THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME and Afzal, I tell him, is that he has a greater need for things. Friendship, money, food. He wants a lot of all of those. He says, “You think you’re different but you’re the same as me.” I start to disagree but then my phone buzzes. Samar Aunty has sent me a message. She says she wants: one pack of Panadol, one GoGo supari, and the three-piece pack of Femina Sanitary Napkins. The last item makes me groan. Afzal and I go to the shop, and we’re lucky that it’s the shopkeeper and not his son who is at the register. The shopkeeper knows not to change his expression when I tell him what I need and who the things are for, and when I say that he’s to add it to Samar Aunty’s weekly bill. He puts the napkins in a brown envelope, and all the things in a small plastic bag.
“How long will she need those for, you think?” Afzal asks, outside the shop.
“I don’t know. How old is she? Forty? Fifty? Maybe she’ll need them forever.”
We make our way by the nullah and into Samar Aunty’s lane. She gives me two rupees for the errand. She says, “I have a job today.”
“Where?” I ask.
“A house in Gulshan. One of my regulars. The woman’s getting a little comfortable leaving her cash around. That’s all I’m telling you.” Then she adds, “There’s another one Munnoo has been hinting about. I’ll talk to him about letting the two of you come along then. Bigger house, a wedding a month away.”
Before we leave, she pushes two rupees into Afzal’s hand as well. Once we are out of her neighborhood, he shakes his head. “What does she think this is going to get us?”
“Nothing, really. But keep it. Don’t give it to your sister.”
At my house, Mami says I am late. I had kept her son waiting for a full hour and a half and now he’s gone to bed and he isn’t going to do well on his test tomorrow. I say I am sorry. I don’t ask her for food; she isn’t going to give me any now. The floor is covered with my sleeping cousins. I climb over them to the doubled-up quilt in a corner and close my eyes. My body is tired but my mind stays awake. I want Munnoo to give me more work. I have been training long enough. The small-time jobs Afzal and I are stuck with are too easy now; sneaking wallets out of pockets, holding a toy gun to a lady in a bazaar and asking for cash which never gets us more than two hundred rupees, no matter where in the city we are. Munnoo says we lose our shit too easily and the women can sense that. Besides, we look fifteen even though we are nineteen. I hate it when he goes on like that. I tell him, “You wouldn’t be keeping us around if you didn’t need us, so the next big assignment is ours,” and he says, “Keep growing that beard and maybe in six months you will be promoted.”
Afzal and I meet at the bus stop. We have decided to try Bank Road today. I am starving by the time we get there. I had slept late and woken up angry at Mami and the cousin who couldn’t remember his times tables. When Mami said to come eat, I told her I wasn’t hungry. I left without wishing the cousin good luck for his test. At the market, I get a glass of sugarcane juice and it eases the ache and gets rid of the fog in the brain. I leave a third of the juice for Afzal; he isn’t talking much and he looks pale and a little distracted. I think, He really needs to get out of his sister’s house. It is a little after eleven. People are moving up and down the sidewalks and between parked motorbikes and cars.
“OK, should we split up? Or just start walking?” I ask Afzal.
“How about there?” He points with his chin toward a building across the road. It looks like there is a single gate for entrance, and the guard waving streams of people in and out seems tired already.
We spend five minutes there, and then we move on to another place, a bank this time, and another one. By two o’clock we have five wallets. It is a good time to take a break. I find three thousand rupees in the first one. It’s just downhill after that. No more than a hundred or two in each.
“We won’t have anything left after Munnoo’s cut. We should take the credit cards,” Afzal says.
“Not worth it. They’ll get blocked and we could get tracked.”
“Half of the money then.”
He sounds upset.
“OK, one day, it’s just not wise to piss Munnoo off this early in our careers.”
We buy lunch from a stall. I tell Afzal that I think we’re good for the day. “You could call Erum. She could meet you at the beach. And maybe her cousin could come along too. I can’t remember her name. She has a nose ring.”
“I’m not really in the mood today.”
“What’s the matter with you? How bad did it get with your sister last night? I thought her husband had hidden the belt?”
“He did. But she’ll probably find something else.”
“I don’t understand why you don’t move out. Saleem’s going to get tired of saving your skin. Even sleeping in a drain has to be better than living with that witch.”
Munnoo’s office is just a part of a room in his house with a curtain drawn across. Afzal and I have kept a little money for ourselves, hidden in pockets inside our kurtas. Not half, but enough to keep us fed and our girls fed. I’m sure he knows that we don’t turn in everything we find—probably everyone on his team does this—but he’s never checked.
