Amal Unbound(32)

There it was again, that unfamiliar silence. I waited for her to ask me about the estate. About Jawad Sahib and what it was like to live there. Here I was with all the firsthand information she could ever dream of, but instead, the quiet continued to stretch between us while she studied the ground.

I cleared my throat. “How’s Miss Sadia?”

“She’s good!” Hafsa perked up. “But she still goes over our class time.”

“Yeah.” Seema nodded. “Some things don’t change. Especially around here.”

“Well, except for that building, right?” Hafsa said to Seema. She turned to me. “It opens next week. We were all wrong, weren’t we?”

“What building?”

“The one with the green door,” she said. “I was right—Khan Sahib’s family was building it, but it wasn’t a factory. It’s a literacy center.”

So the center Nasreen Baji had bragged about to her friend was the mysterious building we watched go up. And it was in my own village.

“No one’s going to go,” Hafsa said. “They don’t want to touch anything that family is involved with.”

“But it’s free, isn’t it?” I said.

“Nothing with him is free,” Hafsa said. “You of all people know that.”

“Hafsa?” my mother said as she walked into the room. “Your mom just called. She was looking for you.”

“Oops,” she said. “I better go. Get there on time, okay? Farah and I are going to do a dance!”

Before I could respond, she raced out the door.

How quickly her life had moved on.

While I scraped plates and massaged migraines, she practiced dance steps with our classmate Farah. They got to go to school and dream about a future. I knew Hafsa missed me and cared about me, but she got to barrel forward, her life uninterrupted, while my future had fallen completely off its tracks.

Would Farah be Hafsa’s roommate someday?





Chapter 34





Pink, green, and yellow lights illuminated the tent Hafsa’s parents erected behind their home for the mehndi.

I stepped onto the carpeted floor of the tent with my family. My father wandered over to the folding chairs set up outside the tent for the men under the night sky. Rabia and Safa held tight to my kamiz as if I might vanish without warning.

The bride, Hafsa’s eldest sister, Shabnum, sat perched on a cushioned stage in the center of the tent. A yellow veil framed her face, and her hands were already covered with henna patterns. Now the henna artist was swirling intricate designs of flowers and birds onto her feet.

We walked over to sit on the cushions below Shabnum’s stage. I smiled a little at how subdued she seemed. Hafsa and her sisters were not the docile sort, but the bride was doing her best to look the part for the occasion.

Seema picked up a henna cone left out for the guests to use and began swirling it on my hand.

“Are you done?” I asked her after a while. “My hand is aching!”

“Be patient. I have to get the pattern right! You squirm too much.”

“Sorry.” I tried to still myself. The designs on my palms would take hours to dry, but tomorrow the deep brown Seema painted on would transform into a brilliant orange. It would eventually fade away completely, but for a little while, when I was back at Jawad Sahib’s estate, these hands would remain colored with the memory of this night.

A new song started up, and I watched Hafsa and Farah dance with a third girl. It was Sana—Nasreen Baji’s niece. Their braids were woven with marigolds, and they wore matching outfits.

Chatter swirled around me. Gossip about the groom. The dowry.

“You poor dear,” a woman said to me. It was Hira, the butcher’s wife. She settled next to me and tucked her feet under herself. “Everyone is beside themselves about you having to live in the same place as that monster.”

“What’s it like there?” another woman asked. “Drove by the place once, but you can’t even see the roof from the road.”

“It’s those walls he’s got,” my neighbor Balkis interjected. “Walls and bushes to keep everyone far away.”

“Does he have a waterfall in the house?” Hira asked me.

“No, there’s no waterfall,” I said.

“I knew a woman who worked for them years ago. Told me about a waterfall right in their living room.”

“Heard about the gold staircases, too.” Balkis nodded.

“Now, that Nasreen . . .” Hira clucked her tongue. “Came from the village over on the other side of the market but thinks she’s something else now. Doesn’t even bother to see her family anymore.”

“She’s nice,” I interrupted. “She’s been good to me. She really has.”

But they continued their conversation as though I hadn’t spoken. I watched their animated expressions and listened to the theories of Nasreen Baji’s past and the details of the estate.

Seema squeezed my wrist. “Ignore them,” she said. “They’re just gossiping.”

She was right. For these women, my circumstances were a juicy story. One they could whisper about and cluck their tongues over before moving on to other things.

They didn’t have to tiptoe around Jawad Sahib.