“Thank you,” she said. She folded the cap in her palm, twirled the corner of the handkerchief around her thumb, dipped it in the alcohol. “This is going to sting. I need to clean the wounds first. You don’t want an infection.” She chose her words carefully. She wanted him to understand that she would care for him. That she could care for him. That she cared, not in a silly, girlish way, like how her school friends giggled and covered their mouths when nice-looking boys passed by. She wanted him to see her as someone he could trust.

Gently, she dabbed the handkerchief along the length of his straight nose.

“I feel better already,” he said.

She rolled the handkerchief to a fresh side, added more alcohol. The cut on his right eyelid concerned her. Its swelling covered half his eye.

“Are you able to see out of this eye?”

“Let’s see,” he said. He reached for the candle, brought it to her face, closed the other, uninjured eye. “There’s a tiny dot just to the side of your mouth, too perfectly formed to be ink. It must be a beauty mark. A thin, delicate scar the length of a baby’s fingernail sits above your eyebrow. Your irises are not dark brown, as I previously thought, but bronze. There are specks of gold in them too.”

The mole, the one that looked, she felt, as if she hadn’t properly cleaned her mouth after a meal—he had complimented. The “delicate” scar came from a particularly nasty fall when she was four or five. No one had ever described her eye color as bronze with golden specks—like one would describe a piece of art. It felt as if he was diagnosing her.

She cut a narrow strip of bandage in her lap, laid it over the cut, secured it with two pieces of tape. “Your vision’s fine then,” she said, with as steady a voice as she could manage. “Are you going to tell me how this happened?”

“You’re the doctor. Are you going to ask me how this happened?” He laughed, touched his mouth as if trying to make sure he still had his teeth. He wasn’t in pain. He wasn’t afraid. He seemed to be enjoying himself with her, as she was with him.

“Then?”

He wiped his hands in his pants, picked at a few loose threads at the seam. “I was crossing a street, through a crowd. One minute, people were conversing peacefully, and another minute—pandemonium. People started calling one another names. Vile Hindu! Idiot Muslim! So childish! Not even Laila would behave in such a way. I don’t even know how it started.”