Afzal and I stand in front of him as he counts the cash across the table. He peels off a two hundred rupee note and hands it to us. “Well done,” he says. “Well done, well done, well done. How’s that chin hair doing?” He peers at my face. “I might have to promote you sooner than I thought.”
We step outside the office. I feel the money burning in my pocket. I make Afzal call Erum and she says yes, she’ll meet us at the park. I take the phone from him and ask her if she could bring her cousin and she says she will. “The one with the nose ring,” I add quickly.
Afzal doesn’t talk a lot on the way but I’ve got other things on my mind. At the park, he and Erum sit on a bench far away, leaving me with the cousin. I still don’t know her name and I wish Erum had mentioned it. I want to sit with her on a bench as well but she says she’s in the mood for a walk. I don’t know if that means I can’t hold her hand just yet. A minute into our stroll, she folds her arms below her chest, so at least now I know. After just one round she says she’s hungry and walks over to Erum and lets her know. The girls start walking together to the gate and Afzal and I follow. We buy the girls burgers. They eat while talking about some family function. And then they say they have to leave because it is almost dark. I watch them go. Afzal and I walk back in silence. This whole evening has been useless. Erum’s cousin hadn’t looked like she was having a good time. And now, Afzal’s sad, preoccupied face is making me irritated. I want to beat him up but I can’t because his sister does it anyway and I don’t want to be like her.
He says, “Saleem told me my father works in Lunda Bazaar.”
I stop walking.
“How does he know?”
“He said he saw him—abba—himself. Last week.”
“Does your sister know?”
“He hasn’t told her.”
“Do you want to see him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I breathe out slowly and rub my forehead. “If you ask me, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
All Afzal says to that is he should be getting back now.
For a while, I roam around by myself. It is the weekend and the food stalls are open. Families are eating and shopping. I wonder if I should try getting a wallet on my own. I begin to close in on a man walking toward the line in front of the Broast Chicken restaurant. Then his mobile rings, and I lose interest and turn away.
______________
Afzal has been to see his father. He saw him in a shop, selling used jeans and shirts, but he did not talk to him.
I ask him, “Is he old? Does he look like you?”
“Not old. A little like me, I think.”
“You sure you saw the right man?”
Afzal makes an impatient sound. “Of course.”
I have my doubts but I don’t say anything. His sister has hurt her back so he has to help out at home. I don’t have any work today. In fact, it’s been five days since Munnoo has asked me to do anything. Around eight at night, I go to see Samar Aunty. That’s when she’s back from the house she cleans. I ask her about that big job she’d mentioned. She’s tired and not in the mood to discuss it.
“It’s for Afzal,” I tell her. “He’s upset about his father—you know how he left his family when Afzal was only two? Afzal found him a few days ago.”
“The poor boy. Did he speak to him?”
“No. But he’s become really moody since then. I would say he has depression.”
“Mmm.” Samar Aunty shakes her head. “I know about that. That is a hard thing to live with.”
“I think this new job would help him. Keep him away from his sister, give him back an interest in life.”
“OK, yes, I will speak to Munnoo. But it’s not an easy assignment, nothing like slipping out a wallet and then hiding in the crowd.”
“You can trust us, Samar Aunty, honest to God.”
In another five days, she gets permission to include me and Afzal. I tell him what we’re going to do. Even though I had lied a little to Samar Aunty about his condition, he really does look more excited than he has lately. The job is one week away, and we have preparations to make.
When we next see Munnoo, we thank him and ask him for something to do in the meanwhile, a small job, eight thousand rupees, no problem. But he says we should rest. Back in the street, Afzal says the two of us should go to Lunda Bazaar and do some light work there. I cannot believe he is even trying to lie.
I say to him, “You want to see your abba. Just say that.”
“Yes, fine, maybe. But mostly I want to go there to get some money.”
It is insulting how he persists with the pretense.
But we can’t go there on Monday because my Mami keeps me tied up with chores all day, setting me free only in the evening. There is no time to do anything else so Afzal and I go to the park to practice running. This is for the job. Samar Aunty said we have to be in good shape; we might have to make a run for it. This is what she has told us will happen: she will use the key copy she has made to get inside the house; Afzal and I will slip in through the unlocked door sometime later; in twenty minutes, we will gather the things into bags; Munnoo will be outside with a car.
