‘Shirin, come back.’ Panicking and lifting up the hem of her shalwar, Laila ran after her daughter, beseeching her Allah Pak above the clear blue sky to come to her aid. For he now held her fate in his hands. Her daughter had disappeared straight into the crowd of men. Laila leaned against the mud-baked wall of the woodcutter’s house and held up her face to the beaming hot rays of the sun. Behind her closed eyelids, images of the past plagued. Renowned for his generosity, her father hosted big celebratory parties, like on the day of her brother’s birth, the haqiqa party, to which the whole village had been invited. Her aunties, Mehreen and Rani, accompanied by other women, had danced to their hearts’ content till their legs collapsed under them, inside the inner courtyard, swaying to loud music, away from the men’s lewd gazes. The male guests, too, had enthusiastically rejoiced with several bhangra dances to the loud beating of the drums in the hevali’s outer courtyard, with the crowd spilling out into the village lanes.
