Fiction: Rabiya’s dream of becoming a teacher is shattered when she’s married off to an older man

Her breath, hot inside the veil, has nowhere to go. Perspiration trickles along the sides of her face, crawling down the length of the glass beads of her three-tiered earrings, disappearing into the grooves of her neck, somewhere below the filigreed flowerets of the gold necklace. Beads of sweat form in the creases of her eyelids. A taste of dust fills her mouth. Taking a deep breath, Rabiya flaps the front of the burqa for air as she peers at the bustle on the railway platform.

It is an early morning in May. A dense heat rises from the dry, arid earth and meets the sunlight in a swath of blinding glare. A few wispy clouds hang about droopily in a white sky with promise of neither shade nor rain. Carried on a slow, scorching band of air is a mélange of smells – urine, cigarettes, sweat, freshly cooked roti.

Having begun its journey elsewhere, the train is stopping to pick up passengers from Sahiwal, one of the innumerable cities that crowd the Punjab plains. As always, the railway platform is like a marketplace. Undeterred by the heat, railway passengers and those who have come to see them off, like Rabiya’s family,...

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