‘He never gave you your due,’ Hamida said. 

‘And he was unkind,’ I added calmly, even though the agony and the suffering was acute. It was hidden in my marrow. It would never leave me.

‘Yes!’ Hamida said. ‘I don’t know how you stayed with him so long. Looking after his home, his clumsy mother…’

She stopped rolling the paratha she had so expertly layered with dabs of home-made ghee. She just sat and looked at me, her beautiful dark eyes trying to fathom the stupidity of my ways.

I covered my head and looked away, pretending to concentrate on the quilt I was stitching. I didn’t want Hamida to get out of control.

‘What was the hold he had over you?’ she asked. She slapped the lachcha paratha onto the smoking griddle. It sizzled in delicious anticipation as she touched the edges with a spoon full of ghee, letting bits of it slip under the paratha.

My mouth watered at the aroma that surrounded us. I lowered my head so that I wouldn’t have to meet her piercing stare when she looked up at me.

What was it that had kept me tied to Yusuf?

Was it just his good looks? His lean frame and his commanding manner? Was it the fact that he was educated and looked down his chiseled nose at lesser lettered mortals like me?

Was it because of his cruel streak… and the gentle side of him, which only I knew? His touch which made me sizzle like the hapless paratha on Hamida’s hot griddle? It sent shivers down my spine and made the golden hair on my arms stand up in bumps.

‘He was always cruel,’ Hamida said on a sigh. ‘I know for sure now that it was he who stoned the one-eyed dog to death. Shakila’s khalaa saw him do it.’

The smell of the parathas was getting oppressive. The hut was filled with smoke and my eyes watered.

‘But you supported him even then,’ Hamida said. She piled the parathas in a steel tin and covered them with a banana leaf. She shut the tin with a snap.

‘Look at me, Yasmin,’ she said. Her voice was sweet and smooth as honey. I stopped stitching.

‘I thought I loved him,’ I said. ‘And…and…Ammie always said that a Nikah was forever. That your shauhar is your god…and he never married Gulnar, even though his apa kept trying to persuade him to.’ 

I wiped my eyes with my chunni. I was crying.

Hamida sniffed like she used to when we were little girls, and she was about to deliver a devastating verdict on me.

She attacked a bunch of spinach and started to cut it into thin strips.

‘Big deal,’ she said. ‘You deserved what you got then. You never supported me even when I offered to talk sense into him.’

The spinach fell away like crinkled paper each time the knife scrunched through its thickness and hit the wooden cutting board.

‘I…I thought you were jealous that I was younger and married…’ I said without thinking. I was in a world created by my grief. Nothing was real anymore.

‘And that I was still a spinster?’ Hamida said on a shriek.

I looked up in horror. Was she about to have one of her fits? I felt trapped. The window was too small for me to squeeze through and to reach the door I would have to pass Hamida. She was sure to catch me.

I pricked my finger with the needle and let out a cry. It broke the spell. Hamida returned from the brink. Her concern for my finger was exaggerated but I let her fuss over me. She washed my finger, wiped it with her chunni, applied haldi to it and wrapped it up in a bandage of tulsi leaves.

Time went on. The cooking, the stitching, the small talk. We discussed Yusuf’s demerits with glee. We cursed his poor dead mother.

Then Hamida gave me a delicious brew she concocted on the fire. I drank it, and for that evening I forgot the horror I knew would shadow me for the rest of my life. 

For those hours the world felt oddly held together. The hot cup in my hands, the smoke curling up to the thatch of the hut. The images would come back. Not all at once, but in small, merciless pieces. The slick, impossible quiet when the baby stilled. His powerful hands dexterous then monstrous. The bluntness of the knife, as it became something else. Each time the memory surfaced it would be worse, because it would arrive with the ordinary sounds of life. The clatter of a pan. Hamida’s tuneless humming as she rolled parathas. Folding the terrible into the smallest task until horror felt like a domestic chore.

But for now, Hamida’s brew managed to erase the memory of Yusuf smothering our newborn daughter because he wanted a boy. A beautiful baby girl with tight black curls, perfect fingernails and a rose bud mouth. The most beautiful baby I had ever seen.

Hamida’s brew temporarily dimmed the memory of her and me hacking Yusuf to death with her spinach cutting knife and burying him under the vegetables growing outside Hamida’s mud hut. Right behind the kitchen where she cooked her delicious parathas.