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She reads all the letters, later.
She has to. She has to know.
Each letter is a life. Isn’t that strange? Every letter is a single life, done in Khalid’s soft, curving hand and eventually, a silver thread wrapped around a slim neck. Pulse. Cut. The throat opens like a carmine mouth and the soul leaves breathlessly, and depending on whether one is a Muslim or a Zoroastrian or a Hindu, it goes . . . wherever it goes. A faint gold mist in the air, so translucent that mortals such as she cannot see it.
Sometimes she feels like mortality is a veil.
Sometimes she wonders why Khalid did not simply kill himself.
It is bitter and terrible, of course, to think such things of her husband. He is kind and loving and gentle, and it was not he that led the kingdom into ruin. Except. Except.
She wonders sometimes, in the later moments, when she lies next to him, watching the moonlight play over his face, chiaroscuro, silver and charcoal, soft breathing . . .
His chest moves up and down, so slow and sweet, drowning in dreams.
There is a faint jealousy somehow, a faint yearning, a certain fruit-pit hatred that never quite left, sitting in her stomach, blooming and blossoming until the peaches hang lush and heavy with loathing in her lungs, compassed in knife-edge leaves . . .
She wonders.
Perhaps those girls did not have to die. Perhaps there was no need for a question. For so many corpses laid out on the sand, sent to the next world. Perhaps Shiva needn’t have died. She tries to turn away from the questions when they come to her in the light, in the harsh glare of the sun, in the pale cerulean mirage-waves of desperation and desire alike, in the arid winds scented with fenugreek and fig. As if, if she touches the thoughts in the light, they become permanent and true, and those who look at her will be able to tell that she still harbors that deathly wish . . . so she only dares to hold them in the night, in the safety of moonlit darkness, in the pale light of silver lamp-flame.
She feels he is selfish, somehow, till the very end. He’s hedonistic in ways unexpected, so gratuitously noble for her that it takes on a harsh edge, makes it feel thoughtless. And when Khalid looks at her with those soulful eyes, those eyes that tell her that he would cut off his hands for her, become Majnun to her Layla, wander in front of her house like a madman for love, all for love —
(Oh, yes, he would slip the viridescent-gleam adder into his qamis, near his liver, die for her. Lay down his life and defend her honor to the bitter end on the battlefield . . . pass if she passed, go if she were gone, die if she died . . .)
Perhaps, perhaps.
Would he perish upon her heartfelt request?
If she knows him at all, that would be the one thing he denies her.