The Good Son

2

S onia puts her cell phone away and looks out the window as the plane begins its taxi. She is wearing Pakistani clothes, a shalwar kameez of dark green embroidered silk and a black cashmere dupatta draped around her upper body and head. She had considered taking a coat, but then she would have had to lug it all through the trip and she likes to travel light.

Next to her in the caressing business-class seat sits a young well-scrubbed businesswoman, reading a thick report. The young woman has not said a word to her and will not, Sonia thinks, for the duration of the flight. Even the flight attendant’s smile is gelid when it falls on Sonia in her Muslim dress. They fear the Other, although neither of them would admit it. They mistrust the woman still bound by the patriarchy from which they have so recently escaped; more than that, even, they think her a possible sympathizer of the new enemy. The umma is not popular on international flights nowadays. Sonia doesn’t really mind; she is not a chatterer on airplanes, although in a Central Asian second-class train carriage she would be the life of the party.

Sonia opens her briefcase and looks through the papers of the conference she has organized, the reason for this trip to Lahore. She has booked a conference room in a Lahore hotel, but she would really like it to take place in Leepa House, the Lagharis’ vast summer home in Pakistani Kashmir. Leepa House belongs to her husband, technically, but she has not asked him. He would not approve of her traveling to Pakistan in the first place, and certainly not to Leepa House, with all that is going on in that part of the country. But his brother Nisar has the use of the place, and she will ask him when she gets to Lahore.

The plane passes ten thousand feet and there is the usual announcement; she reaches into her bag, extracts her iPod, and fills her head with the music of Abida Parveen, the famous throaty voice weaving the patterns of the ghazal in between the tap of the tabla and the whine of the sarangi. She sings about going away to build a house in a lonely and forsaken spot, never to see a human face, a house with neither roof nor walls nor doors…

The song makes Sonia cry, as always. She wipes the slight tears away and feels a pang of regret and a passing self-contempt. She is like the bourgeois couple in the Anatole France fable, who stroll by a suffering match girl without a glance and then weep real tears watching La Bohème at the opera. She did not cry when she departed from those she presumably loves or when recalling the horrendous events that have marked her life. She puts this thought from her mind-she does it easily, a well-practiced skill-and thinks again of Lahore.

How will the family deal with her? She’s sure of Rukhsana, Farid’s sister, an actual friend: they e-mail several times a month and Rukhsana visits when she’s in Washington on a story or just to go shopping and see Farid. Nisar, the middle brother, will exhibit the typical inoffensive charm of the businessman and politician and hide the person, if any, behind the smiling mask. Seyd, the youngest, the soldier-he must be a major by now at least-an ornament of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the dreaded and wonderfully incompetent ISI. Seyd, if he even bothers to meet her, will be cold, formal; he disliked her twenty years ago and has not changed his opinion. If Baba had not died, things might have been different.

A deeper pang here, the old wound, intensified by the sound of the ghazal and the memory of listening to that music in his presence. Self-torment is a part of her personality; it is why she plays that music on these long trips, so that the reverie of the stratosphere might be infused with some contact with that time. She has been analyzed by an expert in Zurich, the whole Jungian treatment, and the result is she still suffers but at least knows why, suffers like a human and not a dog, and she can use the suffering in her work; the wounded healer reaches deepest into the psyche, below the level of history and anamnesis to the dark core where the devils play.

The drone of the music blends with the noise of the plane’s engines. Hypnotic: the persona is alert to the immediate surround but beneath this the true self breaks loose of time and is transported back to a former existence as a nineteen-year-old ex-circus performer with a suitcase full of cash and nowhere to go.

In those days you couldn’t fly direct to Lahore, you had to go to Karachi and take the train, so there she was with that suitcase pressing against the back of her knees in a first-class carriage. Farid had insisted she was not to undergo the rigors of a second-class Pakistani train. Still, the sights of Karachi were exotic enough as they traveled by cab from the airport to the train station; it was like an endless circus sprung free of the big top and smeared across a whole land, a boiling mass of brown people in exotic dress and, like the circus people she knew, seemingly possessed of a more intense existence, a striving desperation not to sink and be lost in the cruel stew.

She recalls Farid on that journey, sitting next to her on the sticky-hot seat, more formal than he had been in New York, a different being in his own land. They spoke little as the train rushed onward; she’d ask a question, he’d answer in his precise way and fall silent. He was nervous, she could tell, and no wonder, bringing a strange woman-a girl, really-with a pile of dubious cash into his father’s house. It was only later that she understood what a colossal act of kindness and generosity it was. He never touched her during the entire trip. He’d purchased Pakistani clothes for her in the bazaar in Karachi and showed her how to wear them, her first time in shalwar kameez, but she was used to costumes, to being someone she was not. It was at least not a spangled leotard and a feathered headdress and she was not on a horse under the spotlight.

He said it was fate that had brought them together, and he was not just uttering a banality, as might have come from the mouth of an American. She had just happened to be in Central Park that day, in the middle of the morning, after several exhausting and unsuccessful days of seeking secretarial work, and she was not looking forward to the bus ride back to Paterson, having to tell Guido that she had failed and hear his mockery: Why can’t you get a job cleaning, for God’s sake; who do you think you are?

Who she thought she was-who her mother thought she was-was not someone chained to the rough life of tiny failing circuses, doomed to live in trailers, fifteen shows a week during the season and scrabbling at menial jobs in the winter, no education, no culture, living with stupid, larcenous people. So Marta Kracinski of Warsaw, from a murdered family-an aristocratic family in the Polish manner, proud as bishops, poor as dirt-sat every evening of Sonia’s young life and, by the light of a dim bulb or a hissing gas lantern, put her girl to her lessons, conveying an eclectic, idiosyncratic education: the classic books of Europe, whichever of them happened to turn up in small-town used bookstores; the French language; the Catholic religion; mathematics up through plane geometry; and more than American girls usually get of the glorious and tragic history of Poland. And typing. Marta was big on typing. If you could type, you could get an office job, you could meet a man, a distinguished man-that is, not like Dad. Sonia could type over sixty words a minute by the time she was fifteen and handled all the small correspondence of the circus office.

Sonia rarely thinks of this part of her life and what came after. She has come to terms with her past, as she learned to say in her therapy. Coming to terms: a curious phrase, she thinks, a metaphor from the military and affairs of state. Armies and governments at war come to terms-who will yield and who will gain-and the use of the phrase in therapy supposes a war in the psyche that must be ended. But it never ends; it is like the War on Terror.

