They made their way toward the nearest side street, weaving around a pack of boys lighting celebratory canisters of insect repellent on fire. Someone had unfurled a flag from the lowest story of an apartment building, and children had emerged to play at jumping up to touch the trailing edge. The atmosphere was manic, resembling, in a way that disappointed Alif, the chaos that followed a football match. Bits of paper had begun to fall from the air; fragments of the huge portrait of the Emir that had once graced the northern face of the square. They filled Alif with dread that took him a moment to place.
“The book!” he said, stopping in his tracks. “My God, what happened to the book?”
Dina shook her head.
“I lost track of it when you fell out of the window,” she said. “In that mess, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was trampled into muck. Or maybe one of those awful things took it. Or one of the demonstrators who raided the building. Who knows.”
Alif plucked a curl of paper from his hair, feeling guilty.
“Mohammad—what was in that last story?” Dina looked up at him with a searching expression. Alif took a long breath. They had gotten clear of the crowd, and walked along a commercial street past a row of shuttered shops. Alif realized they were not far from the storefront where Dina had been shot, and Vikram had saved them from the State security agent. Here he had begun to be transformed by the story of himself.
“Nothing we couldn’t have written together,” he said to Dina. Her eyes crinkled again. They were silent for a time. Night birds had begun to sing in the stunted, dusty trees, and the breeze from the harbor carried with it the sound of cheers and shouts and horns.
Acknowledgments
Corresponding as it did with the birth of my first child, the completion of this book would not have been possible without the help and support of the following people: my tireless agent, Warren Frazier; my digital assistant, Mohammad Abbas; cybermullah and blogfather Aziz Poonawalla; my wonderful editors at Grove/ Atlantic, Amy Hundley in New York and Ravi Mirchandani and Mathilda Imlah in London; and most of all my mother, who flew out for the delivery of the baby and stayed on for the delivery of the book. Lastly, thanks to all of my Twitter followers, who have provided me with everything from research references to scones and coffee. Bless you all.
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