CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

In the years to come, Afia would lose count of the times she woke from a dream with the horrible knowledge that she had killed her brother, that he was gone forever, that no power on earth or in heaven would bring him back. She would lie in the dark and breathe rapidly, then more slowly. At last, in the ordinary silence, she would realize it had been only a dream and that Khalid was still alive, though not likely ever to walk the earth as a free man.

Or sometimes she would have the same dream and wake to realize, yet again, that it was a dream only in its details—details where she wielded a knife or cut a rope, or watched her brother drown—and that he was indeed snuffed out, his life no more than the shape of a cloud that dissipates with the next gust of wind. Shahid, she would whisper, Shahid, as if he could answer her and forgive her. But again there was only the most dull and ordinary silence in the gray light before dawn.

Sometimes it would breed in her a white fury that Khalid should still stand and walk, even in a cell, while Shahid lay still forever. The brother who had opened his heart lay cold in his grave; the brother obsessed with jealousy and revenge dined every night on his success. If she had pulled the gun from her backpack and aimed it, instead of handing it meekly over, Khalid, too, would be under the ground. And then she would rise shakily from her bed and fetch a glass of cold water. In the bathroom she would remember Baba, who would never again speak to her, and be glad that at least he had a son living, that he could look out at the moon and imagine Khalid looking at that same moon in the mirror image of his day.

Through the mornings after these restless nights she would stumble with dry, itching eyes and a strain at the hinge of her jaw. If she had more than two or three bad nights in a row she would pop a blue pill and drift to the bottom of an ocean, pressed down by the weight of sleep, rising only when her alarm chimed and she was late to work.

Work was Malloy’s diner, on the edge of downtown Northampton, a place where early-morning truckers and late-night students crossed paths in the summer dawn. She had told Coach Hayes she would stay on at Smith. She had petitioned for asylum. The cascade of events had cost her her scholarship, but Dean Myers said they would work with her. They didn’t hang their people out to dry, the dean had said. Afia didn’t know this expression, but she pictured herself, thin and hollow and hanging on a clothesline, the breeze trying to blow her off and only the clothespins at her shoulders keeping her in place. Many days, that was how she felt.

Some of the truckers tried to flirt with her, when she had an early shift. But she kept her head down, and they ended up saying things about Indian girls, how uptight they were. She didn’t tell them she was not Indian.

“I think it will take me too long to finish the degree,” she said to Coach Hayes when the coach came to see her in August. She had withdrawn from the spring semester, but now she was getting ready to register for fall classes. She was living in a furnished room, a block from campus. She would take only Immunology and Advanced Calculus, which was all the new scholarship money would cover. “And when it’s all done, I won’t be able to go back. To Pakistan, I mean.”

“No need to rush,” Coach said. “And why would you want to go back?”

It’s my home, Afia thought of saying. And now that she could never return, she missed the house in Nasirabad with an ache so painful she had to bite her fist, sometimes, to silence a wail of longing. She missed the garlic and cumin of her mother’s cooking, the chatter of Sobia and Muska, even the clack of Anâ’s knitting needles and the quiet sobs of Tayyab when he thought no one could hear him. She missed the damp-wool odor of her bedroom rug during monsoon. She missed her carved bed, the particular squeak of the springs on the side toward the wall. She missed the way the sun glanced off the walls of their compound. The sweet lament of the muezzin she missed, every night as the sun set. The wildly painted rickshaws, the call of the sugarcane juice wallah, the night watchman’s whistle, the odor of petrol and sugar and dust in the air. The ripe purple strings of the mulberries, the flat disks of drying dung on the village walls, the shouts of the lucky boys who were allowed to jump into the stream, its water milky with limestone runoff. Lema. Her uncles with their cruel giggles and their warm, rough hands.

But Nasirabad, she knew, was not her home any longer. Her mother had turned her away after she’d made the exhausting journey back, ready to marry Zardad, ready to do whatever was needed to make the past recede and the future begin. She had not even been allowed to set foot inside her home. Only the back of Tayyab’s hut, on the pallet next to Panra, and that for one night only. “I wanted,” she told Coach, “to help the women in the villages. They cannot see male doctors, and there are not enough females. People die because of this.”

“They die in a lot of places, all around the world,” Coach said. “You’re going to make a big contribution, Afia.”

“I don’t know,” Afia said. She lingered with Coach, in a booth at the back of the diner. Coach had given her a framed photo of herself and Shahid, from the first year he’d come to America. She’d insisted Afia should have it. And so Shahid’s nineteen-year-old self smiled up from the table, holding a shiny trophy. Afia couldn’t look at it, but neither would she turn the photo over and bury Shahid’s face.

