PART FOUR
ariq has headaches now.Some nights, Laila awakens and finds him on the edge of their bed, rocking, his undershirt
pulled over his head The headaches began in Nasir Bagh, he says, then worsened in prison.
Sometimes they make him vomit, blind him in one eye. He says it feels like a butcher's
knife burrowing in one temple, twisting slowly through his brain, then poking out the other
side.
"I can taste the metal, even, when they begin."
Sometimes Laila wets a cloth and lays it on his forehead and that helps a little. The little
round white pills Sayeed's doctor gave Tariq help too. But some nights, all Tariq can do is
hold his head and moan, his eyes bloodshot, his nose dripping. Laila sits with him when
he's in the grip of it like that, rubs the back of his neck, takes his hand in hers, the metal of
his wedding band cold against her palm.
They married the day that they arrived in Murree. Sayeed looked relieved when Tariq told
him they would. He would not have to broach with Tariq the delicate matter of an
unmarried couple living in his hotel. Sayeed is not at all as Laila had pictured him, ruddy
faced and pea eyed. He has a salt and pepper mustache whose ends he rolls to a sharp tip,
and a shock of long gray hair combed back from the brow. He is a soft spoken, mannerly
man, with measured speech and graceful movements.
It was Sayeecl who summoned a friend and a mullah for the nikka that day, Sayeed who
pulled Tariq aside and gave him money. Tariq wouldn't take it, but Sayeed insisted. Tariq
went to the Mall then and came back with two simple, thin wedding bands. They married
later that night, after the children had gone to bed.
In the mirror, beneath the green veil that the mullah draped over their heads, Laila's eyes
met Tariq's. There were no tears, no wedding day smiles, no whispered oaths of long
lasting love. In silence, Laila looked at their reflection, at faces that had aged beyond their
years, at the pouches and lines and sags that now marked their once scrubbed, youthful
faces. Tariq opened his mouth and began to say something, but, just as he did, someone
pulled the veil, and Laila missed what it was that he was going to say.
That night, they lay in bed as husband and wife, as the children snored below them on
sleeping cots. Laila remembered the ease with which they would crowd the air between
them with words, she and Tariq, when they were younger, the haywire, brisk flow of their
speech, always interrupting each other, tugging each other's collar to emphasize a point, the
quickness to laugh, the eagerness to delight. So much had happened since those childhood
days, so much that needed to be said. But that first night the enormity of it all stole the
words from her. That night, it was blessing enough to be beside him. It was blessing