Page 68 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

into insignificance without even lifting his eyes. In the end, though, this made

for a minor quibble, given that I knew people living in the same neighborhood—
people I had worked for—who beat their servants with sticks and belts.
“He has no sense of fun or adventure,” she said, listlessly stirring her coffee.
“Suleiman is a brooding old man trapped in a younger man’s body.”
I was a little startled by her offhand candor. “It is true that Mr. Wahdati is
uniquely comfortable with solitude,” I said, opting for cautious diplomacy.
“Maybe he should live with his mother. What do you think, Nabi? They make
a good match, I tell you.”

Mr. Wahdati’s mother was a heavy, rather pompous woman who lived in
another part of town, with the obligatory team of servants and her two beloved
dogs. These dogs she doted on and treated not as equals to her servants but as
superiors, and by several ranks at that. They were small, hairless, hideous
creatures, easily startled, full of anxiety, and prone to a most grating high-
pitched bark. I despised them, for no sooner would I enter the house than they
would hop on my legs and foolishly try to climb them.
It was clear to me that every time I took Nila and Mr. Wahdati to the old

woman’s house, the air in the backseat would be heavy with tension, and I would
know from the pained furrow on Nila’s brow that they had quarreled. I
remember that when my parents fought, they did not stop until a clear victor had
been declared. It was their way of sealing off unpleasantness, to caulk it with a
verdict, keep it from leaking into the normalcy of the next day. Not so with the
Wahdatis. Their fights didn’t so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a
bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered.
It did not take an act of intellectual acrobatics to surmise that the old woman
had not approved of the union and that Nila knew it.
As we carried on with these conversations, Nila and I, one question about her
bubbled up again and again in my head. Why had she married Mr. Wahdati? I

lacked the courage to ask. Such trespass of propriety was beyond me by nature. I
could only infer that for some people, particularly women, marriage—even an
unhappy one such as this—is an escape from even greater unhappiness.
One day, in the fall of 1950, Nila summoned me.
“I want you to take me to Shadbagh,” she said. She said she wanted to meet
my family, see where I came from. She said I had served her meals and
chauffeured her around Kabul for a year now and she knew scarcely a thing

about me. Her request confounded me, to say the least, as it was unusual for
someone of her standing to ask to be taken some distance to meet the family of a
servant. I was also, in equal measure, buoyed that Nila had taken such keen