Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Farah Ali’s novel The River, The Town.  Spanning over thirty years, Ali’s novel tells the story of a family in Pakistan reckoning with both interpersonal struggles and environmental challenges. As Munib Khan wrote in World Literature Today, “[I]n Ali’s constructed universe, nature is not some medieval force, mercurial and playing with the destinies of characters arbitrarily. Instead, we have the clear impulses of neoliberalism using up resources, encroaching on land, waging war on the poor.”

The Mural

Two times a week, a bus goes from the Town into the City. When someone wants to move out of here, they take this bus. There is a lot of interest in those who leave. People ask their relatives for updates: “How are they doing? Has Rashid (or Taha or Ahmed or whoever) found work yet? Is little Neher enjoying her new school? How many bedrooms does their new home have?” Almost every time the update is, “You know how it is over there. I’ve explained to Rashid to take what he can get, but he’s being a bit stubborn.” Here, the relative adds an indulgent, worried chuckle. “Says he’s an engineer, won’t settle, etc. etc. Oh, how many bedrooms? Well, right now they’re in one room in some area next to a railway line, but they’ve got their eye on a smart little apartment.” A month later we hear from the relative, “Rashid is a technician at the electric company, goes on one of those trucks all over the city if there’s a problem in the lines. No, the apartment was too far, they are staying in that room for now. No, they are not coming back.”

We also hear other things, such as how the City people feel about us constantly moving into their land, taking up their water, changing the shape of their place with our shacks and grubby children. We hear that Neher’s parents are changing her name to Nargis because nobody in her school has a name which means little stream. Nobody in all of the big City is called anything like that.     

~

The math teacher has decided to teach us a new subject: Purana Gaon. Purana Gaon is a village only thirteen kilometers away. There is no textbook for this course. Once a week, toward the end of the lesson, our teacher puts away the math textbook and takes out a different one. This new book is from the country’s tourism board, he tells us. He holds it up for all of us to see: glossy photographs of simple streets, lines of trees, sun-browned rustic faces of children and the elderly smiling wisely and shyly into the camera. He reads out lists of facts and short passages. “There is much to be discovered and admired about Purana Gaon. Fresh fruit, fresh air, a return to family values, things that today’s young people are greatly deprived of.” 

A student raises his hand. “My uncle says there’s no clean water there anymore.”

The teacher, who is from the City, refers to his notebook and says, “Your uncle will be happy to know about the progress the government has made drilling wells in the village.”

“That’s a lie, my uncle says.”

The teacher purses his lips thoughtfully, then says in the tone of a friendly advisor, “Would it really be so much worse for your people to move out of here? I mean, this Town is falling apart, isn’t it? You should all just leave and go to the villages, the place of your parents’ parents.”

Aab, the girl Juman thinks likes him, is moving to the City. Two of her little cousins died from diarrhea and now nobody in her family wants to stay in the Town. Not her parents, uncles and aunts, not her grandmother from her father’s side or her grandmother’s brother. “Where will you live?” one of her friends asks her at break time. Juman stays on the fringe, within earshot.

Aab shrugs. “Maybe a flat.”

Within two weeks, the girl and her family pack up their clothes and their kitchen, go to the bus depot, and leave. A few days after Aab moves away, Juman says he is feeling too sad to go to school. So we skip our classes and go to the girl’s big, empty house. The main gate is locked; we climb over the wall and land on drying grass and earth. We have never been here before. We go around, peeking through windowpanes. 

“I feel broken up inside,” Juman says.

“You hardly knew her.” Kawsar leans down and rips up a handful of half-dead weeds.

“She let me kiss her.”

“Liar! When?” I try a door handle but it is locked.

“Behind Chacha Ameer’s shop, one morning before school.”

“Hard to believe a girl would let you kiss her. I mean, look at you. All ribs, no muscles.” Kawsar snorts and ducks when Juman throws a stick at him.

“I told her I loved her and she said okay I could kiss her, she was leaving anyway.”

Kawsar cups his hands with his eyes, presses his forehead against a window. His voice, when he speaks, is muffled. “My father sometimes says we should get out of here. But when he says it to Dadi she says she’s never leaving, and then he says he’s never leaving her, because she is his mother and he could never leave his mother.” “Does your mother want to move?” I ask.

“I don’t know. She doesn’t speak about it.”

“I am definitely going,” Juman says. “As soon as school is finished. Print out my CV, get a good job in the City, leave this garbage life behind. Become manager, drive my own car. A Pajero.”

