one or maybe two months' apartment rent."
The shopkeeper gave him a bus ticket, Tariq said, and the address of a street corner near
the Lahore Rail Station where he was to deliver the coat to a friend of the shopkeeper's.
"I knew already. Of course I knew," Tariq said. "He said that if I got caught, I was on my
own, that I should remember that he knew where my mother lived. But the money was too
good to pass up. And winter was coming again."
"How far did you get?" Laila asked.
"Not far," he said and laughed, sounding apologetic, ashamed. "Never even got on the bus.
But I thought I was immune, you know, safe. As though there was some accountant up
there somewhere, a guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear who kept track of these things,
who tallied things up, and he'd look down and say, 'Yes, yes, he can have this, we'll let it go.
He's paid some dues already, this one.'"
It was in the seams, the hashish, and it spilled all over the street when the police took a
knife to the coat.
Tariq laughed again when he said this, a climbing, shaky kind of laugh, and Laila
remembered how he used to laugh like this when they were little, to cloak embarrassment,
to make light of things he'd done that were foolhardy or scandalous.
"He has A limp," Zalmai said. "Is this who I think it is?"
"He was only visiting," Mariam said.
"Shut up, you," Rasheed snapped, raising a finger. He turned back to Laila. "Well, what
do you know? Laili and Majnoon reunited. Just like old times." His face turned stony. "So
you let him in. Here. In my house. You let him in. He was in here with my son."
"You duped me. You lied to me," Laila said, gritting her teeth. "You had that man sit
across from me and... You knew I would leave if I thought he was alive."
"AND YOU DIDN'T LIE TO ME?" Rasheed roared. "You think I didn't figure it out?
About your harami? You take me for a fool, you whore?"
The more Tariq talked, the more Laila dreaded the moment when he would stop. The
silence that would follow, the signal that it was her turn to give account, to provide the why
and how and when, to make official what he surely already knew. She felt a faint nausea
whenever he paused. She averted his eyes. She looked down at his hands, at the coarse,
dark hairs that had sprouted on the back of them in the intervening years.