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it, not practicing it. “Thought control,” he would call it, “something to keep busy the teeming masses.” Then, without looking up from his book, he would add, “Not to exclude you, my love,” and she would feel herself turn red at the blatancy with which he mocked her.
    Some nights he would spout passages from the Bible or a Chinese religious book whose name she could never remember. He would compare these quotes to verses from the Koran, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each text, unmindful of the fact that she was covering her ears to deflect any possible blasphemy. She especially dreaded the times he brought up the Din Ilahi, a sixteenth-century amalgam of Hinduism and Islam that the Mughal emperor Akbar had concocted to unify his subjects. “Religion revealed by man, not prophet,” their school mullah had contemptuously asserted, “is religion fit for no one.”
    Ahmed, though, was all for it, and regarded Akbar as a personal hero. “He really put the mullahs in their place,” he would say, as he looked for opportunities to taunt people. “Perhaps it’s time to give the experiment another shot—force everyone to convert to it, Hindus and Muslims alike. Just think of it—instant peace, instant harmony—the mullahs might have to share their masjids, but so what?”
    Statements like these made her wonder how many more she could afford to hear before being condemned to accompanying Ahmed into the fires of hell. An image from the Koran kept coming to her—that of Abu Lahab being consumed by flames, his wife bringing the firewood, a rope tied around her neck.
    For the first few months of their marriage, she had meekly listened to everything Ahmed said, without comment. But she soon learned that her silence elicited increasingly outrageous pronouncements, which let up only when he had succeeded in provoking her into an argument. She had embarked then into the next phase, the one where she believed that she would be able to change him, that the intrinsic virtue of her beliefs would shine through and banish the shadows from Ahmed’s mind. But she had found herself unequipped to match his prowess at debate—the keenness of his words, the onslaught of his ideas, the way he spun strands of her own arguments into webs around her and then watched in amusement as she flailed and struggled and tried to cut herself loose. She had felt the ground of her own faith begin to soften, and had realized the danger of allowing herself to be further engaged. That is when she had summoned up the courage to deliver an ultimatum—Ahmed was forbidden to talk about religion in her presence, or she would leave, taking Salim with her.
    Of course, Ahmed wasted no time calling her bluff, carrying on as usual, ignoring her threat. Until one night, in the middle of a lecture on the equality of all religions, she grabbed Salim and rushed down the stairs to the taxi stand. Although she returned soon enough (she had forgotten to take money for the taxi), it got Ahmed’s attention. At first, he was furious, railing at her for being unintellectual, calling her backward and brainwashed and bigoted. Then he tried appealing to her open-mindedness, her sense of fair play, arguing that a man should be able to discuss anything with his wife, that they were only words, not actions, so where was the harm? But she stood her ground, leaving the room whenever he brought up the subject, and for good measure, going to Salim’s crib and pressing him to her bosom to reiterate her threat. Ahmed gave up soon after, and the nightly discourses came to an end.
    It was several weeks before Ahmed’s imposed stoniness thawed. But a trace of formality crept into all his dealings with her, a perceptible guardedness, that over the years hardened into something unbridgeable between them. He started lapsing into periods of secretive behavior—days, sometimes weeks, when he would keep to himself and hide things from her. She remembered one night in