Her first meeting with Farid, on a warm day in late May: sitting on a park bench, her belly hollow and griping, with not a dime for food, watching a woman feeding bread to a flock of pigeons and wondering, in a hysterical way, what the woman would say if Sonia got down on her knees and scrabbled for the bread among the filthy birds. A man sat down on the opposite end of her bench, took a bag out of his briefcase, opened a Styrofoam container, and began to eat from it. From which the most wonderful odor arose, spicy and rich with the promise of stewed meats. She felt the spit well up in her mouth and felt also the blush of shamed anger. She looked at the man-stared, really-and after a while he looked up at her. He was dressed like a student, in chinos and a checked short-sleeved shirt, sneakers on his feet. He met her eyes, then looked nervously away.

The pigeon fancier dumped her bread bag, shaking out the crumbs, and left. Sonia sat wretchedly in place, thinking about money, about what she would and would not do to get it, about the man on the bench, heedlessly eating, when with a clatter of wings the whole flock of pigeons rose into the air, and within that clatter came another, stranger sound, a flat noise, like a bat hitting a pillow.

In the center of the asphalt path a small tan hawk clutched a pigeon, from whose open mouth a small ruby of blood shone. The next moment the hawk flew off with slow flaps of its long wings, straining to lift its lunch.

Sonia said, “Wow!” and looked at the man on the bench. His face was transformed by wonder and he smiled at her, white teeth flashing in a face that was almost the same color as the hawk’s plumage. He said something in a bubbling, throaty language she did not recognize and, at her puzzled expression, recited in slightly accented English:

“This was fated from the beginning of the world,

That this pigeon should meet her hawk.

So, we too, from the moment I saw your coils of black hair

And let your talons tear my heart.

“It’s a poem from my country,” he added. “Originally in Urdu.”

“Are you an Urdu?” she asked, and touched her black hair, half consciously.

He laughed sweetly. “No, Urdu is the language of the poet. I am Punjabi, from Pakistan.”

“Is that like India?”

“Very unlike,” he said, still smiling. “We are neighbors, however, like that hawk and the pigeon.”

Then he introduced himself formally, and she did the same, and they chatted there on the sunny bench. He was Farid Laghari, a law student at Columbia, just finishing his degree. She hid her own life from him then, ashamed, and the shame surprised her. She was ashamed of being an ignorant horse girl in a failed circus, speaking to this polite and educated man. Now she recalled her mother speaking of manners and breeding, and how the carnival people had none, and Sonia had not understood what she meant; she had imagined it was part of the fantasy world called Poland or an oblique way of nagging her husband.

But this was the thing itself, here on this park bench: manners and good breeding. She turned toward it like a flower to the sun.

After a time he looked at his watch and told her he had to go. They stood up, and the world spun and she fell clumsily against him.

“What is wrong?” he cried. “Are you ill?”

She was starving. She had breakfasted on a cup of coffee and a doughnut at six that morning and had then cleaned the stalls and exercised the horses before cleaning herself and dressing for the city. She confessed this and he stared at her, shocked.

“Horses?” he said. “You are a groom?”

And then the whole story came out, what she did: the stranded circus, her disgraceful poverty, though never disgraceful before now, but she could not stop talking to him. After listening to the tale he insisted on buying her something to eat; he took her to a restaurant on Madison Avenue, bought her a meal such as she had never eaten, and watched her consume it with evident pleasure. During the meal it emerged that she was looking for work as a typist, and he said, “This must be fate again, because I am just now seeking a typist. I have whole notebooks that must be transcribed for the law review, and later there is my thesis to be typed as well.”

So they agreed. She would begin working for him the next day.

At Zurich Sonia boards the Pakistani International Airlines flight to Lahore. It is another red-eye, scheduled to arrive in Lahore at seven-thirty the following morning. She is seated next to a bulging Lahori matron of a familiar type, a real begum who, on spotting Sonia’s getup and learning her name, immediately engages her in conversation or, rather, monologue. She begins in a thick subcontinental English but after the plane has ascended switches to the Mahji dialect of Panjabi. Sonia has not spoken Panjabi for some years and at first she picks up barely one word in three, but the flight is long, the begum tireless, and in a while the old synapses start firing again and she can appreciate in full the perfect banality of the discourse.

Little response is required in any tongue. The woman drones on and Sonia’s thoughts are free to drift, carried back by the flow of Panjabi to her first entrance into Lahore and her first meeting with B. B. Laghari.

There he was in his white suit and his British school tie, behind a rose-wood desk in his study with the fan turning slowly overhead. She stood in front of him like a schoolgirl and he stared at her out of his hawk face, although not unkindly, and said, “My son tells me you have an interesting story. I would like to hear it. Please take a seat.”

She did. “What part of the story?”

He answered, “All of it, if you please. I have a great love of stories. Start with your family. Farid tells me they were performers in the circus.”

So she told him a story, one that would entrance him, one that would make him have sympathy for her and, more than that, make him think of her as an interesting person, because she had nowhere else to go and he was the power. Some of it was even true.

She started with her parents. Tadeuz Bielicki is a stage magician in Poland, working in a provincial town. It’s wartime. Marta Kracinski is in the Polish resistance, on the run from the Gestapo. Tadeuz saw her in the freezing little theater of some miserable town and approached her after the show; they spoke; she asked for help: You’re a magician, she said, make me disappear! And he did. He used the hidden compartments of his apparatus, and they escaped to Yugo slavia. It turns out that he was some kind of minor Allied agent, and after the war, as pay-back, the visas appear, first for Britain, then for the United States, where Sonia is born.

The pair make their living in the small touring circuses of the era: Tadeus is a juggler and magician, Marta sews costumes, takes tickets, and performs as an understudy where a beautiful woman is needed to replace one of the regular performers. Of course she can ride, like any Polish aristocrat, so she rides the circus horses and atop the elephants; she is the lovely lady in the cat act who holds a flaming hoop: the tamer cracks the whip and the tiger leaps through it. She is of course entirely fearless; she walks among the lions like a queen, pink tights, red spangled costume, plumes nodding on her golden head.

Sonia saw she had him now; he leaned toward her, his large liquid dark eyes aglow.

The show traveled all around the country and as Sonia grew she joined its marvelous life, becoming a true child of the circus. She learned to ride a horse and to stand on its back as it circled the ring, on one foot or on her hands; she learned to sit on the elephant’s trunk and be lifted high; and she learned especially her father’s tricks with coins, scarves, cups, and cards. Her little hands were clever; she worshipped her father and lived for his praise; she excelled at legerdemain: her father said often he had never seen her like.

From her mother she learned everything else, especially about Marta’s favorite subject, her own distinguished family: ancient, deeply cultured, wealthy, ruined.

Sonia saw this part hit home as well; she knew the Lagharis were a family like that: Indian Muslims expelled to Pakistan, heads packed with memories of lost glory.

