Saeed is clever and funny and strong. He has thick hair which falls in a curl across his forehead and a large straight nose and deep brown eyes and now he has a beard. He is sixteen and stockier than my cousins. He could beat any one of them in a fight. And he has spirit, like me. He can run to the top of the mountain, high above the village, in barely two hours, which is faster than anyone else I know.
But Saeed is gentle too. He writes notes to me on scraps of paper with words about the sun in the mountains and the rich scent of peaches in the orchards and, of course, about how lovely I am and how his heart is breaking for me, and he writes all this with such tender feeling that sometimes these notes make my eyes fill with tears, in a joyful way.
Before these so-called Faithful Soldiers of Islam came and everything began to change, I was allowed to go to and from school on my own and to run errands for Mama, on account of Marva’s affliction and of having no brother to go. This was when Saeed first saw me. Sometimes he would lie in wait near the mosque gates and follow me. He walked at a distance but watched me all the time. I couldn’t speak to him or even look back. Some tittle-tattle would have told. But I knew he was there and I sensed he could tell from the swing of my hips that I knew and, for the time being, that was enough.
Then he started to send notes through Adnan, my cousin. Adnan is a large boy, the same age as Saeed, but he was born simple-minded and Hamid Uncle has never forgiven him for it, although the Aunties are always hugging and fussing him as if he were a baby. He is stupid but sweet tempered, always smiling and willing to fetch and carry and help the women with their chores and he amuses the young cousins by rolling about with them in the dust for hours, playing foolish games and letting them ride on his back and pull his ears.
Adnan has a soft corner for my sister Marva. He is forever hanging around our door with big eyes, waiting for her. When she comes into the yard, he sits for hours by her side as she tries in vain to teach him basic letters and sums. When she finally gives up, she tells us tales, crazy, magical stories about the village and the mountains which, on account of her legs, she can never leave the compound to see for herself.
Given the star-struck look on his face, I say he’s in love with her – I’m sure he is – but when I told Marva that, she blushed plum red and scolded me. Perhaps she thinks she’d be a laughing stock if she had an idiot for a husband but I say he’s less of an idiot, in his own foolish way, than some of the men who have three wives and beat them all so hard they can barely stand. And besides, it’s a harsh thing to say but a girl with withered legs should be grateful to have a husband at all and Adnan is at least hard-working.
Jamila Auntie thinks the same. I’ve caught her looking at the pair of them and once, when we were sitting side by side chopping potatoes, she said to me, ‘If Allah in His Wisdom put together his body and her head, He could make a good person out of the two of them.’ I saw at once what she meant. In a strange way, they fit together.
Since Baba confined us to the compound, I hadn’t heard from Saeed and I was fretting, wondering if he’d forgotten me. Then, about two weeks after we took Mama to the clinic, I finished sweeping inside the house and came out to find Baba sitting on a charpoy right there, waiting. I started. It was unusual for him to be home so early. When his eyes fell on me, they darkened and he shook his head. His chest puffed out a little and collapsed again as if he had sighed. He lifted his hand and beckoned.
I was too taken aback to set down my cleaning things and just went straight to him, broom and brush and all. My sandals scuffed up small puffs of dust with every step and each one exploded with an anxious thought. What had I done? May Allah protect me. Had he found out about the notice I stole from the tree? How could I explain that it was exciting to keep, precisely because it was so forbidden?
I sat down at his feet, the broom beside me, and looked up at him. The skin round his mouth was puckered.
‘You have disgraced me.’ He looked heavy with sadness. His breath was hot in my face. I blinked up at him stupidly and didn’t speak. I had never heard Baba say such a thing. A silence stretched between us.
‘Layla. My own daughter. How could you behave with such dishonour?’
I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. My mind was racing, trying to think what I might have done, but it came up blank. My face burnt with shame. Just when I was ready to burst into tears, he pulled a note from his pocket.
I recognized it at once. From Saeed, of course. Wobbly black letters on a scrap of rough paper, the kind used by shopkeepers. He always used it. But how had Baba got hold of it? No one knew about Saeed’s notes, not even Marva.
Baba was holding it taut between us in his hands. Some pretty words were there, about starlight and the sun. I couldn’t speak.
‘Who wrote this?’ His voice was quiet but there was a danger in it which I had never heard before.
I stuttered. Part of my brain was thinking: Does Baba really not know? Maybe I can still protect Saeed. I was terrified. I didn’t know what he might do, either to me or to Saeed or to my poor broken mother. I started to cry in great sobs that set my shoulders heaving.
‘Answer me.’
Baba set his hands on my shoulders and his touch at first was a comfort but then he lifted me to my feet. His fingers dug into my skin. The crying in my eyes made his face wobble and I twisted away to make him disappear altogether.
‘Tell me.’
I was gasping now, refusing to look at him, taken up with sobbing and snuffling. He was holding me so tightly, I couldn’t even raise my hands to my face and wipe it clean. I squirmed and tried to break free.
He started shaking me. I struggled to stay upright. My brain knocked in my skull. His angry face and the house behind it flew into splinters, speared by black streaks and flecks of bright light. The shock of it stopped my crying at once. He was strong and I was slight in his hands and I had the feeling I was flying, my legs dancing in the dirt.
My mouth was wide open, stretching as I tried to draw in breath. Dust flew into my throat and I started to cough and cough as if my lungs would burst. I must have gone limp in his hands because the next thing I remember, I was sprawling on the ground, flat on my belly with my limbs splayed and my kameez up round my waist in disarray, and my hands flat against the ground as if the earth were spinning so quickly that I had to grab hold of it to hang on and stop myself whirling off into space. Everything around me was turning and my body was juddering against the ground as I tried to breathe. Somehow I pulled myself over onto my back and faced Baba who was shaking from head to foot with the exertion and the weight of his own rage. His face was red and sweaty and his eyes were moist and I saw the old man he would one day become, hidden there inside his skin.
‘You are a wicked girl.’ He was panting. ‘You will not have contact with this boy again. I forbid it.’
I stared at him. ‘Baba . . .’ It was all I could say, staring at him stupidly with the world still slowly spinning around me. He tore the note into a dozen pieces and threw them over me and they slowly fluttered, specks carried by the currents of air, before coming to rest at last. Baba turned his head and strode away.
That evening, Adnan came tapping at our door. His face was swollen with tears and he crawled into the house, whimpering for Marva like a little boy. I bolted the door behind him. When he calmed down enough, he lifted his kameez. I grimaced and Marva turned away her face. His back was a pulpy mess of broken skin, hanging in scraps and fragments. Fibres from his clothes and dirt from the yard were embedded in the blood which had congealed and was holding the whole sticky surface together.
He let us put him, face down, on my cot and flinched as I wet a cloth in the pail and dabbed at his back. Marva sat watching, her eyes full of distress. The marks made a criss-cross pattern across his spine. He’d been flayed with a split cane.
‘Was it Baba?’ I asked.
He