“A CV. What will you put in it: I touched a girl?” I laugh.

“Shut up. Better than what you’ll write in yours: I have wet dreams.”

I shove Juman and he stumbles. 

“I’m ahead of you, friend,” he says. “Saving good money from my work at that clothes shop.”

Kawsar wets his finger with his spit and rubs away dust from a pane of glass. “My brother caught a cricket the other day and ate it.”

“I’ve never eaten a cricket.”

That night for dinner my mother makes an oily saalan of onions and beans. For many days after that we eat weak onion saalan flavored with salt and red chili powder. I wonder when my father will get another job. He doesn’t seem to want to. My mother has made him go out every day since the pharmacy burned down. My father sprinkles talcum powder on the sweat stains in the armpits of his thin, old shirt, brushes his hair with a wet comb, and sets off on foot. Then he comes back by late afternoon, takes off his shoes, changes into his old shalwar qameez, and turns on the news. As the days go by, the food in my house appears stranger and stranger. Tiny, dark brown particles stuck to potato skins or onion peelings mixed with oil and flour. I chew it slowly and taste wood. When I go to bed, it is on a stomach that has an uncomfortable fullness to it, and aches. I wonder if Kawsar’s brother was surprised when he bit into that cricket. 

But we continue to grow, the girls and boys in my school. Maybe our bones have adapted quickly to sand and wood, maybe our stomachs have shrunk to the sizes of our thumbs. My school pants stop above my ankles. I don’t feel too embarrassed, though, because I see that Kawsar’s pants are too big for him. Almost all the girls in my class seem to fill out their old uniforms. I want to see how tight they are but the girls have started wrapping their dupattas around themselves. Sitting at the back of the class, heavy-headed and too warm, I slide into daydreams. 

We get a new Urdu teacher. She is fresh from the City, therefore excited and optimistic. She asks us to analyze a poem about forbearance. She asks us to write an essay on the virtue of abstaining from too much food and water. We read a story about a learned man from centuries ago who spent two days on this bit of land that is our Town and declared it was a blessed land, a place for special people. She brings her TV and VCR to school in her car all the way from her home and for the next five days we watch short videos on the topics of true happiness in the face of trials. Then, one afternoon, the fans in the classroom stop moving; the power has gone out. We find it harder and harder to move our pens over paper and our eyeballs over text. We become hot and thirsty. We become tired of studying the same subject. One by one we fall asleep, or maybe only I do.

My mother has started making loud sounds at home. She sighs and moans as she dusts; when she is in the kitchen, she mutters. She walks slowly and holds her hips though she is not an old woman. My father keeps his eyes down or in front of him, never straight at her, not even when she is addressing him. The color of his face does not change, the slow movements of his jaws as he chews remain the same. I stay out later and later but no matter what time I come home my mother is there, waiting for me with the light turned off. She yells out words as I rush to my room. Liar, thief, shit thief, bastard liar. I stop going home after school. I go to Chacha Ameer’s shop where, once every few days, I manage to convince him to give me an old packet of chips.

I meet my friends at Darya Park one day, after Juman is done at the clothes shop. There was a poster with a photograph of this park in the pharmacy that was set on fire. In the picture, the trees were a bright green, the sky a wonderful blue, the grass laid out like a carpet. The park we go to contains the same three things—grass, trees, sky—but they are all shades of yellow. It is how my friends and I have always known it. Only the water in the stream has changed a little in front of us. It has gone down by a few inches, revealing mud clinging to rocks. We take off our shoes, roll up the legs of our pants, and go down the short slope. The mixture of soil and water comes up to a little above our ankles. We curl and uncurl our toes and drag our feet through the ooze. Kawsar begins to walk toward a small puddle in the drying stream. He pulls his T-shirt over his head and flings it onto the bank on our right. When he reaches the puddle, he gets down on his hands and knees and lies down in the water, face to one side. 

“Have you gone crazy?” Juman laughs.

“Get up, you look stupid,” I say.

Kawsar raises himself on one elbow, scoops water with one hand into his mouth. 

“You’ll get sick.”

“Try it. It’s not that bad.” Kawsar’s grin shows through the mud on his face.

Juman tenses up. Then he tears off his shirt and, with a wild laugh, jumps into the puddle. “Come on, Baadal!” he shouts.

