Tariq wouldn't say much about his years in prison save that he'd learned to speak Urdu
there. When Laila asked, he gave an impatient shake of his head. In this gesture, Laila saw
rusty bars and unwashed bodies, violent men and crowded halls, and ceilings rotting with
moldy deposits. She read in his face that it had been a place of abasement, of degradation
and despair.
Tariq said his mother tried to visit him after his arrest.
"Three times she came. But I never got to see her," he said.
He wrote her a letter, and a few more after that, even though he doubted that she would
receive them.
"And I wrote you."
"You did?"
"Oh, volumes," he said. "Your friend Rumi would have envied my production." Then he
laughed again, uproariously this time, as though he was both startled at his own boldness
and embarrassed by what he had let on.
Zalmai began bawling upstairs.
"Just like old times, then," Rasheed said. "The two of you. I suppose you let him see your
face."
"She did," said Zalmai. Then, to Laila, "You did, Mammy. I saw you."
"Your son doesn't care for me much," Tariq said when Laila returned downstairs.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's not that. He just...Don't mind him." Then quickly she changed
the subject because it made her feel perverse and guilty to feel that about Zalmai, who was
a child, a little boy who loved his father, whose instinctive aversion to this stranger was
understandable and legitimate.
And I wrote you.
Volumes. Volumes.
"How long have you been in Murree?"
"Less than a year," Tariq said He befriended an older man in prison, he said, a fellow
named Salim, a Pakistani, a former field hockey player who had been in and out of prison
for years and who was serving ten years for stabbing an undercover policeman. Every