at my first rebel base, in the western Sahara, a courier came from another base. I watched her at lunch, speaking to and laughing with some of my friends. I wasn’t in the habit of approaching girls, but there was something irresistible about her warmth and vivacity—and she had a lovely smile. At the next meal I mustered the courage and took the seat next to hers.
We got to talking. As it turned out, her mother was from the Ponives, my grandparents’ native realm. So we talked more—and more. We were the last two to leave the canteen that evening. The next morning we met again for breakfast and talked until she had to leave.
When she was gone I walked around in a fog for the rest of the day. That night I wrote her, a few lines in my two-way notebook. She replied immediately and we kept on writing for hours. That became a pattern: every night we wrote to each other, about what happened that day and everything else under the sun. [Smiles] I had to get a new notebook every few weeks because we chatted so much.
I suggested many times that we should meet again. But she always found some excuse to demur. After four months, I had had enough and wrangled myself an assignment to improve the irrigation system at her base. But when I got there, no one on the premise knew who I was talking about. They all took turns with courier duties and nobody used the nom de guerre of Durga Devi. When I mentioned her connection to the Ponives, they pointed to this intimidatingly beautiful young woman as the only one with a mother from that realm.
My repeated questions in the notebook went unanswered. I didn’t know what to do. I felt as if I’d been the biggest fool. I was also completely unsettled: I like solving problems, and problems that presented no rational solutions made me restless and irritable.
When I finished my assignment and was about to leave, a message came from her at last, begging me to stay at her base, even though she wasn’t there and nobody knew anything about her. If I stayed, I would find answers, she said.
I agonized over my decision but in the end I stayed. I loved her and I needed to see her again. If staying at her base was going to lead me back to her, then that was what I’d do, despite my misgivings.
In the meanwhile, Amara was promoted to oversee supplies and logistics for the base, which meant we interacted at regular intervals. I found those occasions awkward: she was usually quite curt and never looked me in the eye.
And needless to say, my evening conversations with the one I loved had also become stilted and uncomfortable. I couldn’t just pretend that everything was the same as before.
Three weeks in I told her that she had to see me face-to-face and tell me everything before another month was out. We argued back and forth and finally agreed to meet on a day six months in the future.
A week before our rendezvous, I saw her across the canteen, chatting with a group of carpet weavers as if she hadn’t a care in the world. I stared at her. She looked up at me and smiled—a friendly smile, but one without any hint of recognition.
Next thing I knew, Amara had her hand on my arm and was dragging me away from the canteen. We almost came to blows, she pulling on me and me trying to get back to the girl whose absence had consumed me for months.
“That’s my cousin Shulini.” Amara spoke directly into my ear. “You have never met her nor she you. I took her form when I went to your base.”
I couldn’t speak for my shock—mutables are so rare in real life that the possibility never crossed my mind. She explained that when she traveled away from the base she often took on Shulini’s appearance because her own face made people stare. But she had to stop because she was becoming too old to ’mute at will, at least not without fear of ending up looking permanently like someone else.
I became angry. We’d known each other ten months by then. At any point she could have told me. Instead she chose to let me simmer in my own anxiety. She said she was afraid of losing me, since I never showed the slightest interest in her.
“How about this?