The doors to the banquet hall are closed. Taj can hear the sounds of a wedding party. Music is thrumming, and he can picture people dancing the atan, moving in a circle, clapping their hands at intervals as the music picks up speed. They are all in their best clothes, and Taj imagines the sequins and hair spray and mix of perfumes, making the air a heavy syrup. Sometime before this, the young man’s parents must have approached the girl’s family, and everyone agreed they should get married. No one will reach out to a nice girl’s family on behalf of Taj or present him as the suitor they have been looking for.
He drives away from the hall and leaves the city far behind as he heads to Bala Hissar, where he feels more at home than anywhere except his gardens. The old citadel rises on a hill in curved and jagged lines, a fortress that once kept people safe. He has never seen walls like this anywhere else. Every time he is within them, calm washes over him.
Back when he was Boy, Socrates showed him pictures of Bala Hissar. Boy dreamed that he planted a vast garden inside those towering walls, a garden no one else could see, and there he lived with a girl who loved him and didn’t care that he’d grown up in the streets. At night the old citadel is the largest, quietest place in the world, and it belongs only to him.
Tonight he is meeting a girl, but she isn’t the one from his dreams. She is the first woman he was ever with. He leaves his car on the splotchy grass and climbs up the hill, as he has done a hundred times. She is there, crouching by one of the walls, shrouded in a chaderi. She puts a hand on his arm when he sits down beside her. Her limbs are trembling and her pupils are huge, as they always are with someone who very badly needs opium. She cries and tells him her stomach hurts, that she is scared, her noises becoming small and clawing. He prepares the opium for her. She smokes, and when she is calm again, she curls up against him. They talk about nothing for a long time.
When she pays him with her body, it doesn’t feel like it used to. The first time, Taj felt something he’d felt only a few times before, when accompanying Nazook on an adventure to steal something important, like watches, jewelry, and cartons of cigarettes: that dizzying feeling that power meant ownership, and ownership, power. He had been all that mattered to this woman because he’d brought her opium. He’d owned her completely in those moments, and Nazook used to tell him that’s what women were for. Owning. Tonight, for the first time, Taj feels pity for the woman huddled beside him, naked, using her chaderi as a blanket. She is only here because he brings her opium, and now it feels like the very opposite of power. He helps her put on her clothes, and she insists on staying here alone when he leaves.
Nazook was right about many things, but not this. Boy didn’t realize Nazook could ever be wrong until the day his mentor made a fatal mistake. Once, when he was talking to young Taj about girls, Nazook told him that Taj’s history wasn’t beautiful at all. There was nothing beautiful about a man coming by with day-old vegetables and planting a seed in his mother inside a tent. Nazook laughed mockingly and told Taj his mother had sold her body for radishes and a bag of lettuce.
Taj walks through the old citadel and thinks of the other thing Nazook had gotten wrong. He’d believed he would one day reign supreme in Fever Valley. Nazook had been very wrong about that. He’d been the first to see Boy’s potential—and the last to underestimate him.