The news of Asma's death pulled something loose in me a memory I had folded away like an old letter, the kind of thing you think you have buried until a sudden rain slicks it clean and it slides out into the open.
I was a child then, barely knowing how grown decisions could cascade. We sat in rows in a classroom that smelled of chalk and the sun that slid in through the high windows. I did not understand the affairs that men decided for other people; those matters felt as distant and mysterious as the weather. Then one day a whisper moved through the school, and that whisper became a roar.
They said a girl from the government school had been taken kidnapped by a man and carried to the nearby city. For days she was gone. For days we did not know if she slept or if someone's cruelty had stolen her breath. The town hummed with questions that had no answers a child could make sense of. Adults folded their faces into their hands. Children made small, frightened noises.
And then the chant began small at first, a cruel rhythm taken up by some of my schoolmates, as if it were a game. "Government school defamed Rabia because of you." Words that I had never heard before in that order: defamed, because of you. They pointed to a girl who had been taken. They blamed Rabia for being the one who suffered.
It was the strangest idea I had ever heard. A girl had been forced into a van, dragged away, held for days witnesses saw it, neighbors spoke of men shoving and of doors slamming and yet the girls in my class, the same girls who braided hair with me at recess, beat their chests and called her name like a curse. Why, I wondered, was the one who had been hurt the one who was accused? How could the victim be the one who had defamed the school?
The logic I was supposed to learn in those days was simple and unforgiving: for a girl to be taken was proof that she had invited trouble. If a woman was seen on the road, it was because she had wanted eyes on her; if she was laughed at by men in the market, she must have done something to deserve it. The lines of blame ran invisible but thick. They did not point to the men who took girls in the night. They pointed instead at the girls' clothes, at their laughter, at their very bodies that seemed to have the power to provoke ruin.
After Rabia came back alive, shaken, carrying the sort of silence you could feel in the classroom like a weight something worse than the fear settled. Parents pulled their daughters from school. Mothers who once let their girls go to learn suddenly clutched them close and said it was safer to teach the household skills at home; marriage, they whispered, could be arranged early so that reputation would not be endangered. The age at which they would be married grew younger in the way winter arrives sooner than it should: sometimes nine, sometimes twelve; elders choosing futures before those futures had names. The school shrank as a place for girls, a slow and steady starving of possibility.
My own mother was not like most. She did not see reputation as the cliff-edge it had become for others. She believed perhaps foolishly, perhaps bravely that learning could save something even if the world tried to take it back. "If women are suffering because of men," she told me once while mending a sleeve, "then why not suffer less by keeping our hands working and our minds alive?" It was not a perfect logic. It was not an argument for heroics. It was a small, practical bargain: if the world will hurt us, let us at least be useful while it does. She let me go to school, and for that small mercy I would carry gratitude my whole life. But even her reasoning carried the tired honesty of people who know the choices are always between bad and worse.
So many girls left that year. Classrooms that had been bright with voices grew quiet. Chairs emptied like retreating tides. I remember the way the teacher's eyes lost something when she counted heads and found the numbers dwindling. The government school became, in the gossip of the town, a place that could not promise safety for daughters and so it ceased to be a place worth the risk in the minds of fearful parents.
When Asma's name arrived at my window years later, I went back to Rabia without meaning to. The memory was not tidy; it was a bruise that pulsed. Why, I thought again and again, is the victim made to carry the stain? Who writes the rule that says the one harmed must be the one punished? I do not remember anyone offering a sensible answer then only the same circular phrases: modesty, honor, the danger of bad influence. Those words sounded like shields for fear.
Asma's story did not shock me into disbelief so much as fold neatly into a pattern I had already learned by the age of ten: when a woman suffers, we look for what she did to deserve it. When a man sins, we find a way to call it commerce or necessity. The ledger is careful; its arithmetic is practiced. Bad things become warnings that are spelled out in the margins: do not go out alone; do not be seen wearing this; do not learn too much. The rules protect those who can enforce them and punish those who cannot.
That day in my house, with the kettle humming and the page of my book half turned, I closed the book and sat very still. For a long while I did not move. The news was not yet a headline I could read in the morning; perhaps tomorrow the paper would tell more the who, the where, the official words that would make murder into a "family matter." For now, the air in the room tasted of dust and old paper and the ache of a question: why does a victim become the verdict?
I told myself I would wait for the paper. Maybe it would bring clarity, names, the kind of formal account that soothes people into thinking the system is working. But I knew even then that papers could be rewritten, that forms could be smoothed over. I knew the ledger's tricks. Still out of some tender, foolish hope I looked for the next day's list of facts, like a child waiting for a letter that might say everything will be different.
Tomorrow, perhaps, the paper would say more about Asma. Tomorrow, perhaps, someone would say the right thing. Tomorrow, perhaps, Rabia's name would be remembered as a wrong done to her rather than a scandal she had caused. For the moment, all I had was the memory, and the quiet understanding that the same harm had been done before and would be done again unless something some small unashamed voice refused to let the ledger close the book.