He distanced himself, limiting his visits and leaving at chaste hours. And he made sure to lower his eyes when she turned around.
On Marya’s seventh birthday, just weeks before the school siege, Zubeida had made a special dinner. She knew what Marya loved and hated from their chatter on the way to the bus stop. She knew her like a daughter. Zubeida cooked chicken karhai with green peppers and basmati rice flecked with pink food coloring, because pink was Marya’s favorite color. Ali grumbled as if eating pink rice would inject him with estrogen. But even he seemed pleased when Marya saw the meal and squealed in delight.
They took their plates into the living room, sitting on an old bed sheet spread out in front of the television. Zubeida turned around for some water and caught Nadeem’s eye. She smiled, but he blinked and looked away, stricken.
On the news that second morning, nothing much had changed except that the hostage-takers released a list of rote demands (free Guantanamo prisoners, stop American drone attacks). It was a stalemate, said the reporters; a standoff, said the lieutenant general in charge; a crisis of immense proportion, said the prime minister. For children were the future of our nation, and we had to save them from this fundamentalist menace.
That day, neighbors brought Nadeem and Zubeida large quantities of food. After Mrs. Farzana yet again pressed her pulao onto Nadeem—”But you have to eat, you have to keep up your strength”—he stood, climbed the stairs to his flat, and locked the door behind him. He crawled into bed, wrapping a pillow around his ears. For a moment, he was grateful for the silence.
But now, without the constant buzzing of the news, he had nothing to distract his senses. He had never purchased a television, ostensibly because of the expense, but mostly because he disliked the noise. And Farah, his wife, had always said newspapers were better. She’d read the Dawn cover to cover every morning, often trying to draw him into a discussion about current events. But he’d been content to listen and smile.
After her death, he couldn’t bear to continue the newspaper service. Besides, now, his life orbited around Marya and the small chaos of raising a child: vaccinations, clean uniforms, learning to comb and pin a girl’s hair. The news was for other, less burdened people.
But something had happened to his world in the moment he’d looked away. Women in burqas at his bus stop, rare once and lately so common. A movie star he’d emulated as a teenager, who was now a politician with the Islamic party, his posters plastered onto every telephone pole. Nadeem felt he’d woken from a hundred-year slumber to find his surroundings transformed beyond recognition.
As a boy, he’d walked nightly with his parents to buy sweet paan. They’d ambled without worry, waving along the way at their neighbors leaning from balconies. He’d skipped Friday prayers often to play cricket with his friends and feared no reprimands. He remembered girls from college, bobbed hair and bright dupattas, clasping their books as they rode home alone on buses. They were never afraid. He was an anachronism in his own time then, simply by remembering the absence of fear.
He woke to the evening Azaan sounding from a nearby mosque. Smoke wafted in as hundreds of clay ovens fired up to bake Karachi’s bread. He began to drift from room to room, turning away from Marya’s things. He kicked aside a stray doll to hide it under a chair, then guiltily retrieved the doll and laid it gently on a shelf.
As he collected more scattered toys, Nadeem came upon Farah’s old record player. She’d played the same album all the time, a recording of that infamous Iqbal Bano concert at the Lahore Alhamra in 1985. Farah would put the record on and sit back, eyes closed, her tapping finger the only sign she was awake.
He was loath to listen to the album after she was gone. But now, alone in his flat as the long night began, he lowered the record to the turntable and set the needle to bob and scratch, watching the black arc of the record spin slowly, then faster, stepping outside himself, stepping back to remember.
We shall see the day that has been promised us
Then we will call as one—I am God
And the people of God will rule.
Who I am too
and so are you.
At a show he and Farah had attended as newlyweds, diyas had lined the walkways of an open-air courtyard, and Iqbal Bano’s voice weaved among them, first low to the ground, then rising up to her dazzling heights. Farah had gripped his hand in the rickshaw on their way home, eyes shining in the darkness.
“Don’t you wonder?” she’d said. “What it was like, back when she sang in ’85? When they chanted revolution with the army at the gates? Don’t you wonder what that’s like, to let yourself get carried away so completely by music, by poetry of all things?”
Nadeem had only placed his other hand on hers in response.
He listened now to the chanting crowd on that twenty-year-old recording—through the whirring ceiling fan, through the shrieks of children and chatter of neighbors down the hall, through distant hums and screeches and horns from the street. He was sick with something he could not place, but it was not nostalgia. He was sick with a desire to run through that hallway, record held aloft, out into that street, to the school and right through its gates, screaming all the way: This is who we were, this is what we did, this is what we could have been. This, too, you’ve taken from me.
