A Thousand Splendid Suns

PART FOUR
48.
Tariq has headaches now.
Some nights, Laila awakens and finds him on the edge of their bed,
rocking, his undershirt pulled over his head The headaches began in
Nasir Bagh, he says, then worsened in prison. Sometimes they make him
vomit, blind him in one eye. He says it feels like a butcher's knife
burrowing in one temple, twisting slowly through his brain, then poking
out the other side.
"I can taste the metal, even, when they begin."
Sometimes Laila wets a cloth and lays it on his forehead and that helps
a little. The little round white pills Sayeed's doctor gave Tariq help too.
But some nights, all Tariq can do is hold his head and moan, his eyes
bloodshot, his nose dripping. Laila sits with him when he's in the grip of it
like that, rubs the back of his neck, takes his hand in hers, the metal of
his wedding band cold against her palm.
They married the day that they arrived in Murree. Sayeed looked
relieved when Tariq told him they would. He would not have to broach
with Tariq the delicate matter of an unmarried couple living in his hotel.
Sayeed is not at all as Laila had pictured him, ruddy-faced and pea-eyed.
He has a salt-and-pepper mustache whose ends he rolls to a sharp tip,
and a shock of long gray hair combed back from the brow. He is a
soft-spoken, mannerly man, with measured speech and graceful
movements.