Chapter 1: The Morning

It began like all stories do, a long time ago in a land far away from here. It began at home, a place where the little nuances of language, culture and heritage blended so easily from one to the other so as to pass without the slightest of notice. It began with a baby girl and a slap, loud and perhaps the most profound she would ever receive.

"The baby's not breathing doctor," screamed the nurse emphatically in her broken English as she continued slapping the back of the little baby dangling somewhat precariously from the nurse's small hands.

They named her Sahr--morning, a ray of hope, a marker of new beginnings, a fresh start. Both Daniyaal and his British-born-turned-Muslim wife Mariam (Mary) had been trying for a baby for many years. In the fourth year of their marriage they began taking the subject seriously and by the seventh, Mariam had undertaken every procedure and pill that was out there in the market provided by both experienced professionals and quacks--in equal measure. When they had given up, in the tenth year of their marriage, Mariam got pregnant in what was genuinely a most welcome 'oops'.

Born at the first crack of light on the longest day in the calendar in a year when the monsoons came earlier and with the force of mighty tempests, both parents saw the child as their only hope to carry on their names and gave up trying for any more. The girl child emerged in the world as a beacon of hope, a messiah. Both as a daughter and a son that would now never be born.

And so little Sahr came out into the world along with tiny toads, bold lizards, ripe mangoes hanging on laden trees and a season singing with the sounds of a million crickets, the winds and rain thundering, and the summer air strong with the damp but clinging hope of opportunity.

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Nobody understood why Daniyaal brought his British wife to Lahore for the birth of his most wanted, precious child. With its third-world facilities, rampant virulent viruses and political chaos the country had always been thought of a as poorly constructed, but potent, time bomb waiting to go off. Thoughts of this nature were echoed at many a dinner party on West side's posh neighbourhoods by both friends and acquaintances before the arrival of the child, but Daniyaal Alamgir was adamant. Not withstanding Mary's initial concern and then later quiet fury, this was the one thing the otherwise reconciling Daniyaal would not bend on. It was almost a frantic obsession that drove him. His only child would be 'christened' in the city of his forefathers in the same way as he had been. Though she may not grow up tasting the morning suspended dust and learning to ride her wheel though pot riddled streets like he did, he needed his child to know that she belonged to the soil of Pakistan even if her passport said otherwise. He needed for her to taste the dew-heavy morning that each new day held in its palm the hope of a better dream.

That was why he called her Sahr.

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In tradition with Islamic rituals and cultural propriety, both mother and child spent the first 40 days confined to the sanitized security of the ubiquitous colonial structure that was Daniyaal's parents house. A sleek black plaque marked the imposing black gate with heavy gilded golden alphabets "Alamgir House," announcing its presence to even the disinterested passer. Through these gates walked in scores of women (and sometimes men) dressed to the nines to shower upon the newly born baby presents, money and good wishes in equal measure. Some praised the child's large hazel eyes, others commented how lucky the parents were to have a child, others still on fortunate the parents would have been had it been a boy, and some on how unfortunate it was that the child had not taken her mother's fair complexion, rather than her father's rich olives tones.

It was Aunty Gulbahar, Daiyaal's only sibling who condescendingly commented the most on the latter. "It will be a bit of a problem with the right marriage proposals. She's too dark. Boys from good families want pretty wives."

Named after a bright "evergreen" flower on a tree that out shines every other flower in the summer season, Aunty Gul as she was loving called by the family, had hoped to marry some affluent man, settle down and have a few children and thereafter contentedly spend the rest of her life struggling to find right matches for her children in the 'correct' circles of Lahore's elite. But fate thought otherwise. Her husband of few months walked out on her calling her plain and unattractive to marry a demure startling fair women with little personality and even lesser vocabulary.

But Daniyaal loved the child regardless of its supposed shortcomings. His heart beamed with pride that she looked more like him than her mother.