Nasreen chewed for several moments, staring at Alia before answering. “Pushing boundaries. That’s the only way to change things. You ask for more than they’ll give, but as much as you deserve. Have you learned nothing from this country?
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There was a question Nasreen could not stop asking. She wanted to know, once he realised what was happening, if he regretted sanctioning those hours at that table; she wanted to know if, during those last moments, he hated them, as she did now. She was convinced he must have, even as she hoped he didn’t.
Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.
I am relentless. I feel a new power, the power of telling the truth. I can be consistent; he cannot. Through questions, my story unfolds up to and including their attempts to ask me to plead guilty. No, no, they were simply asking me to tell the truth. The court is so silent that one can hear a pin drop. When I finish, there is applause, which is met with a stern rebuke from the court.
At that appointment, I half-lied about the voices. I heard voices, but they were all versions of my own voice or echoes of voices from my past. Those voices were not, I decided, the ones she was asking about. And I lied when I did not tell her about wanting to burn myself and the cook. I lied when I did not tell her about the door that had opened: The only solution is a permanent solution. My psychiatrist did not ask if there was a seismometer in my midbrain that warned of fissures that would widen into deep chasms and, eventually, into an all-consuming abyss. If she had asked about that, I might have answered honestly. It’s difficult to say.
OK, we’ll tell her you dug the grave.’ It’s the truth – stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?