Sonia lowered her eyes. Now a theatrical pause, a little catch in the voice: here begins the tragic part. One night, Marta is performing in the center ring. The lions and tigers are leaping about, the whip is cracking; the finale calls for a static display, all four cats must sit up on their platforms while Marta ascends an empty platform between two lions. Each lion rests a paw on one of her shoulders. Marta raises her arms in salute; her smile shines in the pink light. The lion tamer bows, a fanfare from the band, the lights go out, and the band strikes up the music for the march of the elephants.

Sonia was up on an elephant waiting in the dark wings, watching her mother finish the act. She sees Marta take her bow and the lion tamer do the same, and she is watching as, just before the first chord of the fanfare, the right-hand lion, a young male named Odin who has done this a thousand times like a lamb, leans over and grabs Marta’s head in his jaws.

At this Laghari Sahib gasped and uttered what must have been an oath in Urdu. “My God,” he cried, “how very dreadful! What did you do?”

“I rode in on my elephant and did the act,” said Sonia. “The show must go on. They had blacked out the cat ring immediately so the crowd thought it must be part of the act, a fake, and of course the circus went along with this error, which is what they always do when there’s an accident in the show.”

She resumed the rest of the story. Marta was killed instantly; afterward, Tadeuz was never the same: he pined, he became ill, it was TB, he hadn’t the will to fight it. He died that winter, and Sonia continued with the circus, whose slow decline accelerated after Marta’s disaster. The end came one autumn in a muddy field outside Paterson, New Jersey, when the circus awoke to find the owners had vanished, leaving the troupe owed a month’s pay and having sold the vehicles and livestock for ready cash.

Everyone had to find work because winter was coming. Each day Sonia took the train to New York, looking for office work. She could type but she had no references, and that was when fate intervened more kindly: she had met Farid in the park and become his secretary, and he had fallen in love with unsuitable her.

So she spent her days working for Farid and her nights in a spare bedroom in his apartment, but every Thursday she would get on a bus in Chinatown and travel with the Chinese gamblers to Atlantic City. This was from loyalty, because after her parents died, Sonia had been taken in by a large family of aerialists, the Armelinis. Guido, the patriarch, had visions of a new show based on his family act. But where would the funds for this come from? It turned out Guido knew some people in Atlantic City who ran high-stakes poker games. They were always looking for a mechanic, and Guido thought Sonia would be perfect for the job.

Here Laghari Sahib interrupted. “Excuse me, what is this ‘mechanic’?”

“A card sharp. My father had taught me all kinds of sleight-of-hand with cards, you know, for amusing tricks. But the same skills can be used to cheat.”

“Please explain this.”

“Well, when the cards are exposed after a play, the dealer sweeps them up and shuffles the deck. It is possible to mark the location of the cards in your head and then arrange them in any order you like during a riffle shuffle: that is, arrange them undetectably while you are apparently giving them a good shuffle. You can also compensate when someone else cuts the cards afterward. If you are very good you can do what is called a double duke, where you deal the mark a very good hand, maybe a full house-tens high, say-and deal your partner a higher full house or a flush. So the mark bets heavily and you win a lot. I had learned to stack cards from the time I could hold a deck, perhaps five or six years old, so I was quite good at it. At first I refused, but we were in a bad way, all the circus people, we hardly had enough to eat, and so in the end I agreed. He said no one would suspect a girl dealer.”

So she worked the weekend games in Atlantic City and no one did suspect, and the money accumulated. But unfortunately the people who’d set up the cheating games wanted more, as those kinds of people always do, and not only did they refuse to pay Guido his share but they wanted Sonia; they wanted to take her to Vegas like a portable cash machine. So one night in a cheap motel in Atlantic City, when Guido demanded his cut and the men started to beat him, Sonia had grabbed a suitcase full of cash and gone out the bathroom window, hailed a passing cab, and paid five hundred dollars for a trip to New York, where she had told Farid all and thrown herself on his mercy. And here she was.

The plane is asleep. The begum has at last stopped talking-how different her story was from Sonia’s own! Sonia has naturally made up a similarly harmless tale in exchange, she was an American student who fell in love with her Pakistani teacher-scandalous, of course, she could see it in the woman’s eyes, but also fascinating; the woman would dine out on it for months. And there was a happy ending, for with remarkable generosity the father embraced the stranger, brought her into the family, and they were married and the young infidel became a Muslim: God is indeed merciful and compassionate, although Sonia could see that the woman had arranged her own affairs quite differently: three children, all professionals, and three carefully arranged marriages.

I attest there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God. She had recited the Shahada right there in Laghari Sahib’s study, and that was all there was to it, so easy to become a Muslim; she thought she had been as good a Muslim as she had ever been a Catholic, nor were the Lagharis a particularly religious clan. She suspected that Baba had seen his son’s marriage to an American as another mark of modernity and a glancing blow at the stuffy conventions of his social set. In any case, she had been taken into the family and married to Farid; had borne Theo, the necessary male heir, in Lahore; and later on she had produced two lovely if somewhat less satisfactory girls, Aisha and Jamila, and fulfilled the duties of a wealthy Punjabi matron, deferring to Noor, her mother-in-law, and worshipping her father-in-law as a demigod.

A secure enough life, constrained but more luxurious than anything she had ever imagined, her mother’s aristocratic fantasies lived out on a far shore, until it ended. Until she ended it by an act of outrage. Again she shifts her thoughts away and rests her head against the cool glass and looks down into the dark. They are probably over Turkey now, only a few scattered lights mark Anatolia below. She stares at the sparse twinkles until her eyes grow heavy and she joins the other sleepers.

Something wakes her in the night-turbulence in the air or in her spirit, she can’t tell-but she has been dreaming. Sonia takes her dreams seriously, and while the rags of it drift from her mind she gropes in her bag for her notebook, opens it, and flicks on her overhead light. The notebook is thick, quadrille ruled, European; she has had it for nearly twenty years; its black pasteboard covers are scarred, gouged with travel and use, its pages marked with grime, wine, tears. She writes down the dream: She is in a farmyard-no, a circus encampment; there is a boy there, who is not quite right, subtly deformed, a crablike stride, his head too large, an avid look on his face. He holds up something for her inspection, a nest of tiny birds or squirrels, she can’t recall which: small, warm, helpless things. He begins to smash them on the ground; they explode with soft pops and gouts of vivid red. He offers her one; she takes it and smashes it. She knows it’s wrong but she can’t help herself; she is carried away by the transgressive excitement. There seems to be an endless supply.

