Saba is at least seventeen, have you asked yourself why she hasn’t had her period yet?

But not Saba. Saba is not like that.

Neighbours, accustomed to grieving, arrived to give their support. But they were turned away by the midwife. This was a different kind of death, Saba heard her tell them.

Saba wondered how many times she had died to her mother and the midwife at the exact moment she had felt herself alive. More than ever, I am not dead, she wanted to tell them. Touch me and see how my heart is beating.

Saba lay back on the blanket. She looked through the window, repeating some of the English words she had written down the previous night.

Not my Saba. Not my daughter. She is not like that.

Why else would a girl go into a man’s hut at night, when a man is at his weakest?

Even though she heard them, even though she wanted to respond, defend herself that the only pleasure she had sucked out of the Khwaja was his knowledge of another language, Saba stayed silent. She did, though, notice the contrast between their Saba and her interpretation of herself. As if she had left her body and become another, Saba thought, when she observed herself from their perspective.

She wondered how the self could fragment and multiply into as many parts as the number of people observing it. Saba was Saba, but also a whore in the making, a ghost, a stubborn girl.

Please tell me, the mother said to the midwife. What can I do now? What will people say?

Saba left her mother’s pleas behind her, and the midwife’s suggestions for how to fix her daughter, and instead she imagined herself in a narrow, dark corridor of a university that smelt of books, of laboratories, studying in a classroom instead of being in a constant dream. Then – and how time flies in a dream – she walked out of the university building as Dr Saba.

Just then, the midwife and the mother restrained her. Saba kicked her legs about, trying to release herself from their grip. But to no avail. She stopped fighting. For a moment, and even as the midwife inserted her two fingers into Saba to test her virginity, to test that she hadn’t slept with the Khwaja or any other man, calm ran through her. She realized how tired she was, how her body ached. She was exhausted from fighting. In that supine position, on her back, arms lifeless by her side, she felt at ease. Perhaps this was the natural position of a girl, she thought. If not, why did surrendering feel so much easier?

Days had passed since the midwife’s fingers confirmed Saba’s purity. Days since the mother ululated as if the midwife had delivered her new baby girl. Days since Saba found the comfortable position, on her back, her eyes shut without sleeping, when the world existed outside herself. She wasn’t part of its advancement or destruction.