Theirs was not a perfect marriage. They had experienced their share of heartache too. For years they tried to conceive. Letting go of the dream to start a family was crushing. But Mahad didn’t do what many men she knew did. He didn’t discard her. In fact, he did the opposite. He told her that without children, he could now devote more time and attention to her.

Forty years into their marriage, years after their one shop spawned six other silk shops all over Lahore, Mahad was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. When dementia began clouding his mind, he confused Laila with his beloved mother, his sister, even his grandmother. Yet he continued to be so grateful for the meals she cooked, the baths she prepared, the reminders of how to use a toothbrush, and he told her so, almost every day. Up until the end, when he could still speak clearly, he asked her if he was being good enough to her.

His death last year had torn Laila to pieces. She closed the silk shops temporarily and took some time to mourn and think about what she now wanted for herself.

And then the visions came, first at night, and then even during the day. They presented a series of images to her, and eventually a narrative took shape. Steel. Metal. Bronze. She saw the sheets of hardness bend, fold, ruffle, sharpen, reflect. She’d spent so many years caressing the soft, slick fibers of silk, and yet, her mind pointed her to other more durable, unyielding, textures.

She sold six of their seven silk shops to one of her managers. She kept the original and, with the proceeds from the others, purchased the entire building and the one immediately next to it. She tore down the dividing walls and the ceilings in between floors, added floor-to-ceiling windows, the counters, and painted the cement floors to create a large, airy main room.

She started collecting scraps of wire and sheet metal. For the first few weeks, she took the time to familiarize herself with her new materials, examined their weight, their mass, their sharp edges, noted their pliability, their sheen.

She liked the sound a hammer made when it pounded metal, how the vibration traveled up the handle, up her arm, like an electric shock. She couldn’t get far with only a hammer, though. So she bought a welding machine, an electrode, a chipping hammer, a set of electric shears, a guillotine, tin snips, and a welding helmet. She learned how heat melted and shaped copper, tin, and steel from a local welder. She studied the force of sparks grinding off the metal. There was a sense of risk to her newfound medium. A power. An invincibility she’d never known.