Page 191 - Leadership in the Indian Army

Laila couldn't decide which he had said.

Am Ihurting you?
Is this hurting you?
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening- Time,

blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally.

What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.

Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She

would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to

resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in

fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as
relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his

face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother

on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her
adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his

absence was her unremitting companion-like the phantom pain of an

amputee.
Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman,

ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial,

maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the

curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon
together. And it would all come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their

astonishing imprudence. Their clumsiness. The pain of the act, the

pleasure of it, the sadness of it. The heat of their entangled bodies.

It would flood her, steal her breath.

But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her deflated,

feeling nothing but a vague restlessness.

She decided that he had said Ami hurting you? Yes. That was it. Laila