I Am Pilgrim(41)

She stared at her only boy – every month looking more like his father and making her love him all the more deeply for it – trying to will him to tell her everything, but he just looked up and met her gaze, unwavering.

‘I’m sixteen in two weeks,’ he said, ‘but I still need your permission to get a passport. I want to go to Pakistan for a month.’

She said nothing, too shocked – Pakistan? Where did that come from?

‘It’s during the long summer vacation, so it won’t affect my studies,’ he continued coolly. ‘Outside Quetta there’s a famous madrassah – a religious school – that has a perfect course for young men starting out. The imam tells me it will set the high standard for the rest of my career.’

His mother nodded; she could almost hear the blind man saying it. What would he know about her son? The boy was tall and strong, surprisingly athletic, and she doubted that a life of religious study would ever satisfy him. ‘Even if I agreed – how could we afford it?’ she asked, opting for the most reasonable-sounding objection first.

‘The course is free,’ he said, ‘and the imam has offered to pay the air fare. Other members of the mosque have said they’ll write to friends to arrange accommodation.’

She bit her lip – she should have anticipated something like that. ‘When would you leave?’ she asked.

‘Ten days,’ he replied, daring her to say it was too soon.

‘When?!’

‘Ten days,’ he repeated, knowing she had heard well enough.

It took her a moment to stop her heart’s wild tattoo. Only then could she try to address her fear that if she didn’t help him it might open a gulf which might never be healed.

‘What do you say?’ he asked, the tone aggressive enough for her to understand the answer he expected.

‘I’d never stand in the way of such an honourable ambition,’ she said at last. ‘But of course I have concerns of my own, so it depends on meeting with the imam and making sure I’m satisfied with the arrangements.’

He smiled pleasantly as he got to his feet. ‘No problem. He’s expecting your call.’

Two days later, reassured by her meeting, she signed the application for an expedited passport, and that afternoon he went to the office of Pakistan Air and bought his ticket.

By then his mother had realized he would be away for his birthday and, in the flurry of packing and shopping, she and the girls took on one extra burden – organizing a surprise birthday celebration for the day of his departure. It was a poorly kept secret, but he seemed to play along, feigning not to notice the extra food being brought in and the invitations going out to his school and the mosque.

By 4 a.m. on the day of the party, however, he was already awake and fully dressed. Silently he slid into his sisters’ room and stood at the end of their beds. They were exhausted, having stayed up until midnight completing the preparations, and neither of them stirred.

He looked at their lovely faces sailing quietly across the dark oceans of sleep, and perhaps it was only then he realized how much he loved them. But this was no time for weakness, and he tucked a copy of a Qur’an inscribed with his name under their pillows and kissed them one last time.

With a heart heavier than he could have imagined, he made his way down the hall and opened the door into his mother’s room. She was asleep on her side, facing him, lit by a soft glow spilling from a night-light in her bathroom.

Unknown to any of them, he had returned to the airline office three days earlier and changed his ticket to a 6 a.m. flight. Ever since seeing his mother in the mall, he had masked his feelings, but he wasn’t sure he could continue to suppress them during the emotional turmoil of what only he knew would be a farewell party. He had told them he would be home in a month, but that wasn’t true. In reality, he had no idea if they would ever see each other again.

Looking at his mother now, he knew there was no easy way. Growing up in the desert, he had only ever seen fog once in his life. Early one morning, his father had woken him and they had watched a wall of white vapour, otherworldly, roll towards them across the Red Sea. Now the memories came towards him like that: her belly growing large with one of his sisters, his father hitting her hard across the mouth for disobedience, her lovely face dancing with laughter at one of his jokes. The rolling mass of human emotion – hope to despair, childish love to bitter disappointment – wrapped its strange tendrils around him until he was lost in its white, shifting universe.

He would have remained adrift in tearful remembrance except for a distant muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. It meant dawn was breaking and he was already running late. He moved to the bed and bent close to the woman’s face, feeling her sleeping breath gentle on his cheek. They say that when men are dying in battle their fingers nearly always twist into the soil, trying to hold on to the earth and all the pain and love it holds.