It probably wouldn’t happen, though. The problem wasn’t so much that Malik was younger than Laila—it was only a matter of a year or so, and the Prophet himself had married a woman nearly old enough to be his mother—but that Malik was still a schoolboy, and Laila was a marriageable young woman. Her father could hardly be expected to wait for his old friend’s son to grow up; he would be looking for a mature and substantial husband for her—and soon.

O

“Listen! It’s them.”

A summer had passed, and another was not far away. Laila and Amira were huddled in Laila’s father’s library, forbidden territory for females, but Abdullah Sibai was in India buying silk, and there were no other men around. Under such circumstances, Laila’s mother often became inattentive, and Laila and Amira slipped into the library to listen to Abdullah’s elaborate and hugely expensive radio. Amira’s father had one just like it—he and Abdullah had gifted each other with the sets, on which they monitored news and financial developments all over the Middle East.

Laila and Amira put the radio to a different but equally international use: they listened to music from as far away as Istanbul and Cairo. Cairo was their favorite because of the greatness of the Egyptian singers: Abdul Wahab, Farid al-Atrash, and the incomparable Um Kalthoum. Sometimes, too, they could pick up a Cairo station that played Western music; it was there that they heard a group of musicians that Malik, with British-school snobbery, had mentioned to them as being all the rage in Europe. They were called The Beatles.

“Turn it up,” Amira begged.

“No. Mother will hear. Let’s dance.”

Laila had shown Amira how Western teenagers danced (where she gained such esoteric knowledge Amira still had no idea). It was as different from the dancing Amira knew—beledi dancing, which Miss Vanderbeek said Westerners called “belly dancing”—as the music was from anything she had ever heard. It was all wild and free, almost madness—but fun. As she danced, she tried to catch the English lyrics, but words in a song didn’t sound like words read from a book. She could make out “baby” over and over again—though what a baby had to do with it, she couldn’t tell—and the phrase “twist and shout”; she would have to look up “twist” in Miss Vanderbeek’s dictionary. Malik had told them that the song was already passe, Cairo being years behind the times when it came to rock and roll, as the music apparently was called.

The song ended on a series of pounding notes on instruments Amira did not recognize, and almost immediately the station began to fade.

“Just as well,” said Laila. “We’re tempting fate as it is. Let’s go to my room.”