Theft

It was later, when she was in her old bed in the dark, that the shock of it sank in. He was gone, and she was on her own with the child. She would never find happiness again. There was a pain sitting like a lump in her chest, a proper presence, and an anxious charge like a current through her limbs. Her ears hummed as she lay trembling in the dark, and for the first time in that long day her tears flowed. It felt as if love had fled from her forever.

He was drawn to sadness and could not help noticing it in people.

She tried not to build fantasies on such meager signs but she still found pleasure in imagining how it would feel to be with him, to lie with him.

To himself he said ruefully, Once a servant always a servant.

When he was alone on the mat in the storeroom that night, closed in and in the dark, he felt a panic cutting through his misery. He sat up in alarm and heaved for air. He was too old for sobbing in the dark, but he could not stop. After what seemed a long time, the nausea eased, and he stretched out on the floor mat and tried to sleep. He remembered his father sitting silent and sullen on the bus, then striding in front of him past the blue mosque. He remembered his look of rage, his last words to him.

He was to be their servant boy, their boi, he understood that now. It was so sudden, and no one had explained.

Karim at times wondered why parents like his, who were neglectful and unloving, bothered to have children. He had only a hazy memory of his father, and his mother often rebuked him for what she called his antics and often seemed to find him irritating and hardly ever sat to talk with him in the way his grandmother did. Sometimes his mother surprised him with that lazy smile he so loved and even gave him a hug and a caress, but often her address to him was a grumble or an impatient command.

he reserved his cruelty for her and took pleasure in it, and she feared that one day his viciousness would become violent. She did not know whether it was best to cower and tremble in front of him as a sign of her capitulation, which she knew he desired, or to be obstinate and abusive in return. She was learning to live with his contempt and her own self- disgust, but she was frantic for her child’s safety. She wondered, at times, if this was what life was like for most women, if they lived this way, in terror of their men. Why did they not speak? She did not know who she could speak to.

She learned to make it easier for herself, to evade pain by preparing her body to receive him. She learned to acquire some control so she was not always at his mercy, to delay and postpone, and to feign enjoyment. She said no when she could, and fought back when he rebuked her, returning vicious abuse to his hectoring threats. It was a nightmare she could not tell anyone about.