Then a presence appears, dark, powerful, a woman in a spangled costume. The odd boy cringes before her, hands over the nest. Sonia feels horrible, she wants to undo the carnage. The spangled woman embraces her and tells her she is forgiven; it was the boy’s fault, and Sonia is shown the nest and sees it is still full of tiny birds. Or squirrels. The boy will be punished, but Sonia is loved; she will not be punished, only she will have to take the place of the boy, will have to be deformed too. The dream becomes horrible; the kind stern woman wants to turn Sonia into…

Sonia finishes writing down what she can recall. It is a significant dream. She often has such dreams when she travels, travel being symbolic of the psychic journey, releasing the collective symbols up through the quotidian sludge to illuminate, to terrify, sometimes to foretell. She wonders what old Fluss would say about it. Not much, he never interpreted but pushed and prodded her into doing the hard work, and she recalls how she resented him and loved him during that year in Zurich at the Jung Institute when he saved her life and became her mentor. Remembering him and neat, snowy Zurich, she smiles; she is going to the opposite of Zurich now, where the archetypes walk the streets in the blazing sun of day. Is this also the reason for taking this somewhat inconvenient flight, instead of going straight from London? She switches off her light, puts in earplugs, falls asleep again, and wakes only when the cart comes around with tea. It is six-thirty in the morning, and an hour later they land in Lahore.

She sees Rukhsana waiting for her on the other side of the customs barrier, looking nearly the same, a woman ten years younger than Sonia, maybe grown little plumper over the last year or so, startlingly like her father in drag. She is wearing a dark Western suit and blouse with a chiffon scarf draped loosely around her head as a sop to propriety. Expensive sunglasses perch above her broad brow. She is a reporter for the liberal English paper The Daily Times and has seen no reason to quit this job just because she is married and a mother.

The two woman embrace warmly. Rukhsana says, smiling, “Lahore Lahore hai,” Lahore is Lahore, which is how residents of that city greet one another after a long absence, as if to affirm that there is no other place fit to live in. Rukhsana fights Sonia over Sonia’s bag, wins, links arms with her, and carries her out of the terminal. A sprightly blue Morris is parked right at the curb, in violation of traffic regulations but protected by a large card on the dash that reads PRESS in English and Urdu. The two women drive off into the insane Lahore traffic, west on Durand Road, through the death-defying intersection by the Lahore Press Club, past the Provincial Assembly, and down Egerton Road to the Mall, which no true Lahori ever calls by its new properly Muslim name.

While they drive, Rukhsana talks; family first. The children, Hassan, Iqbal, and Shirin, are fine in health and accomplishments; husband Jafar is fine too, in health and accomplishments; she speaks also of his defects, which are numerous, both physical and mental. Her brother Nisar remains chubby and sly, mistresses galore, richer than ever although a little nervous now, trying to maintain his place on the spinning circus ball of Pakistani politics. Seyd, the baby brother, recently made major, still a pompous pain in the you-know-where, dreadful politics, a supporter of the recently deposed general. Sonia asks what Nisar thinks about the conference they are organizing, the reason Sonia has returned to Lahore.

“Oh, you will hear that from his own lips. I suppose he is as interested in it as in anything else that does not immediately put money into his pocket. Or votes.”

From which they pass to a précis of the current political situation in her nation and the familiar defects of the foreign policy of the United States.

“No wonder you are losing!” Rukhsana says. “Pakistan is stupid enough, but we are all Bismarck compared to you. Why is this, Sonia? People ask me, because I was educated in America, so I am the expert. What can I tell them?”

“You can tell them that not one American in ten thousand can distinguish Iraq from Iran or find Pakistan on a map. We are not a subtle people.”

“Oh, you can say that again! The British were bad enough, but at least they made the effort to understand. They spoke the languages, they knew the history, and still they made terrible errors. But nothing like this. Our country is coming apart, and it all comes from what you are doing. You know how I know this? My brother is moving funds out of Pakistan, so when it collapses we will not be standing in our shirts. This is what we’ve come to.”

She pauses to honk at a motor rickshaw driver who has swerved into her path, a long blast nearly unheard over the continuous honking of the other traffic.

To change the subject, Sonia observes, “The traffic has gotten worse. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”

“Yes, Lahore is unlivable now, but we still live here. I’m glad I have this Mini. Jafar wants me to use the Mercedes, but can you imagine trying to steer that boat in this mess? Look, there is the High Court. Do remember when you used to drive us children to meet my father there when we had half days at school, and he would take us to the bazaar for ice candy?”

“Oh, yeah, and other sweets. He had a sweet tooth himself, and your mother would always complain that he was ruining our appetites. And he would let himself be berated and give us a sly wink.”

A painful silence after this; then Sonia said, “I’m sorry about your mother. I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral.”

“Yes, you should have been there with your husband. She was not very nice to you, but you should have come.”

“I didn’t think I’d be welcome.”

“Oh, what nonsense! Because of something that happened twenty-eight years ago? A book? But now you come.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and is.

“I forgive you,” says Rukhsana, “although others may not.”

“Does that include Nisar?”

“Oh, no, with Nisar everything is negotiable, even forgiveness. Otherwise we would not be here. Move your ass, you stupid monkey!” This is shouted out the window at a van that has stopped in a traffic lane to make a delivery.

“Besides, in the family you know what we say: Sonia Sonia hai. You are horrible but we still love you. Here we are.”

She honks at a gate in a whitewashed wall and a servant opens it and they drive into an enclosed yard shaded by two arching peepul trees, the paving of the courtyard scattered with blue jacaranda petals.

Sonia climbs from the little car and pauses. “I assume he’s in your father’s library.”

“It’s his library now,” says Rukhsana, bitterness touching her voice; Sonia walks slowly down the crushed stone path to the house.

When Sonia comes out of Nisar’s house an hour later, the heat and the ordinary odors of Lahore-spices, jasmine, traffic fumes, sewage, rot-feel welcome, like real life. Nisar has fitted the house with air-conditioning, including a back-up diesel generator, and he keeps his office as cold as his heart. Or so Rukhsana says as Sonia slides into the car.

“It wasn’t too bad,” says Sonia. “He said we can use Leepa House for the conference. He’ll call ahead to the caretakers.”

“In return for what?”

“As you predicted, he wants a meeting with Bill Craig to pitch a scheme for making computer components in one of his Karachi plants. It’s a good deal.”

Rukhsana starts the car, drives out the gate, and turns north, up to the Mall and beyond it to Ravi Road, passing through heavy traffic along the western edge of the old city. They are going to the studios of Ravi TV to record interviews.

Rukhsana asks, “And how did he treat you? Was he nasty?”

“No,” Sonia says wearily, “he was polite and businesslike. He doesn’t seem to dwell in the past.”

“As I do, you mean?”

Sonia sighs. “Honestly, Ruhka, I don’t want to dredge up old family fights or take sides.”

Undeterred, Rukhsana continues. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live here. Farid is the eldest son, he’s supposed to be the head of the family, but Nisar always gets his way, and-”

“Yes, but as you well know, Farid has no interest in being the head of anything. Look, there’s the cemetery. Can we stop for a little while?”

“We’ll be late.”

“Please.”

