Page 84 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

firing Zahid. I also let go of the Hazara woman who came in to wash clothes.

Thereafter, I washed the laundry and hung it on a clothesline to dry. I tended to
the trees, trimmed the shrubs, mowed the grass, planted new flowers and
vegetables. I maintained the house, sweeping the rugs, polishing the floors,
beating the dust from the curtains, washing the windows, fixing leaky faucets,
replacing rusty pipes.
One day, I was up in Mr. Wahdati’s room dusting cobwebs from the moldings
while he slept. It was summer, and the heat was fierce and dry. I had taken all
the blankets and sheets off Mr. Wahdati and rolled up the legs of his pajama
pants. I had opened the windows, the fan overhead wheeled creakily, but it was
little use, the heat pushed in from every direction.
There was a rather large closet in the room I had been meaning to clean for

some time and I decided to finally get to it that day. I slid the doors open and
started in on the suits, dusting each one individually, though I recognized that, in
all probability, Mr. Wahdati would never don any of them again. There were
stacks of books on which dust had collected, and I wiped those as well. I cleaned
his shoes with a cloth and lined them all up in a neat row. I found a large
cardboard box, nearly shielded from view by the hems of several long winter
coats draping over it. I pulled it toward me and opened it. It was full of Mr.
Wahdati’s old sketchbooks, one stacked atop another, each a sad relic of his past
life.
I lifted the top sketchbook from the box and randomly opened it to a page.

My knees nearly buckled. I went through the whole book. I put it down and
picked up another, then another, and another, and another after that. The pages
flipped before my eyes, each fanning my face with a little sigh, each bearing the
same subject drawn in charcoal. Here I was wiping the front fender of the car as
seen from the perch of the upstairs bedroom. Here I was leaning on a shovel by
the veranda. I could be found on these pages tying my shoelaces, chopping
wood, watering bushes, pouring tea from kettles, praying, napping. Here was the
car parked along the banks of Ghargha Lake, me behind the wheel, the window
rolled down, my arm hanging over the side of the door, a dimly drawn figure in
the backseat, birds circling overhead.
It was you, Nabi.

It was always you.
Didn’t you know?
I looked over to Mr. Wahdati. He was sleeping soundly on his side. I
carefully placed the sketchbooks back in the cardboard box, closed the top, and
pushed the box back in the corner beneath the winter coats. Then I left the room,