Honour Read Online Free

did not punish anyone. She scrunched up her nose, shook her head and looked away – as if she longed to be somewhere else. When she spoke again, her voice was calm. ‘Modesty is a woman’s only shield,’ she said. ‘Bear this in mind: if you lose that, you will be worth no more than a chipped. * This world is cruel. It won’t take pity on you.’
    In her mind’s 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 wasn’t up to human beings to question. What mattered was that the colour black didn’t 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 – even if he were the man whom she loved – 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, ‘honour’ was more than a word. It was also a name. You could call your child ‘Honour’, 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 mothers’ 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 doctor’s office. The discomfort that she had felt then returned – only now the feeling was magnified. She wondered about the other colours – periwinkle-blue, pistachio-green and hazelnut-brown – and the other fabrics – 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 Pembe’s 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, 1962–7
    Pembe was a woman of untenable thoughts and unfounded fears. This part of her personality wasn’t 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 – 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 was a son – the son that her mother had craved, and prayed to have throughout her entire life.
    Naze had had one more full-term pregnancy after Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty. It had to be a boy this time – there was no other possibility. Allah owed her this;
He was in her debt
, she said, even though she knew she was speaking utter blasphemy. It was a secret agreement between her and the Creator. After so many girls, He was going to make it up to her. Such was her conviction that she spent months knitting little blankets, socks and vests in a blue deeper than stormy nights, all of them designed for her perfect little boy. She wouldn’t listen to anyone – not even to the midwife who examined her after her waters broke and told her, in a voice as quiet as the breeze, that the baby wasn’t positioned right, and that they had better go to the city. There still was time. If they set off now they could be at the hospital before the contractions