Rukhsana twists the wheel violently and cuts across two lanes of traffic, prompting a chorus of horns. She spits out a skein of curses in the street language of Lahore, and turns into the gate of Gau Shala, the old burial ground of the city.

She parks. Sonia asks, “Do you know where they are?”

“Of course,” says Rukhsana stiffly, and leads the way through the thick, dusty, monumented ground, walking ahead like a soldier.

Sonia stands for a while in front of the simple stone slabs that mark the graves of her father-in-law and her two daughters. Jamila would be thirty and Aisha thirty-four, she calculates, but this thought does not summon a sense of loss. Like the markers, that part of her heart is stone now. Grief among traditional Muslim women is operatic, but they are not allowed to attend funerals. They wail at home. She wailed in the streets of Zurich when she heard the news, when someone (it was in fact Rukhsana) remembered to call her. Farid had suffered a complete collapse and was hospitalized for a month after the event. She has long forgiven him, for that lapse and for what happened at about that time to her son. The many catastrophes in her life have marked her, but not by the manufacture of grudges. She recalls a Yeats line Baba often quoted: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” She does that, has done that, for years. The two women walk back to the car, arm in arm. Rukhsana’s cheeks are wet, but she makes no comment.

After they have taped their interviews, they drive to the Avari Hotel on the Mall. Sonia checks in and learns from the desk clerk that the rest of the members of the conference, except for William Craig, have already arrived. The Avari is a perfectly anonymous luxury hotel of the type found in any major city. One might be in Singapore or Toronto, Sonia thinks, upon seeing her room, except for a discreet plate marking the qibla, the direction of Mecca for prayers. She has selected this hotel on purpose; there will be culture shock enough for the Western conferees when they get to Kashmir.

Sonia orders tea from room service and sits on the bed with the conference papers spread about her. The conference is called “Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach.” The meeting is actually her idea, although the official sponsor is Amin Yakub Khan, a wealthy Pakistani, once a friend and protégé of B. B. Laghari and now the president of Pakistan’s largest charitable trust. Sonia and he had put together the conference in a flurry of phone calls and e-mails last winter, keeping a low profile because of its controversial nature, designed to discuss the possibility that the kind of ethnic and confessional violence that had characterized the region since the exit of the British Raj was in fact a kind of mass insanity and that the analytical tools that had been used to help many individuals recover from madness might be adapted to the peacemaking process. When Sonia first suggested the project, Amin had laughed and said it might be easier to flood the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra with Prozac.

But she wore him down. It would be interesting, she said. It’s always nice to meet people who are not in the tedious mold of one’s everyday acquaintances, it would be a week out of sweltering Lahore in May, and it would be a sort of memorial for Baba, who was always a partisan of East-West cooperation and a lover of peace. They were coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. They could write a dedication to him when they published the proceedings. So he agreed, in the end, and it only remained to choose the participants and obtain funding.

For the latter, Sonia made contact with William Craig, the famously eccentric telecom billionaire, who owned a vast ranch on the New Mexico border not far from where she lived for part of the year. His foundation had been supporting a network of mental health clinics in the region for years; she worked at one of these, and they sat together on the organization’s board. They were not exactly friends, but she was able to reach him directly and thus to have her proposal stand out from thousands of others. He immediately agreed to pay for the thing but he wanted to attend, which she had not expected. Perhaps he would cancel at the last moment.

The other invitees were a mixed bag. She had let Amin pick them, insisting only that at least one of them be an Indian national. He’d selected Manjit Nara for that slot, a psychiatrist and ethnographer from Delhi, an expert on Kashmir. Besides him, they invited Father Mark Shea, a Canadian Jesuit who had been prominent in several Latin American peace negotiations; Porter and Annette Cosgrove, American Quakers, who had worked to end the conflict in Angola and written some important books on nonviolent political change; and Karl-Heinz Schildkraut, from Zurich, an old friend of hers and a psychotherapist with a long-standing interest in the history of India and Pakistan.

When the funding came through, Sonia had called her sister-in-law. Rukhsana would be a good choice for the conference rapporteur and could also help Sonia back into the good graces of the Laghari family. Rukhsana had suggested another invitee, Harold Ashton, an Englishman, a former foreign service officer and an expert on the diplomatic history of the subcontinent, who also accepted. Sonia drinks her tea, when it comes, and reads the papers prepared by the attendees until jet lag seizes her and she sleeps.

She awakens three hours later to the sound of the azan, the call to Maghrib, the prayer at sunset:

God is great God is great God is great, I attest there is no God

but God, I attest Muhammad is the messenger of God, make

haste to prayer, make haste to welfare, there is no God but God.

The wailing song floats in from a nearby mosque loudspeaker and cuts through the international air-conditioner hum. She has not prayed as a Muslim for a considerable time, but after hearing the azan she finds herself almost reflexively reciting the du’a, the supplication before prayer, and then she ties up her hair in her scarf and goes to the bathroom and performs the ritual ablution, washing her feet and her hands and arms and running her wet hands over her face.

She takes the prayer rug the hotel provides and arranges it to face the qibla. Silently she goes through the proper intention for the Maghrib prayer and then enters the prayer state easily, without friction, the ritual words and the prescribed movements, the hands up next to the face, the hands folded, right over left on the belly, the kneeling, the full prostration, the cycle of one raka’ah after another until the three ordained for the sunset prayer are done. Sonia has always been religious in her own fashion. In America, she attends a Catholic church in whatever neighborhood she finds herself, as her mother trained her to do. In Muslim lands she follows her adopted religion. In Europe she presents herself as an adherent of Carl Gustav Jung. Nor is it hypocritical, she thinks, not merely a case of When in Rome. She doesn’t see why her worship should be restricted to one faith, especially as she is devoted to all of them and believes that God understands this peculiarity and approves.

Now it is time to get ready for the reception. She showers, washes and dries her hair, dresses in her best shalwar kameez, a black number shot with silver threads, and arranges a black silk scarf over her short hair. The wall mirror shows her a thin, slight woman with graying black hair atop a deep-tanned face out of which shine dark, bright eyes. She thinks she looks like an American in costume, so she takes a breath and shifts the tension in her muscles, especially the muscles of her face. She looks again and smiles shyly for effect. Now she is a Muslim lady, probably a Pathan, at home in Pakistan. She is very good at this, and it gives her an absurd and infantile pleasure.

The hotel has provided a small room set up with a large round table and a bar. As she enters, Sonia sees Rukhsana speaking to a couple of men. One is a slight elfin figure in a cheap tan suit, his blue eyes bright and cheerful behind rimless glasses, his narrow skull clothed with a thatch of sand-colored hair going gray; the other towers over him, a really huge old man, his face decorated by a noble nose and a white brush mustache. Rukhsana gestures her over and embraces her; Sonia can smell liquor on her breath, although the glass she is holding appears to be fruit juice. Rukhsana introduces the smaller of the two as Father Mark Shea, S.J.

