The day that Sundri was to be married arrived as any other, with the rooster crowing in the semi-darkness of dawn, the calling of doves from the nearby forest and the sudden brightening of the sky as the sun struggled to make its ascent. Her mother, Sebhagi, was the first one awake as always, rustling around the home as she prepared the morning’s first meal – sweet flat bread and tea – for the menfolk of the house. Then the men stirred: Mohammad Karim, Sundri’s father, and Abdul Karim, her elder brother, grunting to her as they came to the table, words a useless commodity this early in the morning.

Usually Sundri was up with her mother at dawn to help serve breakfast or do any of a hundred chores that awaited her, but today Sebhagi let her sleep for an extra half hour. It was her wedding gift to her only daughter, who would today leave their house to be married to Ghulam Farid, whose family lived in the next village. They were related, Ghulam Farid’s father a first cousin of Mohammed Karim’s mother. Ghulam Farid worked as a sharecropper on the nearby zamindar’s fields but he had aspirations of owning a petrol pump in the town. Sundri had been betrothed to him when she was seven years old, the fathers meeting over tea and cake to decide their children’s fate. It had been decided that she would marry Ghulam Farid when she had come of age, and that had happened a month ago.

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