It was the end of her shift; she still wore the apron the diner gave her, and the little name tag above her left breast. She covered her head, but with a bandanna, like the other waitresses; the Arab thing, the owner had said, made customers nervous. She made better money than in the Price Chopper. Some days the aunties stopped in after their shift, to drink Cokes and eat French fries. Other days, Afran stopped and had hot tea at the counter. “I might not be able to complete the degree. Without . . .”

“Without Shahid,” Coach finished for her.

“I betrayed him,” Afia said, her voice going flat the way it always did when guilt pressed its hot weight upon her. “And for what? A boy who told me I was pretty.”

“You know what we call your relationship with Gus?” Coach asked. Afia shook her head. “Puppy love,” Coach said. “Here we consider it a kind of practice.”

“Practice for what?”

“For love. The real thing. We think it’s good to have a sort of warm-up game, before you choose a life partner. Shahid had some puppy love too, you know.”

Afia tipped her head, frowned. “I did not know.”

“Sure. With a girl, Valerie, I think, and they broke up. I don’t think he was betraying you.”

“It is different for a man. Even here, it is different. This is a shame I will never wipe clean, Coach. Do not try with me.”

Coach moved the saltshaker around the table. “Would you really have married him?”

“Khalid?” Afia nodded. At Coach’s shocked look, she said, “It is like a mathematical equation, no? I am shame. Khalid kills Shahid. To . . . to nullify?” Coach nodded. “To nullify the badal, the revenge, you know, someone must seek revenge for him killing my brother. To nullify the revenge he can marry me, erase the shame. Khalid is my brother step—”

“Stepbrother,” Coach interrupted.

“Stepbrother, but also we are cousins. This is good, in my culture, to marry one cousin. To keep family together. Now my father can give forgiveness to Khalid, and my mother has no more shame. It is small, this—what do you call it?—sacrifice.”

Her eyes slid over to the photo of Shahid. What would he have wanted? For a day and a night she’d cried for help from the closet Khalid had locked her into, at the Pioneer Motel outside Northampton where he’d been staying. Only when the cleaning woman, ignoring the Do Not Disturb sign in the morning, had turned the latch did Afia burst out and beg the manager to call the police in Devon.

By then it was all over. No more did she need to imagine Gus lying in a pool of blood. Never again would her body shrink in on itself as she pictured Khalid pounding babies into her, back in Nasirabad, while her mind tunneled underground. Coach Hayes had saved her, a second time.

In the diner, Coach was stirring her coffee. She was still talking about love. “Romance,” she was saying, “may not be the best foundation for marriage. But people fall in love everywhere, Afia. Here and in Pakistan, and now and since forever. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it hurts like hell. But it’s the opposite of a betrayal. It’s a kind of . . . of keeping faith. With the heart.”

Afia’s own heart took a small skip. At least twice a week, now, Afran drove out from his summer job in Boston. They went for walks along the old logging roads west of town. He did not touch her. But he no longer offered to behave toward her like a brother. He told her about his home in Turkey, the olive groves and the mountains rising up from the Black Sea. He would go back, he said, but to Istanbul, where there was money to be made.

“Afia,” Coach said, “you’re smiling.”

“I am thinking,” Afia said, blushing, “that Shahid had this romance.”

“So what about you?”

“Me?”

“You’ve got your life ahead of you, don’t you? You going to spend it beating yourself up?”

Afia looked around the coffee shop. Her life. Would it be here, in this place smelling of pork fat and coffee beans? Even when she had lain in Gus’s arms, she had never imagined the rest of her life without her parents, her uncles and aunts, her brothers. Now she had only the molded tables with their shiny surfaces, and a glimmer of salvaged light in the courses at Smith. And, she thought with a tiny sliver of hope, Afran. Maybe this, after all, was what Shahid would have wanted . . . but then Shahid had never wanted, like her, to be dead. “Maybe,” she said.

“So you’d rather have stayed home in Pakistan, let your parents arrange a marriage, give up your dreams of being a doctor.”

Afia looked at her in gentle surprise. “And have Shahid alive?” Her eyes went to the photo, to her young, exultant brother. “Oh yes, Coach. Forever, yes.”

•   •   •

Lissy left the diner and drove back along sun-dappled roads to Devon. Had she kept her nose out of Shahid Satar’s affairs, she thought, Afia would be dead and Shahid alive. End of story. No, not the end. Gus dead, too. Khalid at large, and the feud between brothers set to end the way it ended for the Greeks in their tragedies.

