Page 248 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Nine

Winter 2010

When I was a little girl, my father and I had a nightly ritual. After I’d said my
twenty-one Bismillahs and he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side
and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers

would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears,
at the back of my head, and he’d make a pop sound—like a bottle being
uncorked—with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the
dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring
tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the
ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and
frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant
music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father’s face unfurled
into a smile, when he sang, Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the
dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently,
then, so very gently—my father said all good things in life were fragile and
easily lost—he would raise his hands to my face, rub his palms against my brow
and happiness into my head.
What am I going to dream about tonight, Baba? I asked.

Ah, tonight. Well, tonight is a special one, he always said before going on to
tell me about it. He would make up a story on the spot. In one of the dreams he
gave me, I had become the world’s most famous painter. In another, I was the
queen of an enchanted island, and I had a flying throne. He even gave me one
about my favorite dessert, Jell-O. I had the power to, with a wave of my wand,
turn anything into Jell-O—a school bus, the Empire State Building, the entire
Pacific Ocean, if I liked. More than once, I saved the planet from destruction by
waving my wand at a crashing meteor. My father, who never spoke much about
his own father, said it was from him that he had inherited his storytelling ability.
He said that when he was a boy, his father would sometimes sit him down—if he

was in the mood, which was not often—and tell stories populated with jinns and
fairies and divs.
Some nights, I turned the tables on Baba. He shut his eyes and I slid my
palms down his face, starting at his brow, over the prickly stubble of his cheeks,
the coarse hairs of his mustache.