But this is not what happened.
After just a few weeks, the khan was considered dead, and the mansion in the saffron fields fell into decay.
The world’s war found Aziz and her mother and the old cook and the harvesters—and put its calloused hand over their mouths.
The fields went fallow.
Hunger came on them like a bandit.
Her mother sat all day with an untouched glass of tea and watched it cool. Aziz began to feel that her mother had also left her, and would only return with the khan.
Aziz spent those famine days at the front window of the house, in a state of half-reading. Carriages drove past the open courtyard, taking people to the cities to find work. One woman stuck her hand out of a carriage and let a man cut the bracelet from her wrist in exchange for a loaf of bread.
The day her uncles came, Aziz witnessed the old cook carrying a pot of barley stew from the bonfire on the other side of the orchard to the main house, when a gang of people attacked him, spilling the pot onto the dirt. They pushed the cook aside. And then they fell to all fours and plunged their faces into the stew and the mud.
* * *
IMAGINE YOU’RE EVIL.
Not misunderstood.
Not sad.
But evil.
Imagine you’ve got a heart that spends all day wanting more.
Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity.
Imagine you’re like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers.
Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.
Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey.
Imagine you’re evil and you don’t do any of those things, but you’re like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what’s going on and you say nothing’s going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English.
Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you’re disgusted, because you don’t like meanness. But you don’t do anything or tell anyone.
Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.
Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them.
Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone.
All the kindness you could have given.
All the excuses you gave instead.
Imagine that for a minute.
Imagine what it means.
* * *
WELL, ANYWAY, DON’T GET too upset.
You can always find somebody worse-acting than you and say, at least I’m not as bad as that guy.
And you can feel good and go to the mall and go back to being evil.
* * *
HER EVIL UNCLES APPEARED on a cold early morning, right after Aziz walked into the courtyard and found her mother dead.
Aziz was only ten. She stood over her mother and thought, How will I tell this news to Father when he comes back? That was how out-of-touch she was, probably. She knew he was dead, but also, in a different story, he was temporarily dead. She wanted to live in that other story.
In a different tale her mother would have died of heartache for her missing husband (in this one, disease).
That was the story that actually happened. Aziz lost her dad, then lost her mom, then the uncles arrived as if they had heard the news of their sister already. As if they knew Aziz had become the orphan heir of all the khan’s estate.
She had no one but the old cook, and the steward family who kept the orchards, and the harvesters who lived in the village. But they couldn’t defend her against her own kin.
The uncles—I don’t know what they looked like or how many. Let’s make two. Both younger brothers to Aziz’s mother, both squat and shaggy.
No wait, one is pinched and thin.
Together they look like a bird and an onion.
One is the kind of villain who wants more for himself.
The other is the kind who wants less for others.
The one who looked and moved like a bird was the first to walk into the house and inspect everything, as if he’d just walked into a bazaar. The uncle who looked and smelled like an onion stood by the door, sweating.
So the story goes that the uncles had whispered with a clerk in the village and given him gold. In exchange, they took the deed to all the khan’s fields.
And what about their orphan niece?
They would keep her, of course.
She would care for the house.
There is no more description of this time in Aziz’s life, because no one ever talked about it.
The harvesters refused to call the uncles “khans.” Under the watch of Mr. Bird and Mr. Onion, they marched into springtime fields so full of purple flowers they looked like carpets in the house of God. But Aziz never heard the harvesters laugh again.
As she washed and mended, she only ever heard them say, “Don’t worry, Aziz joon. Soon you will come of age and claim the khan’s inheritance.”
No one knows if Aziz felt better when she heard that sort of thing. Because Aziz would never say. But it would have been better if she put her head down and helped the cook prepare the private meals for her uncles. It would have been better if Aziz never dared hope anything in those long five years.
Because the version where she grows and takes her father’s house back—that’s not how the story goes.
* * *
PEOPLE GET MARRIED FOR all kinds of reasons.
I said that once in Mrs. Miller’s class and Julie Jenkins said, “Like love.”
And I said, “Or money. Or protection. Or just to talk to somebody,” which is what I thought at the time, because my mom married Ray. It seemed to me she just wanted someone who spoke Farsi like we did, and he was the only one we met when we got here. Mrs. Miller didn’t know that, so she said, “Thank you, David. Let’s stay on task.”
She called me David for the first few weeks, even though we told people to call me Daniel. They’re both the same to me, so I didn’t correct her. “Ma and Pa love each other,” adds Julie. And we go on reading Charlotte’s Web.
We lived in an apartment before Ray. Brentwood Apartments. It was a nice place. I once saw a kid explode his tongue with a car battery, so I guess it was the kind of place where they value education.
His name was Tanner and he was trying to kill the cockroaches in a drain ditch behind the apartments. He had the two prongs of jumper cables with the other end attached to the car battery. And he’d put them on the cockroaches.
I was only there because Ray was shouting at my mom and they’d sent us outside. I played in the cement drainage area because Tanner told me someone had killed a kid in the woods last year. So I stayed away from there.
“Come check this out,” said Tanner.
I didn’t move.
He jabbed the prongs into the ditch, under an open grate, and laughed. “I think you could kill a turtle with this.”
“Don’t,” I said.
That made Tanner look up, because I was telling him what to do. He could have probably killed me if he wanted. “What’d you say?”
I would have run home, but Ray hit my mom a lot back then, and it was worse if we were around. I said, “Nothing. I thought … is there a turtle in there?”