Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

To the south-west of the Great Stupa a hundred paces or so, there is a figure of Buddha in white stone about eighteen feet high. It is a standing figure, and looks to the north. It has many spiritual powers, and diffuses a brilliant light.

The Sacred Casket. The Likeness of the Holy One. The Holy Men. The Illuminating Statue. It was all there, every bit of it.

The last excavation at Shahji-ki-Dheri had taken place in 1911. Every year since then the Archaeological Survey of India, Frontier Circle reported a continuing leasing dispute with the owner of the land. The most recent report was promising – ‘the compulsory acquisition of the land may be considered’. Viv looked up the Land Acquisitions Act – there was no reason it couldn’t be applied to Shahji-ki-Dheri. Perhaps all that was needed was a little nudge from the right quarters.

– There’s something here that’s caught my attention, Mr Remmick, I wonder if you could advise me how to move forward with it.

She made a fluttering motion to indicate some flight of fancy, leaning forward slightly towards Remmick who turned an even deeper shade of red. They were the only two sitting on the verandah of the Peshawar Club, gin-and-tonics in hand, watching the sky turn a fiery orange.

– There’s an archaeological site here I’m interested in. Shahji-ki-Dheri.

– The Kanishka Stupa?

– I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the main stupa excavations, of course, but there’s an illuminated white statue at the edge of the stupa complex which I’m interested to see if there’s anything left of.

– Illuminated?

– Probably a story that arose from the sight of moonlight on white marble – but it’s the marble I’m interested in. Why a white marble statue in this place of grey schist? Or is it limestone? I have a theory about trade routes during the Kushan Empire.

As anticipated, his expression fixed into a pretence of interest, allowing her to skip ahead.

– Is the leasing dispute likely to be resolved soon?

– Very soon, I’d imagine. The DC is looking into taking the land away from the owner. It should all be settled by the dig season.

– Hurrah for you, Mr Remmick! That’s a better answer than I’d expected. When is the dig season?

– It can start as early as November. But, Miss Spencer, I should strike a note of caution. I know there’ve been women archaeologists in Greece, in Turkey. Even Egypt. But this is Peshawar. Pathan men don’t much like the idea of women. .

– Don’t much like the idea of women doing what?

– Don’t much like the idea of women.

She thought of the soldier on the train; the ease of the silence between them right at the end. But who knew what he’d really been thinking?

– Are the English in India in the habit of having our behaviour dictated by the Natives?

– Ha! Well expressed.

He raised his glass to her.

– To the dig season!

Silence rolled thick down the mountain, smothering even the calls of the nocturnal birds. Viv collided with a garden chair, the bump of flesh on wood loud in the darkness. Piece by piece she removed every scrap of clothing until she was naked in the moonlit night, the faintest of breezes warm on her skin. Picking up one end of the garden hose she carried it back along the length of itself to the tap and, crouching down on the grass, placed the mouth of it between her shoulder blades, beneath the dip of her neck. A spine of water overlaid her own. Warm at first, but as it drew itself up from the deeper parts of the underground tank it cooled and she stood up, painting every inch of her skin with water, bending her head into it so her hair grew heavy and slicked.

She stood up, looked towards the distant mountains. Tahsin Bey stood behind her, his fingers tracing circles on her skin. The outermost circle was the girdle, the broken bowl, the circlet of mountain ranges, hills and spurs; overlapping it, the tribal areas where men killed each other before breakfast over a chicken, a bad dream, a smile; further in, the British troops protecting Peshawar from the tribesmen; then, the fields and orchards and gardens where the very summer which made the British flee to hill stations brought fruit and fiery-coloured flowers bursting into life; closer now, closer, the proud Englishness of spires and barracks; and right in the centre, the innermost circle, the eye of the storm: Vivian Rose Spencer standing in the garden of her bungalow, a shiver of pleasure running all the way through her.

July – September 1915

The familiarity of Peshawar choked off any hope that life might veer in directions Qayyum couldn’t anticipate. No breeze, only heat which shrank his clothes onto his body. He thought of the snake he’d once seen shedding its skin. ‘Shedding’ wasn’t the right word. It simply seemed to glide forward along a pebbled pathway, leaving behind a layer of scales. As though the skin it had lived in was nothing more than a sock. Qayyum had picked up the discarded skin – one piece, split along the snout. He brought the split together and held in his hands a weightless, transparent snake; even the shape of its eyes intact. When he held it up against the sunlight rainbows danced crazily along the length of it, as though something were swirling into life, and he dropped it in terror.

