with a scimitar and enough inheritance to buy a small orchard. Khan grew up with a keen sense of business. At the age of seven, when his father died, he took matters into his own hands, and he held the title deed to a new orchard shortly after he turned sixteen. In Tajrish, Khan was second to the village mulla. When the rumor had broken out that his orchards were haunted by jinns, Khan approached Mulla Ali, and it was with the help of the clergyman—who held a red apple in his hand and bit into it in front of everyone—that Khan shed his ominous reputation and persuaded the village people to work for him again.
Ahmad’s father, Nosser, was Khan’s only son. Khan’s wife was in excruciating pain for weeks before Nosser was due. When the pangs started to throb, she first clenched her teeth, then bit her index finger. When she dropped to her knees clawing the carpet and calling out Khan’s name, he would run to her room with opium. All the women in the house and many of the neighbors gathered in the main house when the due date arrived, saying prayers and reciting verses from the Quran. For five hours, as his wife’s shrieks pierced the night, Khan sat motionless at the walnut desk in his room, twirling the tips of his black mustache and tapping his finger on the wood as if to tick off seconds that passed too slowly. When the screams stopped, he closed his eyes and listened first to the cries of the baby and then to the wailing of the women mourning the death of his wife. He got up from his desk and stood there for a while, tall, in his pressed suit and pants, not knowing what to do. With the back of his hand, he brushed off his lapel, which was not dusty. He straightened his suit, which stood as crinkle-free as black marble. He bent his head and closed his eyes listening to the sad sounds from downstairs. Finally, he took his Astrakhan hat from the hanger, and left his room to see the baby.
In the privacy of their homes, the people of the village said what they believed: that the sinister birth of the child had taken the life of the innocent beautiful woman. It was with a mixture of fear and reverence that the people of Tajrish regarded Khan and the young Nosser. Khan gave many work in his orchards and helped the poor. He orchestrated a movement to build a mosque in place of the old room where Mulla had laid rugs to use as the public praying room. The money that was collected allowed a dome, but ran out after the first minaret was erected. Hands locked behind his back, Mulla looked at the workers on the scaffolding installing the turquoise tiles halfway up the minaret and thought, Who has seen a mosque with a single minaret? After the mosque was built, Khan stood in the first row of the noon congregational prayer, right behind Mulla Ali. From that night on, that place of honor was established as his. Khan never remarried after the death of his wife, but he had two rooms built by the side of the main house in the Orchard and asked his sister, Malek-Zaman, to move in with her husband and her two little girls. “Malek, consider Nosser your son,” Khan told her sister. He did this to save Nosser from the humiliation of having a stepmother and to give him the love of an aunt, the closest to that of a mother.
Nosser grew up to be a bully. Taller and stronger than the other boys his age, he ran the fastest and climbed the highest in the walnut trees until the village kids excluded him from their games altogether. Nosser, in turn, harassed his cousins and the others with sticks and slingshots and pinches and ruined their games. His aunt’s husband punished him for his mischief when Khan was not around. One winter night he grabbed Nosser’s arm and dragged him to the small stable at the end of the Orchard where Khan kept his two horses. He tied Nosser to a beam and filled his pants with horse manure before leaving him there for the night. He knew the boy would risk a beating from Khan for being a nuisance if he ever told anyone. But his stronger reassurance was that he knew Nosser was too