On Tuesday, we go to Lunda Bazaar. Now that we’re here, Afzal doesn’t waste any time pretending. He maneuvers through the mass of people until he stops by a wall. He says in a low voice, “That’s my abba. Mercury Clothing.” Diagonally across from us, I see a skinny man with a mustache in a shop the size of two kiosks. He is holding up a t-shirt and talking to a customer. There is nothing about him that resembles the boy next to me. Afzal is taller than him by at least five inches. Afzal’s hair is brown and that man’s looks black. But I don’t say any of that to Afzal. I think, Maybe it’s the angle.
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
He keeps standing there and I’m thinking that we’re starting to look a little suspicious now.
“Let’s come back tomorrow when you’re ready,” I say to him.
Afzal kicks the wall and turns around. That day, we find two thousand rupees and a watch. We keep all of it.
I don’t see Afzal all day on Wednesday. I call him and he doesn’t answer. When Thursday comes and he’s still not around, I get worried. I send the newspaper boy’s little brother to Afzal’s home to find out what’s going on. He comes back and tells me Afzal has been hurt and can’t walk. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The only thing to do is see for myself how badly he’s been injured, if he can recover by the time we have to go on the big job. The kid yells after me for the coin I had said I would give him, and I turn around long enough to say that I’m having to go by myself after all, aren’t I?
Afzal’s house is quiet. His sister has only one child, a seven-year-old girl, and she’s probably playing by the railway lines. I rap gently on the front door, hoping that anyone but the sister answers. It’s Afzal who opens it.
I thump him on the shoulder. “You’re OK! You’d scared me.”
“It’s just a sprain.”
“So you’ll be fine for next week, right?”
Afzal nods. He looks tired.
“Good. Good. You shouldn’t walk around on that foot, keep resting.”
He nods again. I say goodbye and he shuts the door softly. Still feeling light from the relief of seeing my friend able to move, I go to the park. I manage to do four whole laps around it.
On Fridays, my maamoo doesn’t go on the fishing boat. It’s supposed to be his day of rest and prayer. On Fridays, my mami has a list of chores for me as long as her arm. She says I don’t contribute nearly enough to the household’s expenses to have a do-nothing day. So all morning I dust the rooms, and all afternoon I scrub the floors. Then I go to the market and buy the things she has listed. She checks the receipt against each item she unpacks. I know if I ask her for a break she will definitely give me five more things to do. If I stay quiet, she might still give me new tasks, or she might tell me to have meetha paratha and tea.
This Friday, her mind seems to be somewhere else. I ask her what I need to do and she says, vaguely, “The floors,” and disappears somewhere outside. All that running has caught up with me; I just want to lie down and take a nap. I stack up a few mattresses to make available the space I have to clean. I push the wet towel in a straight line with my foot—I’m not going to squat and pretend to care about getting the corners if Mami isn’t around. I pass the slightly open door and hear the sound of crying while someone says angrily, “You cannot leave. I won’t let you leave us.” The angry person is my maamoo, and the crying one is my mami. I push the towel into a corner of the room, lie down on my quilt, and pull a sheet over my face.
The night before the job, I finally fall asleep around three in the morning. When I wake up the sky is bright with sunlight. It is only a little after ten; I have to find a way to kill the time before I have to go to the house. Mami sees me sitting and sends one of the children to me. “Ammi says you have to help me revise for my exam,” the twelve-year-old says. Sighing, I take the Pakistan geography textbook from him. I try to get him to memorize lists of the major land features, average rainfall, and main industries of each province. At the end of almost an hour I tell him if he doesn’t stop fidgeting I’ll go and then he’ll fail. He says he won’t fail because he has never failed, and it will be a great favor to the family if I do leave. I throw his book at him and he dodges it and laughs. I swear at him and he says it doesn’t matter what I call him because I’m just a charity case, an orphan, and one must make allowances for an orphan. I want to slam the main gate on my way out but I don’t want Mami to get alerted.
I reach the house for the job and squat under a tree. It is too hot for anyone to be around but I want Afzal to get here fast. Five minutes later, I see him in the distance, walking slowly in the dark.
“Are you limping?” I ask. I don’t try to keep the impatience out of my voice.
“It’s not going to be a problem,” he says, not looking at my face.
