Najeeb nodded.
“How about some more tea?” he suggested, pointing to the nickel-plated kettle on the red-coiled electric burner beside his chair.
Gulnaz laid her hand over her untouched cup.
There was a pause. Each waited for the other to speak.
It was Qazi Najeeb who broke the silence. His wife would have cursed him if she’d been here to see the way he behaved. At this age, it was admittedly shameful.
“Any information we receive will be discussed when the trial comes together formally. But even if he’d raised his hand against his wife, that still doesn’t justify murdering him and her village knows that. Those people, her neighbors and Kamal’s family, are surely anxious to see a verdict.”
“Of course they are. The man’s body may be cold and buried, but his family is alive and well. I’m sure they’re filling my grandchildren’s heads with hateful lies.”
“Khanum, I may be nothing but a man in your eyes, but I know a few truths, too, and here’s one I will share with you: children always forgive their mothers. That’s the way God’s designed them. He gives them two arms, two legs, and a heart that will cry ‘mother’ until the day it stops beating. Your daughter can grow horns on her head, but her children will think it’s a crown.”
Gulnaz looked at the judge; her skin prickled. What did he know of forgiveness? She remembered Zeba’s face, meshed by prison fencing. She thought of the way her fingers had reached through the metal rings to touch Gulnaz. Was that forgiveness or desperation? Had she sought her mother’s touch only because she was in Chil Mahtab?
“With all due respect, Qazi, plenty of children are born without arms or legs.”
The judge chuckled.
“Very true. But none are born without a heart. I stand by what I’ve said. A mother is a mother until the very end.”
Gulnaz straightened her back. She hadn’t noticed that a half-raised nail in the chair was digging into her leg. She shifted, but it seemed to follow her.
When Gulnaz stood to leave, Najeeb told himself to look away as she turned toward the door. He was acting like a schoolboy. Then again, he hadn’t asked her to saunter into his office asking him for private favors. What kind of women dared be so bold, anyway?
“Khanum Gulnaz,” he began, feeling as if the boundaries of propriety had already been blurred. “It’s been a pleasure speaking with you. I’m glad you asked your lawyer to arrange for this.”
Gulnaz looked at him, the same fearless stare that she’d given him when they’d been face-to-face in Safatullah’s decorated courtyard.
“I came for the sake of justice,” Gulnaz explained pointedly. “True justice, which is as rare as a seashell in this country. I can only hope you’ll come to see that she’s not responsible for Kamal’s death, just as she was not responsible for his life.”
She was on her feet, her back to him. It was the end of their conversation. Najeeb felt his chest tighten to think that this very moment she would walk out of his office and never return. What did she think of him? He still couldn’t tell by the way she spoke.
Gulnaz paused, her hand resting on the door frame. Her finger tapped once, twice before she turned around and asked one more casual question.
“By the way, Qazi-sahib. It would be rude of me to leave without asking. How is your younger brother doing these days?”
CHAPTER 23
WHEN BASIR WAS TEN YEARS OLD, HE MADE AN IMPORTANT discovery — the adults he’d always trusted could lie. In fact, it was not as much of a possibility as it was a proclivity. They were just as dishonest about small, insignificant details as they were about life-changing truths. When Basir detected the first lie, he vowed to keep his eyes open for a second. By the time he noticed the third and fourth deceit, he decided it was impossible to trust much of anything that came out of the mouths of adults.
Kaka Mateen claimed he’d gone to fight in the war, but he’d actually run off to Iran. Khala Shokria swore she’d made fried potato flatbreads just for him, but he knew she’d bought them from the street vendor. His mother claimed to love all her children equally, but Basir could see that Shabnam claimed more of her heart than the rest of them.
Basir didn’t point out the lies. He knew better than to contradict his relatives. He simply nodded and tightened his lips so nothing disrespectful would slip out.
This decision to distrust complicated Basir’s life. Everything that was told to him had to be tested. Sometimes he wished he could be more accepting, but when he sensed holes in a story, he could not rest until he’d put his eye to each tiny opening and made sure he saw all that there was to see. Truth became an obsession, and vetting became a compulsion. That compulsion was what brought him to keep a secret box within the grove of trees in Ama Tamina and Kaka Fareed’s small yard.
Months before he’d walked into his house to find his father’s head cracked open, Basir had heard from a friend that scorpion mothers ate their young. For Basir, who had seen dogs nuzzle their pups and mother hens coddling newborn chicks, this seemed unnatural. Scorpions were admittedly nasty creatures but that didn’t quite explain why they would disrupt the God-ordained order of things. Mothers spent their energy creating and caring for babies. Even scorpion mothers shouldn’t consume their offspring. It was backward and couldn’t be true.
Basir set out to unearth the truth for himself.
After nine days of turning over rocks, he found a pregnant, tawny-colored scorpion and nudged her into a box. Her tail curled up as she darted left and right, but there was nowhere to go. Basir had put a heavy rock over the top of the box so she wouldn’t be able to escape and kept it behind the outhouse of his home, where no one in his family would dare to look. It was dangerous, he knew, but his curiosity demanded he take the risk.
He threw scraps of food into the box every couple of days and used a long stick to poke at the scorpion from a safe distance. She hated him for keeping her captive. Basir could see it in the poise of her tail, the vindictive posture she assumed when he lifted the box cover.
She would kill him if he gave her the slightest chance. But her own babies? Basir was still skeptical.
Day after day, he would check on his captive. Every time he was done with his observations, he would shut the lid of the box and replace the heavy stone that kept the scorpion trapped within. The box itself lay well out of sight, in an ignored corner of the lot. Still, its presence made him nervous and he wished the insect would hurry her babies along so he could bring his experiment to a close.
When he’d walked into their courtyard that day, Basir had thought for the shortest of seconds that his scorpion might have been responsible for the gory scene. It was as if he’d half expected that his need to test something as dangerous as a scorpion would, one day, cost him the life of someone in his family. Basir walked into his home and smelled death and destruction that day. He’d nearly fallen to his knees with the weight of it, believing it to be his own doing — until he’d seen the hatchet.
When Basir and his sisters had been sent to live with Ama Tamina, Basir’s scorpion was still in her box.
Basir walked out of Ama Tamina’s house one evening and without explicitly planning to, his feet plodded their way back to his family’s home. It was nearly dark, and no one noticed the slight young boy slip through his front gate.
He stood in the front yard, motionless. He half expected his mother or father to emerge from the doorway of the house, sipping tea and chastising him for being out after dark. No one came out. Basir stepped over the threshold and was met with the pungent smell of rotting onions. It felt oddly comforting to a boy who was likely expecting to detect something far worse. His mother’s brass mortar and pestle lay on a square of newspaper, a small mound of cardamom beside it. Rima’s pink knit blanket lay crumpled by the wall.