Read One Amazing Thing for Free Online Page A

sneaked up to her face to wipe away tears. Her fingertips came away kohl-streaked. He hadn’t felt like such a jerk in a long time, though he said far worse things to the girls he went out with. Perhaps it was that Farah didn’t carry tissues, which he translated as meaning that she had not expected him to hurt her. He stopped the car and apologized. She didn’t reply, but she gave a stiff little nod. The thin, curved rod of her collarbone reminded him, illogically, of a fledgling bird. That was when he started to fall in love.
    Once when he was recovering from the flu, she had come into his room with a glass of barley water Ammi had boiled for him. She felt his forehead to check his temperature, and then touched the two-day growth of beard. “Looks good,” she said. His defenses eroded by fever, he was caught in the inflection of her voice. Something ancient in it reached out and reclaimed him. He stopped shaving after that. When at the dinner table his parents pelted him with questions, asking him why he wanted to do something so controversial now, when it was absolutely the wrong time, Farah lowered her eyes demurely. The beard had become a code between them. Even now, a year and a half after she had returned to India (India, where she was waiting for him to come to her), he had only to close his eyes to feel her cool, approving fingers on his jawbone.
     
    “FOLKS, PLEASE, I NEED YOUR ATTENTION!”
    Cameron’s voice crashed against Tariq’s eardrums, shattering the memory and jolting him back to the present. He found that he was kneeling with his forehead to the floor. He had gone through the entire evening prayer without paying attention to the sacred words. This realization, along with losing Farah all over again, made him angrier with the African American.
    “We need to eat and drink a little,” Cameron was saying. “It’ll keep hunger and thirst from overwhelming us later on. If you come up to the counter and make a line, I’ll hand each of you your portion. It’ll be small, I’m afraid—”
    Tariq jumped up from the prayer mat, banging his knee on a piece of furniture because the African American had turned off the big flashlight and was, instead, holding up the pencil light—another part of his strategy for controlling them.
    “Why should you decide what we’re going to do?” he said. “Why should you order us around?” Even to his own ears, his voice bounced off the walls, too loud. He could see faces turning toward him in consternation. He bit his tongue to silence himself. They needed to realize that he was right. That way, he could have them on his side at the right time. “This is an Indian office. If anyone is to give orders, it should be the visa officer.”
    But Mangalam, hair hanging limply over his eyebrows, shook his head. Even in the thin light, his face was haggard. He had been trying the phones every five minutes and had come to the conclusion that service was unlikely to be restored any time soon. He did not want the responsibility for all these lives. In his youth, before marriage and the diplomatic service had snared him with false promises of glamour and ease, he had been a student of chemistry. It seemed to him that each person in this room—and the young man in front of him was a prime example—was like a simmering test tube that might explode if the minutest amount of the wrong element were added to it. He did not want to be in the forefront when the blasts came. He was no hero. Wasn’t that why he had escaped to a post abroad rather than battling it out with Mrs. Mangalam?
    “Mr. Cameron Grant here has been in the United States Army,” he said. “He is used to handling emergency situations. He knows better than I do what precautions must be taken. I vote that we follow his strategy and offer him every cooperation.” Other voices joined him, leaving Tariq stranded.
    Tariq’s mouth filled with a rusty taste. Fool, he thought, glaring at Mangalam. The man was typical