I run my finger over the new hairs above my lip. After two and a half weeks my mustache has grown in above my beard. My Islamist identity has transformed into another Sikh identity. I unburden myself of the things I have acquired in Peshawar. The tools obviously go to Zaid. My few books I bring to a second hand bookstore. My music collection and the latest of my players I pack into a small satchel and bring to Lucky Lane. I want Noor to understand the Ustaad’s message; beauty continues in exile, and eventually exile can lead to homecoming. But more importantly, I need her blessing.
She sits with her back toward the door, the room still smells of male sweat and sex. She turns, her expression of bland fatigue softens into recognition. She respectfully pulls a chunni over her hair, as if our meeting required the manners of the outside world.
I kneel before her, rest my head in her lap. “I’m returning. I need to see my sons, to face my wife.” She runs her fingers through my hair. “What should I say to her?” I ask in a whisper.
“Don’t say much.” She traces the outline of my ear with her finger. “Listen. Tell her you have never stopped loving her. Mostly, you must ask for her forgiveness.”
I inhale at the enormity of such a request, lift my head to see her eyes. “Do you think she would give it? Would you?”
She looks past me, seeing beyond this room to some distant landscape, maybe the apricot orchard, maybe the edge of her brother-in-law’s farm. After a long pause she finally speaks again. “She will ask why you waited so long. Why you didn’t let her know you were alive.” She looks directly at me. “What will you tell her?”
I squirm as I did when once my mother learned I had cheated on an exam. Then as now, I could offer no good answer, I could only recognize some flaw in my character, some selfishness, some weakness. “I’ve been ashamed, I’ve felt afraid. I was strong enough to plan and build a bomb, but I wasn’t strong enough to face her.”
“You’ve waited long enough. Go and be a man.”