They roll on and, as night passes into day, tiny dots of light appear, cast through holes in the truck’s bed, but there is nothing to see except the planks lying inches above their faces. Sonia is thinking about entombment, the physical kind that she experiences now, and the other kind, the psychic kind, the closed hell of unhappy families, of addiction, with which she has had much to do in her work, in her own life.

She recalls reading that the pain of a toothache will drive all so-called psychological suffering out of your head, but now, suffering physically as much as she ever has, she thinks that is cynical and not true. The suffering, even the torture, imposed by one’s enemies can be borne because it is imposed, the sufferer is not responsible for it; the enemy acts through hate, and the answer is the same one Jesus gave from the cross: they don’t know what they are doing. Yes, they can break your body, but also aren’t they a little foolish? Aren’t they like little boys pulling the legs off insects?

And also one is inspired by the famous tortured ones who did not break-Saint Joan, Mandela, the survivors of the camps-so there is a model, and these examples shine light into the darkest cell.

But it is different, she thinks, when the suffering is imposed by those who are supposed to love you, whom you are supposed to love. Then there is no escape, then you must learn to love the lash, and then there are no noble examples to follow; there is no nobility at all. And the worst torturer is the most beloved of all, the self, for who knows better where the knife must twist to yield the most exquisite agony?

Tea with Farid’s mother, Noor, and her lady friends, and her three sisters: what could be more calm, civilized, elegant? Oh, Farid, my husband, she thinks, and laughs inwardly, would it surprise you to know that I would rather be captured by terrorists than sit through another one of those endless afternoons? Women like Noor, upper-class Lahori begums, had only two functions in life, keeping their husbands contented and marrying off their children in a satisfactory way. Sonia’s arrival, she gathered (and really gathered in hard-earned bits, since no one ever bothered to explain it to her) had presented Noor with an intolerable conflict: Baba wanted Sonia accepted into the family home, so of course she had to be accepted; but this meant that Noor would forever after be saddled with the most unsatisfactory daughter-in-law imaginable, a shame to her distinguished family and friends.

Until she met Noor and her circle, that house of staring women, the subtle, unchallengeable knives of their looks, Sonia had never been exposed to naked contempt. In the circus life the rubes admired the circus people, of course, and within the circus family a strict hierarchy ruled; everyone knew their place, and while there was certainly enough nastiness and petty intrigue, this did not break the essential solidarity of their lives, which was the show, their show, against the world.

But in her father-in-law’s house Sonia was all alone. She didn’t speak the languages, she didn’t know the rules, and she hardly knew her husband, who seemed like a different person in his father’s house from the one she had known in New York. The air in that house seemed to have shriveled him; he did nothing in her defense; he told her, Sonia, just be nice, they’ll get used to you and you’ll learn how we do things here.

So she learned. She was bright and observant and soon discovered she had an ear for languages, and when she could understand a little she was able to comprehend the full extent of the contempt in which she was held. She started to get the little asides at the tea parties now, the comments on her physical appearance (a corpse, a skeleton, a demon), on how she held a teacup, her utter lack of any family.

Her status rose considerably when she gave the Lagharis a grandson. Now she was tolerated by the women, although it was made clear to her that she knew nothing about rearing a child, that Noor would make the decisions about how to raise him, that the actual daily care would be provided by an ayah whom Noor would choose. The only fight she won in that period was choosing the child’s name: Theodore, after her own father; Laghari Sahib, from whom there was no appeal, agreed. He thought it distinguished to have a grandson named Theodore Abdul.

Gradually, she came to understand the power of the weak. She cultivated Baba, she flattered, she learned reams of poetry, both English and Urdu, for his delight, she became another prized exotic pet, like his parrots, his Yorkie. And she suborned the servants with bribes and gifts, she listened to their tales of woe and injustice and sympathized, she learned the various languages of that city. She sought allies and found one in Nasha, the wife of Gul Muhammed, Laghari Sahib’s Pashtun bodyguard. From her Sonia learned Pashto and something about the way of the Pashtuns. The women became friends of a sort. They were both isolated from their native cultures, lonely and vulnerable, so they had a basis for companionship. Here also she made her first connection with Nasha’s son, Wazir.

In fact, it was Wazir, more than anyone else, who taught her Pashto. He was three or so when she was pregnant with Theo and it was love at first sight, the way it sometimes happens between a child and a woman who is unsure about being a mother. After Theo was born, and it became clear to Sonia that raising him would be a perpetual battle for control against Noor and the dread weight of Punjabi culture, she found a kind of release in being a second mother to little Wazir. And this was possible because there was something wrong with the first mother. Nasha was sickly, she had endured a series of miscarriages, and the one baby she had produced besides Wazir had died in infancy. Her chief terror was that Gul Muhammed would divorce her and send her back in disgrace to her village in Afghanistan. Against this, there was only one possibility for survival-that her son would become a great and powerful man. It was Sonia who convinced her that the road to power for a man in the late twentieth century was through education, and Sonia had gone to Laghari Sahib and told him that Wazir was unusually bright and deserved an education equal to that which his own sons had received and which his grandson would receive. She used every circus wile she possessed to do this, to sell the proud old man on the idea that it was part of his own uniqueness, and part of the debt he owed his bodyguard, to send the young Pashtun to Aitchison College, the Eton of Pakistan.

So it was done, and Gul Muhammed agreed, for he was a sworn servant of Laghari Sahib. It was Sonia’s first real victory in the house of Laghari. Later, she continued her interest in Wazir’s education, making him into something neither Nasha nor her husband could ever have conceived, and whether it was a prize or a curse had still not been established.

With effort, Sonia turns her thoughts away from this line; she does not want to think about Wazir just now. Instead she thinks of how she managed her escape from the house of Laghari and its whispering women. From the bazaar, secretly, she had obtained the clothing of a Pashtun boy: worn and faded shalwar trousers, a kurta, a long Pashtun waistcoat, a turban wrapping her hair. At dawn one morning, dressed in these clothes, she slipped from the sleeping house, down the back alleys of Anarkali to the Urdu Bazaar and felt free for the first time in she could not recall how long it had been, since at least her girlhood in the circus, once again feeling the superiority of the show people over the rubes.

It was not invisibility. For a large part of any male Muslim population, a smooth-faced boy, especially one who appears poor and unattached, is as attractive as a woman, something Kipling didn’t bother to mention when he described Kim’s adventures, and as she strolled through the bazaar there were whispered invitations. But she found these easier to dismiss than the ones she got on these same streets as a woman.