A Sister to Honor (30 page)

At first, Afia recoiled. The officers brought the boxes onto the ground floor of the house and set them in the corner, but she could not touch Shahid's things. It felt like touching the dead. The boxes seemed to whisper to her—of Shahid's life, his little notes and his Facebook page and the assignments still due to his classes, the life he was supposed to be leading.

She opened her own boxes, tried to read
Jane Eyre
, to memorize molecular formulae. She sat on the floor with Chloe and played games. Chloe was like Muska when she was little, bouncy and curious. Did Afia know about Dora? Did she think Purple Monkey was a boy or a girl? Did Afia like purple better, or pink? Could she try Afia's glasses? Why did they make the world look all funny?

Over the next few days she took Chloe to the playground, which was sunny and unseasonably warm. She cooked the family a meal of spicy kebabs and minted raita. She took the bus back to Smith to meet with each of her professors and with the dean, who promised her scholarship would continue through the spring, no matter what her family said or did. She picked up the phone to call Moray in Nasirabad, and put it down; she opened a file on Shahid's laptop to write Moray a letter, and after staring at the blinking cursor, clicked it closed. She was not afraid of what her mother would say, she told Coach. She was afraid of what a phone call, or a letter, would do to her mother. Coach thought she meant grief, hurt feelings. She didn't know what a blackened daughter was, how she could wither whatever part of her family she touched.

Gus called once, twice, three times, and when she would not come to the phone he drove to Coach's house. She sat with him outside, on the deck, a public place where no touching would happen. He still walked with crutches. He had dropped out of school for the spring. Maybe in the fall he'd finish. Vet school the next year, if he was lucky. His eyes flicked over her, then moved to the pattern of wind on the lake, moving cakes of ice around like paper boats. She focused on his sweater, one of those Irish cable knits that she used to see in American movies about blond couples falling in love.

“Without me,” she said, “luck will come back to you.”

“Is that what you think you brought me, M'Afia? Bad luck?”

“You must not call me that,” she said. She kept her voice steady by picturing it as a set of molecules that she had to move carefully in a petri dish, gripping the tweezers hard but never too hard. “I have caused you only pain,” she said.

“Hey, you didn't plant a bomb. You didn't mess with my car.”

“But you told the police—”

“That it was possible, yeah. But anything's possible, right? You'd run off. The detective said you'd confessed.” He leaned across the wrought-iron table on the deck. She could smell his specific odor, the tangy scent that filled her nostrils when they'd lain side by side in his wide bed. “Shahid did the number on my brakes, and I get why. Really. I wasn't paying attention. I put you guys at risk. I messed with your whole family.”

She looked at him then. So young, he looked. His face round and full, patchy beard growth around his jawline, freckles framing the short nose.

“My family, you know,” he went on, “it's just my mom, plus my dad who's never around. That's it. I used to envy you. All those uncles you had, all those cousins you e-mailed with. And Shahid. I used to imagine being in a little corner of your family. Then I did things—well, the way we do here, you know, guys and girls. Shahid tried to stop me. I didn't listen, so he did what he did. And then Coach . . .” He exhaled a long breath. He looked out over the lake, the sun shooting it with silver between ice cakes. “She never believed in the team,” he said. “She believed in Shahid. If she comes back to Enright—”

“Gus, you must blame me. Not her. She wanted all for the best. The team, too.”

“Maybe. But I won't play for her anymore. That is, if I can ever play again.”

He set his hand flat on the table. She couldn't help herself. She put her own hand over it. Then she lifted it, bent her head toward the fingers, smelled them, touched her lips to his palm.

“Afia, tell me what you're feeling. Can you feel anything for me—”

She set his hand down. Her own went to her ears. Gus looked shocked. She struggled for the words. “Feelings!” she blurted, louder than she'd meant. “Why does everyone ask me about these feelings? To my family I am dead. And Shahid, he is dead, really dead. There is a—a path. That we follow. I am off that path. No way back. Like—like the bird we saw when we were picking apples. The bird that broke its wing. It sits on the ground, and it will die, because it is not flying, and it is supposed to fly. What does it matter, what that bird feels?”

“Afia, you're not going to die.”

“Please. Stop talking this way.”

“Stop talking about us, you mean.”

She looked at his hands, still on the table. She wanted to lift the other hand, to touch her lips to it. She pushed herself up, opened the sliding door to the house, stepped inside. When she turned around, he was gone.

