Page 88 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

One day, in Paghman, I was sitting on the grass, studying the chessboard.

This was years later, in 1968, the year after Suleiman’s mother died, and also the
year both Mr. Bashiri and his brother became fathers, boys they had named,
respectively, Idris and Timur. I often spotted the little baby cousins in their
strollers as their mothers took them for leisurely walks around the neighborhood.
That day, Suleiman and I had started a chess game, before he had dozed off, and
I was trying now to find a way to equalize my position after his aggressive
opening gambit, when he said, “Tell me, how old are you, Nabi?”
“Well, I’m past forty,” I said. “I know that much.”
“I was thinking, you should marry,” he said. “Before you lose your looks.
You’re already graying.”

We smiled at each other. I told him my sister Masooma used to say the same
to me.
He asked if I remembered the day he had hired me, back in 1947, twenty-one
years earlier.
Naturally, I did. I had been working, rather unhappily, as an assistant cook at
a house a few blocks from the Wahdati residence. When I had heard that he

needed a cook—his own had married and moved away—I had walked straight to
his house one afternoon and rung the bell at the front gates.
“You were a spectacularly bad cook,” Suleiman said. “You work wonders
now, Nabi, but that first meal? My God. And the first time you drove me in my
car I thought I would have a stroke.” Here he paused, then chuckled, surprised at
his own unintended joke.
This came as a complete surprise to me, Mr. Markos, a shock, really, for
Suleiman had never submitted to me in all these years a single complaint about
either my cooking or my driving. “Why did you hire me, then?” I asked.

He turned his face to me. “Because you walked in, and I thought to myself
that I had never seen anyone as beautiful.”
I lowered my eyes to the chessboard.
“I knew when I met you that we weren’t the same, you and I, that it was an
impossible thing what I wanted. Still, we had our morning walks, and our drives,
and I won’t say that was enough for me but it was better than not being with you.
I learned to make do with your proximity.” He paused, then said, “And I think

you understand something of what I am describing, Nabi. I know you do.”
I could not lift my eyes to meet his.
“I need to tell you, if only this once, that I have loved you a long, long time,
Nabi. Please don’t be angry.”
I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed