“And what do you do in between those hours?”
Amaal pulled her chair closer to his face and narrowed her eyes at him — “I am the Press Secretary of a very busy government. What do you think I am doing?”
“You are not eating well.”
Her smile stuttered.
“You are not sleeping well.”
“Sama…”
“This is going to go on for long, Amaal.” He interrupted her. “And that is if I make it.”
Her eyebrows went down.
“I see what you are going through but here is an option for you — leave.”
Her eyes teared up.
“Don’t cry.”
She whimpered, making his chest scream out. He had never seen her cry and now that he had made her cry multiple times, he could not console her.
“Don’t make me!” She wiped her tears on the sleeve of her scrubs, keeping her sterilised hands fisted because she clearly wanted to touch him at some point.
“I am not the man I was that morning I drove to you. My mind has drowned again, my body might not be even working healthily, forget looking the same again. I am hearing my mother singing to me from when I wasn’t even old enough to remember memories,” he laughed out bitterly. “I am seeing my life’s sins play out in front of me and the only thing I realise when I open my eyes and see you here is that those sins are too big to be nullified by the good you see in me.” He cleared his throat again as his voice thinned. Water ran down the bridge of his nose but he didn’t look away from her eyes, needing her to see this reality. “My fears, my drawbacks… my shortcomings… I had believed I would work over them but they are back in front of me, showing me the mirror. My sins are far greater than your goodness, Amaal.” Samar blinked his eyes to clear them. Tears blurred them even more. Two soft thumbs came over his eyelids and rubbed them like he was used to rubbing sleep out of her eyes. His throat swelled tight. She massaged his eyeballs and gently lifted them, bending down to him so that they were nose to nose.
“They are not greater than my hope,” she said.
“What are you hoping for? I am a dead man. I was born dead. I have never felt alive other than those few years belonging to my unit. I have never really hoped for anything in life. I only ever went with the flow, needing to survive any way I could. My father named me Samar. Imminent death. There is no other fate for me.”
“You are not death,” Amaal spelt out. “You are life. You gave Iram and her twins a life. You are a man of action who redeemed himself…”
“There is no redemption. I didn’t do it for that.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“Because that’s exactly what was supposed to be done.”
Her eyes sparkled with smile and tears. “Life.”
“Why don’t you go?” He asked, exasperated.
“Would you?”
That took every thought, every argument, every word out of his mouth. And like the sharp girl who had walked into their makeshift party office seven years ago, she pounced on the opening and kept advancing.
“If I were there and you were here, would you leave?”
He stared at her, tongue-tied.
“If I did not have any hope to make it, would you leave?”
He did not answer, because he didn’t like how it was toppling his cards.
“If I asked you to leave in this situation, would you fucking listen to me?” She asked with such tenderness that tears burst and kept flowing quietly down his nose.
Amaal held his face between her palms and rested her nose on his. Lilies. Dipped in sanitiser.