That night, she opened Shahid's computer. She had helped him with his homework enough that she knew the password,
my1Nasirabad
. There on the desktop were his unfinished papers, his video games, his library of hip-hop and Pashtun songs, the action photos of him leaping for the squash ball, diving to dig it out from the corner. In his goggles he looked like an old-fashioned aviator. That he was cold and dead, under the ground, seemed impossible. A grave in Troy, like the city where Achilles died, also far from home. She should go there, beg his forgiveness. Upstairs, she could hear Coach and Ethan talking softly. Spring break would be over in a few days. They would want her to go back to Smith, to pick up her studies as if the world had not broken into pieces.

She opened Shahid's e-mail. She was spying now, but on what? Could a dead brother have secrets? More than a month ago, he had made a plea to Uncle Omar for funds, that he might go with her as far as Doha. No answer had come. For the first time since her fleeing, she remembered the plan to send her home. “Zardad,” she murmured.

Another e-mail, this time to one of his teammates—Carlos, she wasn't sure which one that was.
I can pay u back by graduation man I swear it
, Shahid had written.
Yknow what its like, family emergency.
The response was the record of a funds transfer, two thousand dollars. Then Shahid's note,
Youre the best man, I got yr back anytime
. Then, sure enough, two tickets, bought at the full rate. Her heart swelled and sank. What Baba must have sacrificed, to send Shahid the funds to ship her home! And this boy Carlos, she would owe him now. She opened the file for Shahid's bank account with the same password—silly brother, not bothering to think of a different one—and discovered another five hundred dollars, what was left from the allowance Uncle Omar sent every month. All wasted now, all gone.

•   •   •

N
ext morning, she told Coach Hayes she was ready to return to Smith. It was a Saturday. Her roommates would be back by now. She could not burden the coach's family any longer.

“You want to go today?” Coach said.

“No!” said Chloe. She grabbed hold of Afia's leg. “I will miss you too much!”

Chloe was a demanding child, Afia thought, crouching down to her. She needed siblings, other small humans with big needs to keep hers in check. “I'll come back and play with you,” she promised. “You will teach me Spanish. Sí?”

Coach was meeting the girls' squash team that morning, she said. It was the only responsibility left to her, at the moment. She wanted to know which starters would be returning in the fall. She'd take Afia to Smith in the afternoon.

When she'd left, Afia went downstairs. She heard Coach's car pull out—then, five minutes later, another car pull in. She glanced out the window of her room but could not see around to the drive. Upstairs, the doorbell sounded, a lackluster buzz. Heavy steps—Ethan's—to the door.

Then his voice. Khalid's. Afia's chest froze. “Hello. Dr. Springer? I am Shahid friend. From Enright University?”

“You're a friend of Shahid's?” Ethan's voice was faint; he was standing at the door, directing his words outside. He was not opening the door to Khalid. “Are you on the team?”

“No, sir, no.” Something like a chuckle, from Khalid. “I am not excellent at squash. Not like my unfortunate friend Shahid. No, I am international student. Very close with Shahid.”

There was a pause; Ethan said something she couldn't hear. She had backed into a corner, in the shadow by the stairwell.

Then Khalid again. “Yes, very sad. I am close with him. And Afia. He always tell me, ‘Take care of Afia.' So now I try. She is here, yes?”

“No,” Ethan said. This was louder. “I don't know where she is.”

“But I am to take care of her. You take her, yes? From the court.”

“How would you know that?”

“Sir, please. I mean no harm. I am friend of Shahid.”

Afia felt the sweat running down between her breasts, under her arms, the back of her neck. She couldn't make out what Ethan said next, something about Northampton, that they'd dropped her in Northampton to go back to school.

Then Khalid: “I see, sir. Thank you, sir. Do you mind I get a drink of water?”

Afia held her breath. But only one set of footfalls went to the kitchen and returned to the front door. Then Ethan's voice: “Keep the bottle. Good luck tracking her down.”

The door shut with a thunk; she heard the click of the lock. A minute later, the car pulled out and rumbled up the hill. Then, from the top of the stairs, Chloe said, “Daddy? Who was that man?”

“Oh, just a student, honey.”

“But Afia's
here
.”

“I know, cutie. But she's tired. We don't want to bother her right now. Come help me water the plants.”

Afia slipped into her tiny bathroom. She lowered the lid onto the toilet and sat on it, her knees hunched to her chest. She could not go back to the dorm. She would only put Patty and Taylor at risk. Nor could she stay here, to endanger Coach's family. She would have to run, as she had run before, far away, until Khalid found her.

“Shahid,” she whispered to herself. “Shahid.” As if she could summon his ghost, to tell her what he would have her do. He had wanted her to go home to Nasirabad, to forget her dreams and forget Gus and marry Zardad. Which was, of course, the sensible thing, the only real choice. Zardad. Marriage.

