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of lingering twilights in England, a magical time between night and day, when the light is still in the day and the first stirring of darkness is creeping into it. He told me of long, glorious sunsets, explosions of light across the sky, the slow descent of night. The darkness comes quickly here, closes in relentlessly, descends upon us completely and absolutely—that is the way of the desert.
    Avi Goldberg, shouts another prisoner, we salute you.

C HAPTER 5

    T here is another beginning. Maybe I didn’t begin at the beginning. It’s hard to know; it’s not as exact a science as you believed, finding a beginning.
    You are Saleem, firstborn son of Talibah. I do not know her second name, you never told me. Talibah, who married at seventeen, had six children, all boys, and died, aged twenty-seven, in childbirth.
    Being the firstborn son of Talibah means a lot: that you are first to lick the spoon when she makes her sweet biscuits, the ones that melt on your tongue; that you are the first she kisses goodbye in the morning when you line up to say goodbye before school; the last one she tucks into bed at night, the last one to feel her soft kiss and her whispered blessing. It means that you understand things the other boys don’t, and that you get to do things they don’t because you are the biggest. It means that you know her best because you know her longest, and it means that you have to protect her—that you are home that day, sitting on the stairs, the back stairs that nobody ever uses.
    You are sitting on the back stairs, on the marble stone leading to her room. A new baby is on the way. You’ve watched her tummy growing and Grandmother says the baby will arrive soon. She isn’t well, there is talk that this must be the last one.
    She is suffering. You hear her moaning but you can’t go in; if they see you they will send you away somewhere to play for the day. Your knuckles are scratched and bleeding because you fought with your brother Karim when he threatened to tell your father of your plan to stay home. You tortured him into submission, but he got hold of your knuckles and scraped them along the concrete.
    She calls out then and you want to answer her. You rise to answer, you stand up and walk towards the dark door. You know she lies inside in her great big bed, and you want to help her, bring her water, rub ice against her warm cheeks—something—but you sit back down again when you remember what will happen if your grandmother sees you.
    The cries go on all afternoon, and you sit there frozen to the ground. After a while you creep down to the kitchen; it is deserted, so you open the fridge and start to eat cheese and olives. And then Grandmother appears and she is angry, very angry, her nostrils expand, opening and closing, and you stare at them.
    Have you defied your father, she screams. Why you are not with the other children?
    You don’t answer because you don’t know how to tell her about your mother and that you are frightened, and how you think that she and your father don’t love your mother, don’t really love her the way you do.
    Go to your room, she says. We have enough going on here.
    She takes your arm and pulls you up the stairs, into your room, nearer now to Mother and her moans. Nearer, nearer, so that all afternoon in the dead heat of August you lie on your bed trying to block your ears, but still hear her moans, deeper, deeper, until eventually there is silence, and then there is the piercing cry of a baby—your new brother. A mosquito is flying around your ears, leaving a whistling echo in its wake. But your mother is silent and you know she is gone, and you sleep then, deeply with no dreams, nothing but emptiness.

C HAPTER 6

    Daniel Goldberg
    October 26th, 1985
    D ear Sareet,
    It is late October now and the land is readying itself for winter. Perhaps you remember the Galilee at this time of year, and think of it sometimes, the way the hot wind blows, followed always by rain, the