Yet as the years pass, Qasim grows nostalgic for his life in the mountains, and fifteen-year-old Zaitoon envisions a romantic landscape, filled with tall men who roam the mountains like gods. Impulsively, Qasim promises Zaitoon in marriage to a man of his tribe. But once she arrives in the mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate as the bride of an inscrutable husband impossible. Unfortunately, the only escape is one from which there is no return.
Prescient and provocative in its assessment of the plight of women in a tribal society in Pakistan, the first of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels is a story of marriage and commitment, of the conflict between adherence to tradition and indomitable force of a woman’s spirit.