Nadeem hesitated at Zubeida’s front door. The building was silent around him so he knew it must be late. The evening had passed by in strange blocks, some slowly enough to stop time altogether, others speeding up to plunge him from twilight to pitch darkness.
He ached for Zubeida’s company, for respite from his flat full of Marya’s absence. But he stood debating with his own impulse, trying to persuade himself against this inappropriate nighttime visit. Before he could convince himself either way, Zubeida opened the door. Maybe she’d been waiting. Inside, they stood in the narrow hall, Nadeem staring at the mosaic floor tiles, Zubeida at a loose thread on her sleeve. They stood too close for comfort but not close enough for contact. Finally, she broke the silence to offer him tea and, relieved, he accepted.
They sat on opposite armchairs in the living room. Nadeem scalded his mouth with his too-hot tea, eager to drain his cup and leave. This had been a mistake, this was wrong. Zubeida held her cup between both palms and gazed into its depths.
“I was cleaning the house today, trying to stay busy.” She paused. “I found Ali’s report from that parent-teacher thing a couple of months ago. Remember, when we went to the school for their parents’ evening?” She didn’t look up, as if she were addressing her question to the cup rather than to him.
Nadeem nodded. The children in Marya’s class had made cards, pasted together from magazine clippings, and left them at their desks for the parents to find that evening. Inside her card, Marya had written: “Thank you for the presents you will buy me when you see my report.”
“I remember,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about that teacher, Bashir sahib.”
“That Tablighi Jamaat type? Long beard and rags guy?”
“Yes, that’s the one. He’s Ali’s science teacher, imagine that.” Zubeida sighed, shaking her head. “He never looked me in the eye, you know? That evening, I sat across from him, and we talked for ten minutes about Ali, but he didn’t meet my eyes once.” She turned to Nadeem, one eyebrow raised, and bitterness crept into her words. “I guess he thought I was too far gone a sinner. An unmarried girl, raising Ali alone, working with men. Maybe he’s right. Maybe there’s a reason for all this. Maybe if I’d done things differently…” She stopped, her head bent, whether with shame or grief, he couldn’t be sure.
Nadeem pondered what she’d said and wished she hadn’t. “Are you saying—you’re not saying this might be because of something we did, or didn’t do? Are you?” “I’m trying to find a reason. There’s got to be a reason. I’ve been thinking about Ali and what I decided for both of us, to stay here. I thought I was doing the right thing for him, but maybe, it was right only for me.”
“And what else could you have done?” He needed to hear the certainty in his own voice. “You couldn’t depend on other people forever. You chose to take care of things yourself. And you’ve raised Ali, and you’ve worked hard, so why question all that now?”
Zubeida pulled her knees up to her chin, letting her empty teacup fall to the floor. The cup did not break but only rocked over to one side, a dribble of faded tea-water collecting at its rim. “I know, I know. But I just keep remembering Bashir sahib; I think of his beard and his eyes and that mullahs outfit he wore. I made fun of him with Ali when I got home that evening, but I shouldn’t have. That man knows how people really look at me. I thought I could deal with him, with anything. And see, I couldn’t protect Ali, and Bashir sahib was right to think what he did, they were all right. I couldn’t do it on my own.”
Nadeem had sat through much of her speech with his head bowed, anger mounting. Now, at last, he looked up to see her crying quietly, head resting on her knees and legs pressed close to her chest. He could not just watch her this time, as he had the day before. He stood and went to her, each step a mountain scaled, and knelt beside her chair. Twisting one hand through her tangled, matted hair, he caught a tear with the other. He whispered to her, don’t cry, as if he had any right to, as if he could help her. But her back shuddered and relaxed under his touch. She raised her head, and Nadeem guided her chin toward him, kissed her lightly.
He’d wanted her from that first awkward realization of her body, thought about the soft press of her flesh, the down at the back of her neck, the sensation of her. Nadeem had known his desires were unwise. He’d been a decent neighbor and kept his distance. But now, he ached with sleepless, thoughtless longing, and all his restraint was gone.
He found her lips dry and still, so he pushed harder until she parted them, thrust his tongue to explore the texture of her mouth, the ridges of her cheeks, clashing against her teeth. His eyes fluttered briefly mid-kiss, and that was when he saw that Zubeida’s eyes were wide, wide open. He pulled back, startled.
She had wanted this, yes, but not like this. Now, his touch would always rouse the pain of these formless days, forever linked to the fear of losing her most precious, most loved thing. He understood that, but too late.
He stood. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be sorry.” But she didn’t look up at him as she sat on her chair, clutching the seat with both hands.
