Lin and Tariq’s Relationship

Lin and Tariq’s relationship changes from a reluctant arrangement imposed by Abdel Khader Khan into a bond shaped by danger, recognition, and tenderness. Its decisive turn comes during a night attack by wild dogs: Tariq, whom Lin had tried to keep at emotional distance, risks himself to protect Lin, and Lin discovers that he loves the boy with the pride and urgency of a father. Their later closeness is not secured by a formal promise but by Tariq’s silent choice to bring his sleeping mat beside Lin’s.

An Arrangement Made for Them

Abdel Khader Khan gives Lin a specific assignment: teach his young nephew Tariq enough English to improve the boy’s prospects when he begins formal studies. But the request goes well beyond lessons. Tariq is to stay with Lin for ten or twelve weeks, living with him, eating and sleeping in his home, and accompanying him wherever he goes. Abdel Khader Khan wants the boy to learn not only English phrases but what he calls the English way, by spending constant time with a foreigner.

Lin agrees to try, though he is bewildered by the request and unsure of his teaching ability. He objects that he is not English; Abdel Khader Khan dismisses the distinction, arguing that Lin is foreign enough to teach Tariq a foreigner’s ways. The arrangement therefore begins with a mismatch between its stated purpose and its actual scope: language instruction is made inseparable from daily company. Lin has not chosen to become responsible for a child’s whole routine, but that is what the assignment requires.

The departure makes the imbalance plain. Abdel Khader Khan leaves without looking back at Tariq, while Nazeer walks the boy and Lin to the door. As Lin changes into street shoes, Nazeer presses Tariq to his chest with surprising tenderness. Tariq clings to him, grabbing his hair, and has to be pulled from the embrace. Nazeer then gives Lin a lingering, menacing look that makes clear he will hold him responsible if anything happens to the child. Outside, beside Nabila Mosque, Lin and Tariq walk hand in hand but remain joined, in Lin’s view, only by their bewilderment at the force that has brought them together.

Resentment and the Test of Care

Lin recognizes that he has yielded too readily to Abdel Khader Khan, but his recognition does not immediately make him generous. He turns his anger toward the man who assigned the boy to him, condemning what he sees as a callous disregard for Tariq’s welfare. At the same time, he knows that his own helplessness to refuse is part of the problem. His indignation becomes self-righteousness: he judges the uncle for handing a child to a stranger even as he fails to welcome the child himself.

That failure becomes concrete on the path into Lin’s settlement. He tells Tariq to follow his steps along a narrow, erratic track left clear through ground that residents use as a latrine after dark. Lin knows the foulness that meets a newcomer there and remembers his own first fear and nausea. He can read what the place must feel like to Tariq, yet deliberately says nothing to comfort him and resists taking his hand. He wants the boy frightened and miserable enough to plead with his uncle to take him away. The cruelty is not an accidental lapse of awareness: Lin understands Tariq’s distress and uses the silence to express his resentment at being made responsible.

The danger that interrupts this walk exposes how little Lin’s initial judgment has prepared him to care for Tariq. A pack of roughly twenty to forty dogs advances in a crescent, blocking the retreat toward the settlement. Lin knows that attacks are common and that a child was killed at the same spot only a month earlier. When he stumbles and falls, fear shifts his attention from his own vulnerability to the boy who has been placed in his care. Tariq slips from Lin’s neck and falls among timber, then scrambles upright in front of him.

The Turning Point in the Attack

Tariq takes a piece of wood and strikes the black dog at the head of the pack on its snout. As the wounded animal cries out, Tariq crouches and swings at the other dogs, shouting Allah hu Akbar. His thin body and fierce stance make his courage all the more striking to Lin, who watches him fight to defend them both. The boy whom Lin had wanted to make unhappy is now protecting him at immediate risk to himself.

Lin’s response marks the relationship’s decisive reversal. He feels tears sting his eyes and recognizes his emotion as love: the pride-filled love of a father for a son. The change is not prompted by a lesson or an apology but by seeing Tariq act bravely when Lin himself is afraid and vulnerable. Lin’s thoughts turn to words from Karla’s poem about dying for love, linking the sudden recognition to a willingness to stake his own life on the boy’s safety.

The attack continues. Tariq’s blow checks the pack leader briefly, but the dogs regroup and charge in smaller groups from both sides. Lin and Tariq stand side by side and back to back, striking out at the animals as they are driven against a mound of timber. A dog bites Lin’s ankle, though his leather boot protects him. At that point they are close to being overwhelmed. Abdullah, who has been waiting in Lin’s hut, hears the dogs and comes to investigate because he senses that something is badly wrong. The three later recount the adventure together over hot, sweet Suleimani chai.

Trust, Exile, and a Quiet Gesture

After the attack, Lin’s understanding of Tariq deepens beyond the immediate rescue. In the darkness of the hut, he sees the boy wake suddenly and look around. Tariq’s fear gives way to sorrow and resolve as he looks first at the peacefully sleeping Abdullah and then at Lin. Without speaking, he moves his sleeping mat until it touches Lin’s. He settles under his thin blanket beside him, and Lin stretches out an arm on which Tariq rests his head. Their new closeness is conveyed through this unannounced gesture: Tariq chooses Lin as the person beside whom he can seek comfort, and Lin accepts him without resistance.

The scene also changes how Lin interprets their difference. As exhaustion overtakes him, he recognizes that his friends, including Abdel Khader Khan, Karla, Abdullah, and Prabaker, share a condition with Tariq: none was born in the city; all are refugees or survivors who have arrived on the shores of Bombay. Lin understands Tariq as another stranger in a fragment of the city that is itself precarious and unfamiliar. That recognition sharpens his shame about the coldness with which he treated the boy and makes the relationship part of a wider kinship among the displaced and dispossessed.

Lin’s care begins, then, not as a freely chosen responsibility but as an imposed duty that he resents. The dog attack makes that duty personal; Tariq’s courage awakens love, while his later movement toward Lin gives the bond a reciprocal form. Their relationship is still young in these scenes, and the account does not establish what follows the original ten-to-twelve-week arrangement. It does show a profound change within it: Lin stops seeing Tariq chiefly as an unwanted burden, and the boy responds to the newly felt safety by drawing close. For Lin, love arrives together with responsibility—a reason to hold on to the child until dawn.