Steps no longer proved a challenge but he still continued to stand in the doorway to the train compartment for a long moment until some movement to his right raised the shameful possibility that someone had seen a blind man in need of help; he hopped down onto the platform – a slight plummet in his stomach before foot hit cement – and walked rapidly away, the knapsack on his back reproachfully light without its soldier’s kit. The bulk of its contents were letters and mementoes from men who lived in the Peshawar Valley: a pebble from Brighton with a rose painted onto it; a photograph of a female aviator; a medal; a bullet compacted by bone; a scrap of paper with a name on it in the ragged writing of someone learning to hold a pen for the first time; a teddy bear with buttons from a soldier’s uniform in place of eyes. When the objects were distributed it would be the end of his service to the Army.

Leaving the station he hailed down a horse-drawn Victoria. He’d become accustomed to being greeted by salutes from children passing by and from the Victoria drivers themselves as soon as they saw the drab-and-green uniform of the 40th. Now it was the missing eye which set him apart. Even when both eyes were closed he knew it was evident something was wrong with the right one, quite apart from the swelling; a translucence to the skin.

The Victoria passed through Kabuli Gate and entered the Street of Storytellers. If a man is to die defending a field, let the field be his field, the land his land, the people his people. But these were not Qayyum’s people – the merchants and traders, the courtesans and maulvis, the money-changers and beggars. The 40th Pathans, those were his people; not just the Yusufzai, but also the Afridis, also the Dogras. He should have fought harder to stay. So he only had one eye. What of it? Nelson had only one eye and one arm. Better to be there than here.

The Victoria approached two Afridi men holding hands – both had long hair, and the taller of the two had a flower behind his ear. In the Army, Qayyum had learned that everything about such men’s appearance and deportment was unbecoming for a soldier (or for any man, one of the officers had snarled), but lying beside the stream that night at Vipers, waiting for the moon to slip out of the sky, he had seen two sepoys of the 40th – Bahadur Khan and Afroze – with fingers interlinked; and then the terrible sobbing when Bahadur Khan’s fingers turned rigid. The sound had carried straight to the German gunners. And there was also this: how would his mind have survived that night without Kalam Khan lying beside him, filling his own mouth with water from the stream so he might blow cool air onto his comrade’s burning face, the proximity which Qayyum had always denied the other man now his only salve.

A train of camels slowed the Victoria’s progress. Qayyum’s hand was a visor in front of both eyes, protecting one, hiding the other, so he didn’t see the Afridi pluck the marigold from behind his ear and press it between Qayyum’s splayed fingers. The petals softer than the lips of the Frenchwoman. He held it against his skin; there had been kindness in Brighton, but never intimacy.

The Victoria turned away from the broad Street of Storytellers and was soon passing by lanes too narrow for it; such little space between the structures on one side of the street and the other that it was possible for a boy to lean out of a window and ask his facing neighbour to tie his turban so that he could run down to his mother and pretend he had managed it all on his own. Almost home now. Allah forgive him, he’d rather be in the trenches.

At the top of the stairs he pushed open the wooden door and dark shapes threw themselves at him; without a sound he stepped back, still gripping the handle, pulling the door shut. Hazrat Ali, at the Battle of Khaybar, ripped a fortress door from its hinges to replace his lost shield. Qayyum’s attackers called his name from the other side of the door and he commanded, Move back, move back, and this time when he re-entered they stood still, expressions uncertain, allowing him to be the one to embrace his father and mother and nod at his three sisters, all married now, looking past them for Najeeb.

The youngest of his sisters burst into tears, and stepped forward, one hand hovering over the shrapnel scars around his eyes. Qayyum caught the tips of her fingers and brought them to rest on her jutting belly. A boy, he said, and she replied, A soldier. Qayyum shook his head, looked away – how small this space was, how gloomy, with narrow bars of light falling slantwise from the window slats onto the English-style dining table which he’d insisted on buying during his last leave, its bulk dominating the room, books at one end of it, kitchen implements at the other. His mother held a Qur’an as high as her arms would allow; Qayyum ducked beneath it, his mother whispered a prayer, and he was home.