It has been three weeks since my mother has allowed me to take a bath. Slowly, I kneel next to my friends. The coolness of the water spreads over and into my clothes, across my stomach and chest and down my legs. I touch the water with my tongue; the mud is gritty, like I remember it.

I get home a little after midnight. My mother is not there. I enter my room, switch on the light, and see my schoolbooks on the floor, torn in half along their spines. I lock my door. From my bag, I pull out other books, the ones she missed, and, one by one, render them into halves of themselves. It is easy; they are all old, used several times over, the paper giving way easily. I turn out the light and lay on my bed, digging my fingernails into my arms until I fall asleep.

My father has got a job. This is how he tells us he found it: “I went to a shoe seller, I sat on the floor, and I cried. The shoe seller said, you can help me with my accounts. And I said, thank you.” 

He brings us two pairs of shoes from the shop, one for my mother and one for me. They are imperfect; one pair has faulty soles and the other has misaligned shoelace holes. That’s why he was able to get them for a lot less than their original price. I give Kawsar my old shoes and he puts them on without any questions, throwing away his own broken ones whose soles had begun to flap when he walked. He is very careful with his new shoes; whenever we are in the shade, he takes them off and walks barefoot. 

Our school principal told us today that we have received funding from the City for a special Town project: everyone from class 10 and above has to participate in the creation of a mural. We are to paint the wall across from the school, on the other side of the main road. The principal read from a paper in his hand. “You are to make pictures of butterflies, rainbows, trees, ponds, fish in ponds. Happy things.”

The main road is wide but crossing it is easy because there are not many cars at this time of the morning. We carry buckets of paint and a large brush each. Our teacher makes groups of us and tells us what to do. “You paint pink flowers, the size of your palms. You make a tree; make sure the trunk is brown and the leaves are green.” He hands each group a piece of paper with a picture on it. The teacher moves down the line to where Juman, Kawsar, and I are waiting. “You have to paint a stream that will flow along the last third of the wall, all the way from one end to the other.” In addition to a sheet of paper, he gives us two trays. “For when you need to mix.” He moves on and I hear him say, from group to group, “Fish. Spray of water. Green grass.”

We look at the paper in my hands. It has a single photograph of a wide stream, with flecks of white mixed up with gray. It looks like a living body of water, nothing like the sluggish one in Darya Park. Juman whistles and says, “This isn’t an intestine.”

“Do we have enough for all that?” Kawsar asks. We examine the cans of paint given to us; dark blue, black, white. They seem very measured and precise and well thought-out. Hesitantly, we dip our brushes into the colors and move the bristles over the wall. After a few minutes Juman empties a little blue and a little white on one of the trays. We spend all morning painting the stream. When the teacher tells us that we are done we rise stiffly, surprised by how sweaty our faces and how cramped our fingers are. 

We paint for three days in a row. We go to school, we leave our bags in our classrooms, we cross the road and make our stream, our controlled sunshine, our imaginary beasts and healthy cows, our insects and plants. On the fourth day we start to settle down by the wall when the teacher on duty starts to shout. “Kasrat! Kasrat!” I look up to see a boy standing in the middle of the road. What is he waiting for? I wonder dully, my mind busy on getting the correct combination of colors to get a nice gray for a section of the stream. Kasrat doesn’t look back at us. The teacher starts to walk toward him at the same time that a van appears around a corner and comes down the road. The teacher is now running; the van swerves into another lane but Kasrat is fast; he gets his legs struck. We are sent home early. 

Two days later we resume painting the mural. News flows up and down the line: Kasrat has fractures in both legs; what he really wanted to do was die; he was tired of being hot and hungry. His parents are trying to arrange a transfer to a City hospital. They really should have been careful when naming him Kasrat, which means abundance. 

By the end of the month we finish the mural. It is colorful and busy. We admire each other’s skills and shyly admit that our own work isn’t too bad. The school principal takes photographs of the wall and of us with a camera lent to him by the same group that has funded this whole project. 

“They will put it in the City’s newspaper,” he tells us. 

Kawsar tells me he had a vision a few days ago. In his vision he saw a white shirt with crisscrossing black stripes on the front and back. He says the shirt is at the used clothes shop and he is going to go get it, he’s got enough money for it. I look at Kawsar’s triangular face and his eyes which appear overlarge in it. We go to the shop together. It is the same one where Juman is working. I don’t see him there but there are too many other things inside to think about that. The shop is a room with three tables in the middle and a few shelves along the walls. On one table there is a jumble of T-shirts, pants, and shalwar qameez. This is the men’s section. Next to it is ladies’ clothing; more colorful, longer. The shelves have more items, boxes with labels written on them in black marker: child 2–4, or child/boy 6–8, etc. Some say shoes. One box reads ties/shoelaces. Kawsar is already busy holding T-shirts up in the fluorescent light. They are white with blue stripes.

