Page 224 - Leadership in the Indian Army

girl's eyes had teared up and her face was drooping, and what
satisfaction Mariam found from this outburst felt meager, somehow illicit.

She extended the shirts toward the girl.
"Put them in the almari, not the closet. He likes the whites in the top

drawer, the rest in the middle, with the socks."

The girl set the cup on the floor and put her hands out for the shirts,
palms up. "I'm sorry about all of this," she croaked.
"You should be," Mariam said. "You should be sorry."

32.

Laila
JLaila remembered a gathering once, years before at the house, on one

of Mammy's good days. The women had been sitting in the garden,
eating from a platter of fresh mulberries that Wajma had picked from the

tree in her yard. The plump mulberries had been white and pink, and

some the same dark purple as the bursts of tiny veins on Wajma's nose.

"You heard how his son died?" Wajma had said, energetically shoveling
another handful of mulberries into her sunken mouth.

"He drowned, didn't he?" Nila, Giti's mother, said. "At Ghargha Lake,
wasn't it?"
"But did you know, did you know that Rasheed…" Wajma raised a

finger, made a show of nodding and chewing and making them wait for

her to swallow. "Did you know that he used to drink sharab back then,

that he was crying drunk that day? It's true. Crying drunk, is what I
heard. And that was midmorning. By noon, he had passed out on a

lounge chair. You could have fired the noon cannon next to his ear and

he wouldn't have batted an eyelash."
Laila remembered how Wajma had covered her mouth, burped; how

her tongue had gone exploring between her few remaining teeth.