Fiction: Twelve-year-old Zeenat turns her vacation into an exploration of her innermost thoughts

April 24

My family has been talking about the misaq ceremony to transform me into an adult even if I do not look like one. I would rather not have to go through it because these days for reasons no one can understand the priests at the mosque change names they think are not religious enough. I interrupted all their planning to ask my older aunt why she named me Zeenat and she told me that she liked a heroine in an Urdu novel called Zeenat and decided that I would be called Zeenat after she saw me at the hospital. She said she whispered the name in my ear for the first time when I was seven days old. It is what an aunt is supposed to do. I was so small that I do not remember it. She also said that during the ceremony a goat almost killed me. Papa was with the goat in the corridor trying to make the first cut, but instead of dying the goat found the force of life and tried to escape. It ran inside the house towards me in my aunt’s lap but the butcher ran after the goat and cut its throat...

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