“Is that the one you saw?” I ask. 

“No, the stripes are wrong.”

I leave him to his hunt and hold up a jacket. When I see a shirt similar to the one Kawsar thinks he had a vision of, I pick it up for him to see. I am trying on a pair of blue shoes when I hear him shout, “I found it!” He is holding a black shirt with the pattern he described. 

“That is some luck,” I say. From the corner of my eye I see the store clerk raise his head from behind his table. 

Kawsar holds the creased shirt carefully. “I knew I would find it.” “I’m happy for you, friend.” He smiles brightly and goes to pay.

Kawsar wears that shirt every day, even on the hottest days. I try to stay at home for dinner so I can save some part of it to take to him. Weeks go by and he doesn’t mention another vision, so I think his mind has stopped going away because there is a little more food in his body. But one day he says to me and Juman that behind the tire shop is a rusting tin box, and in the box is a puppy, and we follow him in his graying white shirt with the black stripes to where the tires make a rubber labyrinth, and when he rushes ahead then falls into a crouch, we run to him and find him holding a puppy.

~

In July everything in the Town settles into an uneasy stillness. Brown houses sit heavily upon the earth. People walk slower, conserving energy. When we walk, our shirts quickly become dark with our sweat. We stay silent; if we open our mouths they become filled with wool-like thirst. Then, in two days, two children die of dysentery, and these were children of people who live in the bigger houses with painted bricks, so news of their deaths goes around the Town very quickly. Other things we hear: the father from one set of the parents screams at the doctor for killing his child. Then he walks into the school and bellows at the child’s teacher. The teacher does not fight back, does not wipe away the father’s spittle that has landed on his face. When the father is done, the teacher quietly hands him the child’s half-full water bottle. At home the father empties all of it into his mouth and hugs it as he curls up in bed. He falls sick, refuses treatment, and dies. 

The principal shuts down the school, walks to the river in the park, and settles down on a bedsheet with prayer beads in one hand. His wife waits until nightfall for him to come back home, and when he doesn’t, she goes down to talk to him. He tells her he is going to stay by the river for a while, maybe a week or a month. His wife said she doesn’t understand, and why is he not wearing his nicer clothes? Why is he in a shirt with a torn collar and pants with holes in the knees? He explains to her gently that there has been so much death in the Town because people are not being honest with themselves about their sins. His wife loses the color in her face, looks at her husband, wide-eyed, and croaks, “You have gone crazy.” She goes away, angry and crying. Our principal stays on his bedsheet.

People start visiting him. Some think he looks more translucent and pure; others, like his wife, think he ought to be forcefully carried home. Those who believe in him become a larger group than those who don’t. I join them one day. 

“This is a bad time again,” he says to us, raising his voice a little. 

It is thin, like his hair, which now touches his earlobes. 

Some in the crowd moan and shake their heads in agreement.

“This is because among us all we have accumulated a lot of wrong. A great deal of wrong. Until that is properly atoned for, we are not going to have water from above or below.” “That is the truth!” someone yells.

“We must give up lying.”

“We must stop lying,” the people echo.

“And cheating.”

“No cheating.” 

“And stealing.”

“No more!” 

“And lusting.” 

“Never.”

“We need to do some purification,” the principal says. “And that can only be done if we spend some time by the river, reflecting, away from our usual habits of wanting, always wanting.”

The tire shop owner shuts down his failing business and sets up camp by the river. Then a grandmother leaves her son’s house and joins him; she tells her family to give away her bed. Two sisters walk out of their tin-roofed shack while their aunt tries to follow them up the street, throwing pebbles at them and yelling for them to come back. In another part of Town, a man waits for his brother to leave the house for a smoke and a drink, then locks the door. When the brother hammers on the door, the man tells him he’ll only let him back if he cures himself by the water. Juman says to us, with a laugh, that he wishes his father would walk all the way into the river and drown. 

I find out that my mother also has ideas about who should go there. One evening, she says to no one in particular, “That woman Meena means to cause trouble. She has no reason to go on staying in that house, trapping strange men. She should pack up her bags and 

live in the park like those other crazy people.” 

