Fariha’s Reviews > In Other Rooms, Other Wonders > Status Update

Exhaling, she heard the night resume, spreading like spilled ink, first near her, around her head, breeze in the leaves, then sounds further away, dogs barking from distant villages, carrying over the flat landscape.
Steady, she opened her eyes and looked at the patch of ground boxed in by trees, moonlight silvering their outmost branches. What a small innocent place, a stage. That’s it? she asked.

The cooks tempted her, lording it over the kitchen, where she liked to sit, with the smell of broth and green vegetables cooking and sauce. And she had duties in the kitchen, she made the chapattis, so thin and light that they almost floated up to the ceiling. She had that in her hands. Mr. Harouni had called her into the dining room at lunch one day and said he’d never in seventy years eaten better ones,

‘Never. I won’t forgive you. You had your life, I had mine. At every step of the road I went the right way and you the wrong. Look at you now, with bubbles of blood stuck in the corner of your mouth. Do you think this isn’t a judgment? My wife and children would have begged in the street, and you would have sold my motorbike to pay for six unlucky hands of cards and a few bottles of poison home brew. If you...

The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him ‘Uncle,’ and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing. He could now range further, doing a much wider business.