Alif the Unseen (47 page)

“Please don’t worry about me,” she said. “Go home.”

Alif felt Dina’s fingers brush tentatively along the heel of his wrist. He closed his hand around hers.

“Peace be upon you,” he said to Intisar.

“And you.” She turned away, slipping through the exultant mob toward the heart of the square. Alif looked at Dina and smiled. Her eyes crinkled above the seam of her veil.

“I wonder if it’s possible to get a cab in this mess,” he said, glancing around. The only vehicle he could see was the burned, overturned skeleton of a police van.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Dina. “Let’s just walk.”

“It’s a long way to Baqara District on foot.”

“That’s all right. We have lots to talk about.”

They made their way toward the nearest side street, weaving around a pack of boys lighting canisters of insect repellent on fire in celebration. Someone had unfurled a flag from the lowest story
of an apartment building, and children had emerged to play at jumping up to touch the trailing edge. The atmosphere was manic, resembling, in a way that disappointed Alif, the chaos that followed a
football match. Bits of paper had begun to fall from the air: fragments of the huge portrait of the emir that had once graced the northern face of the square. They filled Alif with dread that took
him a moment to place.

“The book!” he said, stopping in his tracks. “My God, what happened to the book?”

Dina shook her head.

“I lost track of it when you fell out of the window,” she said. “In that mess, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was trampled into muck. Or maybe one of those awful things
took it. Or one of the demonstrators who raided the building. Who knows.”

Alif plucked a curl of paper from his hair, feeling guilty.

“Mohammad—what was in that last story?” Dina looked up at him with a searching expression. Alif took a long breath. They had gotten clear of the crowd and walked along a
commercial street past a row of shuttered shops. Alif realized they were not far from the storefront where Dina had been shot, and where Vikram had saved them from the State security agent. Here he
had begun to be transformed by the story of himself.

“Nothing we couldn’t have written together,” he said to Dina. Her eyes crinkled again. They were silent for a time. Night birds had begun to sing in the stunted, dusty trees,
and the breeze from the harbor carried with it the sound of cheers and shouts and horns.

Acknowledgments

Corresponding as it did with the birth of my first child, the completion of this book would not have been possible without the help and support of the following people: my
tireless agent, Warren Frazier; my digital assistant, Mohammed Abbas; cybermullah and blogfather Aziz Poonawalla; tech philosopher Saurav Mohapatra; my wonderful editors at Grove/
Atlantic—Amy Hundley in New York and Ravi Mirchandani and Mathilda Imlah in London; and most of all my mother, who flew out for the delivery of the baby and stayed on for the delivery of the
book. Lastly, thanks to all of my Twitter followers, who have provided me with everything from research references to scones and coffee. Bless you all.

Note on the Author

G. Willow Wilson
was born in New Jersey in 1982. After graduating with a degree in History and coursework in Arabic language and literature, she moved to
Cairo, where she became a contributor to the Egyptian opposition weekly
Cairo Magazine
until it closed in 2005. She has written for politics and culture blogs across the political
spectrum, and has previously written a graphic novel,
Cairo
, illustrated by M. K. Perker, and a series of comics based on her own experiences, for DC Comics.