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eight-thirty. The others were in the verandah of the servants’ sitting area. Saleema leaned against the long table, while across from her Rafik sat on a stool. The dim bulbs with tin shades hanging from the ceiling threw a yellow light which left the corners of the room dark. Neither of them could think of anything to say, and Saleema kept wiping her eyes and her face with her dupatta as if she were hot.
    When the rain became hard she said, ‘Come on, let’s go see it come down.’
    They walked awkwardly through the empty dining room, which smelled of dust and damp brick, then through an arcade to the back verandah. A single banyan tree stood in the middle of the back lawn, the rain cascading down through its handsbreadth leaves. Saleema leaned against a pillar, Rafik stood next to her, his hands behind his back.
    ‘God forgive us, there’s going to be a lot of damage to the straw that hasn’t been covered,’ he said.
    ‘This will even knock down the wheat that hasn’t been cut. Look at how hard it’s coming down.’
    She looked over at him, his serious wrinkled face, his stubble. Despite the rain, moths circled around the lamps hanging from the ceiling. She kept bumping her hip against the pillar. Come on, come on , she thought. Finally, he said, ‘Well at least they haven’t started planting the cotton yet.’
    She turned, with her back to the pillar. ‘Rafik, we’re both from the village, we know all this.’
    He looked over at her quickly. His face seemed hard. She had startled him. Then he did come over.
    She put her arms around him. ‘You’re thin,’she said, as if she were pleading, ‘you should eat more,’ exhaling. The water splashed in the gutter spouts. He also pulled her into his body and held her, melted into her, she was almost exactly as tall as him, his thin body and hers muscular and young. He kissed her neck, not like a man kissing a woman, but inexpertly, as if he were kissing a baby. She kept her eyes open, face on his shoulder.
    The electricity went, with a sort of crack, night extinguishing the house and the rain-swept garden.
    ‘Let’s go, little girl,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘They’ll be calling for me.’ In the darkness, with the other servants hurrying to bring lamps and candles, no one noticed when Saleema and Rafik returned to the kitchen.
    But the next morning, when the servants were eating their parathas and tea, he came over and sat down next to her, saying nothing, sipping the tea and chewing noisily because of his false teeth, his mouth rotating. So everyone knew. After that he ate his meals next to her, and when they had no duties they went off into the empty back garden and sat talking. But they didn’t make love, or even do more than hold hands.
    At the end of the week Harouni and his retinue drove back to Lahore, Rafik, Saleema, and the rest.
     
     
    The servants had a game that they played, with Rafik surprisingly enough not just acquiescent but the ringleader. Up in Rafik’s native mountains marijuana grew everywhere, along the sides of the roads, and thickest along the banks of open sewers running through the rocky pine woods below the villages, the blooming plants at the end of summer competing in sweetness and stench with the odor of sewage. Hash smoke clouded the late-night air in the little village tea stall when he was a young man. Now, every spring Rafik planted a handful of seeds behind some trees in a corner of the Lahore garden, and in the fall he dried the plants and ground up the leaves. He played tricks on the others, making a paste called bhang and slipping it into the food of one or another servant. Sometimes they would taste it and stop eating, but often not.
    A few weeks after the visit to the Harouni farm at Dunyapur, Rafik began secretly compounding a batch of his potion in his quarters, with the help of Saleema. Kamila Bibi had gone back to New York, but Saleema had been kept on, through Rafik’s intervention. The accounts manager Shah