What if, what if. An hour northward, Khalid Satar was pacing his cell at the maximum-security unit in Shirley. The D.A. at the trial, Mike Kelley, had told Lissy the feds might render the guy to the Pakistanis, who were not likely to treat him as well as the State of Massachusetts. But what if Tofan Satar had influence, over there, and managed eventually to free his son? Had Khalid’s thirst been satisfied? Or would he again try to wipe out the stain that was Afia, to erase the sacrifice of Shahid? Even now, it took only the name in her head, Shahid, to knot her heart.

As, clearly, it knotted Afia’s. The girl’s healing was still pasted together, still fragile. The bones of her face stood out more than before, and the eyes behind the glasses shone less brilliantly. Hesitance and a weary cynicism had replaced the stubbornness and gumption she’d had that distant night, when they’d driven to Lissy’s cabin. Then, of course, Afia had believed herself a loved woman. From now on she might prove a hard woman to love.

Lissy swung into the parking lot by Chloe’s day care. For a moment, while the big beech tree shading the playground hid her car, she watched her daughter. Chloe was gripping the monkey bars, swinging her legs, getting her momentum up to grapple her way across. She let go with her left hand, gripped the next bar, swung her right hand ahead, lost her grip, and dropped to the sand. “You okay, honey?” called one of the teachers—Kaitlin, from the Enright squash team. “Fine,” Chloe called back. She stood up, dusted off the sand, climbed back up the ladder, reached again, clambered across two rungs, fell. Behind her, a chunky girl in a yellow dress followed and tried to swing from the bars; falling right away, the girl burst into tears. Chloe crouched by her, patted her back. Pulling her up, she led the girl over to the sand table. She was shooting a longing glance back toward the monkey bars when she spotted Lissy. “Mommy!” she cried.

“Hey, cutie.”

“You’re early.”

“Is that okay?” Lissy unlatched the playground gate and stepped in. “Today’s a big day.”

“I know,” Chloe said matter-of-factly. She took Lissy’s hand; hers was grainy with sand. “We sang to me,” she said, “at lunch.”

“Did your friends like Daddy’s cupcakes?”

Chloe nodded. “Specially the sprinkles.”

“I saw you on those monkey bars. You’re really getting it.”

Chloe pulled her down. She whispered, “But we can’t do it now, Mommy. Megan’ll follow me and fall, and when she cries I cry.”

Kaitlin brought out the clean cupcake pan. She was a midsized, muscular girl with curly brown hair flecked gold by the sun and skin that had tanned nut-brown. “Hey, Coach. Looking forward to training in a few weeks.”

“You know I can’t coach the team till November.”

“And by then you’ll be back in the A.D.’s office. You’ll barely have time for us.”

Lissy’s heart hurt, when her players talked this way. They saw only a division between innocent and guilty, victim and victimizer. They loved her. They would do their utmost for her. Last week, construction had begun on the fitness center. With Shahid exonerated, Lissy’s series of missteps last winter presented itself to the world as gutsy instinct. Already Ernesto had promised he wouldn’t arm-wrestle her. “I like my boys,” he’d said, “but I can’t deal with these suits.” And Jeff Stubnick was threatening to withdraw his pledge if Coach Hayes was not reinstated. In her heart, she felt the pull toward her vocation. The joy of the kids—okay, they weren’t kids, but once a day or twice a week they got to play as if they were. And she was good at managing the department, massaging the other coaches’ egos, subduing resentments, stoking hopes. She was even good, apparently, at the Ask.

But she didn’t know, yet, if she trusted herself to keep her priorities straight.

“You might go out for soccer in the fall,” she said to Kaitlin. “It would help your footwork.”

“Naw, Gus has got me playing tennis,” Kaitlin said. “We want to set up a club league. Mixed doubles.”

“Not a bad idea. How is Gus?”

They’d been dating, she knew, since midsummer. She wondered if Afia knew. It had to seem strange to her, the joining and unjoining of young Americans, meeting and parting as casually as bees and flowers.

“He’s great. He aced the bio GRE. Oh, and he’s been coaching Tom. Tom’s dying to be a starter this year.”

“He keeps working, he’ll have a shot. You?”

“I’m your girl. And we want the honor speech. You know, the one you always give.”

Lissy grinned, to hide the dagger of dread that drove home that word. “I’ll tell you this,” she said. “You and the rest. It’s going to be my honor to work with you.”

“Bye, Kaitlin!” Chloe singsonged.

“Happy birthday, Monkey,” Kaitlin said. She leaned down to kiss Chloe’s head.

