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,
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