The rain came down on Empress Road the way it always did in October — sideways, impatient, drumming on the tarpaulin of Rehman's rickshaw like a thousand small fists. He was sixty-one years old, and his knees had been telling him the truth about it for the better part of a decade, but he stood under the dripping awning of the tea stall anyway, because the stall's owner, Sadiq, had pressed a hot cup into his hands and said, "One more cup, Rehman chacha, then home. No one is going anywhere in this."
It was the last night. That was the part no one else knew.
Rehman had decided it that morning, sitting on the edge of his charpai while his wife, Zubaida, slept through the sound of the rain on their tin roof. The doctor had said the words plainly, the way doctors do when they think kindness is the same as bluntness: the cartilage was gone, the joints were finished, pull the rickshaw for one more season and you may not walk at all. He had sold the rickshaw that afternoon — to a young fellow named Imran, twenty-three, with bright eyes and no idea what the straps would do to his shoulders. Rehman had taken the money, pressed it into Zubaida's palm, and said, "This is the last of it. Now we eat from what I saved, and I will be the man who sits at the gate and tells the children stories they have already heard."
She had cried, of course. Forty years of marriage to a man who pulled other people's journeys, and she cried not because the money was ending but because she knew the way wives know: a man who stops moving starts disappearing.
So that night, Rehman had borrowed the rickshaw back from Imran — "One last night, boy. For old time's sake, and for the fare money too, which is yours" — and gone out into the rain, to say goodbye to the road the way you say goodbye to a friend: properly, to its face, with your own two feet.
By nine o'clock the streets were empty. The rain had thinned the crowds down to nothing, and the few taxis that passed went by with their headlights making silver rivers of the gutters. Rehman was soaked through his shirt despite the raincoat, and his knees were grinding like stones in a mill, and he was happy — the strange, complete happiness of a man finishing a thing well — when he heard her.
She was standing under the shuttered front of the cloth market, clutching a plastic bag to her chest, weeping in the particular quiet way that young women weep when they do not want anyone to know. She could not have been more than twenty-five. Her dupatta was plastered to her hair by the rain, and the plastic bag, Rehman saw with the trained eye of a man who had carried a thousand passengers' burdens, was from the big hospital on Jail Road.
"Betaji," he said, bringing the rickshaw to a stop beside her, "where are you going? Come, sit. The rain is not a place to stand."
She looked at him — at his grey beard, his soaked clothes, the rickshaw with its patched tarpaulin — and the look on her face said she was calculating whether she had the fare. That look was older than either of them; Rehman had seen it a million times. He smiled, which surprised her, because rickshaw pullers did not smile at passengers they had not yet overcharged.
"Get in, betaji," he said. "We will argue about money when you are dry."
She got in. She named a street — a narrow lane near the railway colony, the far side of the city, a good forty minutes in this weather. "How much?" she whispered.
Rehman wiped the rain from his eyes with his sleeve and took up the handles. "We will see," he said, and pulled.
Pulling a rickshaw is a language. The lean of the body says one thing, the rhythm of the steps says another, and an old puller like Rehman could read the road through the handles the way a blind man reads a face. The road that night said: flooded at the underpass, take the long way. His knees said: you are a fool, old man, and they said it with every step. And behind him, under the tarpaulin, the young woman said nothing at all, which was the loudest sound on the whole road.
Halfway there, at the red light near the railway crossing, she spoke.
"My father," she said, and stopped, because the sentence had too many corners to get through cleanly. "He had a stroke. This morning. I have been at the hospital since seven. The doctor said — the doctor said he may not — " She could not finish. The plastic bag rustled as she held it tighter. "I left because my mother was crying and my little brother was crying and I thought if I cried there too, nobody would be the strong one. So I walked out into the rain to cry where no one could see."
Rehman said nothing. The light turned green. He pulled.
"You must think I'm foolish," she said, after a while. "Getting into a stranger's rickshaw in this weather."
"I think," Rehman said, his breath coming harder now on the long incline past the textile mills, "that the rain is a good place to cry. It hides the evidence."
She shifted on the seat. "Your daughter?"
He had not meant to say it. Sixty-one years old and the tongue still slipped like a schoolboy's. But the rain was coming down and his knees were on fire and it was the last night, and some sentences, once started, have to be finished by somebody.