They called her Monkey, Chloe reported as they drove home, not because of Purple Monkey—whom she still held tight, ragged though he was getting—but because of the bars. And she wanted squash lessons. Didn’t Mommy start playing squash when she turned four?

“Tennis at first, and I was five. And I didn’t take lessons.”

“Why not?”

Because, Lissy thought, there was no money. And no thought of tall, willful little girls being athletes. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s fun to just play.”

“Kaitlin says you like to win.”

Lissy chuckled. “She should talk.”

Chloe had stopped wetting the bed. Today she was turning four, another petal unfolded from the swirled knot. They would all grow bigger soon enough, or older, ready for the perils of being fully open. Meanwhile Shahid was still dead, would always be dead, that bloom cut off in its first flowering.

She turned into the driveway. Balloons hung from the porch, a Happy Birthday banner from the lintel. Chloe clapped her hands. “Do you think there’s cake?” she said. “Can we eat it outside?”

From trimming the hedges, Ethan straightened. He wore a faded Obama T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. His legs, burnished with a summer tan, were ropy and taut. His neck glowed with sweat. He pulled off his glasses and wiped his face with a handkerchief from his back pocket. While Chloe banged into the house, he would pull Lissy to him and kiss her, his mouth smelling of beer and sweat, his shirt dampening hers. He knew, now, that she could lie to him. He knew and he loved her regardless. “We can eat wherever you like,” Lissy said to her daughter, and gratitude lifted her from the car, onto the green lawn.

•   •   •

In Nasirabad, Farishta put the finishing touches on her letter. She had written it on paper she’d found on her husband’s desk and tucked it into an envelope from his drawer, adding two extra stamps from the roll in his basket of paper clips and tape. It didn’t say much, only news of the farm, the girls’ work in school, how Anâ was slowly failing. But Afia would know, at least, that someone still thought of her from home. Painstakingly she copied the English address from the slip of paper Afia had given her: Afia Satar, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. She tucked it behind the stacks of spices she kept on the far side of the counter. Tayyab might see it, but he wouldn’t disturb the paper without asking her.

Then she set to arranging her receiving room. With Ramadan over, her visitors would revel in the pleasure of cakes and tea in midafternoon. Sobia was too young for a commitment to marry. Everyone knew that. Her monthly cycle had started less than a year ago; she had just fasted through her first Ramadan. The visiting family—the Munawars, her husband’s cousins through his grandfather, on his mother’s side—was setting out more to prove to the community that Satar’s second daughter was marriageable than to make an offer. Young Tahir Munawar was at the university in Peshawar, studying to be an engineer. His mother and aunties had plenty of time for teas, for the light conversations that led to negotiations. But it was generous of them to come first to Farishta. It reestablished her.

And in light of the request to come to tea, her husband had forgiven her. Forgiven her failure to bring up a virtuous daughter, her setting in motion the cascade of kismet that had left him without sons. More than any restored honor in the eyes of the community, his forgiveness gave her back her strength. He had been a good husband. Not as successful in business as her brother, but a landowner with a khel that went back many centuries on this land, and the quiet dignity that came with such history. He had not once held the specter of Badrai over her, but had treated her as his life partner from the day of their marriage.

Looking back, she saw she had begun to lose his respect when she failed with Khalid—failed to take the earnest, watchful, motherless boy and find a way to make him love her. It was easy to say it was Khalid who had brought on the tragedy in America. But the fact remained that Farishta had failed with him, and failed with her own child too, when Afia forgot everything she had been so carefully taught.

How hard it had been to turn her away! Afia had dared what Farishta could never have dreamed: to make the journey across oceans and continents, through a day and a night, unprotected, among men of no scruples and no honor. And not only that, but to walk alone into the most dangerous place on earth for a blackened woman, her family home. But to embrace her would have been to condemn her—and not only that, to put Sobia and Muska, and Tofan’s livelihood, under threat. Foolish, foolish girl, that she thought her mother could do otherwise than to send her off with a warning. Some mothers—she thought of her sister-in-law Gautana—might have put an end to the girl themselves.

For weeks after, she had wondered. Was her girl on the streets of Peshawar, barefoot like the Gypsies, her thin hands held out for rupees? Had the money Farishta gave her helped her to safety? Or had she been beaten and robbed, like too many girls in the cities? Had she given up on everything and found her way to Karachi, where she could sell her body to the Iranians who brought their goods into port? Where could a girl go, without family?

Back to Amreeka, of course. Farishta should have known. But in all her prayers, all her appeals for a vision, a dream at least, where she could glimpse Afia and know what had become of her, she had never thought her daughter could find the strength to retrace her journey to the jaws of the beast who would devour her. Nor would she have known without the news that came, five weeks after Farishta watched Afia leave the courtyard forever, of Khalid’s arrest.

