prison has a man like Salim, Tariq said. There was always someone who was cunning and
connected, who worked the system and found you things, someone around whom the air
buzzed with both opportunity and danger It was Salim who had sent out Tariq's queries
about his mother, Salim who had sat him down and told him, in a soft, fatherly voice, that
she had died of exposure.
Tariq spent seven years in the Pakistani prison. "I got off easy," he said. "I was lucky. The
judge sitting on my case, it turned out, had a brother who'd married an Afghan woman.
Maybe he showed mercy. I don't know."
When Tariq's sentence was up, early in the winter of 2000, Salim gave him his brother's
address and phone number. The brother's name was Sayeed.
"He said Sayeed owned a small hotel in Murree," Tariq said. "Twenty rooms and a lounge,
a little place to cater to tourists. He said tell him I sent you."
Tariq had liked Murree as soon as he'd stepped off the bus: the snow laden pines; the cold,
crisp air; the shuttered wooden cottages, smoke curling up from chimneys.
Here was a place, Tariq had thought, knocking on Sayeed's door, a place not only worlds
removed from the wretchedness he'd known but one that made even the notion of hardship
and sorrow somehow obscene, unimaginable.
"I said to myself, here is a place where a man can get on."
Tariq was hired as a janitor and handyman. He did well, he said, during the one month
trial period, at half pay, that Sayeed granted him. As Tariq spoke, Laila saw Sayeed, whom
she imagined narrow eyed and ruddy faced, standing at the reception office window
watching Tariq chop wood and shovel snow off the driveway. She saw him stooping over
Tariq's legs, observing, as Tariq lay beneath the sink fixing a leaky pipe. She pictured him
checking the register for missing cash.
Tariq's shack was beside the cook's little bungalow, he said. The cook was a matronly old
widow named Adiba. Both shacks were detached from the hotel itself, separated from the
main building by a scattering of almond trees, a park bench, and a pyramid shaped stone
fountain that, in the summer, gurgled water all day. Laila pictured Tariq in his shack, sitting
up in bed, watching the leafy world outside his window.
At the end of the grace period, Sayeed raised Tariq's pay to full, told him his lunches were
free, gave him a wool coat, and fitted him for a new leg. Tariq said he'd wept at the man's
kindness.
With his first month's full salary in his pocket, Tariq had gone to town and bought Alyona.
"Her fur is perfectly white," Tariq said, smiling. "Some mornings, when it's snowed all
night, you look out the window and all you see of her is two eyes and a muzzle."
Laila nodded Another silence ensued Upstairs, Zalmai had begun bouncing his ball again