“And of course you know Dr. Schildkraut.”

“My dear Sonia,” Schildkraut says, embracing her. “You have not changed even a little bit.”

“Nor have you, Karl-Heinz,” she replies, a lie. Schildkraut is twenty years her senior and now looks it.

“We were just discussing religion,” Rukhsana says brightly. “Perhaps Sonia can add something. She claims to be a Muslim and a Catholic simultaneously.”

“That must be fatiguing,” says Shea. “You actually practice both?”

“I practice,” Sonia replies, “but I’m not good enough to perform either on the professional stage.”

Father Shea laughs, throwing his head back so that he almost faces the ceiling. Sonia thinks he must be a man who likes to laugh but doesn’t get much of a chance in his ordinary work. He says, “I’d be interested in how you get the statement in the Qur’an-that God begets not, neither is He begotten-to play nice with the clear declaration about the nature of Christ in the Nicene Creed.”

Sonia says, “Well, clearly either the Church Fathers were mistaken or the Prophet, peace be unto him, was mistaken, or else-and I think this is most likely-that any statement about God falls short of the ineffable truth and therefore neither is mistaken, but we mortals are incapable of resolving the differences with our puny minds.”

Shea laughs again, more loudly. “Thus you defy the theologians. Well, good for you! We Jesuits, you know, are supposed to be all things to all men, but you put us to shame.”

A man comes by with a tray of drinks. Shea snags a champagne; Schildkraut and Sonia take soft drinks; Rukhsana ignores the man and his tray entirely. Instead she is looking across the room at something, and when Sonia follows her gaze she sees that it is a man heading toward the bar. Rukhsana mutters a brief excuse and walks off in that direction. Soon she is deep in conversation with the man, whom Sonia now recognizes as Harold Ashton, the face familiar from a photograph on a book jacket and a similar one she acquired as she organized the conference. As is usual with authors and their book jacket images, he is jowlier and more worn by time than the image testifies but still handsome in the English style, with a bony high-colored face, long dark hair combed straight back and hanging raggedly over his collar, a strong nose and jaw, and pale imperial eyes. He leans over Rukhsana from his considerable height and touches her arm lightly from time to time.

Now uniformed waiters are passing through the room and laying the first course on the tables, so the conferees do the usual shuffle to find their place cards. Sonia has seated herself between her fellow convener, Amin Yacub Khan, and the Indian psychiatrist, Manjit Nara. Of the other seats, two are occupied by Rukhsana and Ashton, two by Porter and Annette Cosgrove, two by Father Shea and Dr. Schildkraut, and one is empty, its plate of tiny kebab appetizers cooling. Sonia turns to Amin and asks, “Have we heard anything from Craig? Is he going to make it?”

Amin finishes off a kebab, sucking its stick clean. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I heard from him just now on my mobile. His plane is approaching Lahore International as we speak, and he will be here before dinner is over, God willing. I’ve arranged for a car to pick him up and also a police escort.”

“That was thoughtful,” says Sonia.

“Well, yes, we would do the same for any Pakistani billionaire-do we have real billionaires in Pakistan? I suppose we must. I know you have billionaires in India, Manjit.”

The two men banter across Sonia for the next few minutes about the relative wealth of their two nations, which persons have hold of it, and whence it comes. Then the talk moves to globalization, how the free flow of capital is affecting the two countries, how after a long period of stagnation the Pakistani economy seems to be taking off, like India’s did in the final decades of the past century, and what this means for their future relationship. Sonia listens to them talk, glad that they seem to get along so cordially. She is pleased also by their contrast in size, the opposite of their respective nations. Amin is a bear with the shaved head and aggressive mustache of a Mughal aga, a solid cylinder of expensive cloth stuffed with the best Punjab beef. Dr. Nara is a wisp, Gandhi-gaunt, with a flat modest face and the huge liquid brown eyes of a lemur. His motions are quick and precise, birdlike, but like a nice bird in a children’s cartoon, not a bird of prey. The two men seem to be purposely avoiding anything controversial, speaking generalities. Sonia hopes the conference will not be all speaking generalities.

Then Porter Cosgrove speaks up from across the table. “What do you think the effect of all this will be on the Kashmir situation? I mean, there’s no point in becoming increasingly prosperous if you both continue to spend such an absurd amount of your nations’ wealth on arms. Especially as you’re each other’s only likely enemy. I mean, doesn’t anyone in either country think it’s absurd, given present conditions? It’s like France and Germany in nineteen hundred, you know? Anachronistic.”

There is a pause. Then Amin chuckles and says, “Well, you are certainly outspoken, sir. But the actual situation is not so easily dismissed.”

Ah, thinks Sonia, they have already stumbled on the K-word.

“No, the plight of the Muslim majority of Kashmir is not so easily dismissed,” Amin continues, and then smiles down at the Indian. “But perhaps Dr. N and the rest of us can solve it where so many have failed.”

“Stranger things have happened,” says Nara, with his own shy smile. “Although I cannot help but agree with what Mr. Cosgrove says. My thought is that until we recognize violent nationalism as another sort of mental disease we will get nowhere.”

“Yes, but where is the cure?” says Amin. “Who has ever cured it?”

“Well, as to that I have some theories,” the Indian replies, “which I daresay you will hear enough about during the coming week to make you quite ill with the sound of my voice. And while I am not such a fool as to credit the inevitablity of progress, I think that if one hundred years ago you had predicted that Western Europe, the greatest hotbed of nationalism of that era, the very source of the contagion, if you will, would be converted less than a century later into what amounts to a single great country, with a tiny armaments budget and utter peace among all its parts-well, people would have thought you a lunatic. But it occurred. And it can occur in South Asia as well.”

“Yes!” says Amin, “I will drink to that,” and he lifts his glass of soda water.

Sonia appreciates the way Nara has defused the topic and she turns to him and draws him out on his practice of psychotherapy. While she chats, her glance falls frequently across the table, where Rukhsana is sitting next to Ashton and directing nearly all of her energetic attention to him, the two heads leaning at each other like flowers in a bed.

Nara seems to pick up on her thoughts. Quietly he says, “Mrs. Qasir seems to have made a conquest.”

“Yes, or the other way around. Of course, they are old acquaintances.”

“Yes, Harold knows everyone. I myself know him reasonably well.”

“I don’t. What’s he like? I know his books, of course.”

“Yes, a great expert on the subcontinent is Mr. Ashton. As he should be. He is almost the last of his breed, you know; he descends from nabobs, from the white Mughals. I believe his family came to India in the eighteenth century, and they waxed great; his ancestors doubtless ruled mine with an iron hand, though in the famous velvet glove. Very fair, but stern. When we kicked them out in ’forty-seven, some few could not quite give us up, and so we have the Harold Ashtons of the world. Speaks all the languages, of course, chats in the bazaars and the chancelleries with equal aplomb, and informs the world of our mysterious Eastern ways.”

