Whenever Yusuf rolled too close, Kahlil kicked him away savagely. Mosquitoes wheeled around them, shrieking for blood with high-pitched wails. If the sheets slipped from their bodies the mosquitoes instantly gathered to their sinful feast. Yusuf dreamt he could see their jagged-edged sabres sawing through his flesh.

Kahlil told him, ‘You’re here because your Ba owes the seyyid money. I’m here because my Ba owes him money - only he’s dead now, God’s mercy on his soul.

“I knew I wanted to sign with him. Here was a man who never once mentioned money. To me, that was a real businessman. It wasn’t that I didn’t need money, because I did. But to this day, money doesn’t drive me. Money isn’t what pushes me to do this or that. It’s always been about something deeper. For me, it was about dignity, about pride, about the respect I freely gave to others and expected back in return. I may have been a young girl from a rural area, but my parents taught me to value myself, to never think of myself as less than anyone else, regardless of my background or circumstances.

Whenever Yusuf rolled too close, Kahlil kicked him away savagely. Mosquitoes wheeled around them, shrieking for blood with high-pitched wails. If the sheets slipped from their bodies the mosquitoes instantly gathered to their sinful feast. Yusuf dreamt he could see their jagged-edged sabres sawing through his flesh.

Kahlil told him, ‘You’re here because your Ba owes the seyyid money. I’m here because my Ba owes him money - only he’s dead now, God’s mercy on his soul.

A Clot of Blood

“Their intrigues and hatreds and vengeful acquisitiveness had forced even simple virtues into tokens of exchange and barter. He would go away, there was nothing simpler. Somewhere where he could escape the oppressive claims everything made on him. But he knew that a hard lump of loneliness had long ago formed in his displaced heart, that wherever he went it would be with him, to diminish and disperse any plot he could hatch for small fulfilment.

7. The Come-Apart

“Zehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which she’d

cleaned her neighbor. She didn’t cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing — the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.