– A man wears scars as a woman wears bangles.

His mother held up her thick wrists, jangled both of them. She was perhaps thirty-seven or thirty-eight, and if she were English that wouldn’t make her old. But she looked the same age as her husband, twenty years her senior, who remained trim and spritely though his cheeks had the concavity which came from missing teeth. He cleared his throat; a letter-writer who spent his life transcribing other people’s words, he had so few of his own.

– Najeeb went to meet you at the train station, his father said.

– I didn’t see him.

The mention of sight made the old man wilt; he looked at his wife, nodding his head as if she had already said the next thing and he wanted to make it clear he agreed.

– You’ll receive a pension, won’t you? For the rest of your life?

– Yes, Amma.

– At least some good has come of this. When I start looking for a bride I can say, how many two-eyed men have a guaranteed income for their entire lives?

The middle sister giggled, and started to hum a wedding song. Behind her mother’s back she pulled a face and crossed her eyes to let him know that the most beautiful girls in the Walled City were being saved for whole men. There wasn’t enough air in this room to fill a man’s lungs. He felt someone tapping his back, gently, and there was Najeeb, looking straight at Qayyum’s face with an expression that didn’t pretend everything was all right.

– Does it hurt?

He clasped the boy’s head to his chest, and exhaled.

Qayyum sat on a bed strung with rope, bending forward towards the lantern on the ground. He lifted the glass chimney, lit a match, adjusted the flame, drawing the smell of kerosene into his nostrils. These tiny, automated rituals had become a comfort. Only when the glass was secured in place, and his body pulled into a cross-legged position allowing no proximity between his feet and the lantern, did he extract the handkerchief from his pocket. Cupping his palm he placed the weight at the centre of the handkerchief carefully within it, and unbraided the cloth with one hand. The silk draped over his palm. He pulled away the covering of cotton wool and, in the light of the full moon and the lantern, an eye stared glassily up at him.

It was the most amazing thing he had ever seen. He touched it gently with his thumb. The brown of the iris almost the same shade as the remaining eye, tiny capillaries painted onto the whites of it. Once the infection subsided, the doctor on the ship to Karachi had assured him, he would be able to wear it again. And the cluster of shrapnel scars would fade. You’ll be breaking hearts again in no time. He understood now that the nurse had meant it as kindness, not an accusation.

He walked over to the matting which formed a barrier around the roof. Standing on the balls of his feet he was able to see over the matting, down to the street below and the buildings all around. Mud-and-brick houses and once brightly painted windows and doors all equally the colour of night. The construction haphazard so the upper storeys of buildings looked as if they might tumble off at any moment. Here and there, a faint lamp-glow from rooftops. Sleeping camels in the caravanserai, a boy curled against the flanks of one of the foul-smelling beasts. Did you need to learn how to slaughter in ways that were unimaginable to a Pashtun to make your country a place where every child was well fed, every home prosperous, everything a fine city or abundant farmland?

– Lala?

He tried to pretend he hadn’t heard, hoping Najeeb would go away.

– Lala, they’ve all gone to sleep. I brought you some dinner. I’ll leave it here.

The sound of a plate being set down, and the scent of something wonderful. A homecoming meal from which he’d shut himself away.

– No, stay.

Najeeb sat at the very edge of the bed-frame, watching his brother eat. He had been the only one in the family who had met Qayyum’s silence with silence instead of an increasing pitch. Even their father had tried to join in the chatter, multiplying its discordance.

– Hold out your hands. Be careful now.

Qayyum placed the handkerchief in his brother’s hands. Najeeb lowered his face and brushed it against the silk.

– What is that smell?

– An Englishwoman.

Najeeb’s mouth opened wide and Qayyum laughed. The first laugh in a very long time.

– She was older than our mother, and had a mouth which looked as if it had been eating lemons all her life. But she was very kind. Open it, look inside. Carefully, carefully.

Najeeb unwrapped the handkerchief as if it were a present. If he was surprised to see an eye staring at him, he didn’t show it. Closing his palms protectively around it he lowered himself onto the ground, resting on his elbows, his hands as close to the lantern as was safe. For a long time he simply looked at the glass eye, rotating it slightly this way and that so he could inspect every part of its surface. In this way he could stare at a book, a butterfly wing, a rock. A stillness at the heart of his character. There were some boys in the 40th Qayyum had felt particularly protective towards; now he understood he had seen the shadow of his brother in them.

