She would not let Younis out of the house alone so Suleiman went to get the eggs and borrow teacups while the men stared at her. She could not fix her hair while they watched so she kept her hands at her side, folding her fingers. Her shawl was very far away. They asked questions that had nothing to do with the bomber. What was a woman from a family like hers, even if it was only a Gujjar family, doing with a man like him? He could not even walk. What else could he not do? How had he managed to have three children? Where was the third? Oh yes, they had heard. And they were very sorry, but not as sorry as they were to find her with a man like him. It was only a girl, after all, and she still had her son. A very fine boy indeed. He clearly took after her. But why only one son? She was still young or — had her husband not noticed? Did he need them to show him? They delivered their threats to her chest and neck and back again to her chest, grinning, while Younis seethed and Jumanah howled. She had slept in a kameez too thin because it was so, so hot and the rain was coming yet it did not come.

Suleiman returned and she made breakfast.

While they ate the buffaloes lowed in pain, their udders swelling like her shame, but she did not dare step outside to relieve them. The family of four sat in a straight line on the dirt floor — Younis, Jumanah, Maryam, and Suleiman — watching the policemen sit crosslegged on their rope bed with their boots on. They dug those boots deep into the bedding and into the weave of the rope. When the meal was finally finished, the men stood up, plunged their hands in the drinking water in the clay pot, and, still standing inside the hut, pissed against the curtain. “Remember, we will find him.” Then they smashed the borrowed teacups. Then they left.

She scrubbed clean each thread of the curtain and each string of the bed till her knuckles bled and when she put them to her lips the salt was soothing, she wanted no one to disturb her, no one at all.

Now, as she watched her horses disappear deep into the forest, she was glad Ghafoor was waiting for her inside. He would not stand by passively while policemen destroyed her home.


The time he went away, when he left her the red cloth, was a few days after the villa of the head inspector of the forest department had been set ablaze. It was quite possible that this was when the legend of Ghafoor had first begun to take shape, though it was equally possible that it had always been taking shape, from the very first time she saw him, but she never noticed, because she had been too busy watching his fingers play the flute and her taste buds.

The inspector had fined them for grazing on prohibited land, and this time, it was not about a sheep nibbling two stalks of a ginger plant, but an entire flock ripping apart an entire field. It was a lie. The field had been rotten to begin with, and they had been nowhere near it. (The field had been rotten because the land was easily destroyed in the floods the previous year. The land was easily destroyed because it had no trees. It had no trees because the same inspector grew fat each time the forest was torn down. There was always a beginning, hard as it was to keep track of sometimes.) As punishment, the herders were told to pay four thousand rupees, as well as a weekly supply of milk, curd, butter, and ghee for an indefinite period of time. Sugar upon demand.

There were ways of registering resentment.

The night the villa burned, the inspector had been in the kitchen in the front of the house, drinking whiskey. The fire had started at the back, in his bedroom. The wall was made of wood; a walnut tree knocked against the wall. His wife was in the bedroom, his children in the room next to theirs. By the time the fire reached the kitchen, the inspector was intoxicated, though not enough to forget about himself. He tumbled out the kitchen window, drunken head first, and only later, remembered his family. He yelled at his servants — who were not in their quarters; those questions would come later — to go back inside the house to save them. The servants were able to retrieve the children but his wife was lost in a fire hotter than hell, and they would endure the hell on earth the inspector would put them through rather than risk the one in the bedroom.

A crow feather. And then the cloth.

Not one of the servants made to endure the beatings, kicks to the head, or severed pay, dared give Ghafoor away. He was as dependable as a stone come loose from a glacier. What he might do would be worse than anything they suffered now.

She was not proud of him for doing it. The inspector’s children were sent to a city hospital and their burns were crippling. The girl especially, who would marry her now? And without even a mother. The poor woman had played no part in the fine, neither the one imposed on the herders, nor the one imposed on herself, each time she opened her legs for that man whose whiskey tasted of their sweat.

