Page 66 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

“May I tell you another story, Bibi Sahib?”

“By all means.” The lighter clicked, and smoke drifted toward me from the
backseat.
“Well, we have a mullah in Shadbagh. All villages have a mullah, of course.
Ours is named Mullah Shekib, and he is full of stories. How many he knows, I
could not tell you. But one thing he always told us was this: that if you look at
any Muslim’s palms, no matter where in the world, you will see something quite
astonishing. They all have the same lines. Meaning what? Meaning that the lines
on a Muslim’s left hand make the Arabic number eighty-one, and the ones on the
right the number eighteen. Subtract eighteen from eighty-one and what do you
get? You get sixty-three. The Prophet’s age when he died, peace be upon him.”

I heard a low chuckle from the backseat.
“Now, one day a traveler was passing through, and, of course, he sat with
Mullah Shekib for a meal that evening, as is custom. The traveler heard this
story and he thought about it, and then he said, ‘But, Mullah Sahib, with all due
respect, I met a Jew once and I swear his palms bore the very same lines. How
do you explain it?’ And Mullah said, ‘Then the Jew was a Muslim at heart.’ ”

Her sudden outburst of laughter bewitched me for the rest of the day. It was
as though it—God forgive me for this blasphemy—had descended down on me
from Heaven itself, the garden of the righteous, as the book says, where rivers
flow beneath, and perpetual are the fruits and the shade therein.
Understand that it wasn’t merely her beauty, Mr. Markos, that had me so
spellbound, though that alone might have been enough. I had never in my life
encountered a young woman like Nila. Everything she did—the way she spoke,
the way she walked, dressed, smiled—was a novelty to me. Nila pushed against
every single notion I had ever had of how a woman was to behave, a trait that I
knew met with the stout disapproval of people like Zahid—and surely Saboor
too, and every man in my village, and all the women—but to me it only added to
her already enormous allure and mystery.

And so her laughter still rang in my ears as I went about my work that day,
and later, when the other workers came over for tea, I grinned and muted their
cackles with the sweet tinkle of her laughter, and I prided myself on knowing
that my clever story had given her a bit of reprieve from the discontent of her
marriage. She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling
like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.