“She’s not only your wife, Abba—she’s my mother, too. Why do you insist on keeping me at a distance?” From holding her tongue for months—years—she’s gone to confronting everyone in a few days: first Ammi, then Seema, now Abba. But the words don’t produce relief, they merely serve to reinforce a feeling of wretchedness.

After Seema had left, after he started cutting her off for even mentioning Seema’s name, she’d hoped—despicably, for didn’t she still miss Seema then?—that her presence would make up for his beloved’s absence, that she would in time come to replace her sister. But he’d distanced himself from her as well. Did he expect her too to fail him, or was she just too poor a substitute?

“But, Tahera, you’re in America.” The jocular edge to his voice is back. “The last time I checked it’s still thirteen thousand kilometers away.”

And before she can respond—It was you who sent me here, Abba!—he attacks: “And why have you started reading poetry again, anyway? I thought you had no use for anything other than the Quran.”

“I can read whatever I want. But how are you doing, Abba?” She lowers her voice to a careful whisper. “Are you scared that Ammi will choose to remain here with her daughters—even Seema—rather than return to you?” She can feel her spiteful laugh sting, trilling its way across oceans and continents.

If it’s revenge, its sweetness is short-lived: a click, and he’s hung up. Tahera stands trembling, the phone clenched in her hand.

Heart! Thou and I are here sad and alone. Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! The childhood balm of murmured lines from her favorite anguished Keats sonnet. How ironic it is that Abba had used Keats to persuade her to give up her initial college plans of following in Seema’s footsteps in literature, to choose instead a career in medicine, trailing him. Keats had apprenticed to a surgeon, believing it a fit trade for a to-be poet; Keats had nursed his dying mother and brother before himself succumbing to their tuberculosis. She’d allowed herself to be manipulated, believing Abba wanted her by his side. Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, but Death intenser—Death is Life’s high meed.

A sudden swift urge: Let—me—die!

Back in the living room, after Seema’s exit, Nafeesa takes hold of Tahera’s hand. “What did Abba say? You looked upset.”

“Just Abba being Abba.” The squeeze of her hand shows that her mother understands. Some sense of their old communion still exists. They’d been a family within a family, depending on each other to withstand the force of Abba’s and Seema’s personalities.

She feels an urge to lay the weight of her world in her mother’s lap again, to seek comfort if not counsel, as she’d done all her childhood, to have Ammi stroke her hair—like when she’d laid her head in Ammi’s lap three mornings ago. After Seema’s exile, she’d begun to reject Ammi’s efforts on her behalf, as if she could no longer risk relying on her. She wants to reach over and touch Ammi’s face, to smooth out the lines etched by disease that has added to the distance between them.