Tilo lay down and Khadija covered her with a quilt. She reached out and held Khadija’s hand under the quilt. In the years that followed, they would become fast friends. Tilo’s eyes closed. The murmur of women’s voices saying things she couldn’t understand was like balm on raw skin.
She was still asleep when Musa came. He sat cross-legged next to her, looking down at her sleeping face for a long time, wishing he could wake her up to another, better world. He knew it would be a long time before he saw her again. And then only if they were lucky.
There wasn’t much time. He had to leave while the tide was high and the streets still belonged to the people. He woke her as gently as he could.
“Babajaana. Wake up.”
She opened her eyes and pulled him down next to her. For a long time there was nothing to say. Absolutely nothing.
“I’ve just come from my own funeral. I gave myself a twenty-one-gun salute,” Musa said.
And then in a voice that would not rise above a whisper because each time it did it broke under the weight of what it was trying to say, Tilo told him what had happened. She forgot nothing. Not a single thing. Not a sound. Not a feeling. Not a word that had or had not been said.
Musa kissed her head.
“They don’t know what they’ve done. They really have no idea.”
And then it was time for him to leave.
“Babajaana, listen carefully. When you go back to Delhi you must not on any account stay alone. It’s too dangerous. Stay with friends…maybe Naga. You’ll hate me for saying this—but either get married or go to your mother. You need cover. For a while at least. Until we deal with Otter. We’ll win this war, and then we’ll be together, you and I. I’ll wear a hijab—although you look lovely in this one—and you can take up arms. OK?”
“OK.”
Of course it didn’t work out that way.
Before Musa left he gave Tilo a sealed envelope.
“Don’t open it now. Khuda Hafiz.”
It would be two years before she saw him again.
—
The sun had not yet set when Khadija and Tilo went to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Commander Gulrez’s grave stood out from the others. A small bamboo framework had been erected over it. It was decorated with strings of silver and gold tinsel and a green flag. A temporary shrine to a beloved freedom fighter who had given his todays for his people’s tomorrows. A man with tears streaming down his face looked at it from a distance.
“He’s an ex-militant,” Khadija said, under her breath. “He was in jail for years. Poor man, he’s crying for the wrong person.”
“Maybe not,” Tilo said. “The whole world should weep for Gul-kak.”
They scattered rose petals on Gul-kak’s grave and lit a candle. Khadija found the graves of Arifa and Miss Jebeen the First, and did the same for them. She read the inscription on Miss Jebeen’s tombstone out to Tilo:
MISS JEBEEN
2 January 1992–22 December 1995
Beloved d/o Arifa and Musa Yeswi
And the almost-hidden one below it:
Akh daleela wann
Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi
Na aes soh kunni junglas manz roazaan
Khadija translated it for Tilo, but neither of them understood what it really meant.
The last lines of the Mandelstam poem she had read with Musa (and wished she hadn’t) floated back unbidden into Tilo’s brain.
Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
They returned to Ahdoos. Khadija would not leave until she saw Tilo back to her room. When Khadija had gone, Tilo called Naga to say she was back and that she was going to bed. For no reason she knew, she said a small prayer (to no god she knew) before opening the envelope Musa had given her.
It contained a doctor’s prescription for eardrops and a photograph of Gul-kak. He was in a khaki shirt, combat fatigues and Musa’s Asal boot, smiling into the camera. He had a handsome leather ammunition belt slung across both his shoulders, and a pistol holster at his hip. He was armed to the teeth. In each leather bullet loop there was a green chili. Sheathed in his pistol holster was a juicy, fresh-leaved, white radish.
On the back of the photograph Musa had written: Our darling Commander Gulrez.
In the middle of the night Tilo knocked on Naga’s door. He opened it and put his arm around her. They spent the night together on a purely secular basis.
TILO HAD BEEN CARELESS.
She returned from the Valley of death carrying a little life.
She and Naga had been married for two months when she discovered that she was pregnant. Their marriage had not been what was called “consummated” yet. So there was no doubt in her mind about who the father of the child was. She considered going through with it. Why not? Gulrez if it was a boy. Jebeen if it was a girl. She couldn’t see herself as a mother any more than she could see herself as a bride—although she had been a bride. She had done that and survived. So why not this?
The decision she eventually took had nothing to do with her feelings for Naga or her love for Musa. It came from a more primal place. She worried that the little human she produced would have to negotiate the same ocean full of strange and dangerous fish that she had had to in her relationship with her mother. She did not trust that she would be a better parent than Maryam Ipe. Her clear-eyed assessment of herself was that she’d be a far worse one. She did not wish to inflict herself on a child. And she did not wish to inflict a replication of herself on the world.
Money was a problem. She had a little, but not much. She had been fired from her job for poor attendance, and hadn’t got another one. She didn’t want to ask Naga for any. So she went to a government hospital.
The waiting room was full of distraught women who had been thrown out of their homes by their husbands for not being able to conceive. They were there to have fertility tests. When the women found out that Tilo was there for what was called MTP—Medical Termination of Pregnancy—they could not hide their hostility and disgust. The doctors too were disapproving. She listened to their lectures impassively. When she made it clear that she would not change her mind, they said they could not give her general anesthetic unless there was somebody with her to sign the consent form, preferably the father of the child. She told them to do it without anesthetic. She passed out with the pain and woke in the general ward. Someone else was with her in the bed. A child, with a kidney disorder, screaming in pain. There was more than one patient in every bed. There were patients on the floor, most of the visitors and family members who were crowded around them looked just as ill. Harried doctors and nurses picked their way through the chaos. It was like a wartime ward. Except that in Delhi there was no war other than the usual one—the war of the rich against the poor.
Tilo got up and stumbled out of the ward. She lost her way in the filthy hospital corridors that were packed with sick and dying people. On the ground floor she asked a small man with biceps that seemed to belong to someone else whether he could show her the way out. The exit he pointed to led her to the back of the hospital. To the mortuary, and beyond it, to a derelict Muslim graveyard that seemed to have fallen into disuse.
Flying foxes hung from the branches of huge, old trees, like limp black flags from an old protest. There was nobody around. Tilo sat on a broken grave, trying to orient herself.
A thin, bald man in a scarlet waiter’s coat clanked in on an old bicycle. He had a small bunch of marigolds clamped to the back seat of his cycle. He made his way to one of the graves with the flowers and a duster. After dusting it, he placed the flowers on it, stood in silence for a moment and then hurried away.
Tilo walked over to the grave. It was the only one, as far as she could tell, whose tombstone was inscribed in English. It was the grave of Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam, the belly dancer from Romania who had died of a broken heart.