That last night before the train, after the bundles had been sealed and the street's small noises had thinned, we gathered in the dim room where the family had eaten for years. The oil lamp made our faces the color of old paper. There were no visitors, no speeches only cloth and the sound of cloth being folded, the slow music of quotidian ritual. The ordinary world had not been obliterated; it had been scaled down to what could be carried.
We did not make vows in the way the elders meant spoken into microphones, announced to the lane, turned into ceremony. Our vows were small, private bargains stitched in the language we knew best: work, care, and what we would refuse to let be taken from us again. I set the notebook on the table between us and the page trembled faintly in the lamp's light, the ink like a small constellation waiting to be consulted.
"To keep the book safe," Tooba said, and her voice was steady in the way a woman who sews thinks: measure twice, cut once. She wrapped the notebook in an old scarf and placed it in the hollow of a bundle. It was not melodramatic; it was practical. She said it as if securing a tool were itself a promise. Her fingers trembled only a little when she tied the knot.
"To remind the people who work for us that they will not be forgotten," Toora said next. Her hands smelled of the salve she had used all day. She set aside a small envelope of coins nothing grand, enough for a week of medicine for a neighbor who might lose a shift. It was not charity for show; it was a lifeline. She would keep the list and deliver it herself when the time came. Her vow was care translated into action.
Ufaq, who had sat at the doorway while the elders plotted and the cousins rehearsed the correct faces, looked at each of us like someone who had been reading a map and had finally found a place to plant a pole. "We stay precise," she said, and the sentence was an instruction as much as a promise. She traced a small diagram in the air with her finger places to send notes, people to nudge, officials to ask questions of in ways that didn't scream. Her vow was the quiet tyranny of bookkeeping: make the right questions appear in the right places and do not let what is small be smoothed away.
Farid came in then, and for a moment the room held another kind of quiet. He sat down heavily in the chair he had always used and folded his hands. "I will not let you be offered like a thing," he said to us, voice low and raw. He did not promise to fix the world. He promised a roof and the stubbornness of a man who will not be bullied into accepting an easy peace. His vow sounded like a small engine starting in an old house. We heard it and took comfort, not because we trusted it would end the problem, but because it meant he would stand with us while we counted and planned.
We spoke our vows plainly because spectacle makes odd companions of truth. I promised, aloud, the thing that had been growing in me for months: to keep recording, to make sure names and times and small kindnesses were not lost to memory. "Ink keeps what doors would hide," I said. It sounded simple, and it was simple. I placed my hand on the book so the others could see the gesture as a kind of oath. My promise was not for vengeance as much as for witness to hold what happened in the light of record so no one could, later, claim the story had been different.
Tooba added something that made the room smile in a dry way: "If we break, we will do it together." It sounded like a joke until you felt the honesty behind it. Her vow meant she would not shoulder the cost alone; if the path we walked scarred us, it would scar us as a company of sisters, not as isolated victims. That subtle solidarity felt like armor and as fragile as linen.
We made other promises smaller, practical: who would keep the photocopy man's number, who would call the tailor in two weeks, which neighbour's child we would take to market if someone missed wages. We named the little economies that keep a life honest and promised to meet them. That was our vowcraft: not grand gestures to impress a public, but commitments that might make a single day tolerable for a single household.
There was grief between the vows, plain and unembellished. We named the things we were leaving: a tree's particular shade, the exact angle of a courtyard wall where dust gathered, the cracked step that had been Farid's pause every evening. We spoke these not as complaints but as inventory what belongs to the past now, what will remain in memory. Saying the names felt like sealing the jars of our houses so they would not spill into one another in a tangled grief.
Outside, late, someone walked by with a child on his hip; the sound of their passing was a small consolation. The lane had not been silent tonight. It had watched and then retreated into its patterns. We had done what we must do. The vows were skyless but steady small economies of care that might, if we kept them, become a different kind of domestic.
When the lamp burned low, we lay the scarves across the final bundles and closed the door on a room that had been both cradle and prison. The notebook was snug in its wrapping. The vows threads of promise were tied into our pockets: a paper of coins for a neighbor, a folded card with the photocopy man's number, the list of names of those we would keep in mind. They were not dramatic pledges; they were tools.
I went to the rooftop one last time and tasted the night cool tile under the soles, the distant hum of a city not yet asleep. The house looked smaller from up there, a compact object of roofs and chimneys, the same as it had been and newly altered by what had passed inside it. I held my hands open as if offering the vow to the sky so that, if anyone later asked whether we had tried to be humane in our pushback, I could point and say yes: we tried.
We left the room as we had lived in it most of our lives quiet, with pockets of stubbornness and a book that would not let stories die. Our vows were not the tidy resolutions the elders wished for. They were not meant to return the house to a neat line. They were an agreement between us: to carry one another, to record, to soften where we could, and to refuse erasure. It was the kind of vow that does not make headlines but, given the right durable hands, might change the way a small town remembers.