The Rooftop in Androon

The kites had all come down by the time Zoya reached the roof, but the sky still looked as if someone had been writing on it, with long pale strokes where the strings had cut through the dusk.

Below her, the old city was lighting itself one window at a time. A radio somewhere was playing a song her mother used to hum while braiding her hair, the kind of song that was mostly waiting between the notes.

“You came,” Armaan said. He was sitting on the parapet with his back to the drop, which was exactly the sort of thing he did to make her nervous.

“I said I would.” She held up the paper bag. “And I brought jalebi, so you have to be nice to me for at least ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes is a very long time.” But he took the bag, and he moved over so there was room for her on the ledge, and she sat down before she could decide not to.

For a while neither of them spoke. The lanterns on the next roof swayed in a wind she couldn’t feel, throwing small gold coins of light across his face. She had rehearsed this conversation on the bus, then again on the stairs, and now every careful sentence had left her.

“My father found the letters,” she said finally.

Armaan went very still. It wasn’t surprise, she realised. It was the stillness of someone who had been waiting a long time for a door to close and had finally heard the latch.

“All of them?”

“Enough of them.” She pressed her thumb against the sugar on her fingers until it went tacky. “He didn’t shout. I think I wanted him to shout. He just folded them back up, very neatly, and said we would talk after Eid.”

Somewhere below, the azaan began, first from one mosque and then another, until the whole city seemed to be answering itself. Armaan waited until the last voice faded before he turned to her.

“Then we have until Eid,” he said, and for the first time all evening, he smiled like he meant it.