God willing.

THE COMMITTEE OF ELDERS

Saba opened the door of her hut onto the square. She raised a hand against the sun. The judge and the men making up the committee of elders stood in front of a crowd.

Days before she left their hometown, her teacher – a woman who had said she was a direct descendant of the Queen of Sheba, not in blood but in power – comforted her that a new place always offered a new beginning and a fresh start.

But what would her teacher have made of the judge staging another moral trial which, he explained, helped retain cultural values and entrench tradition in this place in the wilderness?

Back home, the judge said through his megaphone, I presided over many cases that highlighted to me the dark sides of our humanity. I fought them there and I will do so here even more. Today, the moral trial was aimed at stray unmarried girls who … He paused, as if searching for the appropriate words. Saba completed his sentence to herself: Girls who discovered how to enjoy the same pleasure as boys without destroying their marriage prospects.

Saba wondered whether it had been Samhiya who was caught, but it was another girl, who was found in the bush, her dress lifted up to her waist. She sat in the front of the eager spectators. The trial, which was more like a public re-enacting of the crime, started.

The girl with plaited hair and a cross tattooed on her forehead stood in front of the heavily built man she was accused of seducing. The man turned away from her and ran to his wife in the audience: Forgive me, he said to his wife, surrounded by their children.

The judge ordered the man to come back and when he did, the girl’s mother rushed forward and screamed: My daughter did not seduce this man. He raped her.

But the girl’s father scurried towards his wife and slapped her. It’s your fault for letting her wear this. Against his body he held the dress his daughter wore that night: Just look, he said.

On the instruction of the judge the girl was taken away to a nearby hut and returned wearing the dress, which barely covered her knees.

The judge read out a statement with a verdict: Impurity will be rooted out from this camp. We will not allow this wilderness to corrupt our souls. This girl will bear her sin on her back.

The man climbed on the back of his seducer. And the girl trudged around the square carrying the man, her sin, an adult double her size.

The girl’s back bent. Yet, Saba noticed, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t wince. Girls, she thought, are used to carrying things: firewood, water, food for their families, their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, as well as themselves and their own sorrows. No amount of weight can crush a girl.

But Saba also knew that this girl’s real punishment was the reputation inflicted on her. From now on, she would be confined to the backroom of life, to a place where she would be forgotten, like a building left alone to decay, so that when a man drove past and sought shelter in her body as a last resort, in his drunken hour, he would find her infested with rats, bats, spiders, mites. This girl, Saba thought, would be a moral ghost story for generations to come.