It was understood that Zahra’s parents would stay on, and tea and biscuits would soon make an appearance. They and their daughter had been exonerated; all blame fell on Maryam and the parents who hadn’t known how to raise her properly. Zahra looked at Maryam, wanting to convey her embarrassment at the unfairness of this judgment, but it appeared Maryam either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care.

  “What a relief,” Maryam’s mother said when they were out in the schoolyard again. There was no one around, not even in the playing field, but Zahra looked up to the latticed windows cut into the school building and wondered if anyone was watching and relaying information back into the classroom about the disgraced girls and their parents.

  Maryam’s mother rubbed Maryam’s shoulder and smiled at her in a manner that was almost cloying. She wanted so much for her daughter to like her.

  “Hold your heads high,” Maryam’s father said, sounding for the first time like the Patriarch. “Don’t let anyone smell weakness.”

  There was no point going back to class when Maryam’s parents departed. It was break time in a few minutes, and anyway, Zahra’s legs didn’t feel as though they could carry her up the stairs. They made it to the school bell and collapsed onto the ground, leaning back against the solid brick of the archway.

  “Thank god that’s over.”

  “Is it?” Maryam said.

  “Oh god. I forgot about Hammad.”

  “Please. I’m glad he’s been expelled. But what about Jimmy?”

  “What about him?”

  “He just gets away with it? How is that right?” Maryam frowned a little, and her voice was unusually thoughtful when she said, “There’s no justice in this world for girls, is there?”

  Zahra never wanted to have to think about Jimmy again. Already he was receding in the way of a nightmare. “Well, no harm done in the end, right?”

  Maryam was silent. Zahra drummed her fingers on her friend’s arm. “That whole ride, I kept wishing I was more like you. You weren’t afraid at all. I’ve never seen you afraid of anything.”

  “I was afraid,” Maryam said, her voice low. She looked at the palm of her hand as if it could tell her what future lay beyond this moment. When she looked up again, she was grinning. “I was afraid of getting you suspended. I didn’t know if our friendship would survive it.”

  “Idiot,” Zahra said, bumping her shoulder affectionately against Maryam’s. But she knew it was possible the friendship wouldn’t have survived it, even if the incident had been mostly her own fault.

  Soon the bell would ring and the students would rush out to hear if Maryam Khan and Zahra Ali had been suspended or expelled; Saba would feel more important than ever, as she retold the story from her point of view; students as young as Class 7 would nudge each other as they passed the girls to say, That’s them; Babar would want to sit with them to be supportive and perhaps continue what he had tried to start on the dance floor but he was just troublesome enough in the classroom that Zahra would be ignoring the “straight and narrow” injunction if she even considered the option; some students would be kind, and that would be shaming; Hammad’s friends would be resentful that he had to bear all punishment when Maryam was the one who had turned up in a white tank top and sat in his lap; some would whisper that Zahra wasn’t nearly as unwilling as everyone said; and everyone would wonder what really happened in those lost hours of their lives. All that would happen, and soon. But for now Zahra could lean on her best friend’s shoulder, the sounds of the city reaching them from the other side of the high boundary wall, and know how lucky they had been for everything turning out all right when there were so many ways in which it could have gone wrong.

  Her grandfather had been in Malaysia, discussing the new line with Khan Leather’s designers, a week-long trip that felt endless to Maryam as she waited for his return. He was due back on Saturday, but on Friday evening she was summoned to see him in the drawing room, which was where he always liked to be received in his son’s home. In the summer silk curtains blocked out the sun, but now the curtains were drawn back from the French doors, framing the garden with its hibiscus bush and frangipani tree in flower. He was in his armchair, palm atop his walking stick, Maryam’s parents on the nearby sofa.

  Maryam moved with rapid steps toward him, and he flicked his wrist. The walking stick, parallel to the ground, measured the distance she had to keep away from him. She came to a stop, halfway across a Persian rug with a hunting scene woven into it. Her first thought was that he had injured himself and her embrace might aggravate the wound.

  “I thought firing Abu Bakr would have taught you a lesson about lying, conniving, and implicating other people in your crimes,” he said. “I’m amazed Zahra’s parents haven’t banished you from her life.”

  She looked at her parents, full of contempt. Of course they’d told him their own version of what had happened, based on exactly zero questions to their daughter about the night’s events.

  “I told him to take us straight home as soon as we got into that car.”

  “You went through all that trouble only to get a ride directly home?”

  “I didn’t know that other person—Jimmy—would be involved. Hammad never mentioned him.”

  “I see. Who would have imagined you could tell a seventeen-year-old boy you’d leave a party with him and everything that followed wouldn’t be exactly as you wanted it to be?”

  “I know Jimmy’s license plate number. I memorized it as he was driving away.” She jutted her chin out, waited for him to commend her. Outside, her sisters were crawling along the grass on their elbows, trying to get to the French doors unnoticed so they could put their ears to the glass and listen.

  “To what end?” her grandfather said.

  “You can find someone with their license number,” she said, hoping this was true in Karachi and not just in American cop shows.

