The Reluctant Fundamentalist Read Online Free Page A

to time to attract your wary gaze—is himself unable to stop glancing over his shoulder at those girls, fifty yards away from him. Yet they are exposing only the flesh of the neck, the face, and the lower three-quarters of the arm! It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper. Moreover, once sensitized in this manner, one numbs only slowly, if at all; I had by the summer of my trip to Greece spent four years in America already—and had experienced all the intimacies college students commonly experience—but still I remained acutely aware of visible female skin.
    It was in order to prevent myself from impolitely focusing on Erica’s wheat-colored limbs that I asked her if her shirt had belonged to her father. “No,” she said, rubbing the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, “it was my boyfriend’s.” “Ah,” I said, “I did not know you had a boyfriend.” “He died last year,” she said. “His name was Chris.” I said I was sorry and told her that it was a fine shirt; Chris had had excellent taste. She agreed, saying that he had been quite the dandy, and rather vain even in hospital. His nurses had been charmed by him: he was a good-looking boy with what she described as an Old World appeal.
    Arriving in town, we found a café near the harbor with tables shaded by blue-and-white umbrellas. She ordered a beer; I did the same. “So what’s Pakistan like?” she asked. I told her Pakistan was many things, from seaside to desert to farmland stretched between rivers and canals; I told her that I had driven with my parents and my brother to China on the Karakoram Highway, passing along the bottoms of valleys higher than the tops of the Alps; I told her that alcohol was illegal for Muslims to buy and so I had a Christian bootlegger who delivered booze to my house in a Suzuki pickup. She listened to me speak with a series of smiles, as though she were sipping at my descriptions and finding them to her taste. Then she said, “You miss home.”
    I shrugged. I often did miss home, but in that moment I was content to be where I was. She took out her notebook—it was bound with soft, orange leather; I had previously seen her scribbling in it during moments of repose—and passing it to me with a pencil said, “What does your writing look like?” I said, “Urdu is similar to Arabic, but we have more letters.” She said, “Show me,” and so I did. “It’s beautiful,” she said, meeting my eyes. “What’s it mean?” “This is your name,” I replied, “and this, underneath, is mine.”
    We stayed at our table, talking as the sun set, and she told me about Chris. They had grown up together—in facing apartments, children the same age with no siblings—and were best friends well before their first kiss, which happened when they were six but was not repeated until they were fifteen. He had a collection of European comic books with which they were obsessed, and they used to spend hours at home reading them and making their own: Chris drawing, Erica writing. They were both admitted to Princeton, but he had not come because he was diagnosed with lung cancer—he had had one cigarette, she said with a smile, but only the day after he received the results of his biopsy—and she had made sure she never had classes on a Friday so she could spend three days a week in New York with him. He died three years later, at the end of the spring semester of her junior year. “So I kind of miss home, too,” she said. “Except my home was a guy with long, skinny fingers.”
    Later that evening, when we went out for dinner with the group, Erica chose the seat opposite mine. Chuck made all of us laugh with a series of uncanny impersonations—my mannerisms were, in my opinion, somewhat exaggerated, but the others were spot on—and then he went around the table and asked each of us to reveal our dream for what we would most like to be. When my turn came, I said I hoped one day