Nadia Hashimi - A House Without Windows

Gulnaz shrugged her shoulders.

“I never hated him for anything in particular. And I don’t know which of us started disliking the other first, but once it started, there was no turning back. When I look at other husbands and wives around me, I see so many people who were just like us — snapping at each other, sitting on opposite sides of the room. That’s how we were, but bolder. We could admit we were bad together.”

“Do you think he chose to fight in the war because of your arguing?”

“Who knows?”

“You must have some idea. There must be something you’re not telling me.”

“Now you, of all people, think I’m not sharing enough of the story?” Gulnaz snapped.

Zeba bit her tongue.

“Why did you never tell me about him before now?”

“What good would it have done? The man was gone. He wasn’t a bad father to you in those early years, though. But after that, you really didn’t have a father, so there was nothing to talk about.”

“But you call him my father.”

“Better for me to call him a father than to have others call you a bastard.”

Zeba knew it to be true, though she didn’t dare agree. Long ago she’d denied her mother’s wisdom. Recovery would be slow.

Zeba arched her back. Her body felt stiff. Why was Gulnaz able to look so comfortable for so long? Did the pebbles not press into her flesh the way they did for Zeba?

“You couldn’t fix things with him?” Zeba asked, thinking of Kamal as much as she was thinking of her father. “When I was a little girl, I believed you could fix everything.”

A passing cloud cast a shadow over Gulnaz’s face. Zeba’s question pushed on an old but tender wound. Why hadn’t Gulnaz done anything about the way they’d argued? She’d started to once. She’d snipped locks of his hair while he slept and torn a pair of his underwear into shreds. A bit of ash, a bit of blood, and he could have been a different man.

But she did not go beyond those first simple steps. Instead, she let him go. It had been as simple as releasing the string on a wind-borne kite. All she had to do was nothing.

“Our minds are wild beasts. We tame them with fear of God or punishment, but sometimes they refuse to cower. That’s when things turn ugly.”

Zeba understood her mother precisely. In the last few months she shared with her husband, she’d begun to feel exceptionally ugly.

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON IN CHIL MAHTAB AND JUST DAYS AWAY from the Eid holiday. The temperature within the prison had climbed to over a hundred degrees. Women who should have been home preparing to celebrate the holiday of sacrifice were wilting within the prison’s high walls instead. The heat should have rendered the women immobile. . but it hadn’t.

Zeba’s success with Mezhgan had set the women’s prison alight with hope.

A steady stream of women moved through the cell Zeba shared with the others. The guards had, at first, tried to prevent the women from congregating but they quickly gave up. The women were persistent and the guards curious.

“Would you let me speak? You’ve had your chance!” Bibi Shireen, a woman old enough to be Zeba’s grandmother, pushed her way to the front of the line. “Zeba- jan, you’re a mother. You’ve got to understand. My son was in love with a girl and when they ran off together, the girl’s brothers found them and killed him. They’ve locked me up because my son is dead and someone’s got to be blamed. And they want my daughter to be married to one of the killers, in retribution for my son’s transgression. I’ve been here three years and have another twenty-seven to go. Do you see my hair — white as a garlic clove? I will die here! What can you do for me?”

“What idiots. Bibi Shireen, I had no idea you had another twenty-seven years still. That’s a disgrace,” Latifa remarked with blatant disgust. She sat on the edge of her bed and watched over the pleas. She was learning things about her fellow prisoners that she hadn’t learned in her eighteen months in Chil Mahtab.

“Tell me, Zeba- jan . What should I do? I once heard something about the feathers of a white pigeon bringing mercy, but I don’t trust the person who told me. Whatever you say, I’ll do it.”

Zeba listened in silence. She had not intended to create such a maelstrom. It had been an exercise really, a way for her to prove to herself that she could do something, even if it meant dipping her feet into murky waters.

“Bibi- jan, ” she said respectfully. “I will think carefully about your situation.”

The women came in two or three at a time with all kinds of requests. Zeba quickly became accustomed to the ones in need of recipes to make families accept their beloved. But the prison housed women accused of more than being star-crossed lovers. Because of their various improprieties, many had been convicted of the broad crime of zina, sex outside of marriage. Some were convicted of attempted zina or imprisoned for assisting another woman to commit zina . An eighteen-year-old girl had run away from her elderly husband. A wife had left a husband after he sold their ten- and twelve-year-old daughters into marriage. Another had been arrested when a stranger reported seeing her leaving a man’s private office.

They all begged Zeba for help. They needed the judge’s mercy. They needed their families to be understanding. They needed their husbands to grant them divorces. The prison was teeming with stories of sex, love, and violence.

Zina. Zina. Zina.

Two women came to Zeba together.

“Go on, you tell her,” said the older of the two, the soles of her feet stained with henna. Zeba thought them to be mother and daughter at first but soon realized she was mistaken.

“Our husband was killed by his cousins, but the family pointed their fingers at us. They’re free while we’re in here. We did nothing, but no one seems to care. What should we do?”

“You were both married to him?”

“Yes,” explained the older woman. “I was his first wife. Then he took her. He was a decent man. He had land that his cousins had been eyeing for years. They wanted it and finally killed him for it. Three of them came into our home and strangled him. Blaming the two of us only made it easier for them to claim his lot.”

Zeba bit her lip.

“Let me think about it,” Zeba said. “I’m not sure what would be best. .”

Actually, she didn’t know at all. Gulnaz had never tackled dilemmas of this ilk, which was not to say that she could not have managed them. The opportunity just hadn’t presented itself.

Madar, you would have the time of your life in this place.

Zeba cobbled together recipes from her childhood, recalling what Gulnaz had done in similar situations.

“This place, these crimes — it is an injustice what’s being done here,” Zeba declared. A chorus of agreement rang through the small cell. “What a burden it is to be born a woman.”

What she could not articulate sometimes came more naturally to her in rhyme.

“Men treasure their manhood as God’s greatest gift

Because without it, justice is brutal and swift.”

There was an outburst of laughter.

“What did she say?” Like links on a chain, the women passed Zeba’s couplet from the cell into the hallway, the beauty salon, and beyond. They repeated it to themselves, not wanting to forget the two lines that should have hung like a slogan beneath the prison’s name.

“Zeba, you’ll never have to wash your clothes again. I’ll do your laundry and use my own detergent if you’ll help me.”

The woman before her had two wide-eyed children at her side. They looked like baby birds hidden under their mother’s wings. Zeba noticed the bandages on her left wrist. She’d seen this woman undoing and redoing the strip of cotton a day earlier in the washroom, her back turned for privacy. Zeba could still picture the neat row of scabbed-over slice marks that ran from the middle of her forearm to the end of her wrist.