I remained seated as everyone around me yelled. I continued with my testimony, speaking in a loud voice that might be heard above the clamour.

After he brought his court to order, the judge asked me to continue.

I could see her.

See what, Mr Jamal?

I could see Saba standing in front of me.

Standing? Where? When?

In the open toilet, on the first evening we arrived in the camp. I couldn’t warn her of my presence with a cough as the cold had damaged my vocal cords. And so, unaware of me, she put the torch on the ground. I saw the back of her legs, her purple thighs as she lifted her dress and crouched in front of me. I kept my eyes open as she picked up the stones, and when a beetle landed on her lower back, Saba jumped up and fled. I stumbled to my knees, parting the long grass with my trembling hands, sweat sweeping over my face, as if the heat emanating from Saba’s spot in that field was the core of human warmth I have been searching for for a long time.

Uproar. He is telling lies. Throw him out.

Let me stop you there, the judge said to me.

But I continued: My Saba exists. Just look at the cinema and you will see her. You think that someone like the Saba I know can only be the creation of an insane man. As if real women are born from the ribs of men, and imaginary ones from their fantastical brains.

Enough of this, the judge said.

He ordered the guard to remove me from the witness chair. Turning to the midwife, he said, Please go to Saba and ask her to come to the court. This is her last chance. If she doesn’t, we will send the clerk to drag her up here.

The court waited for the midwife. The judge was conversing with his fellow elders. Mutterings grew in the gallery. Rumours surfaced once again. I returned my attention to my cinema. Saba lay on her stomach, reading the book she now propped up against a pillow.

I looked away from Saba and faced the cage in which I kept pigeons by the side of my hut. The cat carefully balanced its feet like a ballerina on the thatched fence. Sometimes to confine is to prolong life, I thought to myself as I fixed my attention on Saba’s compound.

Saba opened the door to the midwife. They talked. I could not hear anything in this silent movie I was watching. But I noticed their gesticulations, the way they cut the air with their hands. Saba turned in a circle. She threw her robe off and lay down on the bed.

I remembered that time, months before Saba’s marriage, when, having suspected the worst after she saw Saba coming out of the Khwaja’s hut at night, the midwife examined Saba’s dignity. The midwife’s two fingers in Saba’s vagina confirmed her virginity then. That day, Saba’s mother ululated as if the midwife had delivered her a new baby.