R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

30
The man set the shoes on the counter in front of Pir. “These are barely worn,”
he said of the pair on top.
Pir did not want to look but his eyes were drawn downward. They were there,
the tan sandals with the tiny beads Jamala had worn the last time he saw her. Pir
had stitched those beads on for her.
“You can only take one pair,” Pir said, “and you can’t take these. They are
promised.” He lifted Jamala’s sandals from the pile.
“What? You can’t do that. Those are the best. If I can only take one, that’s
the one I want.”
“You can’t have them. They are promised.”
“Then promise a different pair.” The man reached for them, but Pir pushed
his arm away.
“Take the other three, but not these.”
The man hesitated. Pir thought they might come to blows over the shoes, but
he would not let this pair go. The man shrugged, picked up the other three pairs
and left.
When the stranger was gone, Pir put his wife’s shoes in a box. He added a
tiny shirt sewn for his unborn child and shrouded the box with his sturdiest cloth.
Then he closed the shop and left with his package.
He passed the stall where Mohammed Khan made buckets, shoes and rope
from rubber tires and the one where the Farook brothers made rope beds to sell in
the city. The door to Haji Abdullah’s butcher shop was closed, and the slabs of flycovered
meat which hung in the open air earlier in the day had been moved inside.
Pir looked down at the craggy dirt road that cut through the village when he
passed the house where the engagement party had been held. He did not want to
see the shrapnel holes that still pockmarked the mud brick wall, but he couldn’t
stop himself from looking. There, just beside the door, Jamala and the other guests
would have taken off their shoes and placed them in the wooden wheelbarrow
before entering the house as is the custom. To reach the kitchen where the women
prepared the feast, Jamala would have passed through the entrance into the
courtyard where children played and set off fire crackers. In a separate courtyard,
old men would have been drinking tea and eating biscuits. In the beginning it had
been no different than any other engagement party.
Pir had gone to his shop to collect the pottery gift for the bride and groom. He
had purchased it from a Nomad en route with his camel from the lowlands to the
summer highland grazing grounds. Pir should have been in the house with Jamala
when the bombs were dropped.
He had run to the wounded structure which clung to the rugged landscape
like a hardened scar. In the courtyard, ripening pomegranate and mulberry fruit
contrasted with the dun-coloured earth and echoed the red splotches in the
courtyard. There was no trace of Jamala.