صَدا A Mirror Cracked
When I arrived back in Islamabad, Fatima was there to greet me. Her eyes met mine, and I saw something I’d never seen before: a sadness so deep it felt like the earth had cracked open between us. If eyes were mirrors, hers reflected a landscape stripped bare, hollowed out by loss. The phrase finally made sense when I saw her. Fatima, who I’ve known for over five years, was no longer whole.
I have watched her crumble and rebuild herself, time and again. Her courage has always astonished me. She is, or was, the purest soul I’ve ever known—remarkable in her quiet resilience. Our conversations over the years have ranged across laughter, pain, and survival. I have sat with her as she unraveled her grief, her trauma spilling out in stories that cut like glass. Her words used to leave me heartbroken; I could feel her hope wrestling with despair. But this time, the heartbreak didn’t come. What I felt was something colder, heavier: the numbness of witnessing a life eroded.
Fatima’s voice reached me through the haze of chai steam, but it wasn’t the voice I remembered. It carried no weight of shame, no trace of the fierce morality she once clung to. As she spoke, the faint scent of alcohol lingered between us, an unfamiliar ghost. She had started drinking. She no longer cared about right or wrong. Her fight had been beaten out of her, her spirit consumed by the vultures of this society, circling ever closer. We have failed her. I have failed her.
Her life now revolves around survival—feeding herself and her daughter, meeting the relentless demands of a world that has stripped her of everything except her body. That body, now a currency, is both her prison and her salvation. The ugliest truths of Pakistani society have always loomed large in my mind, but seeing them etched into the person I love like a sister was a wound I wasn’t prepared for.
I asked myself, over and over: could I have saved her? Could I have done something, anything, to pull her out of the fire that has consumed her? But as she spoke, I saw that it was too late for such questions. Her giggles punctuated the conversation, sharp and strange, a brittle mask over her wounds. She has learned not to flinch, not to care that she is bleeding. There is no moral compass anymore—only the pragmatism of survival.
Yet, even now, she thanks God. She shows gratitude, devotion even. I wonder if this is survival in its purest form, a desperate tether to something larger, or if it’s a surrender to the inevitability of her fate. Is her faith a life raft, or is it the acceptance of a slow, quiet death?
We sat there, over chai, and I wept. I wept for her, for her daughter, for all the betrayals and cruelties she has endured. I wept for the society that devours its own, the vultures that pick at the bones of women like her. Anger swelled in me—anger at the inhumanity of it all, at the way we normalize the unthinkable, how we bear witness to suffering and call it life.
Her phone rang. She stood up to leave, her face a blank slate. She needed to see off one client before another arrived. And just like that, she was gone.
I sat there alone, the chai turning cold in my hands, and thought: what kind of society lets its daughters burn while we sit and sip tea?