At length, Najeeb stood up, the same height as the seated figure of his brother.

– What’s in there now?

– Look.

Qayyum held his thumb and forefinger like a pair of crab claws around his eye, pulling at the skin to force the eyelid open. He saw Najeeb’s fingers extend towards him, found he didn’t have to fight against any desire to back away. How strange – not troubling, just strange – to feel his brother’s touch against the bone of the eye-socket.

But no; he had imagined it. Najeeb placed his hand over his brother’s thumb and forefinger, and simply bent down and peered into the socket which was more than Qayyum could bring himself to do in front of the mirror.

– It’s too dark to see anything.

– You can have a look in the morning.

– Thank you.

Najeeb sat down, leaning his weight against his brother.

– I’m sorry I wasn’t at home when you arrived, Lala.

– That’s all right.

– I went to the train station to meet you. You didn’t see me when you stepped onto the platform, though I was right there.

– Why didn’t you say something?

The sight of his scarred, one-eyed brother had frightened him. Why else? He held the boy’s hand in apology, in forgiveness. Najeeb squeezed his hand in return and then picked up the plate Qayyum had eaten from, turning it over with a laugh to demonstrate that there wasn’t even a sliver of onion remaining on it.

– Our mother was worried about what they were giving you to eat in the hospital.

– There were nine kitchens.

Najeeb looked impressed, and Qayyum found himself wanting to say something else, something to temper his brother’s look of awe at the bounty of the English.

– Lala?

– Yes.

– Are you still a soldier?

– No.

– Do you wish you still were?

– Go to sleep, Najeeb.

The brothers faced each other on the roof; one tense and watchful, the other encouraging, slightly impatient.

– Ready?

– No, wait. One second.

Yesterday, a staccato sound on the roof had made Qayyum drop his cup of tea; when it had gone on long enough to sound more like hail than bullets he had come up to the roof to investigate, and found Najeeb holding one hand in front of his right eye while bouncing the ball with the other hand. He had bounced the ball more than fifty times in a row without fault before he realised he was being watched by Qayyum who spent his days repeating this very action, without anything of Najeeb’s fluidity. Qayyum winced to think that all these days while he thought he was engaged in a private act his family below had been able to hear the aching gaps between every few bounces. Tomorrow we’ll play catch, Qayyum had said and turned away.

– Now.

Najeeb threw the ball. It travelled in a slow, chest-high loop, beginning a downward path well before it reached Qayyum so that his hands were only waist-high as he caught it.

– Well done! Najeeb called out.

Qayyum looked up slowly from the cupped hands holding the child’s toy.

– This is ‘well done’ in my life now.

He saw Najeeb turn his face away to the white sky of summer and knew his brother was wishing he were somewhere else.

– I’m sorry, Qayyum said. Najeeb shook his head but didn’t look up. Qayyum wasn’t sure if he was rejecting the apology or pretending there was no need for it.

– I’m more sick of me than you are.

– I’m not sick of you.

– Do you think I haven’t noticed you go away after lunch and don’t come back until long after the lessons with the maulvi are supposed to end?

– It’s not because I’m sick of you.

– No, don’t apologise. It makes me happy to think of you reading in Shalimar Bagh beside a fountain. There was an officer at Vipers – he carried a book in his pocket and in these minutes we were gathered on the slope, waiting for the order to attack, I saw him lie on his stomach, put his head in the book and go somewhere else. I envied him, and then I was happy because I knew my brother also had that in him. Whatever happens in the world, Najeeb can escape.

Qayyum launched the ball back towards his brother. Najeeb fumbled for it – it was obvious he only did that because he thought it a kindness.

– Lala, there’s something I want to know. About when you were over there.

– Ask me anything. But don’t ask me what happened on the battlefield.

He felt a slight constriction of the mouth as he spoke, as though loose stitches were looped between his lips. Najeeb stepped towards him, right hand raised, palm outwards; a formal gesture that came from outside Qayyum’s world.

– Tell me about the Englishwoman who gave you the handkerchief. Was she nice? Did you practise English with her?

– Listen, Najeeb. Don’t become curious about Englishwomen.

– I’m not asking it in a bad way.

