Page 272 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

his face resting on the pillow, how he used to be, how he used to laugh.

We move from the living room to the kitchen. I fetch a pot from the cabinet
and fill it at the sink.
“I want to show you some of these,” Pari says, a charge of excitement in her
voice. She’s sitting at the table, busily flipping through a photo album that she
fished from her suitcase earlier.
“I’m afraid the coffee won’t be up to Parisian standards,” I say over my
shoulder, pouring water from the pot into the coffeemaker.

“I promise you I am not a coffee snob.” She has taken off the yellow scarf
and put on reading glasses, through which she is peering at pictures.
When the coffeemaker begins to gurgle, I take my seat at the kitchen table
beside Pari. “Ah oui. Voilà. Here it is,” she says. She flips the album around and
pushes it over to me. She taps on a picture. “This is the place. Where your father
and I were born. And our brother Iqbal too.”
When she first called me from Paris, she mentioned Iqbal’s name—as proof,

perhaps, to convince me she was not lying about who she said she was. But I
already knew she was telling the truth. I knew it the moment I picked up the
receiver and she spoke my father’s name into my ear and asked whether it was
his residence she had reached. And I said, Yes, who is this? and she said, I am
his sister. My heart kicked violently. I fumbled for a chair to drop into,
everything around me suddenly pin-drop quiet. It was a shock, yes, the sort of
third-act theatrical thing that rarely happens to people in real life. But on another
plane—a plane that defies rationalizing, a more fragile plane, one whose essence
would fracture and splinter if I even vocalized it—I wasn’t surprised that she
was calling. As if I had expected it, even, my whole life, that through some
dizzying fit of design, or circumstance, or chance, or fate, or whatever name you
want to slap on it, we would find each other, she and I.
I carried the receiver with me to the backyard then and sat on a chair by the

vegetable patch, where I have kept growing the bell peppers and giant squash my
mother had planted. The sun warmed my neck as I lit a cigarette with quivering
hands.
I know who you are, I said. I’ve known all my life.
There was silence at the other end, but I had the impression she was weeping
soundlessly, that she had rolled her head away from the phone to do it.

We spoke for almost an hour. I told her I knew what had happened to her,
how I used to make my father recount the story for me at bedtime. Pari said she
had been unaware of her own history herself and would have probably died
without knowing it if not for a letter left behind by her stepuncle, Nabi, before