Without saying anything further, I walk around to the front. Samar Aunty would have unlocked the gate for us. In his haste to keep up with me, Afzal stumbles and a hiss escapes his mouth. I bite my lips so I don’t tell him off for making our job more dangerous because of his foot problem. He manages to hobble ahead of me to the front door. It is dark inside. We take small steps forward, our eyes darting around, trying to make sense of objects unfamiliar to us. My stomach aches with worry. “Samar Aunty?” Afzal’s voice is small, like a little boy’s. Then he cries out; in the dark, I see him stumbling and falling. Samar Aunty is on the floor. She is not moving even though Afzal’s foot has struck her.
I drop into a crouch. Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is shallow and quick. “Samar Aunty, what happened?”
On the other side of her Afzal says, “Are you hurt? Is there someone in the house?”
He moves the light from his phone screen over her body. We see blood underneath her.
“Fuck!” I breathe out. The ache in my stomach turns into nausea.
“She’s not dead, she’s not dead,” Afzal says rapidly. He puts the phone into his pocket. “We have to move her.”
He holds Samar Aunty’s feet and I put my hands under her arms. He guides us toward a sofa and we lay her on it. I moan when I see the blood left behind on the floor. Samar Aunty’s breathing has become quicker; her eyes remain closed.
“She’s unconscious,” Afzal says, but he doesn’t sound like he is sure about that.
“We should put something on the wound,” I manage to say.
“I don’t know where she’s bleeding from.”
Afzal turns on his phone light again. There is nothing on her face, chest, or stomach. It is from the legs down that she seems to have been hurt. Gently, Afzal turns her away from us. Half of her qameez and shalwar are stuck to her body, their colors subsumed by the color of blood, the smell of which rises up to us. Afzal moans.
“I don’t think we can do anything,” he says, on the brink of crying.
“Get her some water.”
While Afzal is gone, I look for a sheet to cover Samar Aunty with but I can’t find anything in the room. I do not want to leave her on her own. I take the scarf from around my face and drape it over her. Afzal comes back with a glass of water and holds it to Samar Aunty’s mouth. Water dribbles onto her neck. He apologizes to her and awkwardly dabs at her neck with his sleeve.
“Now we wait for Munnoo to come get us,” he says. At that moment, we have no memory of why we were in that house in the first place.
We sit in the dark, listening to Samar Aunty breathing and the rush of the occasional car far away. When eleven o’clock has come and gone, I call Munnoo. He doesn’t answer. I try again a few minutes later and he still doesn’t pick up. My head begins to ache.
I say, “The bastard has ditched us.”
“I’m going to check outside.” Afzal doesn’t shut the front door and the night breeze blows in. It brings with it a slight smell of leaves and flowers. In the original plan, the three of us were to slip out through the single gate and into Munnoo’s car. Now, if he does turn up, Afzal and I will have to carry Samar Aunty all the way to the car—a longer, slower process that would increase the chance of all of us being seen. I cannot understand her copious bleeding, nor her inability to open her eyes.
Afzal returns, shutting the door. I look at him and he shakes his head.
“What are we going to do?” I ask him.
“I think we should get what we came here to get.”
I stare at him for a moment. “OK. Yes. Let’s do that.”
Avoiding the congealing blood on the floor, I follow Afzal. Samar Aunty had drawn a map of the house for us; we had to learn where each room was. We climb the stairs to where the bedrooms are. From the biggest one, where Samar Aunty had said the husband and wife sleep, we pick up cash from inside a side table. Afzal tugs hard at the door of the cupboard. It flies open with a dull squeak of wood rubbing against wood. He reaches into the back and brings out three boxes. He tosses one to me. There is a pearl necklace inside. Afzal holds up a pair of gold bracelets. I’m starting to feel better already. I shake free a pillowcase and we put our boxes inside it. On the way out of the room I add a bottle of perfume and a nice-looking clock from the dressing table.
Samar Aunty had said no children live in this house.
Afzal and I collect a pair of cufflinks, a watch, more cash. There’s a VCR upstairs. I put that into a second pillowcase. I keep opening drawers, poking into corners, throwing in CDs, crystal fruit decoration pieces, a few books. I find the CD player meant for the CDs. Afzal says we must go back down now. We find the study, and it is just the way Samar Aunty had described it: a shelf full of books, a floor lamp, and, on the table, two laptops sitting side by side. They are light—that means they are newer models and more expensive. My anxiety comes back as we walk toward the sofa we left Samar Aunty on. She is the same as before, breathing lightly and quickly. We say her name but she doesn’t respond. This time Afzal calls Munnoo, but now the man’s phone is switched off.
