Page 226 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

glass and the window frame.

Sixty-six … sixty-seven … sixty-eight …
The boy in the bed next to mine has an old man’s face, haggard, sunken,
carved. His lower belly is swollen with a tumor the size of a bowling ball.
Whenever a nurse touches him there, his eyes squeeze shut and his mouth
springs open in a silent, agonized wail. This morning, one of the nurses, not Gul,
is trying to feed him pills, but the boy turns his head side to side, his throat
making a sound like a scraping against wood. Finally, the nurse pries his mouth
open, forces the pills inside. When he leaves, the boy rolls his head slowly
toward me. We eye each other across the space between our beds. A small tear
squeezes out and rolls down his cheek.

Seventy-five … seventy-six … seventy-seven …
The suffering, the despair in this place, is like a wave. It rolls out from every
bed, smashes against the moldy walls, and swoops back toward you. You can
drown in it. I sleep a lot. When I don’t, I itch. I take the pills they give me and
the pills make me sleep again. Otherwise, I look down at the bustling street
outside the dormitory, at the sunlight skidding over tent bazaars and back-alley
tea shops. I watch the kids shooting marbles on sidewalks that melt into muddy
gutters, the old women sitting in doorways, the street vendors in dhotis squatting
on their mats, scraping coconuts, hawking marigold garlands. Someone lets out

an earsplitting shriek from across the room. I doze off.
Eighty-three … eighty-four … eighty-five …
I learn that the boy’s name is Manaar. It means “guiding light.” His mother
was a prostitute, his father a thief. He lived with his aunt and uncle, who beat
him. No one knows exactly what is killing him, only that it is. No one visits him,
and when he dies, a week from now—a month, two at the outside—no one will
come to claim him. No one will grieve. No one will remember. He will die
where he lived, in the cracks. When he sleeps, I find myself looking at him, at
his cratered temples, the head that’s too big for his shoulders, the pigmented scar
on his lower lip where, Gul informed me, his mother’s pimp had the habit of
putting out his cigarette. I try speaking to him in English, then in the few Urdu

words I know, but he only blinks tiredly. Sometimes I put my hands together and
make shadow animals on the wall to win a smile from him.
Eighty-seven … eighty-eight … eighty-nine …
One day Manaar points to something outside my window. I follow his finger,
raise my head, but I see nothing but the blue wisp of sky through the clouds,
children below playing with water gushing from a street pump, a bus spewing
exhaust. Then I realize he is pointing at the photo of Thalia. I pluck it from the