The Twentieth Wife Read Free Page A

the next few weeks, clinging to the hillside. And farther in the distance lay the first rising path into the mountains through the Khyber Pass.
    Ghias helped Asmat collect twigs and dry branches for a fire. Then he sat near her, watching her chop a wilted cabbage and some carrots along with a shank of lamb for the kurma. Her hands were raw in the cold, her knuckles white. Mehrunnisa lay wrapped in a bundlejust inside their tent. Muhammad, Abul, and Saliha played with the other children in the twilight. From where he sat, Ghias could hear their screams of delight as they threw snowballs at one another.
    “They will get cold and wet,” Asmat said, looking up from her work. She put a cast-iron skillet on the makeshift chula: three flat stones in a triangle, holding the twig fire inside them.
    “Let them be,” Ghias said softly, watching her. Asmat poured a little oil from an earthenware jar into the skillet, waited for it to heat, and added cardamom pods, a few cloves, and a bay leaf. The lamb meat went in next, and she browned it deftly with a wooden spoon.
    “When did you learn to cook?” Ghias asked.
    Asmat smiled, tucking in a stray lock of hair behind her ears. She watched the meat on the skillet intently, her face red and glowing in the heat from the fire. “I never learned, Ghias; you know that. Meals were always brought to me. They appeared like magic, out of nowhere. But the woman in the next tent taught me this kurma.” She turned to him anxiously. “Are you tired of it? I can learn something else.”
    Ghias shook his head. “No, not tired of it. Even though,” he smiled wickedly, “we have eaten this every night for one month.”
    “Twenty-two days,” Asmat said, as she added the vegetables to the meat and poured water into the skillet. A few pinches of rock salt from a gunnysack, a sprinkling of pounded masala of cloves, chili powder, and cardamom, and Asmat covered the skillet and sat back. She looked up at Ghias. “At least I do not burn the kurma anymore.”
    “Asmat, we have to talk.”
    Asmat turned away from him, pulling out a copper vessel. She dipped her hand into another sack, poured five handfuls of wheat flour into the vessel, and started to knead the flour into dough for chappatis with some water and oil. “I have to make dinner, Ghias.”
    “Asmat . . . ,” he said gently, but she would not look at him. Her back was stiff, her movements jerky.
    From inside the tent, Mehrunnisa cried. They both turned to the sound and waited. She cried again, feebly, without strength. Then, as though exhausted by the effort, the sound stopped. Asmat bent over the dough again, her fingers kneading it with a vengeance. Her hair fell over her face, sheltering her from her husband. One tear, then another fell into the dough, and she kneaded them in. Ghias rose and came over to her. He took her in his arms and she burrowed into him. They sat there for a few minutes, with Asmat leaning into Ghias, her hands still in the flour.
    “Asmat,” Ghias said quietly, “we cannot afford to keep Mehrunnisa.”
    “Ghias, please,” Asmat raised her face to his. “I will try to feed her. Or she will take to the goat’s milk, or we will try to find her a wet nurse. The women were talking the other day of a peasant who just had a child. We could ask her.”
    Ghias looked away from her. “With what would we pay her? I cannot ask Malik for money.” He gestured around him. “He has already given us so much. No,” his heart strained as he spoke, “it is better for us to leave her by the roadside for someone else to find her, someone with the means to look after her. We cannot do so anymore.”
    “You should have kept . . .” Asmat pulled away and started sobbing. But Ghias was right. He was always right. The kuchi had needed the money. Now they could not possibly look after the child, and Asmat’s tears would not stop.
    Ghias rose, leaving his wife near the fire, and went into the tent. He had thought about