The Maths Lesson

TRANSLATED FROM KURDISH

It was an innocent morning, Miss Shanaz!

In the year four class of a heartbroken school

the door’s back was broken, the window

cracked from sorrow. Outside, a high wind

howled and we sat on our hard benches –

two to three students to a bench – trembling.

But on that morning, using a question

as excuse to bring Jhala to the blackboard,

you suddenly asked her about her sister,

murdered by her father a few weeks before.

You committed a crime, Miss Shanaz, when

in front of thirty students, you made Jhala cry

with your endless questions. Her hands

started to shake but you didn’t let it go.

You were looking for details to tell your friends

in the teachers’ common room as you had tea

and cake. She cried and we were stunned,

listening. She wiped away fat tears,

turning towards the blackboard in shame,

so we couldn’t see. ‘Who are you crying for?’

you asked her. What a senseless question!

Even we children knew that she cried for her sister,

not her father. After that lesson, after that day,

every time I saw Jhala I was speechless, because

after your questions a girl in the class told me –

that night when her father was strangling her,

Jhala’s sister put her finger between her teeth

in order to breathe. The girl also told me when

she had eventually died, her index finger was left

behind in her mouth. All that year the bitten-off

finger of Jhala’s sister and the bruised fingerprints

of her father on her neck stayed in my mind.

Until the end of that year, every time I saw Jhala,

her shaking hands and big tears came into my mind.

What a crime you committed, Miss Shanaz!

You turned the Maths lesson into an interrogation

session full of fear and panic: fear that if we don’t

listen to our fathers, we too may be strangled,

our thin fingers left behind in our throats, and after our

deaths, one innocent morning our little sisters may be

grilled with questions – in class, in front of their friends,

made to cry to the point of breaking.