Page 249 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

And so, what is my dream tonight? he would whisper, taking my hands. And

his smile would open. Because he knew already what dream I was giving him. It
was always the same. The one of him and his little sister lying beneath a
blossoming apple tree, drifting toward an afternoon nap. The sun warm against
their cheeks, its light picking out the grass and the leaves and clutter of blossoms
above.
I was an only, and often lonely, child. After they’d had me, my parents,
who’d met back in Pakistan when they were both around forty, had decided
against tempting fate a second time. I remember how I would eye with envy all
the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister.
How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to
their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing,
betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They
wouldn’t speak to one another. I didn’t understand. Me, I spent most of my early
years craving a sibling. What I really wished I had was a twin, someone who’d

cried next to me in the crib, slept beside me, fed from Mother’s breast with me.
Someone to love helplessly and totally, and in whose face I could always find
myself.
And so Baba’s little sister, Pari, was my secret companion, invisible to
everyone but me. She was my sister, the one I’d always wished my parents had
given me. I saw her in the bathroom mirror when we brushed our teeth side by
side in the morning. We dressed together. She followed me to school and sat
close to me in class—looking straight ahead at the board, I could always spot the
black of her hair and the white of her profile out of the corner of my eye. I took
her with me to the playground at recess, feeling her presence behind me when I

whooshed down a slide, when I swung from one monkey bar to the next. After
school, when I sat at the kitchen table sketching, she doodled patiently nearby or
stood looking out the window until I finished and we ran outside to jump rope,
our twin shadows bopping up and down on the concrete.
No one knew about my games with Pari. Not even my father. She was my
secret.
Sometimes, when no one was around, we ate grapes and talked and talked—
about toys, which cereals were tastiest, cartoons we liked, schoolkids we didn’t,
which teachers were mean. We shared the same favorite color (yellow), favorite
ice cream (dark cherry), TV show (Alf), and we both wanted to be artists when
we grew up. Naturally, I imagined we looked exactly the same because, after all,

we were twins. Sometimes I could almost see her—really see her, I mean—just
at the periphery of my eyesight. I tried drawing her, and, each time, I gave her