– The English, they don’t think there are any good ways for an Indian to want to know things about their women. Maybe they’re right. Would you want Englishmen to come here and ask about our sisters?

– What would they ask?

– Are they nice? Can I practise Hindko with them?

The idea of an Englishman wanting to practise Hindko with any of their sisters was so absurd Najeeb started to laugh. His arm slung back to throw the ball to Qayyum, as though they were in a time before. Arrow-straight, it gathered speed, making for Qayyum’s face, his eye. Najeeb shouted out a warning, but his brother’s hands came up to catch it with the old deftness, the sound of palms closing around a speeding ball sweeter than all the sitars in the world.

Finally there came the morning when all signs of the infection had dissipated. Qayyum placed the glass eye into his socket, and stood for a long time looking in the mirror. Almost himself, but when a man’s gaze on the world changes everything shifts with it. He hoisted his knapsack with the soldiers’ mementoes onto his shoulders, put on his sturdiest shoes, and went downstairs.

His mother looked up from the peas she was shelling at the dining table, and her face was unknown to him. The colour came and went from it, and she lifted two fistfuls of pea pods from the pan and threw them up into the air as though they were rose petals at a wedding, her voice a cry of delight. Najeeb had been on the way out, schoolbag in hand, but he walked back into the room and embraced his mother around the shoulders.

– Amma, it’s a glass eye.

Qayyum silently picked the pea pods off the floor and table and returned them to the pan, slipping his hand away from his mother’s when she tried to clasp it.

Away from the noise and chaos of the city he was received in villages and small towns as the fulfilment of a dream: a Pashtun soldier returned from war. Everywhere he went he was asked to stay a night and a banquet was prepared in his honour, even when it meant slaughtering the chicken which the family relied on for eggs; the object he brought with him – pebble or bullet or photograph – was passed from hand to hand as if it were a piece of the Black Stone brought by the angel Jibreel himself. On foot he travelled through the Valley’s orchards, crossed its rushing streams at their narrowest point. One day, bathing his face in the water, he felt himself rinsing Europe from his eyes. How had he thought the beauty of France superior to this – he opened his arms wide to the rivers bounding down foothills, racing each other to the Valley – this jewelled earth.

His last stop before he returned to Peshawar was Shahbaz Garhi in the Yusufzai lands, home of his forefathers. The brothers of Sepoy Khuda Buksh took the letter and the red feather from the throat of a bird which he had brought for them and told him that the man who had sent these tokens was dead; someone from the Army came to see them the previous week to deliver the news. So now you are our brother in his place, they said, as if relaying a fact rather than conveying an honour, and allowed him to enter the zenana where the older women kept their tear-streaked faces uncovered while they pressed him for news of the boy who only Qayyum had seen as a man. When it was time to leave one of the old men of the family took him by the elbow:

– There’s something you should see, Yusufzai scribe.

His new brothers took him to a giant rock with shapes cut into it. Kneeling, the youngest of them used the end of his turban to wipe away dust from a small section. Faded symbols made up lines which sloped and slanted towards each other like weary battalions. Even before there was paper there were scribes amongst the Yusufzai, the old man said. But what does it say, Qayyum asked. The old man didn’t know exactly but they were the words of the King, Asoka, who ruled with blood and fire until one day on a battlefield he looked at the mountain of the dead, heard the sobbing of a woman whose husband and sons had all been killed, and became a follower of the Buddha, renouncing violence and inscribing stones with his belief in peace.

His fingers lightly brushing the ancient words, Qayyum saw Asoka walking through that field at Vipers and saying to himself, No more.

There was a small hole in the canvas draped over the branches, and when the sun was directly overhead a narrow shaft of light fell into the inkhorn. Qayyum closed his fist around the buffalo horn – it was warm, heat radiating from the ink contained within.

A few days earlier his father had taken to bed with a fever and Qayyum’s mother looked at her son in a way that reminded him that he had obligations beyond those of a postman. So now here he was, beneath a tree, legs squeezed under the table with the built-in inkhorn – his father’s pride. As a child he’d disliked the smell of ink, associating it with the boredom of standing behind his father with a fan on hot afternoons, waving a breeze onto his neck while being careful to keep the fan from smearing the ink on the page. And the letters that were dictated were inevitably dull – someone needed money, someone was sending money, someone had arrived, someone was leaving, someone was married, someone had a child, someone was dead. Everyone was well, everyone missed someone, someone missed everyone, the chicken had stopped laying eggs, where were the bolts of silk? Occasionally news of a blood feud or murder enlivened things, but not often. He’d always known he’d choose a different life for himself – he had grown up in the shadow of a fort; how could he stay immune to the soldiers parading on maidans, boots and buttons gleaming?