Nadeem muttered good night before he left, running up the stairs two at a time until he was back in his flat, and all the world’s could-have-beens were shut behind him.
On the third morning of the siege, the army called the families to make an announcement. Despite the awkwardness lingering between them, Nadeem and Zubeida met to travel together to the place where everyone had been asked to gather. Nearly two hundred people crowded into the theater, next door to the school, which the army’s special operations force had commandeered as their base. The families all sat on folding chairs and stared at the empty stage, as if waiting for a star performer. Some whispered over prayer beads, but otherwise, everyone was silent.
The lieutenant general assigned to address them began with platitudes before reluctantly getting to the point. “You all understand how delicate this operation has to be. We have, of course, tried our level best to use diplomatic means. But these people,” his face puckered with distaste, “they are barbarians pretending to be Muslim. We cannot negotiate with them.”
He paused for only an instant, but that instant immediately filled with desperate voices: “What do you mean?” “What do you mean you won’t negotiate?” “What’s going to happen?” “Have they hurt anyone?”
The lieutenant general held up a hand. “You will have to place your trust with the Almighty, and with us,” he said. “Rest assured your little ones will be returned to you soon, insha’Allah. Everything will be back to normal, very soon.”
Nadeem knew they would send in troops. This was madness. Troops did not belong in a school. But he had lost his voice, along with everything else.
He bent forward, dug his elbows into his thighs, and pressed his brow hard into the heels of his palms. Why gather the families in this, of all places, where they would hear everything, trapped and powerless. Nothing made sense. The only thing he could be certain of now was that, whatever happened, he would not leave without Marya.
Nadeem was sure he heard the silence before the explosions. Silence stifled the theater as people clutched each other, breaths held, some recoiling and bracing themselves as if the mayhem was in here, among them. In seconds, the hush broke like a cinema still freed of its frame. One woman, her hair wild and gold chains flying, ran for the doors, but soldiers closed in on her, and someone pulled her back. A man vomited over himself and slithered off his seat, sitting down hard in his own filth.
They could smell the smoke. He and Zubeida huddled toward each other, heads touching, flinching at each shot. He began reciting Ayatul-Kursi under his breath, almost by reflex, before stopping himself. Who knew which side Allah favored?
Nadeem found Marya outside the school amid the sirens and cameras. He picked over the debris strewn across the parking lot, his feet leaden, not fast enough, staggering toward the children lined up with medics. He did not notice what Marya wore. He saw only that she stood upright and that her clothes were unbloodied. He caught something amiss only when he carried her to their taxi, after the paperwork. Her arms stayed at her sides and did not encircle his neck. And, unlike her father, she did not shed a tear.
Zubeida waited nearby with Ali, who already seemed so different from Marya. He’d rushed to embrace Zubeida after they were released. The four of them shared a taxi home, and the difference between the children was palpable. Ali was nervous, taking fright at sudden movements and sounds. But this was a minor challenge compared to Marya’s immoveable quiet.
Between finding her alive, holding her, carrying her, there was no room at first for Nadeem to think about what had happened. He was only weak with relief at her pulse. But when they sat side by side in the taxi, his mind wandered, trying to imagine the path she must have traveled with her eyes, ears, words, and the reasons they had now shut him out.
Nadeem didn’t know what to say to Marya, because he still didn’t know what she had seen. She looked at him, at the ceiling fan above him, at the little figurines on the coffee table. She was dressed like other people, by other people. Her hair was secured inside a black scarf, sleeves protecting every inch of her wrists.
This flat had been her home before she was taken. And for Nadeem, it would always be her home. But now, on her return, she carried herself as an unwilling guest, ignoring his suggestions of food, a bath, change of clothes. She huddled in a corner of the sofa, sinking into cushions.
He had been silent too long. And Marya must have sensed his uncertainty. He needed to show her who he was: still her father, a man who knew about the world.
So he strode over to where she sat staring at her own hands clasped into a prayer in her lap. Nadeem put his hand on his daughter’s head, as he used to, but he felt as though he were acting a part he barely remembered. Marya shook her head, eyes shut tight, as if irritated by a fly. He let his hand drift away from her.
She did not speak. When food was placed before her, she picked at her plate but did not eat. The neighbor women came and lifted her chin to examine her face, this way and that, but she did not raise her eyes to them. This time, the women did not cluck but only mumbled a few words and avoided Nadeem’s gaze on their way out.
The previous year, Karachi had been plagued by a particularly cruel summer. Just as Nadeem thought the monsoons were finally in sight, the lu, that scorching gust, had swept in stealthily from the desert. Gentle as a pillow over the city’s mouth, the lu had descended over shanty towns and bazaars, smothering those with nowhere to hide and leaving swaths of noiseless death in its wake.