"Her name was Ayesha," he said. "She was — she would have been thirty this year."
The rain on the tarpaulin was the only sound for a hundred metres.
"It was the floods," he said. "Seven years ago. The water came up in the night, and the roof of the small room where she slept — I had meant to fix it, had said next month for a year of months — came down. She was twenty-three." She had just started teaching at the little school near the mosque. The children called her Miss Ayesha, and they loved her the way only children can love someone who is kind without trying."
The young woman's weeping, Rehman noticed through the curtain of rain, had gone quiet.
"For a year after that," he said, "I could not pull. Not would not — could not. The handles felt like they weighed more than the world. Zubaida and I ate from the savings, and the savings got thinner, and then one morning I went out and took up the handles, and I pulled, and I have been pulling every day since, because a man has to be something, and pulling was the thing I was."
They turned into her lane. The houses were dark, hunched under the rain. He stopped at the gate she pointed to — a small house with a blue door, a light on in one window, someone's mother waiting up.
She got down, and the plastic bag was forgotten on the seat, and she opened her purse with wet fingers. "How much?" she said. "Please. Tell me."
Rehman looked at her — really looked at her, the way he had looked at his own daughter a thousand times across the dinner cloth — and he said, "Nothing, betaji."
She stared. "Nothing? Chacha, you pulled me across half the city in this rain — "
"And it was my honour," he said. "On the night my daughter died, betaji, a man I had never seen before stopped his car in the flood water and carried my Zubaida and me to dry ground on his back. He would not take a rupee. He said, 'I have a daughter too.' I have spent seven years trying to be that man for somebody, and tonight — " he smiled, and the rain ran down his beard, and for the first time that night he did not look tired at all, "tonight I finally got my chance. So you see, the fare has already been paid. Just not by you."
She stood in the rain in front of the blue door, and she did not argue. Something in his face told her that arguing would be a kind of cruelty. Instead she did something that Rehman would remember for the rest of his life, which was not a long time, but was long enough: she took both his hands — his old, ruined, road-worn hands — and pressed them to her forehead, the way a daughter does to a father.
"Dua dena," she whispered. "Pray for my father."
"I will," Rehman said. "And you — you be the strong one tonight. The rain can be the one that cries."
She went inside. The light in the window stayed on a little longer, and then it went off, and Rehman stood there for a moment in the empty lane with the rain coming down and his knees screaming, and he felt something loosen in his chest, like a knot he had been carrying for seven years had finally been given permission to come undone.
He pulled the empty rickshaw home through the rain. It was lighter than air. Imran was waiting up, and helped him out of the wet clothes, and Zubaida made him ginger tea, and he sat on the charpai with the blanket around his shoulders and told them both about the girl with the blue door, and Zubaida wept quietly into her dupatta — the good kind of weeping, the kind that washes.
The next morning the rain had stopped, and the city was rinsed clean, and Rehman woke up and did not go out with the rickshaw, and the strangest thing happened: he did not miss it. Not the pulling, anyway. What he had loved was never the pulling. It was the carrying.
Three days later, the girl came to find him. She had asked at the tea stall, and Sadiq had pointed her to the lane, and she arrived with a basket of fruit and the news that her father had opened his eyes that morning and asked for water, and the doctors were calling it a good sign. She sat with Zubaida for an hour, and before she left, she pressed an envelope into Rehman's hands.
He tried to refuse. She said, "Chacha, it is not a fare. It is a daughter's gift. And there is a letter inside."
The letter, written in a young woman's careful hand, said only this:
You told me the fare was paid by someone I never met, on a night I never saw. My father is alive, and I do not know how to thank God loudly enough, so I am thanking you quietly instead. I have started teaching at the little school near the mosque — the one your Ayesha taught at. The children call me Miss Hira. Every month, on the rainiest night, I will find someone standing in the rain with nowhere to go, and I will pay their way home, and I will tell them: the fare has already been paid. Just not by you.
Rehman read it twice. Then he folded it very carefully, and put it in the tin box where he kept Ayesha's school certificates, and he went and sat at the gate, and the children of the lane gathered around him, and he told them a story they had heard before, about a rickshaw puller and a rainy night, and this time, for the first time, he told it all the way to the end.
And somewhere across the city, on the rainiest night of every month, a young woman stands under an awning with an umbrella she does not need, watching for someone who does.