Monsoon.

She sat in her bed while watching the glass window in front of her sweat. Condensation in this chilly winter afternoon caused the glass to be all misty and grey. It was a sad shade of grey that the window became. It acted like a filter and everything seemed grey through it. It was beautiful, in a blurry, depressed way. There wasn't much you could see but the sound of honking and the loud noise that the pouring rain would make against the steel roofs of the houses next door. After listening to the same sounds, she picked up a pattern of sounds amist the madness of the Pindi traffic.

She was smiling after a week. It had been a week since it last poured like that. She hadn't slept in a week and the laid back ambience of the warm room in the cold afternoon made her drowsy. Ambreen loved the silence of the appartment on a rainy day. It reminded her of her mother. She had fallen sick in the monsoon season when Ambreen was thirteen. She had caught malaria when she left Pindi to see her family in Bagh. Since she came back, she had been sick for the whole monsoon season. Ambreen remembered sitting by her Amma's bedside and telling her about what happened at school everyday. She would talk her heart out to her mother, who lay in bed quietly. The room would be quiet as Ambreen paused between each story/account of the day she told her mother. All she would hear in those pauses was rain on rooftops, the traffic and her mother’s slow but sure breaths.

Asif, her dad knew of his wife's approaching death and he was shattered by that fact. He couldn't have afforded to buy her medications that she needed to get better. He could barely afford Ambreen’s school fees and house rent. Living in the big city was hard, much harder than the simple life in Bagh. He moved to the city with big dreams and hopes of making it big and giving his family a good life. He had a daughter and he wanted to give her the best future ever. He wanted to educate her and have her choose a life partner that she could be proud of and not some middle aged villager who was interested in dowry and a young(er) wife. He refused many proposals in the village knowing the men were the kind who beat their women, had multiple wives and spent their days ordering women around/objectifying them.

Ambreen smiled at the memories that rain brought back_ The memories she still liked to visit once in a while. She saw her reflection in the mirror and it broke her heart. It wasn’t bad enough that she missed her mother or that her habits resembled her. She was also a mirror image of her mother when she was her age. She was tall and slender, had long brown hair that she always wore in a black paranda and wore the nose ring that her mother had passed down to her. It was the same nose ring her grandmother had given her mother. It was the only thing of her mother’s that she got after she passed away.

Ambreen put her head down on the bed for a little while. She was tired of all the nostalgia and didn’t want to cry yet another time that she decided to go down memory lane. She was about to fall asleep when she heard the door bell ring. Ambreen ran to the door while covering her head with her shawl. She was in such a rush that she knocked over a vase of her way to the door. She opened the door to Karim, her husband, who had just come home from work. Upon seeing the broken vase on the floor, he threw the water in the glass right across Ambreen’s face. He grabbed her slim self by the arm and pushed her on to the bed, where he kept his cane. What followed next was not pleasant. She spent another afternoon getting beaten up. Her semi-healed bruises became sore again. This time, the pain was just a tad more than the last time.

After Karim was done, he would go and take a shower while she dragged herself to the kitchen to heat his food.

Yes, she found it ironic how she ended up being with the same kind of a man that her father had refused to get her married to in the village. He was no village fool but rather her (smart?) husband from the city who still picked his cane over any conversation with a woman.