Marya’s silence was no less vicious than that white heat. No matter how Nadeem thrashed, this homecoming lay thick and noxious between them. Her chicken karhai cooled uneaten on her plate.
Night fell, and Marya had yet to speak. Nadeem wondered about Zubeida and Ali, their exchanged words, while he longed to hear his daughter’s voice again.
He got her ready for bed, pulled up a chair, and prepared to spend the night keeping watch as she slept. Close to midnight, as he began nodding off, Marya sat up with a gasp. Nadeem reached to stroke her hair and calm her, but she shrank away.
“What is it, beta?” “You! Get away from me!” She spat the words out. “You!”
He was startled, more than anything, by the word “tum”—the “you” meant for friends, children. Never for elders, never for him. He was frightened, more than anything, of her tongue.
“What did I do?”
“It’s your fault. You left me. You didn’t come for me.”
Surely only seconds passed while he held his breath. But he must have waited longer, because when he blinked, she was asleep again. Had he dreamed her words? Could he have invented what she’d said, her “tum?” He hadn’t raised her like that.
In the morning, Nadeem watched Marya eat her eggs. She hadn’t spoken again, but at least she was eating. A shaft of sunlight fell from the window over Marya’s head and the ponytail he’d tied using her favorite goldfish elastic bands. With heavy eyes, he made out the motes and swimming curls in the ray of light like a halo around his daughter. He would talk to her after breakfast.
“Do you remember,” he began when she pushed her plate away. Running her tongue over the bits of yolk stuck to her lip, she darted a quick glance at him. He caught something in her expression before she looked away again: a kind of beseeching, please don’t ask me questions. The expression heartened him. Marya was different today, and this was encouraging. He had a vision of her talking—a few words slowly building into her old chatter, her warm arms around his neck and eggy breath on his shoulder.
“Do you remember,” he began again, “what you said to me, last night, when you woke up?” She bowed her head and scratched a spot of egg congealed on her placemat. “Or maybe it was only a bad dream. Do you remember anything?”
She continued her scratching, pushing harder with her fingernail into the plastic and reinforcing a zigzag impression. Nadeem was just about to try again when she nodded, almost imperceptibly.
He leaned in toward her. “So you do remember what we talked about?” She nodded again, head firmly down, chin tucked in. He cleared his throat and then hesitated. The speeches he’d composed last night, all variations on fatherly reprimands, were so clearly inadequate. He was struck by the inadequacy of everything he knew. Nothing had prepared him for this.
He took a deep breath. “You were—angry at me. I want to tell you that I wish—I wish I could have come. There’s nothing I wanted more than to come and get you—but we couldn’t, you understand, they stopped us and there was the army at the school and guns and they wouldn’t let us in, but I wanted to. I wanted more than anything to get you away from those people.” He stopped. Marya was looking right at him, and he found that his cheeks were wet with tears.
He wiped his face on his kurta sleeve, breathing carefully there before turning back to her. She was examining him with the cocked head air of a cat holding a struggling creature under its paw.
“I wanted to come,” Nadeem said, more firm this time. “I wish I could have found a way. But there wasn’t a way, so I waited, waited every minute for you to come home.” He ran his fingers through his hair and pressed his throbbing forehead, the bridge of his nose.
“It’s not right, for a father to raise a daughter by himself!”
Nadeem’s hand froze. He lifted it slowly from his eyes. Her gaze was fixed on him, but her voice seemed to come from elsewhere.
“It’s not right, Baji told me. She said I should have a mother because heaven is at the mother’s feet, the Prophet said so himself”
His heart struck a foreboding drumbeat. “Marya. Who is Baji?”
“Baji took care of me. And then blood came out of her mouth.”
Such a small thing, a quiet thing. But as soon as she’d spoken, Nadeem was teetering at the edge of a danger more fearsome than any he’d known. He would never find his balance. He would never find the right words.
Nadeem showered and shaved. He put on his best pin-striped trousers and button-front shirt, usually reserved for events at the college. He polished his shoes and tried to sustain his new bravado. Since Marya’s revelations a few hours earlier, dullness had settled on him, purging his indecision. He had no doubt now about what his daughter needed. He would not fail her.
He lifted Marya and hoisted her onto one side as he locked the front door behind them. She was too old to be carried, but this evening he needed to feel her smallness, her frailty, to give him the strength he needed for his mission. They descended the stairs together, one flight.
