Page 89 - Leadership in the Indian Army

unsettling about the way Rasheed seemed to loom over the woman. His

hands on her shoulders. His savoring, tight-lipped smile and her
unsmiling, sullen face. The way her body tilted forward subtly, as though

she were trying to wriggle free of his hands.

Mariam put everything back where she'd found it.

Later, as she was doing laundry, she regretted that she had sneaked

around in his room. For what? What thing of substance had she learned
about him? That he owned a gun, that he was a man with the needs of a

man? And she shouldn't have stared at the photo of him and his wife for

as long as she had. Her eyes had read meaning into what was random

body posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bounced heavily

before her, was sorrow for Rasheed. He too had had a hard life, a life

marked by loss and sad turns of fate. Her thoughts returned to his boy

Yunus, who had once built snowmen in this yard, whose feet had
pounded these same stairs. The lake had snatched him from Rasheed,

swallowed him up, just as a whale had swallowed the boy's namesake

prophet in the Koran. It pained Mariam-it pained her considerably-to
picture Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless, pacing the banks of the lake

and pleading with it to spit his son back onto dry land. And she felt for

the first time a kinship with her husband. She told herself that they

would make good companions after all.

13.

On the bus ride home from the doctor, the strangest thing was

happening to Mariam. Everywhere she looked, she saw bright colors: on

the drab, gray concrete apartments, on the tin-roofed, open-fronted