Perhaps it had not been Ghafoor, she told herself, ignoring the rumors spreading through the valley faster than the fire had burned the wife. Faster, even, than Genghis Khan had burned 10,000 villages. From the ashes of the dead, she reminded herself, the King of the Universe had gifted the world its first postal service. Without that gift, she might not have survived her marriage.


He was happy for her when she got married.

He sang for her on her wedding day, the same song about Prince Saiful Maluk and Princess Badar Jamal he had sung before, outside her highland shrine. He suspected she was trying not to listen. She was angry he had not bid for her hand. Many men had come forward to offer their best cattle. Not he. Though his success as a merchant continued to grow, she had been given to Suleiman instead. Suleiman’s family gifted hers almost their entire herd, and when the gift was accepted, members of the tribe had gifted his family some of their cattle. In this way, Maryam was made up for, in part.

He had brought her a wedding gift, that, he could see now, as he waited inside her hut, was nowhere. The two carpets made by women in Tashkent: they had hung on a wall, or so he thought. Would that space there not make a good place? He looked closely above the rope bed, which was unusually disheveled, he thought, but saw no carpets.

The hut was not too clean and not too comfortable. A yurt was lavish and beautifully lit. Kazakh herders were far better off than the Gujjars of Kaghan Valley, and a small part of him regretted coming down here at all. A yurt was sacred, and, after three summers living in one, he decided this was as it should be. It ought to be a replica of the endless hemisphere of the sky. No boots should be allowed to stamp their will inside. No broken teacups should litter the floor. No clay pot should lie empty. Why was there no drinking water here? These walls were not thighs, the smoke hole was an evil eye, and there was no lattice frame, no womb.

The similarities he had found to exist between the Turkic nomads of the steppe and his own tribe suddenly began to fade. It was true they both lived according to the cycles of nature, carrying goods on their backs, sharing their assets, welcoming guests, and driving their herds from one pasture to the next so a field was never overgrazed. But if what he saw in the steppe was abundance in spite of hardship, what he saw here was ruin because of it. Did Maryam still cleanse her home with juniper branches, or had even she given up keeping this ritual alive? He could not imagine a festival taking place here anymore. He was suddenly glad for the woman beneath whom he could lie each night, the woman with the round white arms, who was waiting for him high up the Oxus River and deep in the steppe.

He had to remind himself that he had been happier for Maryam when she got married than when he did. He had to remind himself that he was here now, in the midst of this wretchedness, for a reason. He needed a plan. He believed himself close to finding it.


She was happy for him when he got rich.

He had not bid for her hand, though he could have afforded to. Instead, Suleiman’s family had placed the highest bid, and the marriage suited both their families.

In recent years, her family had increasingly succumbed to the pressure to settle more, and move less. Though the eye of the state could watch them more closely now, they had been left with little choice. They could not afford to keep ducking the eye. Living solely on cattle rearing was becoming a curse, given all the dying indigenous breeds and the restrictions on grazing in a diminishing forest. So they bought small plots of land and tried to be cultivators.

During her lifetime, her mother had vehemently opposed the change. You can harness a horse, but not a Gujjar! She watched in fury as Maryam’s brother first planted instead of herded, then kicked his ice-encrusted plot, abandoning it for work at a mine. While the contractor pocketed his pay, he took to drink. Others in her family, however, proved more successful. They became traders and merchants, or joined the army. A few, like her brother’s friend Ghafoor, even traveled the world and came home rich. They were welcomed in big shops in big towns. They wore good clothes; they owned good guns. And every now and then, though very rarely, if one went too far, he was asked to leave, and if he returned, the others looked away for as long as they could, without mentioning the crime, without mentioning the legend.

Her husband’s family, on the other hand, had refused to change, a fact which won them immediate favor with her mother. They were herders and always would be. Only with tradition came pride and dignity. Only with seasons and stars, sturdy animals, and fresh spring grass, came peace. They did not own good clothes and avoided even bad guns. But this did not mean they could not benefit from the protection of those who, like Maryam’s more cunning relatives, could knock on the front door of the forest inspector’s new house in a crisp white shirt, carrying silver spoons for his very new wife.