“You sound like you don’t care for him.”

A delicate shrug. “Nothing personal, I assure you, and at least he is not an ignoramus in his chosen field. It’s only that… have you ever noticed that when an English person of a certain type-I mean the type represented by Ashton-enters a shop kept by an Indian or a Pakistani, here or abroad, something happens to the shopkeeper or clerk? As soon as that pukka accent emerges the air changes, the clerk stands straighter, he becomes more attentive, perhaps a bit fawning, and other customers are ignored. The clerk is in a sense hypnotized by what we must call racial memory. Colonialism still inhabits our unconscious, even now, fifty years on.”

“And yours too?”

He smiled and sniffed a laugh. “Oh, yes, mine too. I find I start sounding like an old babu, and my English becomes a little tangled. It is humiliating.”

“How do you know him?”

“I am one of his informants. He considers me an expert on the psyche of the various subcontinental races. Which is, I suppose, why I am here.”

He abandons this uncomfortable subject and addresses Amin. “This really is an excellent curry, properly spiced. I always find, don’t you, Amin, that when Westerners are at a dinner they always make the curry tastelessly bland.”

“Yes, indeed!” says Amin. “But not here. All the Westerners must be vetted for proper curry, or they can’t come. Mr. Cosgrove, for example, is passing the test. I see you are enjoying your dish, Mr. Cosgrove.”

Cosgrove swallows his mouthful of incandescent mutton and says, “Yes, delicious. We both like spicy food, don’t we, dear?”

And without waiting for his wife to reply he launches into a presentation of his thermophiliac bona fides. They have been in Haiti and Angola, in Mozambique and Guatemala, all zones where people have learned to mask the taste of slightly off meat with chilies. He actually quotes this theory, unconscious of the pained expressions growing on the faces of the Pakistani and the Indian at the table. “We eat anything,” he asserts with a smile.

A man who enjoys the sound of his own voice, observes Sonia, as Cosgrove reels out a series of amusing and gently self-deprecating anecdotes about culinary disasters in the world’s hellholes. His wife listens with the sort of gelid expression often seen on the faces of loyal wives with older loquacious husbands, even though much of the deprecation involves her: skinning and cooking the capybara, mistaking ipecac for baking soda, and so on.

Sonia has not had much to do with Quakers before now and had imagined them to be severe, taciturn, and dreamy. Apparently not, if the current example is typical. Annette, however, is a little dreamy. Perhaps, she muses, Cosgrove is a Quaker by marriage and Annette is the real thing. Cosgrove has the bland, unobtrusive, forgettable face one sees often in white America, the fruits of genetic homogenization. Annette is from the same stock, but hers is unforgettable; she does nothing with it, but nothing is required: the cheekbones and the clear, lightly tanned skin are marvels. She has a wide mouth, unreddened by lipstick, but red enough without, and an endearing little overbite that enhances her smile. They are both blue-eyed, with fine corn-silk hair, Cosgrove’s neatly trimmed in a ten-dollar haircut and Annette’s kept long but bound up in a crown of braiding. She is slim; he is not, perhaps from eating everything. Sonia wonders what their intimate life is like, whether they have a family or if, instead, they have devoted their all to the peace of the world.

After Cosgrove runs down, the conversation becomes general. They speak of Lahore and the problems of Pakistan; then the issue of America, the great bull of the planet, and how it can be made to tread more lightly upon our common earth. The curry is cleared away and a deep-fried rohu follows, a local fish much prized by the Lahoris, bland and emollient with greases, a rest stop for flaming pharynges, and then a chicken tikka that proves even hotter than the curry. Sonia sees that Annette has become flushed and sweaty but continues to eat manfully, like her husband, soaking up the fiery stuff with handfuls of naan, wisely abstaining from ice water.

The chicken is cleared and dessert arrives: gulaab jamun, pyramids of deep-fried dough balls soaked in rose-flavored syrup. Sonia tastes it and smiles at Amin.

“You remembered,” she says.

“Yes, you reminded me when we were setting this up how Baba used to serve it to his guests, and I thought it would be fitting. Ah, I see they are wheeling in my cross, so to speak.”

Hotel staff have rolled away the bar and set up a podium. When the dessert is finished and the coffee poured out into tiny cups, Amin rises. He is a good speaker, strong-voiced, and the style of his subcontinental English reminds Sonia powerfully of Laghari Sahib, which, together with the taste of roses in her mouth from the gulaab, brings a stab to her throat and a pressure of tears to her eyes. He speaks, in fact, of that gentleman, describing him to those in the assembly who did not know him, his charity, his integrity, his devotion to peace and lawful ways.

It is a bland speech, and short, and after it Amin introduces Rukhsana, who takes his place at the podium and speaks briefly about how happy her father would have been to see this assembly and its mission and to know it was going to pursue its deliberations at his beloved country house. Then some logistics for the following morning: they will drive to the Leepa Valley in a convoy of two minibuses and a car. It will be a long drive but it will pass through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and this rarely seen, because the area is normally barred to foreigners. The government has arranged for transit through the military zone.

As she speaks, a thin, ungainly white man dressed in a pair of wrinkled chinos and a short-sleeved blue shirt walks into the room. He peers around through thick glasses, as if unsure that he has come to the right place, until his gaze falls on Sonia, at which point he nods and walks over to her and sits down at the table.

“You missed a good dinner, Bill,” she says. “Spicy, just what you like.”

He smiles and rolls his eyes. William Craig famously lives on cups of yogurt and jam, washed down with Diet Coke.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Craig says. “I got tied up in Dubai. You know how it is.”

“Exactly. I’ve often been tied up in Dubai.”

Rukhsana has seen Craig enter and now she announces that the author of the feast has arrived after the feast and would Mr. William Craig like to make any remarks? Craig declines. Rukhsana finishes her logistics talk and answers a few questions, after which the meeting breaks up, but not before all the attendees have gathered around Craig to pay their respects. It is perfectly feudal, Sonia thinks, and quite appropriate for the country. As she leaves, she observes Rukhsana and the Englishman, Ashton, again in close conversation. Perhaps there is something going on there, perhaps Rukhsana had a liaison with this man. Sonia understands that she herself has little interest in this sort of thing and is always the last to find out who is sleeping with whom. She hopes it will not affect the conference and is oddly saddened by the knowledge that her sister-in-law may be betraying her husband, a kind but emotionally oblivious physicist. Why the mullahs want to lock up all the women, she thinks as she leaves.