I ask, “Who is Meena?” 

She ignores me and turns to my father. “What do you think?” 

My father says, “There is a new drama on TV.”

Once a week at ten, we watch Bara Shehr, Baray Khwaab. Big City, Big Dreams, in fat, curvy letters below the Urdu title. It is about a girl and her family. She looks around sixteen or seventeen. She has brown hair and wears jeans with a long shirt. She is nothing like me. She is nothing like the people around me. For the next six weeks, in twenty-minute episodes, I watch her and her family. I fall in love with all of them: the father with his short, black hair, the mother who wears pink and yellow shirts, the little sister who is a mini version of the older one with braided hair, their big, tall brother. I memorize their accents, their slang words, their mannerisms. I inhale their wholesomeness. One afternoon, while walking around the Town, Juman says something the brother in the show had said. He does the City accent really well. Kawsar responds as if he is the father. I pretend to be the older sister. It doesn’t seem important who we are playing. What matters is that for a few moments we become different people.

I ask my friends about Meena. Kawsar says he heard that her husband left her some time ago for another woman in the City, started a whole new family. 

“Maybe he got sick of her,” Juman says. “Maybe she screamed at him or hit him or something. Maybe she turned ugly.”

“She’s not ugly. She came to our house once. Asked my mother for some work, said she’ll clean floors and cook and everything.” “What’s her face like?” Juman asks.

“She’s not like the girls in our school, you know; she’s much older. Like an aunt or something.”

“Yes, but is she beautiful?”

Kawsar shrugs. “She’s not ugly.”

“Did your mother give her the job?” I ask.

“No. She said my father wouldn’t allow it. But she gave her some money and clothes.”

Juman thinks the three of us should go to the City. He says he’s tired of the stream and the sad, empty houses and the sad, empty faces around him. He wouldn’t mind setting fire to all of it.

“No car,” I say.

Juman clicks his tongue in impatience. “We could borrow from someone.”

“Nobody would lend it to us.”

But one morning he is outside the school, and when Kawsar and I arrive he grabs us by the straps of our bags and quickly steers us away from the gate. “What the hell’s going on?” I ask, and Juman lets go and begins to run. “Hurry!” he cries. So we pick up our feet and follow him, bags thumping on our backs. He disappears inside a narrow street. When we get there, we see him standing beside a white sedan. Juman grins and gets in on the driver’s side. Kawsar and I open doors and scramble onto the seats. 

“Whose car is this?” Kawsar’s voice comes out high pitched.

Juman starts the engine and fiddles with the radio.

I remember now. “Hold on, isn’t this Aab’s uncle’s car, the one with the limp? He let you take his car? Wasn’t he coming back for it from the City?”

“Shut up,” Juman says. “He doesn’t know. He’s not even here.” “I’m not sitting in a stolen car,” says Kawsar.

“It’s only for today, you idiot. Just to the City and back, okay? I’ll refill the petrol as well, happy?”       

Juman grips the steering wheel with both hands and hunches over it. A woman on the radio speaks excitedly about the weather and the traffic, then a song starts. I’ve heard it played at the barber’s. It’s a good tune. From the backseat, I see Kawsar move his head along to it. In a little while we arrive at the road that goes out of the Town. We sit straighter, fix our hair with our hands. Juman changes the radio station; the song playing on this one was very popular last month. It came on almost every evening before the news. Kawsar tries to say the words but he gets them wrong. 

The part of the City we enter looks nothing like the shows on TV, but we don’t care. All that matters is that there is an excess of everything in this place that none of us have been in before. Juman drives past shops, people, fruit, hand-cranked juicing machines on carts. We have left behind thirst and thinness, the sense of depletion. Juman has money, he buys us a bun kebab each. We are hungrier after it. He buys us three more. We don’t ask him where he got the money from. We turn a corner and find ourselves on a wide, quiet road with trees on both sides. Small yellow flowers hang in heavy bunches among the green leaves. We drive in silence past large houses fronted with spiked gates and guards. I think we are relieved when, once again, we reach a busy area filled with shops. Juman parks parallel to a shoe store. 

“I need some things from in there,” he says.

“Those are good,” Kawsar says, pointing at the shop’s window. 

I look at the shoes: black all over, thick white soles, orange laces. To our right, Juman goes in and we follow. There is no shopkeeper. We call out a few times and go to the back to see if there is another room but find nothing and no one. Juman grins and pulls down a pair of joggers. Kawsar steps outside while I stand in the middle of the floor, not sure if I should stop Juman or let him be. Kawsar comes back. “The man has gone for prayers. They say he will be back in half an hour.”

