The Fallen Widow

Chapter 34: Chrysalis

The morning had barely broken when Hoorayn pushed open the gate. It was not locked. Kaneez had always said that a woman with nothing worth stealing had nothing worth locking away, and Hoorayn remembered this as the gate swung open under her hand and she stepped into the courtyard she had scrubbed on her hands and knees.

The same courtyard. The same cracked tiles. The same rusted tap over the same stone basin. The hens were gone. Kaneez without hens was Kaneez without the last small economy that had kept her fed.

She pushed the main door open.

"Who is there?"

The voice came from the back. Thin, startled, the voice of a woman roused from sleep into alarm. Hoorayn moved through the room, her eyes adjusting to the low light. The bare shelves. The single steel cup on the floor beside a rolled mattress. The smell of closed windows and loneliness so thick it had become its own weather.

"Who is it? What is happening?"

Kaneez felt her way along the wall, her eyes unfocused and milky, the cataracts having taken almost everything now. She was smaller than Hoorayn remembered. The grief had taken something structural from her, the upright bitterness that had always held her together softened into something merely old and afraid.

Hoorayn went to the shelf. Ran her hand along it. Empty. She moved to the tin box in the corner, the one she remembered Shafiq keeping his papers in. She crouched and opened it.

"You devil woman." Kaneez found her old edge beneath the fear. "You come here in the morning. My son is dead. Can you not leave me in peace?"

"The reports." Hoorayn moved through the papers. Receipts. A folded letter. The garage registration. "The medical papers. I know they exist."

"What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind?"

Her fingers found it. Folded twice, the paper softened at the creases from years of handling. She opened it. Read it. Read it again.

The letterhead was from a clinic in Jahanpur. The date nearly two years old, 3 months after her marriage. The language clinical and deliberate.

The report read that Meh'r-Bano was barren. The language was clinical but a comment added there was no chance she could have a child. If that was true, why has she had morning sickness? Why did the nurse give her a new report of her pregnancy? Why was she feeling sick of the smell of chicken?

She stood up slowly.

"You told me I was barren." She turned to face Kaneez who was still finding her way along the wall.
"My first year here. You took me to that doctor. You sat across from me and told me the results confirmed it. That it was me." Her voice was shaking. "You looked me in the face and you told me."

"What reports? What are you talking about?"

"This report." She held it up though she knew Kaneez could not see it.
"Which says I cannot have a child. But you lied! You all lied to trap me in here. You made me believe I was broken. That I could never." She stopped. "You made me carry that for years."

Kaneez had gone very still against the wall.

"Tell me the truth." Hoorayn crossed the room until she was close enough that even Kaneez's failing eyes could make out the shape of her.
"Today a nurse told me I am pregnant right now. So tell me everything."

The room was very quiet.

Kaneez's hand dropped from the wall. She stood without its support, suddenly smaller, suddenly just an old woman with bad eyes and a dead son and a bare room she would die in alone.