“We have to get out of here,” I say to Afzal.
“We have to clean up the blood first.”
“Are you stupid? There’s no time for that.”
He’s not listening to me, though. He is already walking to the kitchen. I watch him come back with a sponge, a bar of soap, and a cup. “This is absolute shit, man,” I say. “Get me a cloth or whatever.” Afzal goes to the kitchen again and brings me a rag. But all we do is spread the stain. I get a bowl and fill it with water, and we rinse out the blood and use more soap. My arms begin to ache. I can’t tell if we’ve made any improvement; the light from the phone isn’t too good. I throw my rag into the bowl and stand up. “Afzal, I am going. You can bring Aunty or you can leave her here, that’s up to you. I’m done with this madness.” He gets up and dries his hands on his pants. “We can go now,” he says.
We put our things outside by the gate. We go back for Samar Aunty. Afzal says he has to do one last thing. He comes back, limping and holding large, torn-up pieces of cloth.
“What the hell is that?” I ask him.
“There was blood on the sofa,” he says. “We couldn’t leave that behind.”
I don’t waste time telling him off. He stuffs the pieces into one of our makeshift bags.
There is only one way to manage everything: I carry Samar Aunty over my shoulder and Afzal carries the bags. We make our way slowly down the street, keeping to the walls of houses. The smell of urine is strong here but I don’t care what we step on. I worry a stray dog might find us, but the only other living creature we see is a cat.
We reach Samar Aunty’s house around three in the morning. We set her on the ground, adjust her qameez, and spread her dupatta over her. Covered in sweat, our limbs aching, Afzal and I make our way to where Munnoo lives. I am furious at him but can’t think of where else to go. His gate is unlocked. We walk from the front room to the back room to his office on the other side of the curtain, but there is nobody there. We slide the bolt, tie the mouths of the bags to our wrists, and collapse into oblivion.
______________
I am the first of the two of us to move into Munnoo’s house.
When morning comes and I go to my mami’s, her oldest son has to hold her back from beating me with the heel of her shoe for being away a whole night. While she’s screaming, I quickly pick up my clothes and my comb. My cousins can use the other things if they want to. No one asks me where I’m going.
Two weeks later, Afzal and I go to Samar Aunty’s house with her share of the money from the goods sold from that job. We find out she is dead. She hemorrhaged from a miscarriage, her sister tells us. “She died outside the house,” her sister says, puzzled and hurt. Afzal and I take the money back with us. We do not talk on the way. Afzal goes on home, and I walk around with the extra money in my pocket. I end up buying myself shoes, a shirt, and pants.
I start getting the staff together for meetings in Munnoo’s office. I install a new lock on the gate. I call Munnoo’s number a few times but I always get the powered-off recording. I put crates and boxes down the middle of the front room so there is a space for Afzal and a space for me.
But Afzal doesn’t want to leave his sister’s place. He says he can’t do this to his family. I tell him I’m like his brother and he says I don’t understand. He attends all the meetings but he looks preoccupied. I think, It’s the shock from Samar Aunty’s death.
One night there is a hammering on the gate and I take out my gun in case it’s Munnoo come back to claim what he had ditched. But it is a boy who lives in the street. Afzal ate a lot of medicine, he says excitedly. He’s not waking up. He’s in the hospital.
By the time I get there, Afzal’s stomach has been pumped and he is asleep. His sister crouches in a far corner of the emergency ward, hugging her daughter and weeping, while her husband stands next to Afzal. When he sees me, he shakes his head. His eyes, like mine, are wide in pain and surprise.
When Afzal is ready to leave the hospital, his brother-in-law brings him to me, to Munnoo’s house. He said Afzal’s sister didn’t want her daughter to be around someone who could put dangerous ideas about life and death into her head.
For a few days, I talk to Afzal about the different jobs the boys have been going on, which haven’t been many. I don’t ask him why he did what he did. It’s only when the matter of an assignment at a watch shop in Lunda Bazaar comes up that he talks to me about it.
He’d gone to his abba and told him who he was. His abba was surprised but not unhappy. They ate a meal together. His abba said that from now on they must meet at least once a week. Afzal gave him money, the unexpected extra from Samar Aunty’s death as well as most of whatever else he had saved. When he went to him again the next day, his abba wasn’t there. His shop was closed. The shutter was padlocked. Afzal waited all afternoon and all evening, standing across from it. No one volunteered any information and he didn’t like to ask. Around six, a wallet-seller finally told him that the Mercury Clothing man didn’t work there anymore. He hadn’t left any word for Afzal; no letter, no message.