He and Zubeida settled with their tea in the front room, sending the children to the den. Nadeem watched as Ali grasped Marya’s hand to lead her away. He seemed so natural, lively already. When they’d arrived home, Zubeida now said, Ali had cleared his plate of food and spoken miraculous words. Please. Thank you. Water. Sleep. Nadeem couldn’t help envying their good fortune.
As soon as the children were out of earshot, Zubeida leaned forward to ask, “How is she?” Her eyes were wide with concern, and Nadeem was ashamed of his jealousy
“She’s … not sleeping well. But she’s begun eating, so that’s something. She’ll be all right, she’ll be back to normal, eventually.” He picked up his teacup, took a long sip, and pretended to believe himself.
Zubeida nodded consolingly. “Yes, I’m sure she’ll be back to herself. Don’t worry, just give her more time.”
“And Ali? He seems well.” Nadeem forced cheer into his voice.
“Yes, thank God.” Zubeida leaned back in her chair, crossing her fingers over her eyes. “We’ve been so lucky. He’s started talking about it, his experience. I really hope Marya can do that in time, also. I think it’s good for them.”
“Yes.” He gazed at the skin forming over his milky tea and tried to push away his memory of Marya’s words. He was struck by a new thought: “What does Ali say? What does he say happened in there?”
Zubeida lifted her crossed hands from her head and looked at him with sympathy. “They were separated, you know. Girls and boys, right away. So Ali didn’t know where Marya was. He was very upset about that.”
“Still, what did he say happened?”
Zubeida hesitated, bit her lip. She picked up her cup and turned her wrist slowly, letting the tea swirl, the milk-skin ride up the rim, not spilling a drop. Finally, she caved, despite her obvious misgivings. “He says they told them horrible things—the boys—things about us, about the parents and families and schoolteachers. Society. That we didn’t care for them, we didn’t care for their souls, that we are sinners, of course. I don’t know, a lot of preaching. Ali says he just kept quiet and pretended to listen.”
She leaned forward again, resting her teacup on the table next to her, and for a moment, Nadeem thought she was about to take his hand. But she seemed to reconsider and said instead, “Marya will be OK. She’s an intelligent girl. She wouldn’t have listened.”
Nadeem nodded. He’d resolved not to tell Zubeida what Marya had said the night before. He was here to present a case: his vision of what they could be, Nadeem and Zubeida and Ali and Marya, the family they could still be. He would not mar this image with nightmares, wounds that might never mend.
“I’m very glad Ali is talking.”
“Yes,” Zubeida was solemn. “But, still I’m worried. I see his fear when he thinks I’m not watching. He twitched and mumbled in his sleep last night. And he told me he’s never going back to school, to any school. I don’t know what I’ll do.” She spread her palms face up over her lap as her last words faded into a whisper.
Nadeem sat up straighter and pressed his back, shirt wet with perspiration, against his chair. He was emboldened by her palm-raised gesture; it seemed to invite rescue. “As you say, it will all take time. We have to be patient. And we’ll have to be there for each other. We’re in it together, after all. You and me, and the children.”
She narrowed her eyes and studied him, up and down: his pressed, formal clothes, his shaved face and polished shoes. Understanding seemed to wash over her. A flush began to spread in spider-thin capillaries across her cheeks, disappearing into the wisps of black hair that she now tucked nervously behind her ears. Nadeem willed her to meet his eyes and make this easier, but she stared intent at a point just beside his left shoe. He tried to summon his practiced speech. Now, though, broaching the proposal in direct terms felt crass.
“So.” His voice was an arid croak. He coughed and started again, “So, you agree then? About coming together? The four of us, a family?”
She looked up, still quiet. Her expression was familiar. Something he had seen in his own bathroom mirror earlier that night. Determination, but also, defeat.
Nadeem wished this moment could end and their lives could begin. But Zubeida’s gaze was locked with his as they hovered over their decision. Her set lips, brows gathered in too-early lines, the hunch of her shoulders. She understood the deal they were striking. They would be partners of a kind: he would give Zubeida and Ali the name Zubeida could not; Zubeida would give Marya the home Nadeem could not. This was how they would survive a world that had marked each of them as wrong.
But they were losing what they could have been. They were losing the warmth of a flickering television cast over pink rice. Now, memories of what had brought them together would always linger as shadows. Nadeem was bonding them irrevocably to the men and women who had taken his daughter away.
“Yes,” Zubeida said. “I agree.”
He longed to speak and sever this bond while he still could. But he couldn’t forget Marya sitting up in the dark, the ache in her voice, her “tum.” She would not forget her yearning for a correct family. He could not give her that on his own.
Nadeem reached out and brushed Zubeida’s cold hands. Together, they rose to tell the children their news.
