I sighed with relief. I was bouncy all the way back. But then I had no desire to see the boy again. The last encounter I had with him was on a day when I was coming home from school with a group of girls.

We were all wearing the gray school uniforms. The day was hot and a mass of locusts buzzed, travelling through the dirty haze that hung in the air. We were approaching his house. I broke away from my friends and began to walk fast. I suspected that the boy might be waiting for me and did not want anyone to notice. As I reached the door to his house I saw him standing in the dim hallway. He beckoned to me. I looked at him, shook my head, and went on. Either he was crushed by my behavior or he himself had lost interest, because he did not persist in trying to see me.

I dreamed of escape into a different world. I asked my father, repeatedly, to let me go abroad. I begged or threatened alternately until he softened. Later he even became eager for me to leave, as if he had thought of the idea himself. Perhaps he hoped that an education would protect me from some passion or impulse that he might have sensed in me.

When I had finished high school and was about to leave for a college in the States, Darius came into my room. A cigarette smouldered between his lips. As I packed he watched the smoke as though afraid of other confrontations. The usual roughness had disappeared from his face.

“You’ll write, won’t you?” he asked.

I did not reply, thinking I would never write to him. And I did not.

Now I was walking beside Darius, uneasy with him as always, pretending to listen to my father and Ziba as they chatted. At home I excused myself to shower and take a nap even though it was unusual for me to sleep during the day. Ziba had heated the bathroom water in the morning.

The shower was a small cemented area off the kitchen. The water alternated from too hot to too cold but I stood under it for a long time. My upper back and chest hurt—an elusive pain, hard to pin down. It was like a muscular pain but I kept worrying that an illness might keep me bedridden for days. I was no longer immune to the germs here.

I found a bar of soap and a yellowish shampoo on a shelf. The soap was of a poor quality and would not lather. My father could have done more to make the place comfortable, I thought. He was not poor certainly, although he had made sacrifices to send me to school in the States. The house, once beautiful, was in decay now, like the neighborhood. But this was the house and the neighborhood my father was used to. Always reluctant to make changes, he would never think of moving.