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quickly. Rahim set it on its feet. Its legs were so slender that Mumtaz was afraid they’d break as the fawn bucked to get away from them. Its soft pink tongue licked out at its shiny black nose, and Rahim let it go.
    “She’ll be back,” he said. “She’s looking for her mother, but she won’t find her. Go ask Zenat to warm some buffalo milk with sugar, and get out one of your old nursing bottles so you can feed her.”
    From that day on, Mumtaz and the fawn were inseparable. The tiny hooves followed her,
tak-tak-tak
, across the courtyard and down to the canal. The child tied colored ribbons around the fawn’s neck, and the animal’s coat became thick and shiny from the rich buffalo milk. The
mali
fed her grain in the mornings when he tended the birds. Mumtaz was totally absorbed in her pet, and it lifted Shabanu’s spirits so that Rahim noticed a new warmth in her.
    In the dead still afternoons the heat began to accumulate, and Shabanu and Mumtaz napped. The air shimmered up from the dirt in the white light outsidetheir door. The mosquito netting hung heavy and limp around them as they lay side by side, sleeping behind leaden eyelids. The air felt too hot to breathe, and the
charpoi
strings prickled their shoulder blades through the rough cotton sheet.
    They had been napping for more than an hour on such an afternoon when a shrill scream pierced their heat-drugged sleep. Shabanu pushed aside the mosquito netting. At the doorway she paused to grab her
chadr
, and as she emerged into the shade of the tarpaulin that Zenat had stretched over the doorway, she saw two men scuffling, their feet raising clouds of dust from the parched earth. One of the men wore a smartly starched turban.
    The screaming went on, and Shabanu saw a veiled figure slip away to the edge of the stable yard as other menservants came in their undershirts from doorways behind which they’d been asleep. Some wrapped limp turbans around their heads as they ran.
    “I saw him in her room!” the voice shrieked, over and over. The voice was strange but familiar. Shabanu knew it was the voice of Leyla, though the veil and dust muffled the sound. The voice quavered, and its pitch seemed oddly higher, as if Leyla was trying to disguise herself.
    “The mosquito nets were heaving! I was afraid he was trying to strangle her!” The voice trailed off, thin and ghostly.
    Through the dust Shabanu saw the twinkle ofmirrors on Ibne’s vest. His proud white turban fell from his head in the scuffle and was trampled in the dirt.
    He struggled silently with the other men, who grunted and wheezed as they fumbled to pin his arms to his sides and pull him to the ground. Ibne’s eyes slid wildly from side to side until they found Shabanu’s in the shaded doorway.
    She thought of the times Ibne had brought Rahim’s gifts to her in the desert, he riding his shining white horse, and she sitting with her father astride a camel.
    In all the years Shabanu had known Ibne, this was the first time their eyes had met. His held an urgent plea as the servants wrestled him to his knees. He didn’t make a sound as they dragged him away. When the dust cleared, the dark veiled figure had disappeared.
    Zenat came to take Mumtaz in the early evening so Shabanu could dress for dinner, and Shabanu asked what she knew about the commotion in the stable yard. The old woman worried her long, widely spaced teeth with her tongue and kept her eyes lowered. She pulled at her stained white
chadr
.
    “They said he was caught in your room,
Begum
,” she said.
    “They!” Shabanu said. “Who are
they?
” The old woman kept her eyes on the floor.
    “The women,
Begum
,” she said.
    “Was it Leyla?”
    “I don’t know,
Begum
,” Zenat muttered. She was rescued by Mumtaz, who came in with her dolls and Bundr tucked into the wicker pram. The fawn trotted behind her, raising and lowering her velvet head.
    When they were gone, Shabanu sat in the corner of her room, where she could keep an