As Hiya gleefully added the finishing touches to her newly-completed toy airplane, which had now assumed pride of place at the centre of her amber study table, Shwaan stood in front of a bookcase at the other end of the room, looking up at the framed photograph of a young woman in a white lab-coat smiling cheerfully at the camera.
The photo was old, from what Shwaan could tell, the quality of the picture less clear than what he had seen in modern photographs. Still, it looked to have been well cared for, the metal frame sparkling in the light of the bulb mounted on the opposite wall. A young man stood slightly to the left of the woman. He too was smiling broadly, though he was barely in the frame. Him, Shwaan recognised immediately as a younger version of the Senior Secretary of Defence. The broad shoulders and the proud jawline were still the same, though they seemed softer somehow. Shwaan thought absently that he had looked better with the stubble than he did now, without it.
"That's Mommy," Hiya informed him. Shwaan had not heard her come up behind him, but there she was with her arms crossed, looking seriously up at the picture Shwaan had been contemplating. "Baba says she was really pretty. I think he's right," she confided, nodding sagaciously.
Shwaan was not quite sure how to respond to that. He tried to think of anything he had heard about Subhas Kinoh's wife during his time in Ragah, but drew a persistent blank. "Oh," he said finally, looking down at his young companion. "What was her name?"
Hiya looked at him like he was an idiot. "Misri," she said, as if it was the most obvious thing on earth. "And that's Baba," she added after a beat, as if to make sure he hadn't foolishly missed that bit of information as well.
"Well, I think your Baba is right too," Shwaan told her, and he wasn't lying. The woman in the picture really was striking, her brown eyes sharp and lively and her smile infectious, even through the fading Polaroid. "Was your mother a doctor, Hiya?"
"Nuh-huh," she shook her head, squinting dubiously at Shwaan as if worried about his lack of general knowledge. "She was a sci-en-tist." Enunciating each syllable carefully, she looked mildly proud when she had accomplished the feat. "At SifCo. Baba says she was very smart, just like me."
"At SifCo?" Shwaan repeated, looking up at the picture once again. "She worked at SifCo?"
Hiya nodded. "When she was alive, yes. Bala di says she died in a car crash on her way there, back when I was a baby," she said matter-of-factly.
Shwaan supposed Hiya had never known her mother well enough to feel her loss, if it really had happened when she was still an infant. He looked up at the picture again. It was hard to believe those vivacious eyes belonged to someone long gone. Besides, how old was Hiya anyway? Something about that timeline didn't sit well with him, but he couldn't place his finger on it at the moment. With a mental shrug, he turned around. There would be time to look into it later.
"I think your Baba is back," he informed her, tilting his head a little to hear the voices downstairs with more clarity; they sounded vaguely agitated to him. "Should we go down?"
Hiyanodded, then took his hand in a proprietary grip and marched out of the room,Shwaan trailing a little behind her.