Chapter 11

Fareeha’s bumping heart pushed a brief spasm of elation through her body, and she felt herself rising with the dust cloud that Bashar’s departing Jeep threw up into the hot afternoon: she swirled for a moment. But as the dust settled so did a thin layer of doubt settle over Fareeha. Her grin fell to earth, leaving a blank, expressionless face; perspiration broke again at her hairline and the olive skin of her forehead began to glisten. Exposed in the empty square, she burned in the hot afternoon sun. She drew in a deep breath, turned, and fled, taking with her an image of that ugly-headed gangster that flashed before her every time she blinked.

She sought shade at a café, first under its grimy awning, then within the coolness its four bare walls. The fat proprietor looked up from his aluminium kettles and teapots as a spout of green-coloured tea arced into a sugar-filled glass from a lifted pot. He didn’t smile.

Fareeha kept her head up and made it to an empty table near the back, followed by every pair of male eyes in the room. She fell onto a stool and shouted out her order, like a man. At the table next to hers, silent men shared a cigarette; and the young man whose turn it was to smoke puffed a lungfull at her in disgust. Words were not needed.

Fareeha thought of Hassan. She had been to this and other cafés often with him, always as the only female customer; but at least with him she had felt protected from the contempt of others, insulated against their scorn. Now she was alone. ‘You’ll thank me later,’ she muttered to the smoking youth, under her breath.

The proprietor, bulging from a white apron, sent a serving boy over with Fareeha’s glass of mint tea. He stood before her with a shiny silver tray, glanced nervously back towards his boss, and then demanded payment before he would put the glass onto the low table. His adolescent voice quivered like a girl’s. Fareeha huffed as she extracted her purse from the deep folds of her long skirts; she clanked the necessary coins onto the metal plate and snatched away the steaming glass by herself.

She sipped, tried to make herself comfortable, and began the serious job of self doubt.

Bashar; she blinked and saw his ugly face on the clean surface of her tea: his thick skin, fat mind. She wondered how much of her garbled little speech had got through. The situation in Sa’ An was plain enough, although she hadn’t understood it clearly herself until she had woken up just a few days ago and looked carefully. She’d used the term economic disaster area and not unstable hot-spot, the one Muzaffer had preferred, but she thought it conveyed the same sense of desolation, the feeling that they were living in a place beyond the pale, not far from hell itself.

It was lucky that Bashar was a smoker himself and had been displaying the packaging of his own favourite brand. But had he become angry when she told him that they were probably fakes and that he was paying far too much for them? His grunts and groans hadn’t really told her. He seemed to know Nisham, the muleteer; and she hoped he had grasped the fact that the smuggler’s chosen route—over treacherous mountains, through a war zone—added an unnecessary expense, to be incurred by the smokers of the free state.

Inflation. Fareeha wished that she hadn’t used that particular term on Bashar, but she had put it in pretty simple terms and given a few real examples. Prices rose daily, forcing more and more smokers to abandon their habit. He must have seen that whoever could supply a cheaper, stable source of cigarettes and tobacco would find a limitless market.

Fareeha sipped her hot, sweet mint tea and felt herself calming down a little. Bashar was still there, when she blinked, and she could now almost hear the cogs of his mind clicking and whirring. He must have seen the dollar signs.

Fareeha tensed again, however, as she thought about what should have been the climax of her little speech, but which came out as fragmented babble. The bit that explained why she needed him, and why he couldn’t do it himself—without her. Had he understood that? She drew up he wobbly glass and sipped slowly, through the dangerous face of Bashar Khan.

She put down the glass and sighed. It was too late now, nothing more she could do about it: she had done her best—Mrs. Sharwalla would be proud of her. Fareeha loosened her shoulders, unclasped her hands, and shouted an order for another tea, like a man. She adjusted her weight on the three-legged stool and was almost regretting offering Bashar sixty percent to her forty when a horn sounded in the distance: a ship’s horn. If she had relaxed at all it had been fleeting: the horn reminded her of the next thing she had to do, the next person she had to face with her mad idea, and her heart, in her tight breathless chest, again began to squeeze in and squeeze out.