“You are an idiot for asking,” Juman says, but he is too delighted with what he has on his feet to be truly angry or worried. He marches over to the window and brings down the black shoes. He throws them over to Kawsar. Then he points at my feet and says, “Come on, you know you don’t want to look like a poor Town beggar.”

We run to the car with different shoes on our feet, in our arms, strung around our necks with the laces tied, feeling happy and strong with our haul. The roads have become fuller in the time we were inside the shop; all around us, children are going home. The traffic moves slowly and Juman stays behind a van, stopping when it stops, moving again when it moves, until it parks by a school. Juman also parks. The school gate is open and older boys and girls are walking out. 

Kawsar peers at the sign above the building. “Grammar School, Senior Campus.”

“Let’s go talk to them,” Juman says, pointing at a small group of girls standing by the wall. 

“What? Why?”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re from the Town?” I say.

Juman makes an impatient sound. “What does it matter where we’re from?” He puts his hand on the door and Kawsar grabs his shirt. “Okay, but don’t call me Kawsar in front of them.”  

Juman shakes off his hand. “Fine! I’ll call you Babar, like the king, is that better? And I’ll be Ahmed and Baadal is Taimur. Okay?” 

He steps out of the car first, and we follow slowly. My mouth is dry and my stomach is feeling unsettled but my feet feel good in my new shoes. As we walk toward the girls, I try to remember if my plain white school shirt has any old stains on it. I try to smile a little but it feels unnatural. I wonder what we’ll do if the girls’ parents appear. And then we are right in front of them and Juman is introducing us. He has forgotten my given name, making it Tariq instead of Taimur, but that’s okay, the girls are smiling. The one with her hair in a smooth ponytail asks us which school we go to and I find myself making a joke, not giving a direct answer. The words come easily to me. Even the way I’m standing, with my hands casually in my pockets, feels natural. We stand outside that school talking with the girls for almost ten minutes when the tallest one says, “You’re from the 

Town, aren’t you?” 

Kawsar answers, “Yes.”

I think, It’s all right, it doesn’t matter.

The girl says, “My cousin’s aunt collected clothes for the people there once.” The girl still sounds friendly. But she is interested in us in a different way now. The three of us have collectively altered, diminished. 

“My car is here, it was nice meeting you,” one of the girls says. I don’t know which one, and it does not matter. 

After this we don’t feel like doing much else. We drive back home. After a few minutes, Kawsar asks, “How did they know?” And I tell him, because suddenly I understand, “Our school pants are shit brown.” We become silent again, listening to the low-volume drone coming from the radio.

~

Juman gets busy, writing his CV and trying to find a place he can get it typed and printed. The hospital in the Town hires Kawsar as a cleaner and part-time receptionist. 

“Why don’t you find something too?” he says. This irritates me because I know I must do something; I must have a plan. I am done with school and school is done with me, I have no reason to behave as if I am still a fifteen-year-old boy.

“Maybe you could get a vision and tell me what it is I am supposed to do.” I laugh as if I am making a joke, but I know my words are cruel. I don’t try to stop Kawsar as he walks away. 

My mother sees my face at home and the muscles of her features change and her eyes become small and her nostrils widen and her mouth moves. She does other things too: she sets a plate in front of my father and none in front of me. She drags a chair to the door of the living room and sits on it. My father stares at his food and she shouts, “Eat it! Now.” Then she points a finger at me and in a dangerously sweet voice, says, “You. You sit down there, amazing son of mine, too good to work.” She crosses her arms. “Eat your dinner,” she commands my father again, and he picks up a tiny morsel and puts it in his mouth. When he gets up and tries to feed her, she begins to cry, and I escape. 

But she is not done. In the week after that she starts following me, speaking increasingly garbled words: “What time would you like your dinner, baadshah, your Noble Excellency? Can’t you see that your father is getting old, getting paid more in old shoes and less in money?” I run out and she is behind me. “Your Royal Heap of Cow Manure, Your Fancy Lordship,” she says in a mimicking voice.

“Stop it!” I scream. I tear a pile of newspapers. I throw a glass plate on the floor and it shatters. I turn toward the door, pushing past my mother, past my father, who is sitting in front of the screen, eyebags and mouth sagging, pretending he cannot hear a thing.

 

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