Every morning, we send one of the children in the street to get our breakfast. Then we get to work. We have a team of ten people. They do what Afzal and I used to do, with minor changes: no guns, toy or real, and no women. And we don’t have any women on the staff either.
Afzal doesn’t talk as much as he used to; mostly he seems like his mind is somewhere else. But he eats when I tell him to, and he doesn’t mind when I send someone to check on him when he’s been by himself too long.
One evening my cousin Tipu, the geography test one, finds his way to my new house. He’s brought us a little food from my mami: paratha and qeema. He asks me and Afzal about our work and we tell him we buy and sell used products. He says, “Right,” then takes out a Pakistan Studies textbook.
“I have a test tomorrow.”
“I hate your school,” I say.
Tipu ignores me and turns to Afzal. “If you have some minutes, can you help?”
“Don’t get into this,” I say. “This kid is hopeless. Nothing stays in that brain.”
Afzal takes the book. They go over and over the same facts, first one then the other: Ravi, Jhelum, Indus, Chenab, Sutlej. Jhelum comes from the Kashmir Valley and is part of Chenab; Sutlej is also called the Red River; Chenab is made by the Chandra and Bhaga rivers in the Himalayas, where Ravi also starts; Indus is the longest river in Pakistan. I close the door to the front room, muffling the sounds of their revision. This is the only time Afzal comes out of his fog and looks a little happy.
Tipu comes over almost every week. Sometimes he brings along another brother or sister. Mami always sends something for us with him. The girls, Erum and her cousin, don’t come by at all. I ask Afzal if this is really the best use of having our own place, and he shrugs that he’s not stopping anyone from visiting us. This is true. My cousins like it here because of how Afzal teaches them. The girls, when we asked them to stop by, had been deeply offended. “Is it really your own house?” Erum asked, skepticism in her voice. I told her yes; we ate there, we slept there, we used the bathroom there. Maybe the mention of the bathroom offended her the most.
Afterward, Afzal said I shouldn’t have lied about the house.
“How is it a lie? Do we not actually live here?”
“We do, but it’s Munnoo who owns it. I think. Definitely not us, though.”
I let out an exasperated huff. “Well, then find out who owns it and let’s buy it.”
“I wouldn’t feel like it’s my home even if I owned it.”
“So you want to live here, temporarily, forever.”
Afzal says he can’t talk to me when I’m like this.
This is part of his moodiness. Once, while waiting for two members to come back from a job, he asked me, “Do you want to keep doing this same thing all your life?”
“I don’t mind, really,” I said. “You don’t?”
He shook his head. “Definitely not. I’m getting out in a month. Two, at the most.”
The old anxiety started up in my stomach. I had done this work with him since we were fifteen. “What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“Teach, maybe. Or train with a mechanic. Do something clean and fair.”
“My abba sold combs and hairbrushes at traffic lights. On his feet all day. Exhaust fumes in his face. He died a slow, miserable death. And my dada before that? His sorry little restaurant run to the ground because of the police. Didn’t even last a year. Don’t teach me about fair.”
A few days after this we go to the doctor because the limp in Afzal’s leg isn’t going away. He doesn’t want me to go with him but maybe I wear him down or maybe he is tired and in pain so he stops resisting. He tells the doctor the same thing he’s told me, that it is an old sprain, but the doctor says his ankle is broken and has been so for a long time now. “How long?” I ask him. “At least four months,” he answers. That was when Afzal was limping around the house, when Samar Aunty had been bleeding. I watch with my mouth dry as the doctor puts a cast around the ankle. Afzal refuses the crutches. At home, I practice in my head the right way to ask him if his sister did that to his foot, if she hit him with a brick or a stick or a rod, but I cannot make the words come to my mouth. What would we do with the words out in the open? What would we do if he lies and we both know it’s a lie?
Now, if he starts a controversial topic with me, I don’t argue with him. I pretend to agree.
But he keeps trying to start a fight. He says I could learn a few things from Munnoo. He says we shouldn’t take my mami’s food anymore. When the rest of the team comes over he prefers to stay in the other room. When he does sit with us, he stays at the back, reading. He hasn’t been on a job in a long time. I don’t push him into doing what he doesn’t want to do. But to try to end his moroseness I call Erum one day. I tell her Afzal is feeling a little sad, and maybe we could all just go as friends to the park or the beach to cheer him up. She says we have to stop making excuses for calling her. Then she hangs up.
