Woman at Point Zero

‘I’m in business. My capital is women’s bodies and I don’t mix work and love together.’

Revolution for them is like sex for us. Something to be abused. Something to be sold.

That marriage was the system built on the most cruel suffering for women.

Your wishes are my orders,’ and he paid me on the spot.

‘How is it possible to live? Life is so hard.’

The next moment he hit me with his fist in the belly so hard that I lost consciousness immediately.

He took to locking me in the flat before going out

On a cold night I told her to come and sleep with me in the bed, but when my uncle’s wife entered the room and saw us, she beat her. Then she beat me also.

I could tell at once that in their heart of hearts they feared not Allah, and that at the back of their minds patriotism meant that the poor should die to defend the land of the rich, their land, for I knew that the poor had no land.

My father, a poor peasant farmer, who could neither read nor write, knew very few things in life. How to grow crops, how to sell a buffalo poisoned by his enemy before it died, how to exchange his virgin daughter for a dowry when there was still time, how to be quicker than his neighbour in stealing from the fields once the crop was ripe. How to bend over the headman’s hand and pretend to kiss it, how to beat his wife and make her bite the dust each night.

Who says murder does not require that a person be gentle?’