Their departure is scheduled for dawn the next day and she knows she should try to sleep, but she is restless and she is in Lahore. On impulse, she takes from her suitcase a garment she has not worn in over twenty years, a black burqa, and drops it over her head. Now she is invisible. Once she had a fight with her sister-in-law about burqas. Sonia had said casually that she didn’t mind them and Rukhsana had snarled, “Oh, it’s fine for you to say that, you’re a tourist. But imagine having it forced on you!” She understood Rukhsana’s point and was suitably abashed, but she doesn’t think she is a mere tourist. A tourist belongs somewhere and goes elsewhere for amusement, but she belongs nowhere and amusement is not why she has come to Lahore.

She slips out of the hotel, a darker shadow in the gathering dusk.

When she enters the alley at the side of the hotel she hears Amin’s voice. Coming closer, she sees him standing next to a wonderfully painted minibus, one of a pair parked there, and speaking to a squat, balding man in a mechanic’s coverall. She waits in the shadows and listens. This is the man Amin has hired to take them to Leepa. Amin calls him Hamid.

They are negotiating the fee in the old-fashioned manner, as formal as prayer. Hamid offers his two sons as drivers and guards and five cousins and in-laws as additional spear carriers. Amin says they don’t need a platoon of guards, nor do they need their own small army. After all, they will be traveling through one of the most militarized regions in the world, and there are real soldiers everywhere.

Agreeing to cut the crew down to the sons and two cousins, they shake hands, and Amin hands over a pack of English cigarettes to show grace and favor. Sonia slips away, curiously heartened by the scene she has just observed, the more so because she has done it in secret. Eavesdropping has been a habit of hers since childhood, born in the circus, nourished by Lahore.

She tours the streets, still bustling even now, distributes alms to beggars, and then, suddenly exhausted, returns to her room and packs for the following day. She lays out her traveling shalwar kameez. This is made of stain-resistant burnt-almond fabric and has numerous small pockets in it, some sewn in unlikely places. She fills these with various items, chosen from long experience in traveling through South and Central Asia: a Swiss Army knife, a small flashlight, matches in a waterprooof case, hard candy, a compass, a sewing kit, and, for luck and remembrance, a new deck of cards and a Sufi rosary. She strips and crawls naked between the stiff hotel sheets and is almost instantly asleep.

The next morning, just after sunrise (a tomato-red smear barely visible through the scrim of brown filth in the air) they all go, sleepy and cranky, to the buses. Although there are only ten people to transport, Amin has decided to engage two minibuses, to allow for stretching out a little and to leave room for the considerable load of supplies necessary for a week’s stay in an isolated area. On Sonia’s bus are Amin, the two Cosgroves, Father Shea, and Dr. Schildkraut. Hamid’s son Azar is the driver, and Hamid sits in the shotgun seat with a stockless AK stuck in the footwell. Leaning against an old Land Rover are the cousins, who will lead the way, and Hamid’s other son, mustached and hung with webbing gear and toting the same kind of weapon. Ashton, Nara, and Craig are on the second bus with Hamid’s other two sons as driver and guard, but Rukhsana is not; she calls at the last minute. She has an emergency meeting: someone is suing her about a story she wrote and she has to attend to it with her employer. She will follow in her own car; of course she knows the way perfectly well.

So they set off under a yellowish-pink sky, traffic blessedly light at this time of day, and soon they are on the famous Grand Trunk Road, which stretches from Kabul to Calcutta, heading north out of Lahore. As they pass through the outskirts of the city, Schildkraut says, “So this is the Grand Trunk Road! I had somehow imagined that it was, so to speak, grander.”

Sonia says, “Yes, it would be a county road in the U.S. or Europe, but then it’s over four hundred years old and hasn’t been widened since. Except for the motor vehicles, Kipling would feel right at home. On the other hand, you’ll think it pretty grand when we get up into the mountains, where the standard is a one-lane dirt track.”

They drive on amid frantic honking traffic. Before Rawalpindi, they turn onto a secondary road, barely a lane through high brush, that Hamid promises will be a shortcut. Dust soon coats every surface. The heat builds up and there is hardly any breeze coming through the windows because of the closeness of the roadside vegetation. The passengers fall into the somnolent, jouncing discomfort of the road traveler in South Asia. This too would be familiar to Kipling.

Now the road is perceptibly rising, leaving the dusty plains behind. Immense mountains loom violet in the distance and evergreen trees appear on the low ridges. They pass through Azad Pattan and Rawala Kot, Bagh and Dungian. The air clears, it becomes positively cool. In the backseat, Schildkraut sags, gently snoring. The Cosgroves converse softly or read. Father Shea is snapping photos with an expensive-looking digital camera, exclaiming at the increasingly sublime landscape. Past Chikar they enter the Jhelum Valley. Shea’s exclamations increase and Schildkraut awakens to join in expressions of wonder at the steep slopes, covered in cedar, fir, and pine, and at the crystalline air, the waterfalls, and the rushing river far below.

Past Naili they enter the restricted zone and stop at a blockhouse, where Amin gets out to converse with an officer and show him papers. When he returns, he says, “We should be at Leepa House by three at the latest. It is just twenty kilometers up this road.”

“This road” turns out to be a track cut into the side of a mountain. Riding on it is like flying a small plane, so vast is the view; at one point they have to back up almost a kilometer to allow for passage of a convoy of troop carriers and armored vehicles.

They enter the Leepa Valley. The road makes a sharp hairpin bend to the right. The Land Rover in the lead disappears around it.

Now comes a flash of orange light. The shock of an explosion shakes the bus, followed by a cloud of acrid smoke. Hamid cries out an oath and stamps on the brakes. They come around the bend and there is the Land Rover on its side, burning. Hamid yells in despair and jumps from his seat. He runs wailing toward the ruined vehicle and is immediately cut down by a burst of automatic fire. Azar unlimbers his AK and leaps out of the bus. He gets off a string of shots and then he is hit too and falls next to his father.

More firing. Sonia tells her fellow passengers to get onto the floor and they do. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion. A random bullet shatters one of the side windows. The firing stops. They can hear the wind sighing in the cedars and the sound of running footsteps.

The side door of their minibus is flung open and a man stands there. His face is masked and he points a Kalashnikov at them, shouting in Pashto: Out, out!

They stumble from the bus and stand in the smoke of the burning car. Sonia sees that the other bus is being similarly treated. The windshield there has been blown out and Hamid’s two promising sons are still in their seats, slumped and dead.

More masked men come down from the hillside. The passengers are surrounded, their hands are bound in front of them, and they are pushed into a close group by the rifle butts of their attackers. Other men loot the baggage in the second minibus.

Then the passengers, the former conference on mental disease and violence in the subcontinent, are roped into a coffle and marched off the road up a footpath. No one on either side has said a word after the initial rough commands. The conferees have left, for a time at least, the domain of speech.