She planted her feet on the cold floor and sat up.
Zardad.
Shahid had assured her, the night he was killed, that no one in Nasirabad knew about that third photo, the one Khalid had taken, the one that showed Gus's face. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance. If she went back. If she pleaded with Moray. Oh, how she needed her mother, to hold her and scold her, to lash out at her, to beat her if she had to, but to help her in the end, to make her choose the right path. She tiptoed back to her room, around the makeshift bed, to the computer she had repacked and stacked in the corner. Opening Shahid's e-mail again, she clicked on the one-way confirmation for Afia Satar.
Full value of wholly unused ticket
, she read,
may be applied toward purchase of a new ticket price at current fare levels upon payment of the cancel fee
.

She went to the airline's site. The difference, with the fee, was just over six hundred dollars. Too much, too much. Wait. The other ticket, Shahid's round trip to Doha.
Charge USD 300.00 for cancel/refund
. More clicks—
Yes
and
Yes
and she entered the information for Shahid's bank account, and the money flowed back, almost three thousand dollars. Her heart pumped so fast that the beats seemed to run together.

Buses left Northampton every day for New York. She had seen the other girls get on them. Today was Saturday. She chose Tuesday. She filled in the numbers, checked the boxes to agree on the rules, the fees. Her fingers had gone cold as porcelain. A half hour later, she brought the computer upstairs. Coach's husband was doing laundry. Chloe was watching cartoons. Safe, safe and happy.

“Excuse me, Ethan?” she said.

“Afia. I thought you'd gone back to bed.”

His eyes behind his glasses gave nothing away of the morning's encounter. “I have been working on a project. I wonder, might I use your printer?”

He gestured for her to sit at his desk. His smile was guarded. He was Chloe's baba, Afia thought as he left to pull her away from the TV. Ready to do anything, to protect his child. She printed her new ticket, then went to finish packing.

A
s the mulberry trees began to bloom in the spring, Farishta did her best to take up her duties. Six weeks, now, the house had been plunged in grief. The cause was as simple and old as the red dirt of the hills around Nasirabad. A girl had gone rotten, and a boy had lost his golden life. Only these had been her girl, her boy. Birthed between her legs, both of them, from her young first husband, Malook—who had long since faded, in her memory, to a shorter, darker, less even-tempered version of Tofan Satar.

How exultant Malook had been to see his first child, long and honey-colored. Shahid's fat testicles and thumbnail-sized penis had proclaimed success. They had lived in Peshawar, the only couple not part of the sprawling compound in Nasirabad, because Malook was a company major and they had the privilege of military housing. Gray and nondescript, their house had sat in a row of such houses, made safe and therefore privileged by the armed checkpoints at every intersection approaching the neighborhood. Lonely as she was, with Malook gone to the tribal areas three weeks out of every month, the children—Shahid with his restlessness, his thick curling hair; Afia a curious, serious infant—had filled her days. When Malook got leave, they would drive out here, to Nasirabad, where her in-laws would make a fuss over the children. She noticed Tofan especially, even then, the eldest of four boys and a girl, the quietest, with a courtliness that seemed quaint and a laugh that boomed out from the
hujra
. His wife Badrai had been sickly even when Farishta first met her, but solicitous as an older sister. By the time Shahid was big enough to play with their cousins in the courtyard, Badrai's skull beneath her dupatta had gone bald as marble and death was written on her face.

Then the two Punjabis, in uniform, at Farishta's door at dawn one morning in a stinging hot Peshawar summer. An improvised device, in South Waziristan. Five dead, including Malook. Not enough left of his body to bury, though the imam would say the rites and send his soul to paradise. For a time she had moved back home, “home” by then being the fine place her brother Omar had built for their parents and her widowed aunt. What had she felt? A loss, certainly—her husband gone, their life blown away like dust—but she had not known him well. The sweaty couplings in the night; the spurts of anger when she burned the chapatis; the flask of whiskey he kept hidden at the top of the cupboard. At home, she was loved to suffocation, her children whisked from her and taken up by the elders of the household—including Omar, who took a shine to Shahid even then. What a relief it had been, when Badrai, in her illness, managed to travel to Peshawar and extend the offer! To be a second wife. To inherit the husband, the tall, quiet, barrel-chested one with the mustache and the belly laugh. They would be a family again. She and her children would belong to someone.

Gone, now. Like his father, Shahid had given her no body to inter in the plot outside Nasirabad. No one would join her mourning. The men had said the Janazeh prayer, but she had been shut out from that. Shut out, too, by her mother-in-law and Tofan's sister, Gautana, who knew what evil Farishta had set in motion. Shut out, clearly, by Khalid, who had not responded to the messengers they had sent, had not come down from the mountains. And by Tofan, who grieved his adopted son as if Shahid had sprung from his own loins, but who would not come to Farishta's bed, would not taint his sorrow with hers.