But in the Army he came to understand the importance of letters, no matter how ordinary their contents. Never more so than on that day in Brighton when a sepoy from Peshawar had come hobbling into his ward, waving a piece of paper in his hand and said, Finally a letter from home. Qayyum had taken the paper and recognised the handwriting. His voice was not entirely steady as he and his father clasped hands across the world to tell the sepoy everything was well, the harvest had been good, the chicken had recovered.

As the morning became afternoon, everything slowed. The muezzin’s voice wavered as he sent the call to prayer winging out from the minaret of Mahabat Khan Mosque. A blur descended onto the inkhorn. Qayyum lifted the horn from its holder, and saw a fly struggling to stay afloat in its dark waters. The ink an ocean of death. Carefully, he positioned his quill beneath the thrashing insect and lifted it out, flicking it onto the ground as soon as it was clear of the ink. The fly staggered about, blue smudges its trail, its wings rising and falling impotently. Qayyum took the pitcher near his feet, dribbled water onto his hand and from there dropped the tiniest quantity onto the fly.

– Working hard, Lala?

Qayyum snapped his wrist and the remaining water sprayed Najeeb, who responded with the giant smile.

– Instead of bathing flies, come and listen to a badala with me.

The knife-sharpener who shared the canopy with him said he’d look after Qayyum’s belongings, his knife cleanly slicing the still-flailing insect in two as he spoke. Najeeb took hold of his elder brother’s hand and led him towards the Street of Storytellers, chattering away about how there were so many stories of Peshawar that none of the Storytellers in the bazaar ever told; all his life he’d heard the same old tales and maybe he should be the one to let the Storytellers know that there were other possibilities. There was a particular confidence in him that seemed to grow daily, hard to pin down; it would be necessary to make sure it didn’t become arrogance. But for the moment it consisted primarily of exuberance, and Qayyum couldn’t help smiling at the thought of his brother approaching an old storyteller, informing him that he had a better story than any of the old tales of the bazaar. Probably something he’d picked up at the Mission School – please let it not be a story of Christianity, or somehow that would get back to their mother who had only grudgingly given in to Qayyum’s insistence that Najeeb needed to be educated in the English way if he was to progress through the world.

The brothers walked through the Street of Storytellers, Qayyum’s elbows jutting out in that posture which had started as self-protection, a guarding of the space around himself, and was already becoming an attitude of ownership. He slowed as they approached the lines of Storytellers who were offering familiar fare, the stories of Peshawar unchanged through generations as Najeeb had said: ‘Laila Majnu’, ‘Hazrat Ali’, ‘The Prince and the Fakir’, Hadda Mulla’s jihad against the English. This last story had gathered the largest crowd, and Najeeb squeezed himself in among the gathering, leaving Qayyum no choice but to follow though he’d have preferred ‘Laila Majnu’.

The English approached, armed to the teeth.

Hadda Mulla, their foe, finally within reach.

In cover of darkness they crawled into town

When thunder and lightning and hail crashed down.

Everything lit up so all – all! – could see

The white man’s forces assaulted by bees.

A handful of stings and they’re overpowered,

Is it bees or Allah’s wrath that makes them such cowards?

A decade and more has passed since then

But now hear the call for jihad once again.

Haji Sahib in the hills is gathering his forces

Rise up! Join him! By foot or on horses.

What did it mean, this great emptiness which opened up in Qayyum’s chest in response to the Storyteller’s badala? A Mohmand tribesman raised his gun in the air at the end of the last couplet, the butt of a rifle catching Qayyum on the shoulder. Men around him cheered, and repeated the last line back to the Storyteller. Rise up! Join him! Qayyum turned on his heels and walked briskly away. It wasn’t until he was back under the canopy, flicking away the two pieces of the fly with his toe, that Najeeb caught up with him.

– I’m sorry, Lala. I didn’t know there’d be so many people.

He pushed Najeeb away, more roughly than he’d intended.