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By Root 740 0

I’d greeted everyone, I took a walk in my old alley. The entire block had changed. Dada Abu had bought the house that had once belonged to the Balochi people; he’d torn it down and remade it in solid cement, adding a blue metal gate. This was now the primary residence, where he lived with Dadi Ma and one of my uncles, along with the uncle’s wife and six children. My other uncles lived in various houses scattered around the neighborhood. Uncle Saroor, who had taken two more wives after black magic Gina, lived directly across the street in a multi-story home, keeping each wife on a separate floor.

There were visible signs of material progress. The houses with the dung patties on the walls were gone. The alley was paved. The gutters were covered. The pungent nali smell was fainter. There were no cows or donkeys blocking the main square. The big empty lot that used to be full of trash and wandering cows taking plump dumps looked as if it had been bulldozed.

The desert had also discovered privacy. Everyone had erected huge walls around their roofs. This meant no more roof-hopping and no peeking into other people’s lives. No one left their doors open during the daytime either; and no children ran from house to house, chasing chickens or stealing an egg or sitting down arbitrarily at someone else’s breakfast table. There were virtually no people in the streets. Even when the azan occurred, I saw no increased signs of activity in the neighborhood.

It was Dada Abu who finally helped me understand the neighborhood’s newfound obsession with secrecy.

“You shouldn’t leave the house except with a grown male relative,” he cautioned Flim and me. “And you,” he said to Ammi, “shouldn’t leave the house at all!”

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed.

“This place isn’t safe,” he said. “There are strangers here. Foreigners.” He was referring to the countless new sectarian and militant groups that passed through town.

Then he stepped closer and inspected the length of my beard.

10

I hated staying at home with the women. What made it particularly irritating was that they didn’t treat me like the other men: when I walked past them, they neither covered their face nor threw a dupatta over their head. I considered this nonchalance an affront to my masculinity, and I blamed my lack of a legitimate beard.

I wanted them to scurry before me and be fearful of unleashing my masculine hormones. Instead, they treated me like a child.

There was one woman who did exhibit a bit of self-conscious modesty—my cousin Nyla. Whenever I came near her, she tossed her dupatta over her head or turned a bit to the side so as not to make direct eye contact. This suggested to me that she was wary of the possibility of temptation arising between the two of us; naturally, I became attracted to her and started following her around.

I spied her from a distance one day when she was in the kitchen. She squatted on her chowki and thrust her small hands into sticky dough on a tray, her thin body rocking back and forth. The chowki squeaked and the steel tray skidded on the cement floor as she worked and rocked. Her cheap chooriyan clinked on her arms. They were her only adornments. As I watched, one of the chooriyan snapped. She pulled the broken pieces off her arm and placed them in her pocket so that the children wouldn’t step on them.

Nyla was a domestic dervish. She was a master of the kitchen. When she was working, she was under constant assault by the toddlers, who seemed particularly fond of her. The miniature Mongols wandered back and forth and tried to stick their feet into the food or upturn the tray of cut radishes. She withstood their onslaught by offering them vegetable bribes and sweet-talk.

At night, when everyone had finished dinner, Nyla cleaned the dishes at the trickling faucet. When—more often than not—there was no running water, she had to pump the nalka from a seated position, which required a great deal of force. As she did the dishes, the rest of the family, women included, retired to their charpais on the rooftop, leaving her downstairs in