He came back from the meeting as if he had taken a measure of the room and found it wanting.
Farid opened the gate softly, the metal sounding dull in the afternoon heat, and walked in with a quiet I had not heard in him before. It was the kind of quiet that is not absence of sound but the presence of a decision humming under the skin. He set his cap on the table, sat, and folded his hands as if folding paper into a more deliberate shape.
"He says we must do something," he told us without preface, the words landing like small, heavy coins. He did not list the elders' proposals as if cataloguing options; he said it like a man who had counted the cost of each and decided the simplest path was exile. "It is better for you girls. For the house."
It is a particular sting to hear a father speak of "better" when the word measures his want for peace more than it measures what you want for yourself. I watched his face as he spoke: the lines at his mouth tightened; his thumb rubbed a spot on the table the way someone might try to erase a smudge without quite managing it. He had not spoken in the furious gusts that I had seen before. This was furor turned into a steady hand: removal.
"To leave?" Tooba's voice was the exact note of someone reaching for a plan rather than pity. She did not ask in surprise she asked in the way one checks a measurement twice. Toora stood with a bowl of water in her hands; she had been wiping a small stain from the table and now she let the cloth dangle, palms soft with movement. Ufaq, quiet in the shadow by the door, watched him like a midwife watches contractions: timing and restraint.
Farid's jaw worked. "It is not exile, child. It is safety. We will go where no one will know and start again. I will take what I can and we will be small until the noise passes." He spoke the way men who believe in practical fixes speak decisions framed as modest acts of care. He hid, in the language of protection, the fact that protection often means removal.
There is a double grief in being told you will be moved for other people's comfort: the practical loss of a home and the moral loss of being treated as a thing to be carried. But there is also a stubborn, private logic in the decision: if the town will not repair itself, perhaps distance will make the pressure wane. The sisters listened in different registers: Tooba's hands moved already toward boxes as if work was a therapy; Toora's face closed in steady lines, the healer becoming a keeper; Ufaq's fingers tapped the heel of her palm as if cataloguing steps.
We packed with the economy of people who have learned to carry only what keeps shape. Clothes folded into neat bundles, a few photographs tucked between linens, the small jar of spices Farid could not bear to leave. Every movement was an argument against the elders' script; every folded shirt was a quiet refusal to be smoothed by their treaties. Farid took care to tie the bundles himself, as if by binding cloth he could bind the fissures the family wrestled with.
Neighbors watched in the ways neighbors do through curtains, through small pauses at the shop. A woman from next door brought two boiled eggs and set them on the stoop without wanting thanks. Her gesture said more than conversation: it was the lane's measure of farewell, not celebration. An old man who had once nodded at Rehaan now looked away, his eyes a small stone in the road.
Packing is a conversation in itself. Tooba counted the hems she would bring and wrapped them in cloth. "Bring the blue," she said, as one might name a fact. Toora packed a small box of balm and bandages. I folded the notebook into the lining of my shawl for a moment then held it out and let the seam rest against a bundle; I did not want to lose the book's small record in a rush. The book has become a shape of us; I would not abandon it to the looseness of movement.
Farid spoke rarely between bundles. "We will leave at dawn," he said once, as if the hour might make the departure less raw. He had bought the train tickets overnight in small, nervous gestures I had not seen him make before. Reservations are a kind of promise men make to themselves when they cannot make them to strangers. He moved with the humility of someone who had been taught to provide, no matter what the cost.
There were moments of tenderness that felt like small rebellions. Toora wrapped Farid's hand in a cloth when he bent to adjust a strap and left the scent of camphor on his wrist. Tooba slipped a coin for the photocopy man into his palm and told him to buy new staples. Ufaq found a small stack of appointment cards for a friend and tucked them in a corner of a box so the friend would not miss a treatment. These were not grand gestures. They were the work of people who knew how to care when the world offers only cold fixes.
Before we left that night, I stood on the rooftop and looked over the courtyard one last time. The photograph that had begun this slow calculus was still the same: glass, a captured moment. It seemed small and monstrous all at once small because it was only a paper thing, monstrous because what people had allowed it to do to a life had been profound. The roof's laughter felt different now, more brittle. I pressed my hand to the cool tile and watched the lane's lights blink as if nothing urgent were happening.
We did not make a spectacle of leaving. There was no departure parade, no dramatic slamming of doors. We moved like people who must not be watched too closely: quiet feet, a few whispered instructions, the economy of hush. The neighbors' farewells were small a nod, the soft handing over of boiled eggs, a folded cloth. It felt like exile that tried to be a sanctuary.
Before the gate closed, Farid turned to us with a face so stoic it was almost soft. "We will be careful," he said, as if careful were a shield. "We will find small work. We will be each other's roof." His eyes flicked to the notebook at my hip and for a moment the man who had once believed silence the easier path looked at me with something like understanding. He did not understand everything, but he understood enough to know that removal would not erase the record.
When the gate shut behind us, the lane exhaled in ways only neighborhoods know how to show: the click of a latch, the turning of a wheelbarrow at the corner, a distant radio resuming its slow list of songs. In the carriage the world leaned into motion; the rhythm of the train stilled some of the ache, replaced it with the small, regular idea of travel. But the ledger of days is not so easily smoothed. Ink keeps memory. I felt the book against my side like something warm and heavy.
We went because it was a choice made from the limited things given to us: safety framed as removal. It was not the solution I wanted, but some decisions are made of the compromise between what must be endured and what must be preserved. I pressed the book to my chest like a small map and let the carriage take us away. The town's lights diminished in a smear and I imagined the roof's laughter as something distant and brittle that might, one day, crack under the weight of its own sound.
At dawn we would arrive with small belongings and a new address, and with the sharpness of a life not surrendered. That is how we left: with hands full of the few things that mattered, and the stubborn record beneath my shawl proof that leaving would not mean forgetting.