I was shocked. Why the tomb, then? Why build a tomb and guard a tomb? Why burial rites and burial shrouds if our ultimate fate is a hole in the cliff face? Why not bury us there in the first place if the tomb won’t hold us longer than it takes to crowd with bones?

Which is why, once I grew older, I became so taken with the idea of cremation and scattered ashes.

From dust to dust. What need is there for a tomb, for a gravestone, for a shrine? Laid in a room alongside people you’d never liked until someone comes to clear you out. I’ve since learned that a body’s cells are perpetually renewing. Like: I’m no longer the child who stood astonished in that tomb, nor am I the shy teenager at school, nor the adventurer I was as a young man, always risking death. The pair of red glasses I’ve owned for twenty years are older than any single scrap of my flesh, and they belong to me more surely than my nose or foot.

We rose in silence, the gravestones all around us and between us like stone shrubs, and I recalled an old tale I’d heard about the dead: that after their visitors leave they venture out and sit, backs against their gravestones, and talk. I remembered the day a spirit seemed to take possession of Alya; like, all of a sudden, her tongue was talking out of a former life that still inhabited her body.

That night I learned just how far away she had been born.

We were sitting out on the veranda of a restaurant that seemed completely untouched by what was going on in the world outside: still, soft-lit, the air conditioner bringing breezes that were scented like they’d passed through a garden of flowers. Her phone rang. Raising her hand in apology she answered the call, and then there she was, suddenly speaking a strange language, one I’d never heard before. I nearly choked on my food from the shock of it. As if a spirit had possessed her. Then she was smiling, a flower opening, as she passed me a glass of water.

I watched her until she finished the conversation, still smiling at the astonishment in my eyes. She said, “I was born at the ends of the earth.”

An Asian country. Her father had been posted there. She and her sister had a habit of using the language whenever there were strangers around. But was the stranger someone next to her sister on the other end of the line, or was it me?