They trek across the desert, pulling their children, camels, and mules, their carpets and tents from place to place as they go. When Boy was very small, he felt sorry for these people who had lost their homes. Then one day Nazook exploded into laughter and told him, “You are an idiot who would be lost without me. Those people are homeless because it is how they have always lived. They’re nomads.” He stretches out the word as if Boy might be too stupid to understand. How can there be such a thing, Boy wonders. Wall-less by choice?
He asks Socrates. Some nomads hate living inside, the teacher explains. The government tried to force them into high-rises, which the English and the Germans and Russians came with cameras to film. But everything inside the high-rises was wrong. How unnatural to live up so high, so dangerously close to where the spirits lived, with loved ones separated by walls, doors, locks. Within four weeks, three had already taken their own lives because they could not live this way. A woman and her twelve-year-old twin girls killed themselves days later because strange men could watch them from a building across the way, and the shame became unbearable. Soon, the Kochis all packed their belongings and moved back out. When Socrates said this, Boy felt sick. To be human was to want walls—wasn’t that what separated humans from animals?
Taj walks among the Kochis now; they are the best poppy workers around. But their very existence is an affront to him. They mock everything he has ever wanted, satisfied without possessions or dreams of a bigger life. When Taj built his house, he treasured his walls so much that he refused to hang carpets or photos or scarves on them. The walls had to be blank. It wasn’t fancy art that reminded him of his success. It was the walls.