A Thousand Splendid Suns

guilty to feel that about Zalmai, who was a child, a little boy who loved
his father, whose instinctive aversion to this stranger was understandable
and legitimate.
And I wrote you.
Volumes. Volumes.
"How long have you been in Murree?"
"Less than a year," Tariq said-He befriended an older man in prison, he
said, a fellow named Salim, a Pakistani, a former field hockey player
who had been in and out of prison for years and who was serving ten
years for stabbing an undercover policeman. Every prison has a man like
Salim, Tariq said. There was always someone who was cunning and
connected, who worked the system and found you things, someone
around whom the air buzzed with both opportunity and danger-It was
Salim who had sent out Tariq's queries about his mother, Salim who had
sat him down and told him, in a soft, fatherly voice, that she had died of
exposure.
Tariq spent seven years in the Pakistani prison. "I got off easy," he
said. "I was lucky. The judge sitting on my case, it turned out, had a
brother who'd married an Afghan woman. Maybe he showed mercy. I
don't know."
When Tariq's sentence was up, early in the winter of 2000, Salim gave
him his brother's address and phone number. The brother's name was
Sayeed.
"He said Sayeed owned a small hotel in Murree," Tariq said. "Twenty
rooms and a lounge, a little place to cater to tourists. He said tell him I