Tariq Is Entrusted to Lin to Live in the Slum and Learn English

Abdel Khader Khan’s decision to place Tariq in Lin’s care turns a request for English lessons into an intimate, involuntary responsibility. He asks Lin to teach his eleven-year-old nephew and have him experience both the life of the poorest residents and the everyday example of a foreign teacher. Lin initially resents the imposition, but Tariq’s fear and loneliness make the assignment more than a lesson in language: it becomes a measure of whether Lin can recognize a fellow stranger and offer care despite having been compelled to do so.

The request and its terms

Abdel Khader Khan introduces the favour as a practical educational arrangement. Tariq should learn enough English to improve his command of the language before beginning formal studies. Lin is willing to try teaching him, though he doubts his own ability and asks whether he is expected to teach at Abdel Khader Khan’s home. The answer enlarges the request: Tariq is to stay constantly with Lin for ten or twelve weeks, living, eating, and sleeping where Lin does. Abdel Khader Khan wants more than memorized phrases; he wants the boy to learn what he calls the English way through sustained company with a foreigner.

Lin objects that he is not English. Abdel Khader Khan treats the distinction as beside the point: Lin is foreign, and that is the experience Tariq is meant to acquire. The arrangement therefore makes Lin’s outsider status part of the proposed education. It also gives the request an asymmetry that Lin feels acutely. He is not simply being asked to deliver lessons; he is expected to make his daily life available as the setting in which Tariq will learn.

When Lin worries aloud about the boy’s safety and the loss of his own freedom to go where he chooses, Abdel Khader Khan acknowledges both concerns rather than dismissing them. He offers a limited trial: Lin will take Tariq for forty-eight hours, and if he finds the situation impossible, he can bring him back without incurring blame. The trial softens the demand without making it voluntary in any simple sense. Lin still feels the force of Abdel Khader Khan’s authority and later recognizes that he has yielded too readily.

Tariq is introduced and handed over

Abdel Khader Khan identifies Tariq as the fourth son of his youngest sister, Farishta. The boy is eleven, sturdy though small for his age, and already speaks Hindi, Pashto, Urdu, and Marathi fluently, in addition to having learned some English words. Those details establish a child with considerable linguistic ability, but they do not make the transfer reassuring for him. When he appears in the cloister, he looks younger than his age, clutches a tied calico bundle, and watches Lin with distrust and the threat of tears.

Tariq approaches by taking a wide detour around Lin to stand beside his uncle. After Abdel Khader Khan speaks sternly to him in Urdu and points toward Lin, Tariq comes forward and offers his hand. His hesitant English greeting and the smallness of his hand in Lin’s make the abstract arrangement physically immediate: this is a frightened child being placed in the care of a man who, only moments earlier, was considering how to refuse.

The farewell exposes another attachment within the household. Abdel Khader Khan leaves without looking back at Tariq, while Nazeer kneels to hold the boy with unexpected, passionate tenderness. Tariq clings to Nazeer’s hair, and the embrace has to be broken apart by force. Nazeer’s lingering, menacing look at Lin makes clear that he regards Lin as answerable for the child’s safety. Tariq and Lin then leave together, holding hands, but sharing little beyond bewilderment at how decisively Abdel Khader Khan has joined their lives.

Reluctance becomes responsibility

Outside, beside Nabila Mosque, Lin’s first reaction is anger at his own submission. He judges Abdel Khader Khan’s decision as a callous disregard for Tariq’s well-being and sees himself as an unsuitable stranger to whom a child has been surrendered. His indignation is mixed with self-disgust: he is furious not only at the arrangement but at his own inability to resist it. As the call to prayer begins from the mosque’s minarets, he marches Tariq through the crowded street at a hurried pace, his resentment still shaping how he handles the boy.

That first response is not the last. Later, Tariq, Abdullah Taheri, and Lin rest in Lin’s hut after the events of the preceding days. In the darkness, Tariq wakes suddenly and looks from the sleeping Abdullah to Lin. His fear gives way to sorrow and resolve; without speaking, he moves his sleeping mat until it touches Lin’s, settles under his thin blanket, and rests his head on Lin’s outstretched arm. The movement is small and deliberate. Unlike the handover, which was arranged by an authority figure, this closeness is Tariq’s own act of seeking comfort.

Lin’s response marks a change from the coldness he has recognized in himself. He listens to the boy sleeping beside him and understands the loneliness that his earlier self-protection had obscured. The assignment has not merely placed Tariq in Lin’s orbit; it has made Lin answerable to a child who has begun, cautiously, to trust him. Care emerges not as an easy feeling but as a duty accepted through the immediate presence of another person.

Exile and the meaning of the bond

As exhaustion overtakes him, Lin recognizes a common condition among the people who have entered his life in Bombay: Abdel Khader Khan, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and the others were not born in the city. He understands them as refugees and survivors who have arrived on the island city’s shores, bound by displacement and by the kinship of the lost, lonely, and dispossessed. This recognition changes the meaning of Tariq’s position. The boy is not simply an inconvenient guest in Lin’s precarious corner of the city; he too is a stranger there.

Lin’s recognition does not erase the coercion of Abdel Khader Khan’s decision or the fear visible in Tariq when they first meet. Instead, it brings those facts into a fuller relation with Lin’s own conduct. He sees that his selfishness has made him overlook the boy’s loneliness, and that understanding the two of them as strangers allows him to respond with greater tenderness. The episode thus moves from an adult’s imposed plan, through a child’s frightened compliance, toward a bond formed in a quiet gesture beside a sleeping mat.

The request’s stated purpose remains practical: to improve Tariq’s English and prepare him for formal studies. Its emotional consequence is broader but specific to the scene: Lin begins to accept responsibility for Tariq not because the original arrangement was freely chosen, but because the boy’s vulnerability becomes impossible for him to ignore. Their shared outsiderhood gives the teaching arrangement its deeper significance, linking instruction and daily care to the possibility of belonging among people who have found themselves far from where they began.