A Deconstructed Heart Read Online Free PDF

that she was finally asleep. He would lie awake, reliving the days’ events in his mind, replaying the moments when she might have turned to him, taken his hand, touched his face with desire. He woke each morning like a new thing, washed in salt, eyes puffy, stumbling in the first light slicing through the blinds.
    He would go downstairs to clean up. The non-Muslim guests brought bottles of wine, which he poured down the sink, feeling slightly sick at the fumes as it splashed into the white basin. The corks became pincushions for Naida’s sewing box, and she stuck flowers or candles into the bottlenecks until they had more makeshift vases than they could use.
    Soon, she began smashing the empty bottles, using the broken glass to make mosaic-decorated flowerpots and paving slabs, spending hours arranging and re-arranging the shards to create swirls of colored glass that winked and sparkled in the garden. She took an art class and made oceans of blues and greens, caught in place by grout. Crystal forests of green bloomed icily on side tables and picture frames. The blues and greens were soon not enough, and Naida began smashing old china cups and hand-held mirrors—much to Mirza’s superstitious dismay—and bangles.
    The crude results of her first attempts, the door-stops and ashtrays, made way for elegantly finished pieces. Large slabs with people, their jagged glass contours urgent with movement, arms raised to carry buckets of water across Sahara-like plains, or to shelter eyes from the noon sun in an iridescent Indian sky, people so full of life it seemed that only the grout was holding them in place. She worked for hours, snipping glass with heavy tile shears, or smashing glass objects wrapped in an old shirt, his, with merciless swings of a hammer. She came into the house after hours in the garden or in the garage, her hair escaping from the clumsy knot which she had made to tie it back, her fingers nicked with small cuts from the glass pieces. If she had been mixing dye into the grout, the lines on her palm were outlined in black soot, and Mirza was reminded of the telltale gunpowder grains that he had heard about on television that entered a person’s palm when they fired a gun.
    She took her offerings to craft fairs and brought them all back dejectedly in the beginning. As the contours of her work acquired grace, she was able to make a few sales and spent the money immediately on new materials. A corner of the garage was filled with large bags of grout, like cement, coating everything with a fine layer of gray dust. There were coils of chicken wire and buckets of plaster of Paris, sacks of river pebbles, Italian glass with gold streaks through the tile, like marble, round red lozenges that looked like blood when Mirza held them up to the light, cupped in his hand. Sometimes he came when she was out, and, rolling up his sleeves, he dipped his hands into the sacks and tins filled with smooth glass, feeling the glass pebbles slip through his fingers, so cold that the hair on his arm stood on end.

Chapter 6
     
     
    “Amal?”
    She stood back to let in her uncle’s student. A green truck was parked on the kerb. There were planks of wood in the bed.
    “Rehan, isn’t it?” she asked.
    “Assalamu alaikum. Yeah.”
    “Walaikum assalam,” she mumbled.
    “What’s he doing?” Rehan asked as Amal led him through to the back door in the kitchen.
    “I think he’s reading.”
    “No, I mean, what is he doing?” he asked again, standing still.
    She stopped, with her hand on the door handle and looked at him. He was tall and thin. His orange shirt was a little too small for him and skimmed the top of his belt, like a child who had outgrown his clothes. An ipod poked out of one pocket of his loose jeans, the earphone in his ear, but she could not hear music. “I don’t really know, to be honest. But he needs your help. Before the storm comes. The tent he’s in right now…”
    He nodded and stepped out into the