Strange, so strange. The moment Tofan got the shocking news, he forgave Farishta. At first she had been puzzled to the point of alarm. Then the story filtered down, by way of Roshan to his son Azlan and then to Tayyab and back to Farishta: Khalid had been engaged in jihad, planning a great action against the military who rained drones down upon innocent families in the mountains. He might be tortured, he might be detained for life in Amreeka, but he was a hero. Everyone in Nasirabad sang his praises and gave credit to his family. Their reputation was restored.

Nothing in this fantastic story had mentioned Afia. But Farishta knew from her husband’s grave, unspoken relief that the arrest of Khalid meant the end of retribution. It meant that Afia—though dead to them, as dead as Shahid in his cold grave half a world away—would live. The greatest love is a father’s love for his daughter. And there were still the two girls at home to bring them hope. A month ago, Tofan had come back to Farishta’s bed just as the sunset gave them permission, and he had tasted of her before he tasted of either food or water.

She went in to Tayyab. “The English cakes look very sweet,” she said.

The old man nodded and made a little bow. “Yes, memsahib, but we have the salty biscuits as well, and little pots of kheer.”

“Now, I don’t want you carrying the tray. That’s Sobia’s job.”

“Yes, memsahib.”

Sobia was in her room, trying on one shalwar kameez after another. It was all still pretend, to the girl. For some time she had longed for her big sister and would retreat, weeping, to her new room when she was scolded for mentioning Afia’s name. But now she was enjoying the role of the big sister, the first who would be married—not now, of course, too soon, but whenever her mother decreed it was time. She would go, then Muska would go, and then it would be only Farishta and her husband unless Khalid was released and made his triumphant return.

That last thought sent a shudder through Farishta’s body. Strange, how Shahid had been a hero to lead an American squash team and be on his way to a Harvard degree; and now Khalid was a hero for supposedly performing jihad in America, where Omar’s money had sent him. When Farishta thought of the Eid celebration that had ended Ramadan, she felt ill. It was the one time each year that Omar and her mother came to Nasirabad, for the great feast. Tofan had never liked his brother-in-law. He would have been relieved to skip the invitation, the lavish meal, Omar’s flaunting of his cosmopolitan wealth. But if he ever came to understand why Farishta would not, could not, break bread again with her only brother, he would set out to kill Omar, and no power in the world would hold him back. So she had treaded softly; she had forced her bile down; remembering the children she had left, she had allowed her brother to cross her threshold without harm.

The sitting room was perfect. Sobia, in a cherry-red shalwar kameez with embroidery of gold and royal blue, was in the kitchen practicing tea service with Tayyab. Farishta stepped onto the veranda that looked over the valley and the mulberry trees, stripped now of their fruit. Sometimes, when she squinted, she could see Shahid and Afia climbing the trees barefoot with their baskets, gobbling as many berries as they gathered. Now, along the dirt road that ran by the orchard, she spied a village boy on a bicycle, sheaves of sugarcane strapped to the back fender. He was going into town, to supply the sugarcane wallah. “Boy!” she cried out. “Boy, come here!”

While the boy pushed his bicycle up the long slope, Farishta retreated to the kitchen. “What do you think, Moray?” Sobia said, turning in her outfit.

“Pretty,” Farishta said. “But let’s curl a couple of locks”—licking a finger, she drew her daughter’s bangs out from her dupatta and wrapped them into spirals—“to decorate your forehead. I’ll be right back,” she said.

She pulled the stamped envelope out from behind the spices. If Tayyab saw her, he gave no sign. He was, he could always claim later, half blind. From the drawer she pulled out a ten-rupee coin. Then she strode quickly back to the veranda. The boy had leaned his bike against a tree and made the rest of his way up on foot. “Yes, memsahib?” he said eagerly. For the Satars were still, or again, known as a big family, and if the mistress of the family wanted you, it must be for a lucrative errand.

“Tuck this envelope in your kameez,” she told the boy. “But do not get your sweat on it. When you pass the post box by the sugarcane wallah, you take this out and pass it through the slot. If anyone asks you, you say you have written away to a contest. You understand?”

The boy nodded. She slipped the envelope under his shirt, by his thin chest—thin as Shahid’s, at that age—and offered the coin. His eyes danced. “Allah’s blessings on you, memsahib,” he said.

“Allah hafez,” Farishta said. And she watched him spin away down the road, carrying her words across the world to her child.