They hung the bulbs like borrowed moons.
Tiny electric globes trembled along the courtyard wire, the kind of light that softens faces into history. Someone had strung marigolds on the gate as if scent could smooth shame; a couple of men arranged a low table with samosas and tiny glasses of sweet sharbat. The air smelled of frying oil and something floral jasmine someone had tucked into a pocket at the last moment. Everything about the night wanted to make the raw edges look like choice.
I sat where the light was mild, at the edge of the gathering where faces blurred into one another if you didn't look closely. Tooba had put a final stitch into the shawl and slipped a scrap of paper into its lining: a single word, "steady," in her looping hand. It was a small benediction, private and serious. Toora had tied my hair the way a surgeon ties a knot firm, concise then smoothed her palm over the place where a ribbon should have been. Those private acts are the only true tenderness a night like this allows.
They opened the evening with the economy of men who know how to make ritual sound like remedy. A cousin spoke about dignity and the way families repair; an elder proposed a line about "moving forward." Their language was varnish polite, practiced. It shines and it covers. Between the speeches children chased one another with paper boats in a puddle and a few old women clucked with the mechanical relish of those who enjoy watching a pageant.
I gave them the small public I had prepared for them: a civil face, small words of thanks, no surrender. The smile people want from a girl in such rooms is a craft; Tooba had taught me how to practice it without breaking. A smile is a tool and a shield. I used it with intent. Inside me the rhythm did not change. The book I keep the thin record under my pillow felt heavy against my ribs like a cold coin.
They tried, in pockets, to pretend normality. Men who had once been loud on the roof traded quiet, low jokes. Some sipped sweet drinks; a few spoke more easily after a secret cigarette behind an acacia. The clink of cups and the rustle of dupattas made the courtyard feel like a pageant of ordinary life. They hoped ordinariness would bury memory.
A cousin told a harmless story about the lane and the laugh rolled out like a practiced wave. At the edge, near the chai stall, a woman's face tightened the schoolteacher who had refused the invitation. Her eyes held the exactness of a witness. She had not come to applaud; she had come so that her presence would mark the night differently. Witnesses do not need to shout. They change the sound of a room by simply holding a place.
I watched the small movements: who lingered near the lamp, who hovered by the food, which hands reached without searching for approval. People who once could buy ease with a smile discovered themselves needing receipts if only social receipts: promises, references, a whispered assurance. The currency of convenience, it turns out, is fragile when people begin to count it.
There were slips that revealed the real fabric: a man's laugh that was too sharp, a compliment that landed like a see-through veil. Tooba caught my hand under the table in a spare, fierce squeeze. Her fingers said steadiness; they said look outward and count. Ufaq, placed where she could view faces, made a careful nod when the camera clicked. Her small sign of attention was not for show. It was the signal that another eye was keeping track.
A group of men clustered at the far edge and talked in the soft voices of those tallying risk: who had come, who had not, who might withdraw favors tomorrow. Their list-making was bookkeeping in a different shape. Comfort had become something to measure. Their measuring felt like slow loss.
When the photographs were taken still images meant to prove that the night had everything it needed Rehaan arranged himself as if he had always been the kind of man who knew how to look large and benevolent. The shutter clicked and the image would be used, later, to smooth memory for those who preferred pictures to facts. I posed the way the camera wanted me to: still, open, small. But the book under my pillow already held another photograph the one that mattered the record of who sat and who stayed away.
The crowd thinned and the music softened into fragments. A few men remained in small knots at the gate, their conversation low and the clink of a glass a punctuation against the night. They compared notes about attendance and plates. That sort of conversation is a ritual of risk assessment an inventory of favors and the reputations that buy them. It used to be an invisible ledger of entitlement; now the ledger had to be explained in low tones because people had begun to ask questions aloud.
I left before the lamps were taken down. There is a particular humility in walking away from an event that means to contain you; the act feels like reclaiming steps. Outside, the air was cooler and smelled faintly of jasmine and fried spice. I folded the shawl, the seam where Tooba stitched her steadiness still warm. I walked home with the small book under my arm.
At the table by the window I wrote the evening in small, exact lines: who had spoken, who had laughed too loudly, which hands had remained empty, the moment the schoolteacher's face had tightened. I noted the photograph as it had been staged and the photograph that mattered. Ink makes memory hard to erase. I do not want spectacle; I want a record that does not allow ease to be bought with a smile.
There was no sudden revelation that night. No dramatic unmasking. What changed was quieter: a room that looked whole and yet carried seams, empty seats that made the place less warm, and people who would have to answer questions of sponsorship and favor the morning after. That is the sort of change that matters here small, stubborn, and practiced.
I slept with the smell of fried onions on my hands and the book warm beside me. The bulbs had softened the courtyard; they had not softened what I keep inside. The smile I gave them was public; the record I wrote was mine. I will continue to perform what they expect when I must, and to keep a careful chronicle of the things they think they can smooth away. That is how I will keep my no intact quiet, precise, and steady.