PROLOGUE

A blur of sound nibbled at her consciousness: machine beeps, alarms and hisses. Voices fading in and out. Then, unmistakably: drawers sliding open and closed. Paper packages being ripped open. Water splashing. Paper towels rustling.
She could hear.
That must mean she was still alive.

A specialist from ophthalmology, Dr. Niaz Rahman, accompanied by a junior doctor, made his way to the intensive care unit. He’d been the day before to see the patient, but the bleeding and swelling of her eyes had made any examination impossible.
“Rumana, can you open your eyes?”
“. . . No?”
“Can you see any light?”
“No.”
“I need to see inside your eyes.”
The specialist dampened a gauze pad with saline and reached down to clean the patient’s eyelids of encrusted blood.
She screamed and jerked back into her pillow.
He was puzzled. He thought he’d barely made contact. Forgo the cleaning, he decided. Just get a look inside. With his ophthalmoscope in one hand, he reached again with the other.
This time her scream was chilling. Tears gushed from her eyes as if from a burst pipe.
Neither the specialist nor the junior doctor spoke.
She wanted to know. “What’s happened to my eyes?”
“More tests are needed.”
Out of earshot of the patient, the specialist spoke to the junior doctor. Any pooling of blood inside the globe of the eye does not normally cause pain. “The damage has to be extensive.” What with the many road accidents in Dhaka’s chaotic traffic, he’d seen horrific injuries. Once, a metal rod that split the globe of the eye. He knew vision could return after trauma. But this was the worst.
Never had he seen a gouging.

Silence enveloped Rumana after her transfer to a private room. Finally, a heavy clunk of what sounded like a door handle. Then a rush of air into the room, and the footfall of a purposeful walk.
A metal tinkling, then footsteps in the opposite direction, and the same tinkling and swoosh of air.
Drapes being drawn. Open or closed?
“Are you the nurse? Can you tell me, is it morning?”
A cheerful male voice confirmed yes.
Rumana felt a stab of panic. Why couldn’t she see the daylight?

With every new visitor to her bedside, Rumana heard anew the sharp intake of breath and the stifled tears, and felt the tremor of their hands on hers. She did not have to ask how she looked. She’d heard the MRI technicians talking to each other. “What could have happened? Was she attacked by a wild animal?”
One week on, a morning nurse burst in. Her words fairly tripped over each other. “Rumana, your picture is all over the news! There are pictures of you with your daughter. You were so beautiful!”
Rumana plunged into sorrow. Would anyone even recognize her now? What if she didn’t recover her sight? She’d never see her daughter’s face again; Anusheh was only five years old. What if his face, contorted with evil, was the last thing she ever saw of the world?
Rumana forced herself to turn away from the memory of the attack. She put her mind to doing what, as a student and a teacher, she knew how to do best: pose a question, answer it with research. Try, she told herself, to locate the beginning of the trail that led to the attack. But where did the trail start? With her agreement to marry, or when she first indulged his attentions? Or were there clues deeper in the past?

