Ricky-Rashid had previously hoped to bring his wife with him when he returned to the varsity for his studies, but his vision of living like an English couple in his student halls had also been shattered. He would return alone, and would no longer pretend that he was the Ricky he had tried to fashion himself into, the cosmopolitan intellectual around town; from this time on, he would call himself Just Rashid. He would not sleep with Henna until she was seventeen and had finished school, but the feelings she had innocently awoken would not go away, and in an attempt to scratch the persistent itch of desire he would spend the next few years having frustrated and unsanitary sex with kind-faced, matronly prostitutes, all the time guiltily thinking about Henna’s unripe, forbidden body.

The Alchemic Conception of

Shona Kiran Karim

FROM BEING A willowy prepubescent, by seventeen Henna had developed into a rather buxom adolescent, with teenage spots and child-bearing hips that no longer had any cause to earn disapproval from her expectant father-in-law, who had patiently waited several years for a grandchild. Despite the pocked skin and the puppy fat, Henna was still very good-looking, and remained a convincing actress. From the unpromising start with her inlaws, who had exploded with anger when Rashid had nervously revealed the truth about her background the day after the wedding, she had managed to win them back with her wiles and charm and studied innocence. She was the victim in all this, after all, a child-bride sold into a marriage under the threat of violence by her vile father, treated like just another one of his grubby business deals. During Rashid’s long absences at university overseas, she made herself indispensable to the Karims, and they disloyally found that they preferred her lively company to that of their stilted son, or even his spoilt younger brother. She eventually became, as her wily father had predicted, the favourite daughter, and by contrast, returning Rashid was treated as the prodigal when he came back for his vacations, with his academic affectations, funny foreign clothes and, worst of all, his funny foreign ideas.