makeshift tents, she saw her baby, Tariq's baby, its temples wasted, its jaws slack, its skin
mottled, bluish gray. She pictured its tiny body washed by strangers, wrapped in a tawny
shroud, lowered into a hole dug in a patch of windswept land under the disappointed gaze
of vultures.
How could she run now?
Laila took grim inventory of the people in her life. Ahmad and Noor, dead. Hasina, gone.
Giti, dead. Mammy, dead. Babi, dead. Now Tariq...
But, miraculously, something of her former life remained, her last link to the person that
she had been before she had become so utterly alone. A part of Tariq still alive inside her,
sprouting tiny arms, growing translucent hands.
How could she jeopardize the only thing she had left of him, of her old life?
She made her decision quickly. Six weeks had passed since her time with Tariq. Any
longer and Rasheed would grow suspicious.
She knew that what she was doing was dishonorable. Dishonorable, disingenuous, and
shameful. And spectacularly unfair to Mariam. But even though the baby inside her was no
bigger than a mulberry, Laila already saw the sacrifices a mother had to make. Virtue was
only the first.
She put a hand on her belly. Closed her eyes.
Laila would remember the muted ceremony in bits and fragments. The cream colored
stripes of Rasheed's suit. The sharp smell of his hair spray. The small shaving nick just
above his Adam's apple. The rough pads of his tobacco stained fingers when he slid the ring
on her. The pen. It’s not working. The search for a new pen. The contract. The signing, his
sure handed, hers quavering. The prayers. Noticing, in the mirror, that Rasheed had
trimmed his eyebrows.
And, somewhere in the room, Mariam watching. The air choking with her disapproval.
Laila could not bring herself to meet the older woman's gaze.
Lying beneath his cold sheets that night, she watched him pull the curtains shut. She was
shaking even before his fingers worked her shirt buttons, tugged at the drawstring of her
trousers. He was agitated. His fingers fumbled endlessly with his own shirt, with undoing
his belt. Laila had a full view of his sagging breasts, his protruding belly button, the small
blue vein in the center of it, the tufts of thick white hair on his chest, his shoulders, and
upper arms. She felt his eyes crawling all over her.
"God help me, I think I love you," he said Through chattering teeth, she asked him to turn
out the lights.
Later, when she was sure that he was asleep, Laila quietly reached beneath the mattress
for the knife she had hidden there earlier. With it, she punctured the pad of her index finger.
Then she lifted the blanket and let her finger bleed on the sheets where they had lain
together.