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Back The Wild Ones Save as PDF
Chapters (61)
  1. Cover
  2. PRAISE FOR The Wild Ones
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. The Beginning, or How Paheli Became the First Wild One; With a Cameo by Taraana, the Boy Made of Stars.
  7. An Introduction; Hold On to Your Hats.
  8. The Sweetness in the Sugarcane, or The Impractical Nature of Immortality
  9. Paheli: The Vagrant Experiences of a Mango Addict
  10. Cotton Candy Sugar Screams
  11. From the Book of MEMORIES
  12. “Will You Walk into My Parlor?” Said the Spider to the Fly.
  13. The Best Ice Cream in the World, Teddy Bears, and a Tree Creature.
  14. From the Book of MEMORIES
  15. I.
  16. The Reappearance of the Boy Made of Stars and the Plight of the Girl by the Oleander Lane.
  17. Paheli: An Interlude in Blue
  18. Besieged in the Between
  19. Tea, the City of Stairs, and the Story of a Boy
  20. From the Book of MEMORIES
  21. Heartbreak, Stone Buildings, and Tandoori
  22. Observations, Conversations, and Hot Parantha
  23. Paheli: The Spies Who Came In from the Between
  24. From the Book of MEMORIES
  25. The French Quarter, the Spanish Half, and Eulalie
  26. Paheli: The Eggplant Overture
  27. Sunny Jelly Beans, Po’Boys, and “Alouette”
  28. From the Book of MEMORIES
  29. The Keeper of the Green and the Mysteries of Magic
  30. Blood and the Between
  31. The Library of the Lost and the Stories of the Silenced
  32. Walking in Wicked Ways or The Importance of Balık Ekmek
  33. From the Book of MEMORIES
  34. Looking for the Needle in the Haystack
  35. Paheli: The Peculiar Crackle in the Electricity
  36. Ten Degrees Past Despair
  37. The Fault in the Stars
  38. The Blue City in the Mountains
  39. Paheli: Disharmony in the Attics
  40. From the Book of MEMORIES
  41. Paheli: Continued
  42. The Politics of a Body, the Politics of Pleasure
  43. The Medina, the Riad, and the Red City
  44. Paheli: The Atlas Mountains, the Cozy Rooftop, and the Confession, Possibly of Love
  45. From the Book of MEMORIES
  46. Souks, Spices, and Survival: A Guide into Chaos
  47. Jemaa el-Fna: The Mosque at the End of the World
  48. Paheli: A Moment in Chartreuse
  49. From the Book of MEMORIES
  50. Paheli: On the Frailties of the Heart
  51. Sonagi, or A Sudden Rain
  52. Paheli: The Cheese in the Trap
  53. Paheli: The Maze and the Minotaur
  54. A New Era, a New Dar; the River Sings
  55. The Burning Door, the Fallen City, and Taraana 2.0
  56. Paheli: The Beginning of Forever
  57. From the Book of MEMORIES
  58. Moving One Rock at a Time Will Eventually Move a Mountain, aka Goodbye
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. More from the Author
  61. About the Author

My throat is raw and my cheeks are damp when I finish and open my eyes again. All the middle worlders are on the floor, jerking as if they’ve received an electric shock that has cooked their brains. Well, that is not exactly incorrect. The children are frightened, and were I someone else, I would offer them comfort. But I don’t because I can’t. Because I won’t. I return to the alley, lean against the wall, and wait.

I don’t wait long. Two middle-aged women, dressed in bright saris, arrive first. They march into the warehouse and scream at the sight of the children. In the next moment, they’re on their phones. Other humans make their way over in the following minutes, and soon there’s a brouhaha brewing. The media arrives before the police.

I find Widad near the gate leading out of the area.

“You did well,” I tell her. “Let’s get out of here.”

We take a taxi back to the city center, and Widad leads me to a dessert store where we order too much mithai and two glasses of mango lassi each. We are jittery with shock. Or perhaps adrenaline.

I am sure of one thing, though. I didn’t save the children. I just removed the obstacles so someone else could.

“Do you think he’ll know it was us?” Widad asks between sips of her lassi.

“I don’t know. Perhaps?” I drown my sorrow in a gulaab jamun.

“Will you tell the others what we did today?” Widad asks next.

I think of Valentina’s rage, and I shudder. “Drink your lassi.”

From the Book of MEMORIES

WIDAD

CITY OF ORIGIN: LAHORE

Dear Dead Boy,

I read that you died. It was quite by chance that I saw that conversation. Friends from high school were talking about it on social media, expressing shock, sharing stories. One of us is dead. Well. You’re the fourth one, actually. Two boys have already died. One girl. All tragic, but you were the only one out of them all that I touched. It has been more than a decade since that day. I had forgotten. I wonder if you had too. You used to sit in your corner of the classroom not looking at me, and I used to sit in mine pretending your coldness didn’t hurt. We fought, heated whispers, absolute hate because there were these feelings and neither of us knew what they meant or what to do with them. So we hid behind stinging words and cruel looks. We expressed these feelings in the only way we knew.