She brought Naheed back and the years kept passing. She began to fantasise about a man she saw walk by in the street regularly, and one day she talked to him briefly at someone’s house, convincing herself that he loved her too. She wrote a long letter to him and he came up here and according to him it was not an assault, her letter being the proof of his innocence.
*
The lock on the stairs remains in place, its key in Tara’s pocket, and for two days and two nights Naheed does not eat anything Tara brings.
*
‘One reason I can’t do what you want me to do,’ Naheed says, her face turned away, ‘is that I know he is alive.’
‘A woman can’t feel the child inside her at such an early stage.’
‘I am talking about Mikal.’
‘Mikal?’ Tara looks at her. ‘Have you heard something? Has he been in touch?’ Then she stiffens. ‘Why are you waiting for him anyway?’
‘I know he is alive and that he will come back to me. We loved each other.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Yes you did. He didn’t say anything but I think he came here to ask for my hand. You must have made him feel like a worthless beggar. I know. We planned to disappear from here before the wedding, we agreed on a time, but he didn’t come. I waited, and I never really stopped.’ She pauses and takes a deep breath. ‘Maybe this new waiting is just part of the old one.’
‘Did you two plan all this?’ Tara says quietly. ‘He took Jeo away to have him killed and now you’ll wait for his return? Is this Mikal’s child?’
‘It’s nothing like that, Mother. I just know he’s alive, I feel him.’
‘You can’t build a life on a feeling, Naheed. I may be mad but I know that much.’
‘There is no body, there is no grave.’
‘That doesn’t mean he is not dead. Some boys who went to Kashmir or Bosnia or Tajikistan didn’t come back, just the news of their death.’
Naheed breaks into tears. ‘Oh Mother, I don’t know what to think. But please understand I can’t do what you are telling me. And I did not say you were mad.’
Tara gets up. She stops at the door. ‘He did come here and I sent him away. You’ve known all along?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were going to run away?’ She looks devastated as she asks this. ‘Leaving me behind, with those wedding preparations I’d made, having to explain to Jeo’s family and the entire neighbourhood what happened? Everyone would have said that I, being a wanton woman, had raised a brazen disgraceful daughter.’
There is a pained silence from both and then Tara comes back and takes the key from her pocket and places it next to Naheed on the bed.
She brings in a tray of food, telling her it is unadulterated, but Naheed still cannot bring herself to trust her.
‘You’ll fall ill with weakness. Believe me and eat something,’ Tara says, pointing to the tray and then to the fridge in the corner — the kitchen is too small to accommodate it so it stands here in the bedroom, their only room, filling the air faintly with the odour of chemicals that have been leaking from its mechanisms ever since it was bought second- or third-hand a decade ago.
Finally Tara unlocks the door to the stairs herself.
‘Then go to Rohan’s house and eat something from there.’
It’s almost midnight.
‘I’ll go in the morning,’ the girl tells her.
*
Hunger awakens her a few hours later, deep in the night, and she comes out of the room and stands under the star-coated sky. There is a pomegranate in the kitchen, from the trees in Rohan’s garden, that she had brought for Tara some days ago. It has been skinned and the seeds lie glitteringly in a steel bowl, surrounded by their own reflections, the red making her think of the ruby. She lifts a seed and places it on her tongue, then expels it. Tara could have sprinkled something on them.
She looks down from the roof into Sharif Sharif’s courtyard. Towards his family’s kitchen, almost dizzy with hunger. She walks down the stairs and the screen door squeaks as she enters the kitchen, a small bird noise, a cicada. She stops and looks around more or less frantic with the thought that she must nourish the life inside her. Her fingers reach out and blindly lift the lid of a jar and she can tell from the syrupy smell that it is sugar. She places a large pinch onto her tongue, feeling the crystals melt in the saliva. She hears a sound, a breath suddenly drawn in. Or is it the rasp of a matchstick being struck? Will a small yellow flame soon illuminate Sharif Sharif’s face somewhere in the blackness? She drops the jar and hears it break with a sound louder than she would have expected, hears the smaller sound of sugar scattering within the breaking of the glass, a muted hiss. There is graininess under her feet as she rushes out.
Upstairs she eats the pomegranate, lifting the seeds to her mouth with both hands.
When Tara gets up an hour later for her predawn prayers, she is still awake. She asks Tara for breakfast and ten minutes later Tara brings her a paratha and an omelette with coriander, onions and green chillies. When the sun comes up she walks out towards Rohan’s house.
*
She takes a sip of water and a crimson thread swirls into the glass.
She puts it back on the table and lies down on the bed again, shaking with fever. Her skin burns and she feels as though she is looking out through fire.
‘What time is it?’
‘Night,’ Tara says.
‘What day?’
‘Thursday.’
Tara places her hand on her forehead — the hands of kindness and a weak human mercy. Naheed looks into her eyes, the eyes through which she had seen tears enter the world for the first time. She hears Tara say, ‘This isn’t anything to do with me. I didn’t put anything in your food.’
On Friday morning the amber eyes open and she sits up in bed and asks if she can help with the housework. Tara gives her a basket of peas to shell. Ten minutes later when Tara comes into the room she finds her asleep in the chair, with the basket fallen on the floor, the peas scattered.
On Saturday she works on the hem of a tunic that Tara has sewn. Afterwards she goes to the bathroom — Tara reminding her yet again not to lock the door — and spends a long time in there, Tara standing anxiously outside, sounding a knock on the door now and then, gently like a heartbeat, but there is no response.
When at last she emerges Tara asks, ‘Did something happen?’
She gives a nod. ‘It’s over.’
*
She sleeps for a long time but the body temperature remains high, Tara sitting beside the bed with her Koran or her seamstress work.
‘I heard someone say that you sew things, good aunt,’ the young man had said, appearing on the stairs the week before.
Tara makes women’s clothes, but sometimes boys come to her to have their trousers and shirts altered — usually tightened, which their own mothers refuse to do for them.
‘Would you stitch an American flag for me?’
‘An American flag?’
‘Yes, we have to burn it at a protest rally in the bazaar.’
Tara was reluctant. ‘I don’t make such things,’ she told him as she said no. ‘And I would rather not get involved.’ She had imagined herself being arrested for a crime involved with public disorder.