Suroor’s sister, Kuhl, grew up with plentiful money and a severely restricted life. She was not permitted to wear any shoes other than Clarks, with their plain, low, boxy heels, and she could not wear any customary Punjabi ensemble unless it had been sewn by the family’s tailor, whose father had been their grandmother’s tailor. When she made the decision, along with Suroor, to begin wearing hijab, her mother was so mortified that she concealed this development, and her daughters, from their relations—these were women, after all, who traveled regularly to London to have their hair tinted, cut, and styled. Kuhl went to an English school in Karachi, and when she graduated her father sent her to England to study medicine without seeking her opinion on the matter. Kuhl grew up on the understanding that choices in life had been assigned in advance. That her body, just as it docilely wore what she was instructed to wear—always the proper and suitable thing—would be docilely taken by the man whom someone would deem most suitable for that suitably garbed body. It never occurred to her then, not even in her deepest imaginings, that her body might have its own desires about when and how it was taken. Certainly, she never imagined that her body would demand to be taken precisely by someone improper; by the man who was not deemed suitable at all.
The first time she saw Imran he was bent over a plate of biryani in the mosque cafeteria, eating with his hand. Kuhl watched as he finished and licked his fingers; to her surprise, she felt no disgust or embarrassment at all—just a light tremor in her legs. Still, a long time had to pass before she was able to realize that in that very first moment, her desire for him had been kindled.
Her life was like a paper kite. She would lift her head to watch as it went bobbing by, the breeze taking it farther and farther away. In the beginning, she believed that she had a firm hold on the cord that tethered that kite, and that she could control its movements. But the kite didn’t respond to her tugs. It flew away, eluding the pull of that thin and frail thread, which was really no more than an imaginary line. It was a kite far in the distance, hovering, circling, now ramming into a lamppost, now getting caught on an antenna, and finally, likely to be ripped to tatters as it chafed against a length of barbed wire. Or it might careen back to earth, but then it would surely plunge straight into the dirt.
She asked herself why all the people around her seemed to be holding fast to the lines that controlled their own paper kites. Their own lives. Were they knowingly creating an illusion, or were they genuinely hoping to maintain their grasp? Why was every human being granted the line that secured their kite, even though the strength of a person’s grip on that cord could vary from weak to strong? Her own grip had been rubbed raw by the string that anchored her, wounding her badly enough that she let it slip out of her hand.
Suroor, for her part, was feeling more tethered. Finally, she was able to rid herself of feeling filthy and shake off the heavy burden of concealing her sister’s love affair, for Kuhl had apparently made the decision to tell her parents and make her marriage official, public, and permanent. Suroor would perhaps no longer have to give up her room to the lovers, spending her time imagining what they were doing in her narrow, innocent little bed.