Padar, if you’re not careful, you’ll lose to her again!

Sitara, I’m prepared for it. She’s won me over a thousand times already, my father would reply. He had a way of looking at my mother that made her look away and blush.

Sulaiman, please! Mom would chide, holding in her laughter behind a tight smile. Stop or I’ll not play with you at all.

You see, Sitara. If you don’t have the heart of a lion, do not travel the path of love.

We walk a flagstone path to the far end of the gardens. The swimming pool is empty of water, though that hasn’t deterred a band of small boys from playing in the hollow. Two boys sit on the edge, their legs swinging. They turn their heads away and cheer, as if they’ve conjured the cool splash of water on a hot day.

“Sometimes I look at kids here and see ghosts from my childhood. I look for my friends and neighbors and cousins in their faces,” I admit. “As if time might have stood still all the years I’ve been gone.”

“Time isn’t that courteous,” Clay replies, his voice weighted with melancholy. “People keep living and growing and changing and dying whether we’re there or not.”

We pass a tree stump, thick and gray as an elephant’s foot, and a marble masjid with scalloped archways. Men prostrate in prayer in the alcove of the structure, where slanted sunlight warms their devoted backs. We walk through wooden doors twice my height and enter another enclosure.

Babur ordered that this garden be constructed in the image of the gardens of Paradise. Clay and I circle his tomb, admiring the marble lattice of its exterior before stepping into the cool shade inside. The entire structure is a marble enterprise, with a tall, upright headstone.

“Do you believe in heaven?” Clay asks me. Stippled light falls through the latticework and creates the effect of waves on the tomb.

His question makes me think of what Shair said about the seven heavens as we stood over his son’s grave. Whether I landed in the heaven with water or the one with white pearls, or brass, or gold, wouldn’t matter to me. Nor would I care if I ascended to the heavens with the Angel of Death or Isa or stood in the shade of the enigmatic Lote tree with Moses. I only wanted to know whether God would spread a single family over its seven layers. Nothing beyond reunion mattered.

Shair would probably be buried today or tomorrow. I’d noticed an empty plot near his son’s, in that cemetery designed to stay verdant all year long.

Then I remember something else Shair said, something another soldier had relayed to him about the martyred.

He said he’d laid them to rest among giants with a view of Paradise.

I grab Clay’s arm.