betrayed.
âItâs for your own good that I say what I say. If you laugh too much today, youâll be crying tomorrow. Better to feel bad now than soon after.â
âI donât understand why we canât laugh today and tomorrow and the next day,â Pembe remarked.
It was Jamilaâs turn to scowl now. Her sisterâs brazenness had not only taken her by surprise but also put her in an awkward position. She held her breath, fearing what would follow next: the rolling pin. Whenever one of the girls crossed a line, Naze smacked both of them with the thin wooden rod in her kitchen. Never on their faces â a girlâs beauty was her dowry â but on their backs and bottoms. The girls found it strange that the instrument they so bitterly abhorred also made the fluffy pastries that they cherished.
Yet that evening Naze did not punish anyone. She scrunched up her nose, shook her head and looked away â as if she longed to be somewhere else. When she spoke again, her voice was calm. âModesty is a womanâs only shield,â she said. âBear this in mind: if you lose that, you will be worth no more than a chipped. * This world is cruel. It wonât take pity on you.â
In her mindâs eye Pembe flipped a coin in the air and watched it land on her palm. There were always two sides, and two sides only. Win or lose. Dignity or disgrace, and little consolation for those who got the wrong one.
It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, Naze continued, whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other. As to why He had done that, it wasnât up to human beings to question. What mattered was that the colour black didnât show stains, unlike the colour white, which revealed even the tiniest speck of dirt. By the same token, women who were sullied would be instantly noticed and separated from the rest, like husks removed from grains. Hence when a virgin gave herself to a man â even if he were the man whom she loved â she had everything to lose, while he had absolutely nothing to lose.
So it was that in the land where Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty were born, âhonourâ was more than a word. It was also a name. You could call your child âHonourâ, as long as it was a boy. Men had honour. Old men, middle-aged men, even schoolboys so young that they still smelled of their mothersâ milk. Women did not have honour. Instead, they had shame. And, as everyone knew, Shame would be a rather poor name to bear.
As she listened, Pembe recalled the stark whiteness of the doctorâs office. The discomfort that she had felt then returned â only now the feeling was magnified. She wondered about the other colours â periwinkle-blue, pistachio-green and hazelnut-brown â and the other fabrics â velvet, gabardine and brocade. There was such variety in this world, surely more than could be found on a tray of winnowed rice.
It would be one of the many ironies of Pembeâs life that the things she hated to hear from Naze she would repeat to her daughter, Esma, word for word, years later, in England.
Askander . . . Askander . . .
A Village near the River Euphrates, 1962â7
Pembe was a woman of untenable thoughts and unfounded fears. This part of her personality wasnât something that had evolved over the years. Instead, she had turned superstitious abruptly, almost overnight: the night Iskender was born.
Pembe was seventeen years old when she became a mother â young, beautiful and apprehensive. There she was in a room bathed in a dusky light, staring at the cradle, as if she was still not convinced that this baby with his pink, fragile fingers, translucent skin and a blotchy purple mark on his button nose had defied all the odds and survived; that he would, from now on, be her child, hers alone. Here