I don’t mind doing the extra work I have to do. I like having the people report to me and I like strategizing with them. Back when Munnoo was around, I was on the same level as some of them. I don’t think they’re unhappy with the situation now. I listen, take a smaller cut. Maybe living in Munnoo’s house has made it easier for them to see me in his old role. Maybe having a quiet, unassuming person like Afzal around makes me look good too.
So when one of the juniors says in a meeting we could be doing a lot better if we had a girl on the staff, and most of the others agree, I don’t know what to say. “I can recommend someone who’s a good fit for this role,” the boy tells me. Afzal is no help; he doesn’t look up from my cousin’s schoolbook. The others say we should try the girl out for one week, a probationary period. I give in.
She arrives on time on Saturday morning. Her name is Fiza. She is twenty-six years old and works as a cleaner the way Samar Aunty used to. “I am very good at my job,” she adds. I’d never wondered why Samar Aunty did what she did; she’d always just been there, part of the whole operation. I ask the girl to explain her reason for wanting to work with us and she says, “Same as yours. Money.” I tell her she can start; Afzal and I will see how it goes for a week or two. I give her the details of a small job. And then I make myself add, “If you get pregnant, you will have to stop working here. So just don’t.”
Fiza is efficient. In meetings, she doesn’t smile unless she finds the joke especially funny, and then it is a quick one. I don’t ever hear her laugh. She keeps a chadar around her all the time and prefers to stand when inside the office.
Maybe it’s her unobtrusiveness as well as her skills that make her a part of us. I forget about the probation period. Money flows in steadily and Afzal seems different. He doesn’t always sit at the back now, away from the rest of us, and sometimes he talks. Sometimes he even addresses Fiza.
“I think you like her,” I say to him one night.
“I think you’re wrong,” he replies.
But I’ve good reason to believe what I said. I don’t know when he got them but he has a few new shirts now. And I think his hair looks different. It’s neater. One afternoon I see them talking in the office, sitting on chairs six feet apart, and after that they meet so often that the fact of their being together becomes a part of all three of our lives.
It is Fiza who finds Afzal the bookbinder job. It is in Paper Market. He leaves in the morning and comes back at night. This is the least money he has ever made possibly, but I don’t say anything because it’s the most content he has ever looked. Sometimes I tease him that he and Fiza couldn’t be more different; she steals from homes she cleans, and he sits behind a table putting glue on book spines. I tell him he should marry her, no girl that exciting could accept a man that boring. He says he’s thinking about it.
Only one bad thing happens in this time: Afzal’s brother-in-law Saleem comes over with a message from his sister. She isn’t feeling well and wants to see Afzal. I tell him not to go, she will find a way to make him unhappy. But he tells Saleem that he’ll see her soon, and he tells me he has to do the right thing. The day he gets ready to go to her house, I am not able to do much. The pain from anxiety comes back to gnaw at my insides. Six hours later, when I hear the door open and see him come in, I don’t know if I should punch him or hug him.
“What happened?” I ask him.
He says, “I didn’t go.”
It is around a week after this that a big opportunity comes the way of the business. It is at a house Fiza works for. On a Friday night in August the family will be out at a wedding. I tell Fiza I’m up for the job. Afzal, who has been listening, says he would go as well. I don’t make a big deal about it while the others are around, but the moment they leave I ask him if he’s lost his mind.
Fiza says, doubt in her voice, “Are you sure?”
Afzal shrugs. “I used to do this work all the time. This is my last assignment. I need an official last one.”
The sky is overcast as the three of us go along the roads. I park under a tree and there is a crack of thunder just then. Getting inside the house is easy. The things we gather are few but valuable. Within an hour, we are ready to go back. We pick up the bundles and run to the car as the first drops start to come down. We slam the doors shut as I start the engine. The noise of the raindrops pelting the car is almost deafening.
I laugh from relief and shout out, “Congratulations!”
Afzal turns around to look at Fiza. “You all right?”
“Yes!”
Briefly, they hold hands. Afzal takes his phone out and looks for a song to play even though we won’t be able to really hear it. Then, in the rearview mirror, I think I see a car, and I wonder if it’s only my imagination. I speed blindly through the rain. There is the sound of a gunshot, tearing through the night.