A Thousand Splendid Suns

tourists."
The British had built it as a hill station near their military headquarters
in Rawalpindi, he said, for the Victorians to escape the heat. You could
still spot a few relics of the colonial times, Tariq said, the occasional
tearoom, tin-roofed bungalows, called cottages, that sort of thing. The
town itself was small and pleasant. The main street was called the Mall,
where there was a post office, a bazaar, a few restaurants, shops that
overcharged tourists for painted glass and handknotted carpets.
Curiously, the Mall's one-way traffic flowed in one direction one week,
the opposite direction the next week.
"The locals say that Ireland's traffic is like that too in places," Tariq
said. "I wouldn't know. Anyway, it's nice. It's a
plain life, but I like it. I like living there."
"With your goat. With Alyona."
Laila meant this less as a joke than as a surreptitious entry into another
line of talk, such as who else was there with him worrying about wolves
eating goats. But Tariq only went on nodding.
"I'm sorry about your parents too," he said.
"You heard."
"I spoke to some neighbors earlier," he said. A pause, during which
Laila wondered what else the neighbors had told him. "I don't recognize
anybody. From the old days, I mean."
"They're all gone. There's no one left you'd know."