The others had their grief pure; hers was adulterated by failure. For it is from the mother that the daughter learns. When a girl heaps shame on her family, it is her mother who has left the door open, who has allowed shame to enter. Why, oh why, had Afia not simply come home? What sort of madness put a gun in a girl's hands? Better the girl should have loaded her pockets with rocks and waded into the river. Instead her son lay cold in a foreign land. Unless it was a trick, a foul trick. When she dreamed of Shahid he was always alive, lost in a canyon or trapped in a cave, calling ever more faintly,
Moray, Moray
.

Her husband slept in the
hujra
. He asked Tayyab to serve him his meals separately. She heard him, outside in the night, wailing. But he had never struck her, never scolded her. He had put her away, as one puts away a favorite cloth that has become irrevocably stained. Many days she wished he would rage at her, a swifter and surer punishment.

•   •   •

T
hen, two days ago, she had seen the autorickshaw draw up to the wall, and the girl alight. Tayyab's third daughter, Panra, the brightest of the lot, sent away six years ago to Omar's compound in Peshawar to attend their mother. Tayyab himself, after all, had been a wedding gift from Omar, who by then could not imagine his sister in a household without a cook. A year, now, since Panra's last visit home. Perhaps they had arranged a marriage, though his daughters' marriages thus far had brought Tayyab no good luck.

“Memsahib,” Tayyab said the next morning, when she was up early—she rose, now, before dawn each day, unable to bear her own wakefulness—“I have disturbing news.”

Tayyab's eyes were failing, milky cataracts inching their way across. Stooped and fussy, he clung to the old ways; you could not lift a tea bag without his coming upon you and shooing you out of the way so he could prepare the whole tray, complete with sweets and napkin. He cared for Farishta and her children with the same intense devotion he gave his own. This time, he drew her back to the courtyard behind the kitchen, even though no one was awake to hear them. He told her that Panra had seen Khalid at Omar's compound, back in the winter. Khalid had not recognized her as she served the tea to him and to Omar. “And so,” Tayyab went on, his hands clasped in front of him as if preparing to genuflect, “she heard the sahib say to him, he would fund this trip, he wanted the thing taken care of and his nephew not distracted.”

Farishta frowned. Khalid was meant to be in the mountains. Yet in her gut she had known he was not there. Something had been afoot months ago, when Tofan had come to her with a face like a tornado, saying Khalid had found a photo, an objectionable photo. “Take me to your daughter,” she said.

Rising from the table in the hut, Panra bowed to her. She was a pockmarked girl with a large nose, but she had always been a hard worker. For her to travel alone from Peshawar to Nasirabad was an act of tremendous daring. She looked exhausted and frightened, like a deer on the chase. “You have come from my brother's home,” Farishta said sternly to her.

“Yes, memsahib.”

“And you heard him in conversation with my stepson, who was going on a trip.”

“Yes, memsahib. To—to
Amreeka
.”

Farishta took in a sharp breath. “Tell me exactly what my brother said. Do not be afraid, child. I will not punish you.”

The girl raised her eyes. They were large, deep blue, long-lashed, and shot through with red. She licked her lips. “He said,” she began, “that a shameless girl was not worth the price.”

“What price?”

“The price of a great career, he said. He counted on Khalid sahib to finish the business. When he finished talking, he was very angry. But Khalid sahib was not angry. He ate an orange in the sunlight. Then the driver took him to the airport.”

Farishta gave Tayyab two thousand rupees, that the girl might take an autorickshaw back to Peshawar when she was ready, and not be molested. He escorted her back to the house. There, at the threshold, she crumpled. Folded slowly over her knees and ankles. Her arms clasped her shins.

Of course. Of
course
. Her brother Omar—who had no children of his own, who would never have anything other than the dancing boys—treasured Shahid's success above all else. Khalid was not in the mountains, refusing their messengers. Khalid was in
Amreeka
. He had killed her only son, he had killed Shahid. And Afia—who was not so spoiled as to be good as dead, no, but to Omar that didn't matter, she was a nuisance and an impediment—had confessed to the crime herself. She had added Khalid's guilt to her own. What a stupid, brave, loving, ridiculous girl! And yet how could she, Farishta, go on now? To see Omar again, to speak to Omar, was out of the question. She could not tell her husband what she had learned. He would fly into a rage. Would beat Tayyab's daughter, would fire Tayyab. Or if he believed this story, it would circle around, again, to Farishta's own feet. For was not Omar her blood, who had no business interfering in the affairs of the Satars?

