What Nani Knew

Nani did not sleep much any more. She sat in the courtyard long after everyone else had gone to bed, wrapped in her grey shawl, shelling peas that nobody had asked her to shell and listening to the radio play songs from films that no longer existed.

Zoya found her there at two in the morning, when she crept down for a glass of water and a reason to be awake.

“Sit,” said Nani, without turning around. “You walk like your mother. She thought she was quiet too.”

Zoya sat. For a while they shelled peas together, the small green bullets rattling into the steel bowl, and the radio sang about a moon that had forgotten its way home.

“The Qureshi boy is a good boy,” Nani said at last.

Zoya dropped a pea. It rolled across the tiles and disappeared under the charpai.

“I have been watching that brick for two months,” Nani went on calmly. “In my day we used the drain pipe. It was less obvious, but the letters got wet.”

“Nani—”

“Your grandfather wrote me forty-one letters. I kept every one. Your mother thinks I burned them.” The old woman smiled into the dark. “Tell the boy his handwriting is good. A man with good handwriting has nothing to hide.”

She handed Zoya the bowl of peas, pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders, and went inside, leaving her granddaughter alone in the courtyard with the radio and the moon and the most astonishing secret she had ever been told.