A Thousand Splendid Suns

sent you."
Tariq had liked Murree as soon as he'd stepped off the bus: the
snow-laden pines; the cold, crisp air; the shuttered wooden cottages,
smoke curling up from chimneys.
Here was a place, Tariq had thought, knocking on Sayeed's door, a
place not only worlds removed from the wretchedness he'd known but
one that made even the notion of hardship and sorrow somehow
obscene, unimaginable.
"I said to myself, here is a place where a man can get on."
Tariq was hired as a janitor and handyman. He did well, he said, during
the one-month trial period, at half pay, that Sayeed granted him. As
Tariq spoke, Laila saw Sayeed, whom she imagined narrow-eyed and
ruddy-faced, standing at the reception office window watching Tariq chop
wood and shovel snow off the driveway. She saw him stooping over
Tariq's legs, observing, as Tariq lay beneath the sink fixing a leaky pipe.
She pictured him checking the register for missing cash.
Tariq's shack was beside the cook's little bungalow, he said. The cook
was a matronly old widow named Adiba. Both shacks were detached from
the hotel itself, separated from the main building by a scattering of
almond trees, a park bench, and a pyramid-shaped stone fountain that,
in the summer, gurgled water all day. Laila pictured Tariq in his shack,
sitting up in bed, watching the leafy world outside his window.
At the end of the grace period, Sayeed raised Tariq's pay to full, told
him his lunches were free, gave him a wool coat, and fitted him for a