  “You want me to call the police? I should send them after him—for what crime, exactly? And what happens when they say, what was a girl from a good family doing in that car? Do I say, she lied to her parents about where she was going, and how, and then she took off her clothes and got into a stranger’s car, half-naked? They might give that Jimmy a medal for getting you home safely when most men would have done something very different.”

  “Is no one going to ask me what happened?” Her voice was childish, tearful.

  She saw her grandfather glare at his son and daughter-in-law. “I assumed someone had.”

  Her father bit his thumbnail and looked into the middle distance, her mother made a face that recognized the process to be inadequate but stopped short of claiming responsibility. Maryam felt power shift back to her as she told her grandfather everything that had happened once they were in the car—no point in dragging Zahra into this, and anyway, her grandfather valued loyalty, it would count against her if she tried to shift blame to her best friend. She described Jimmy’s cheap cologne and shiny shirt, his reckless driving, how he turned off the lights on a deserted street and taunted her, the stop at the port to pick up something, probably videocassettes.

  “How do you know it was videocassettes?” her mother said. Maryam had been looking at her grandfather while speaking, and now it was a surprise to become aware of her mother’s genuine horror. “It could have been anything. Drugs or guns, that’s what goes on at the port.”

  Maryam shrugged. “Didn’t sound like drugs. Maybe guns, I suppose.”

  “Maybe guns, you suppose?” Her mother touched her hands to her temples, shaking her head.

  “And then?” her grandfather said.

  “And then I said we know the DIG Police really well, and that he should take us home if he didn’t want the police out looking for him.” She waited a moment to see if this piece of quick thinking would make him look more favorably on her, but he continued to stare at her with the same immobile expression that he wore when his employees stood in front of him and confessed some error or failing. So there was nothing to do but admit that instead of doing as she said, he had driven them to Napier Road.

  Her mother made a low choking sound.

  “What did he do there?” Her grandfather leaned forward.

  “He . . .” How to say it? “He stopped the car and gave me this look. It wasn’t the way boys should look at girls.” She was aware of how feeble, how inadequate, that description was. “And he made me say please to him. Please could he take us home.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he drove us back to Zahra’s.”

  Her mother stood up and put her arms around Maryam, trying to pull her daughter to her, but Maryam stiffened, resisted, and her mother went to sit back down.

  Her grandfather tapped his walking stick on the carpet, irritated by the interruption. “So when we come down to it, his only crime that we know of was traffic violations, which aren’t nearly as serious as driving around without a license, age fourteen. The duffel bag could have been videocassettes, could have been guns, could have been . . .” He gestured out of the window to the gardener tilting a steel container toward the little flowerpots affixed along the exterior of the house. “Watering cans.”

  “He wanted to scare us. He enjoyed us being scared.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Not at first, but eventually.” A terrible thing to have to admit, particularly because it prompted her mother to look at her with such concern, but how else to make him take seriously what Jimmy had done?

  Her grandfather reached for the glass of water beside him and took a long sip. “If I had been there when he’d dropped you at Zahra’s I would have chased after him and thrashed him with my stick,” he said, a glance in his son’s direction to underscore his failure to do the same. “But it isn’t a crime to scare someone.”

  “If we call the police and it gets out, everyone will think something really unspeakable happened to you,” Maryam’s mother said, her tone apologetic. “And there’ll be enough talk as it is.”

  “Can we speak alone?” she said to her grandfather.

  “No,” he said shortly. “Say whatever you have to say.”

  “I know you can’t call the police. But you can make a phone call.”

  He waited for her to tell him who he was supposed to call, and she repeated, Make a phone call.

  “You want me to call Billoo?”

  “Who’s Billoo?” her mother said at the same time her father said, “Why does she know about Billoo?”

  “Do you know what you’re asking?” her grandfather said.

  “It’s not right that he should just get away with it.”

  “So what is it you want me to tell Billoo to do?”

  Maryam shrugged. He was the adult; he should make these kinds of decisions. She only knew that Jimmy must be taught a lesson.

  “Beat him up? Break his kneecaps? Torture him with a power drill?”

  She remembered the man on the pathway, screaming, his groin wet. A terrible memory until now, but she imagined Jimmy in his place and the feeling that came on her was satisfaction. She understood for the first time, at the deepest level, what justice meant.

  “He made us afraid. I want him to be afraid, that’s all.” There would be no reason to even touch him, as he hadn’t touched her or Zahra. But please, let him know fear.

  “God help us,” her mother said.

  “What kind of person are you?” said her grandfather, with a note of unknowing quite distinct from his usual questioning tone that suggested an examiner who has all the answers and is merely testing the quality of his interlocutor’s knowledge.

  “The kind of person you’ve taught me to be.”

  The sound of upset from her mother was drowned out by her grandfather stamping his stick against the floor. “You think you can compare your disgraceful demands to the terrible decisions I have to make for the good of the company and this family?”

  “What decisions?” she heard her mother say to her father, who hadn’t made a sound or said a word, and still didn’t.

  Her grandfather was looking at her the way he looked at disappointing product samples. “I thought I could make you what you need to be. But you’re just a girl, aren’t you? You’ll always be a girl. And there’ll always be Jimmys out there who’ll see through everything else and know that. Perhaps I should be grateful to him for making that so clear.”