* * * *

At school, it was unthinkable to Rumana’s classmates that she would do or say anything to sadden anyone. She exuded positivity. The students confided in her freely. They went to her for comfort. Rumana was the voice of reason, the shoulder to cry on, the one to lift them up. She assuaged their fears and uncertainties. “This is not something you have control over.” She was reassuring. “It will work out.” If someone felt aggrieved, she persuaded them to find their way back to happiness. “Don’t dwell on feeling wronged. Let it be.” In her presence, girls found themselves on their best behaviour. They didn’t use slang or utter a mean or ill-tempered word. One particularly rebellious classmate, Zana Shammi, liked to pinch Rumana’s dimpled cheeks in affectionate greeting. “Hema, how come you’re so-oh nice?”
When Rumana was in eighth grade and Mashrur in fifth, Monzur moved the family closer to the centre of Dhaka to Dhanmondi, a planned residential area developed in the 1950s. With its well-lit and wide roads, it was considered one of the city’s safest neighbourhoods. Home was now a ground floor apartment in one of two 2-storey buildings that stood behind a shared wall. As added security, the occupant of the apartment above was their landlord, and in the building behind lived two brothers, one of whom had been a former engineering classmate of Monzur.
One afternoon, Rahima, as she did every day, took a rickshaw to pick up Mashrur from school. Twenty minutes later, two blocks from home, a motorcyclist pulled alongside and forced their wallah to stop. Three men emerged from the roadside. One brandished a pistol. “Don’t shout,” he told Rahima. “You have a son.” She did as he demanded and handed over her purse and jewellery.
When Monzur learned of the robbery, he marched to the Dhanmondi police station. He didn’t expect the culprits to be caught. As a consequence of the country’s deteriorating social security system, petty crime was on the rise. Snatchings were commonplace. Passengers on a rickshaw could easily lose a purse or a bag to a passing rider on a Vespa. Rather, Monzur thought because Dhanmondi was an upscale neighbourhood, the local police would want to monitor such street crime.
The moment Monzur entered the station, he was treated with suspicion. The officer impugned his motives for coming in. Why was his wife on that block? Why did she have that much cash? Why was she wearing her jewellery? Monzur could see where the officer was headed; he was trying to frame him for collusion with the perpetrators. Monzur left hastily, before the officer could force a bribe out of him to disentangle himself from a contrived conspiracy. At home, Monzur told Rahima that going to the police had been a waste of time. He advised her to leave her jewellery at home in future and to take a chequebook and a minimum of cash.
Monzur pondered his first-ever experience with police. It was true what people said: educated people do not go to the police. He expected to never have need of them. Monzur knew that any person contemplating harm to his family would soon learn that the head of the family was Major Monzur, whose engineering business was built on military connections. That ought to make
them at least think twice.

Now that Rumana’s home was located more conveniently, she could invite friends from Agrani after school. Her two best friends came with her when her father picked her up. The arrangement helped their families, as the parents kept odd working hours. Shehneela Tilat’s belonged to a local theatre troupe; her mother was an actress and her father did lighting and sound. Farzana Morshed’s mother, who was divorced, worked as a clerk at Imperial Tobacco. Her workday started early and it ended late. Both girls’ mothers gave their approval for their daughters to go home with Rumana; her home had supervision, since her mother didn’t work.
Rumana had befriended the pair when she first arrived at Agrani and students were clamouring to sit beside the pretty new girl who’d joined midway through fourth grade. Seeing one of them, Shehneela, reduced to tears at being elbowed aside, Rumana told everyone that tomorrow it would be her turn. Farzana, meanwhile, had many friends. It was not always so; in first grade, girls whispered about her coming from a broken home, and before her father disappeared from her life, teachers had not hidden their confusion about which parent was picking her up on any given day.
In accordance with the household’s inviolable rule of study before play, the three girls first tackled their homework. Unlike her friends’ homes, Rumana’s had window air conditioning units in the bedrooms, which allowed the girls to work more comfortably and, therefore, more productively at their homework. They then moved on to watching a DVD or making greeting cards on Monzur’s Compaq 386. Or they turned to what was forbidden by the dress codes at Agrani: trying different hairstyles, hair clips and coloured elastics, and experimenting with lipsticks and face powder from Rahima’s dressing table.
The three friends sometimes mused about becoming brides, when, for a day, they’d each be transformed into a beautiful goddess. They gave no thought to the identity of the groom; that was a matter for their parents.
For a young woman, marriage was not always the stuff of teenage fantasies. One recent story that was impossible to avoid as a subject of gossip was a husband’s murder of his wife, a crime case that pitted two prominent families in Dhaka against each other. Sharmin Rima, a graduate of one of Dhaka’s top colleges, was the daughter of a martyred journalist and correspondent with the BBC who’d broken stories of Pakistani atrocities during the war. Munir Hussain, a graduate of an American university, was the son of a renowned gynecologist and the owner of a major textile factory. In 1989, after only four months of marriage, Munir stabbed Sharmin and dumped her body in a roadside ditch between Dhaka and Chittagong. Dramatic headlines accompanied every revelation of the police investigation, including a reported trove of nude photos and obscene videos that implicated the husband in a long-running affair with the middle-aged wife of a disabled man. The husband’s trial resulted in a death sentence. When the government carried out the sentence in 1992, disbelieving crowds, wanting proof, chased the truck carrying his body.
Rumana, on the cusp of her teenage years when news of the murder broke, had little interest in the lurid details. She thought only of how the young woman’s life could have turned out differently. Had the two families not forced their son and daughter into an arranged marriage, the beautiful Sharmin could still be alive.