They chanted it like a verdict, not a question.
"Government school defamed- Rabia because of you."
I still hear that rhythm sometimes, an ugly little drum from a childhood yard. It scared me then in a way that has never stopped scaring me. The chant was not just cruel it taught a rule: if God forbid anything happens, the blame will not fall on the hand that struck you, but on the body that was struck. That lesson lodged in my small body and grew there like a stone.
We were children, trying to learn our letters while the world practiced its cruelties just outside the window. A girl had been taken dragged into a vehicle and carried to the city for days. Witnesses spoke of shoving and closed doors; grown men hushed their voices and shook their heads. The town retold the same horror in different voices, but among us the story turned into a chant that was all accusation and no tenderness. The victim's name became a brand: not the name of someone harmed, but the name of a thing to fear and avoid.
That is the strangest cruelty: the woman who suffers becomes the one punished by words. If a girl vanished, the verdict was prewritten in the mouths of children and elders alike: she had invited it somehow. Their logic made no sense to me as a child why would anyone want to be taken? and yet the logic was taught like arithmetic. We learned to count safety in terms of what not to wear, where not to walk, whom not to meet. Rabia returned; she came back with the tremble of someone who had been carved into silence. Instead of mercy, she found fingers pointing at her as if the wound on her was a crime she had committed against the town.
After that, many mothers stopped their daughters from coming to school. The place that once promised knowledge began to empty like a drying pond. Classroom voices thinned; the teacher counted heads and found fewer small futures than the week before. Parents, fearful of what reputation might swallow, chose early marriages and home lessons over the risk of a child who might one day be "marked." The school's bell still rang, but the sound was thinner, less hopeful. The town decided it was better for a girl to learn how to fold sheets and make bread than to risk being called a scandal safer, they said, to be small and useful than risk the rumor that might never die.
I remember walking home from primary school with my cousin only half a kilometer, but with our hearts heavy enough to feel like a long road. We would wait, trembling, behind an old wall where the sun set sooner and very few people passed. We told each other stories to hide the fear: ghosts that were kinder than men. At that age we believed a ghost would guard us more faithfully than the men who walked the streets. We crouched there because even our shadows felt unsafe; every rustle might be someone watching, someone measuring the moment to strike. When one of our older cousins, who was in high school, had to pass by, we would wait until she was gone before breathing again. The simple act of reaching home was an ordeal of half-suppressed panics our breaths stuck in our throats until the safety of the door closed behind us.
The chant gave a deadly lesson: it taught children that the victim's very existence could be interpreted as invitation. For a moment, the thought settled in our chests that perhaps it was true that to be taken was to be blamed. The logic forced itself into the smallest corners of our lives. Some of us learned to keep our voices lower; some learned to walk as if the ground might swallow us. The worst result was that many girls stopped coming altogether, because to be absent was less dangerous than to be visible.
When Asma's name reached my house years later, I found myself folding back into that frightened child again. I waited for the newspaper to bring more details the hope of new facts, childish and foolish, that someone would finally name the wrong and measure it properly. But the next day there was nothing in print. Of course there was nothing; the papers were purchased by men who preferred other stories, or they feared that running such a tale might unsettle their comfortable readers. Silence is a commodity here just as much as sugar or cloth. Stories that men do not want to be told simply do not appear on paper.
Still, because the town is small and connections run like roots, I learned the truth in the way people whisper things at windows and at tea stalls. Asma was ambitious a doctor in training and then a newly qualified practitioner who had worked hard, sacrificed comforts and nights of sleep to learn how to mend and to deliver. She refused a proposal from a cousin. She had believed, perhaps naively, that studying was a permission of sorts; when her father allowed her to learn, she thought he would allow her to refuse as well. But "no" in that home did not have a gentle weight. Her refusal was read as something else: treachery, shame, an affront to male authority.
Instead of asking why she wanted to be a doctor, they asked how dare she refuse the match. Those who proposed her were illiterate, idle men, men who would not let her practice, who expected a wife who would cook, bear children, and be invisible within the compound. Her skill with deliveries and prescriptions would have been seen as a slap to them, a sign that a woman could be needed for more than service and still be valuable. The accusation that she had an affair was the thin paper wrapping of a heavier motive: the men who could not imagine a wife with agency felt threatened and struck back.
They colluded. The men who wanted "honour" restored met in small rooms and made plans in a collusion that breathed like a single animal. Far from being isolated, the act was communal: a remote place, the echo of many bullets, the end of one more voice that dared to say no. And then the ledger closed the death noted, the forms filled, the excuse offered. What might have been an individual crime became a tidy entry: a solution to a family embarrassment.
Sitting with that truth, an old, raw anger comes up in me. How could a father lift a hand to his own child? Where is the tremor of conscience when a man looks upon his blood and thinks only of his status? No hand trembles in the quiet of communal approval. In that place the killers are not shamed; they are praised for "restoring honour." The community rewards the one who severs a voice; he becomes for a time the pillar of respect, the man who dared to protect the family name. The horror is not only that it happens it is that the social ledger writes him in as a hero, not a criminal.
I cannot bring myself to use the word "honour" the way they do. For me it has become a curse-word, a sugar-coated term that hides murder. When they name it "honour restored," "honour saved" the syllables taste like dust and the letters like a lie. Honour, in their mouths, is a banner to be carried over the grave of a daughter. It is the shroud used to hide a crime. I have vowed, quietly and stubbornly, to refuse their language. I will not call a murder "honour." I will not let their adjective sanctify a bloodstain.
This story Asma's, Rabia's is not an isolated tragedy. It is a pattern, repeated until its repetition seems inevitable. It is one more voice erased, one more life removed to prove a point that only those who profit from the system can be foolish enough to celebrate. For the rest of us, life narrows: we learn routes that keep us away from the market at night, we teach daughters how to fold their smiles into something smaller, we bite down on questions that might get someone we love killed.
Yet memory will not be so obedient as the ledger. Names crawl back into the light in whisper and tear and in the private lists that mothers keep in their chests. I say Asma's name now not because it will change the papers or shame the men who did it likely it will not but because the act of keeping the name spoken is a small resistance. To call someone by her name is to place a life back where the ledger tried to bury it. If saying it out loud risks me, then so be it. I would rather risk a mouth full of danger than a town full of forgetting.
So I will not say "honour" as they do. I will say instead what happened: a girl refused, and for that she was killed; a father and his accomplices arranged a death; the town learned to call it a lesson. That is the truth I will hold. The rest the praise, the ledger, the empty word I will leave to them. I will not let their language convert murder into virtue. I will not let "honour" cover where someone's blood still stains the ground.