  “A girl is running this country,” she said.

  “She’ll never run anything. Already we’re hearing more about her husband than we are about her. And god knows what kind of decision you’ll make in that department when the time comes to it. This Hammad—I’m told the headmistress said he’s always been rotten.”

  She couldn’t help rolling her eyes, though she knew he would hate that. “I wasn’t planning to marry him.”

  He stood, placing his weight on his stick, and turned to her mother. “Do what you want. I won’t stop it.”

  Her parents’ startled looks told her something dramatic had happened. Her grandfather lifted his hand off his walking stick, it wobbled, and his hand descended again to catch it before it fell sideways. A familiar tic, but as he raised his arm the phrase “under his wing” went through her mind. That was her place, and the temporary withdrawals of his favor were merely a sign of it. Was her family really blind enough to think otherwise?

  “I’m sorry,” she said to her grandfather. “I know I still have a lot to learn from you.”

  He was shaking his head. “You’re learning all the wrong things. Self-absorbed and willful. No moral center. You’ll never be who I need you to be.”

  On the other side of the French doors her middle sister was pulling a grotesque face at her, full of triumph and spite. Her youngest sister put her arms across her own body. “You going to try to make one of them your heir?” She flicked her fingers toward them, stung into playing her trump card for the first time.

  Her father sat up. “I’m his heir,” he snapped.

  “No one thinks you have any intention of running the company,” she said, rage undamming. “And you couldn’t even if you tried.”

  “He wants to sell it when I’m dead,” her grandfather said. “Oh, you thought I didn’t know that?” This was to her father, who pressed himself into the sofa cushions.

  Once, walking on the gunwale of a wooden sailing boat, she had slipped on an oil patch. There was the endless moment of losing her balance, clawing at air, and then the cold dark waters that all her years of swimming in the ocean hadn’t prepared her for. The absolute immobilizing shock of it. Just a few strokes away from the boat, twice junior champion of the swimming gala, she’d had to be rescued by one of the crew.

  “He can’t sell it. It’s our family business.” She addressed herself only to her grandfather; no one else mattered in this conversation.

  “That has always been my thought, my dream. But Allah gave me only one useless son, and no grandsons.”

  “I can run it.” Clawing at air. “Dada, please, it’s our company, my company. You’ve always said.”

  “My god, what ideas have you been feeding her?” her mother said. “She’s a child. And Toff is your son. He’s your son.”

  “Yes,” her grandfather said. “That seems to be my fate.” He raised a finger toward Toff. “You will stop having conversations with other people about selling so long as there’s a single breath left in me, do you understand?”

  He was looking over Maryam’s head, speaking to his son as if this conversation had nothing to do with her.

  “He can’t sell it, not ever, you said it’s mine. Please, Dada.” She clutched at his sleeve and began to cry, no more than the helpless girl Jimmy had seen and revealed.

  He pried off her fingers, embarrassed by it all. And then he was gone, and her father stood up and walked out of the room, saying he didn’t want to talk about any of this ever again.

  So it was Maryam and Zeno. She pushed off her mother’s attempts to comfort her. “What did he mean, ‘Do what you want. I won’t stop it’?”

  A sound from outside. Her sisters had put their hands to their mouths as if they already knew what their mother planned for Maryam, and it was something far worse than they would have wished upon the sister they didn’t even like. Didn’t they understand? Her future had been torn away from her by the grandfather who had always been her protector. Whatever else happened didn’t matter, how could it? Beneath her feet, a stag with a quiverful of arrows through its heart.

  The weekend morning traffic was light, and most shutters were still down along the stretch of Bunder Road to which Maryam had driven, but the neon-lit hole-in-the-wall for which she and Zahra had come was open. She parked the Mercedes in a no-parking zone and turned to Abu Bakr in the back, who nodded to say he’d stay with the car in case the traffic police turned up. He got out of the car and leaned against its door, letting the men at Cafe VIP who watched the girls’ approach know that he had an eye on everything.

  All the tables inside the white-tiled cubbyhole were available, but the tables on the pavement were taken by young men whose lab coats marked them as students from the nearby medical university. A radio was perched on the counter that took up part of the entryway, broadcasting the West Indies vs. Pakistan one-day game from Hobart. Zahra looked inside the cubbyhole, said again to Maryam that this really wasn’t necessary. Maryam walked up to the counter, asked for chai and paratha for herself and her friend and the same for her driver back there, and a table outside. No, she didn’t want to sit inside, she said, a little louder. Two of the university students stood up, moved their chairs to the table a few inches away, and told the owner to bring out chairs for Maryam and Zahra. Maryam looked at the four men now huddled around a two-person table, elbows knocking into each other, which required an act of choreography to bring teacups up to mouths without spillage, and said if they joined both tables there’d be space for everyone. This plan duly executed, Maryam and Zahra sat at one end of the conjoined tables, and the men all angled away from them, which simultaneously ensured their knees wouldn’t touch the girls’ and allowed them to continue their conversation about the cricket match uninterrupted.