Frail attempts at comprehension

“I got married,” Darab said. He sat down next to me, bringing up his knees.
I stared at him. I was sure that I had misunderstood.
A former tour guide and recovering opium addict from Pakistan’s volatile North West Frontier province Darab had come to Malaysia for work and was now in charge of the resort’s unstable electricity. The schedule was gruelling, but he didn’t mind.
Half an hour after arriving for my three-day vacation, I stood on the the rough sand amidst the whirring of the speedboat, shouts and teasing of bikini-clad tourists and the sound of beer sloshing in glasses. I had stayed at the edge of the action until Darab invited me for a drink.
He lived on the second-floor of the resort’s cabin for its employees, situated at the far edge of the swath of developed land. Inside, his meagre possessions were strewn across the floor.
The clothes and books he had brought with him – other belongings like the leather Roots bag and engraved flask, had clearly been left behind by various guests. It looked like he was sleeping in the middle of a neighbourhood garage sale.
“You need a maid,” I said. He only laughed and filled two cups with cheap whiskey.
Later, we would meet on an abandoned sailboat on the sandfly infested shore of the island. He taught me Pashto. “Pa zra me har wakht rawarege, I miss you all the time,” he whispered, the tropical wind spinning through his black curls like a Bolshoi dancer.
Putting his arm around me he pointed upwards. The night sky so clear that the stars seemed within reach, as if belonging to a child's mobile circling above our heads.
“My girlfriend in Pakistan, Chanda, her name means 'of the moon',” he said.
One night he read passages from the Qu’ran, only stopping when I asked him to translate the lyrical words.
“Are you a believer?” he asked.
“It never held sway for me,” I said in that self-pleased way of a fledgling atheist.
He looked out into the dark-blue ocean and listened to the waves bulldozing across the coral as they struggled to hold their defensive positions. He smiled, like he somehow knew that the inconceivable could exist.
He drew his knees closer.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“My girlfriend,” he began, “she was worried that I would not come back to Pakistan. We got married on the phone,” he said.
“You are married, legally?” I said.
He nodded, slowly picking at his worn shoelaces.
I shook my head. “Mubarak ho, congratulations,”, I said.
My mind raced as I made a last frail attempt at comprehension.