Free A Deconstructed Heart by Shaheen Ashraf-Ahmed

with oiled hair. She would see young Indian couples on the street, some holding hands (Boyfriends and girlfriends? Or young married couples? She did not know). She wondered how everything had fallen into place so neatly for them that they had found love where they were supposed to find it, on cue.
    She thought of her parents, and though they had not discussed the matter, she wondered if they were hoping to find someone for her in India. They had not tried hard enough here, she thought, they had not been to enough parties or weddings, to exchange phone numbers or, simply, be seen.
    “Do you think we should check on him?” Rehan was asking, pushing his empty bowl away from him.
    “Maybe…” she began to say, but suddenly there was a banging on the side door, making Moriarty jump off Rehan’s lap and streak out of the kitchen, her shoulders muscling low to the ground, her tail pointed straight behind her like the needle of a compass.

Chapter 1 1
     
     
    “Your move.”
    “Mmmm?” Mirza opened his eyes, and the varying shades of gray in the tent resolved themselves into familiar shapes: the wooden beams over his head, the two-shelf bookcase, the orderly rows of shoes lined up, the projector with its coiled cord. A thin slice of lighter gray marked the beginning of the day, at the edge of canvas and grass.
    “How long do you expect me to wait? Your turn.” There was an old man, sitting at the foot of his sleeping bag on an upturned bucket. He was sitting in front of two piles of books that balanced a chessboard. Mirza could not distinguish the white from the black pieces on the board.
    “Your turn, your turn!” the old man bellowed impatiently, and Mirza recognized his old neighbor from fifty years ago. Khan Sahib looked the same as how Mirza remembered him, perhaps missing a few more teeth.
    He scrambled out of his sleeping bag, almost hitting his head on the wooden beam. “Sahib?” He scratched his head, remembering the divorce papers that lay signed in the house, and feeling the fine cuts in his fingertips from the broken vase.
    “Sit down, find a… oh, I don’t know what.” Khan Sahib looked around the tent disapprovingly. “Not what I had imagined for you.”
    “What…? What do you mean imagined? How can you be here?” He stared at his long-dead neighbor. He had attended his funeral prayers forty years ago.
    “Tshhhtt. Silly talk.” Khan Sahib adjusted his pajamas. He waved away Mirza’s questions. “If you don’t play right now, you forfeit the game, too much time wasted.” Mirza sat cross-legged, opposite him and stared at his long, bony face and the shadow of his rough cotton shirtsleeve as it swept over the board like a buzzard. He glanced around the darkness of the tent, pinched the roll of fat on his side, then sighed and pushed forward his pawn.
    Khan Sahib picked it off gleefully. “She’s gone, eh?” he grinned good-naturedly.
    Mirza grunted, killing his opponent’s pawn gloomily. “Why are you here?”
    Khan Sahib pointed his long finger skyward. “Allah knows. Perhaps he is lifting the veil on your stupidity before it is too late.” Mirza put out another pawn and watched as it too was killed. He began pushing forward his pieces indiscriminately until Khan Sahib looked up sharply. “Die! So die, then!” he said, “What do I care if you want to play the fool. What kind of man are you? Now I’m beginning to understand what happened around here.”
    Mirza groaned and threw himself down on his bed. He waited a few minutes in silence, but when he looked up again, Khan Sahib was still there.  He was praying now, his hands in supplication and his lips moving feverishly.
    “Why are you praying old man? Don’t you know you are already dead? It’s too late.”
    Khan Sahib kept whispering, rubbed his face with his fingers and then looked over at him, “Too late for me. Not you.” He stood up and took a few steps around the tent, picking up books and placing them carefully back