The singing stopped.
Laila looked across the roofs.
A bird landed on a television antenna.
It chirped repeatedly.
Zahra followed her gaze.
“Lucky thing.”
Laila smiled.
Then she said:
“Mishi went outside again today.”
“Your cat?”
“Yes.”
“She always does.”
“Nobody stops her.”
Zahra looked at her.
The smile disappeared from both their faces.
A week later, Hamid came home carrying a paper bag.
He handed it to Laila.
Inside was a notebook.
Thick.
Good paper.
Expensive compared with the cheap exercise books they usually bought.
“What is this?”
“For your studying.”
She looked at him.
“I thought you said thinking about it changes nothing.”
Hamid sat down.
“I said the truth changes nothing.”
“That sounds worse.”
“Yes.”
He looked tired.
Then he said:
“But forgetting everything would be worse.”
Laila opened the notebook.
She began writing biology notes again.
At first only at night.
Then every afternoon.
Mina joined her.
Soon two neighbouring girls came as well.
Nobody called it a school.
That word attracted attention.
It was simply “studying.”
Three girls sitting on cushions around a low table.
Then four.
Then five.
Farid occasionally brought home old textbooks.
Hamid pretended not to notice when extra shoes appeared near the door.
Soraya always closed the curtains.
One afternoon, Laila was explaining the human heart when somebody knocked hard on the gate.
Every girl stopped moving.
Soraya entered the room.
“Books away.”
Nobody asked why.
The girls moved quickly.
Not because they knew who was outside.
Because they did not.
That uncertainty had become part of daily life.
Hamid opened the gate.
It was only a neighbour.
Her daughter had forgotten her scarf.
Everyone laughed afterward.
But quietly.
That evening, Laila sat alone in the courtyard.
Mishi was beside her.
The cat stretched in the last patch of sunlight.
Then jumped onto the wall.
“Mishi.”
The cat looked back.
“Don’t.”
She jumped anyway.
Laila stood and watched her walk along the wall toward the street.
For a second, she thought about the morning months earlier.
The warning.
Her mother’s fear.
Farid turning back from school because his sister could not safely take twenty steps alone without worrying whether someone would object.