She felt Tayyab's hand press lightly on the back of her head. She did not look up. After a moment she heard his feet shuffle away across the courtyard—walking carefully, as he always did now, for fear of tripping on a loose tile.

•   •   •

I
t was a new grief now. Strange, how a child could be dead differently. What, in the end, is the difference if the end comes through chance or design, by this or that one's hand? But knowing that Khalid had gone across the world to kill her daughter and had ended up, somehow, causing the death of her son was like losing Shahid all over again. She pressed her lips together, she dared not blurt out her new knowledge, but inside a hot wind raged. For Shahid was dead, and this time it all made sense, terrible sense.

Still, she got Sobia and Muska into their uniforms and off to school. She made up the marketing list for Tayyab. She tended to her mother-in-law, who needed her food crushed into a paste and spat half of it out. And then this morning, a bright and breezy Thursday, when the village women went to gather mulberries, she let her daughters pull her along. It had been more than forty days since she had learned of Shahid's death. To continue mourning was shameful, unseemly. She put away her dark clothes and went out.

From the bowed branches of the trees the mulberries hung like fat worms, some purple and others—the sweeter ones—creamy white. In a bright blue shalwar kameez with giant yellow sunflowers printed on the fine cotton, Farishta held the baskets. The others shucked their sandals and climbed the trees. Their men were all in the fields or at the factory; they couldn't see the dupattas slip from their women's heads and shoulders, couldn't hear the jokes they made. Sobia was one of the first to scramble up, her long, narrow feet gripping the trunk as she swung herself onto a branch. Soon a dozen trees sported women like colorful birds, dropping fistfuls of mulberries into Farishta's baskets. When they returned, they would eat the mulberries fresh, bake them into cakes, dry them to put out, months later, in bright woven bowls alongside bowls of pistachios and dates when someone important came to tea.

Muska ran beneath the trees, catching the berries that rained down accidentally as the women shook them loose. She had turned eleven that winter, just old enough to understand what death meant. She didn't ask, as Shahid had asked when his father was killed, when she would see her brother. Many nights she had crawled into Farishta's bed to clutch at her nightgown and sob. At the same time, on days like this one, in the bright morning with dew wet on the long grass, she forgot tragedy and wanted nothing but to stuff her mouth with sweet berries. She didn't know, yet, about Afia, how Afia was as good as dead to them all. She knew only that her sister was still in
Amreeka
and that she was not to pronounce Afia's name in front of her father or uncles. Sobia was more worrisome. She had heard comments from her classmates, Farishta was sure of it, but she would report nothing. She came home, went to her room, did her homework. She was flinty with her younger sister and her grandmother. When Farishta scolded her, she turned her blue eyes on her mother and said, “You wish to instruct me, Moray?” in a tone that could not be punished but left no doubt as to its meaning. Her anguish was buried deep as the emeralds mined in the Kush. Now she took her basket and climbed to the top of the white mulberry tree, where the leaves hid her and only a dangerous sway in the canopy gave her away.

Farishta lifted her eyes. They were below the village, on a slope that led down to the cotton fields. From here you could just make out the road leading down to the highway and the market stalls lining it. At the top of the hill stood a figure in a royal blue burqa. She sighed. So many were covering completely, now. Even the women climbing the trees, when they went to the market, hid their noses and mouths; her sister-in-law Gautana had said the other day that the burqa was the easiest solution, all in one and no worry about slippage. She wondered who the woman was, why she would stand and watch the mulberry picking and not participate. Something familiar in the posture, the set of the swaddled head on the shoulders. Her heart began beating faster, a stone skipping down a hill.

“Muska, my pet. Can you hold my baskets for a few minutes?”

“I'm catching berries!”

“Catch them in a basket. You'll catch more than with your bare hands.”

Taking the handle, Muska scarcely glanced at her mother; her eyes were all for the juicy strings tumbling from the trees. Farishta set off across the field, crowded with wildflowers, their stems prickly, the ground beneath mounded and pitted from bicycles taking a shortcut to the river. Ahead lay the warren of houses where the farmworkers lived. Behind their walls of mud and hay sat thatched sheds occupied by goats and cows lazily swatting flies, while grooved canals ran waste from the courtyard latrines down to the fields. Disks of dung, slapped onto the courtyard walls, dried in the sun. She still remembered coming here for the first time, how all the villagers had brought her little gifts, embroidered fans and flour sifters. Shahid had jumped from the rickshaw and run to the stream with the other village boys, as if he had lived here all his short life.