Amina lies outstretched on the mound of dirt covering the bones that lie beneath, moistening the soil as her tears soak through the baked clay.  Though her mind and heart stand still, every now and then, a vein throbs at her temple. She slowly heaves herself onto her heels, rhythmically  rocking backwards and forwards, until the sight of two girls, linked-armed and laughing, breaks her trance.

‘When are you coming back, Amina?’  She had teased, twirling the ends of her hair, her dark eyes twinkling with mischief and longing. The image of Shano’s slender frame leaning against the door frame, as she coyly cocked her head to the side, flashed in front of Amina. As did that conversation. 

‘As soon as you get married!’ 

‘Well, I’ll have to get married straight away then, if it means you’ll come back!’

‘Oh I’ll come back alright Shani, that’s a promise!’

Shano’s peals of laughter reverberate through the muezzin, stirring Amina momentarily from her listlessness. Behind her, the pious humdrum streams into the mosque. 

That same muezzin had announced the fateful news twenty four hours earlier. Throngs of villagers had poured into the family house, wailing and beating their chests at the sight of her life suddenly cut short.

Amina wrestles with the finality of it all.

Oh Shani, I came back.  

She clenches her teeth. Cruel images of Shano, alive, breathing and free – running in the fields outside their ancestral home, darted all around Amina. She quickly glanced behind her, hoping against hope to see Shano, only to see miles of empty terrain. Her mind whirs relentlessly, vacillating between rage, betrayal, despair, disbelief –  until it settles  – on silently screaming four words:

I said I would.

Hauling herself to her feet, Amina catches her hand on a sharp stone. A stream of blood dribbles down her palm. Her eyes follow the stream and carry on until she notices the blood  stain on the cuff of her white kameez. Her eyes sting with tears at yet another reminder of Shano’s absence. 

Amina’s mind lapses back into cruel reminiscence.

They were traipsing around various shops in the Itwar Bazaar , hunting for lehengas for Bhai Firad’s Nikkah, until they found the right colour and embroidery. Masi Naureen had refused to pay until Shano and Amina tried them on, so they headed to a ‘fitting room’, which turned out to be a draughty storeroom littered with strewn plastic bags and musty dupattas. Amina had immediately shrugged off her kameez and slipped into her lehenga before turning around to face Shano, who, having placed her lehenga over her clothes, was now standing in front of Amina, clearly amused.

 Amina had scolded her cousin.

‘Shano, you’d better hurry and change properly. You can’t tell if it fits you like that!”

‘Yeah, I’m alright, Amina. You’re clearly being filmed!’ 

She had spun Amina around, jabbing a finger at a red, blinkering light in the corner of the room.

“Shano! Don’t play with me!”

“I’m not – it’s why I never get changed at shopping malls. Some of the men here are such perverts!”

Amina remembers the sinking feeling of horror welling up inside her. 

“Well, you could’ve told me! I got changed here!”

“Me too, Amina!” Shano had grinned shamelessly. 

“No,  you piled on clothes on top of the ones you already have on!”

“Well, Mina, it’s not my fault you don’t think like a local!”

Shano had roared with delight, artfully dodging Amina’s attempt to get at her.

A fly suddenly lands on Amina’s nose, snapping her back into the present. She turns her eyes to the cemetery gates where a Suzuki van  roars past, whipping up a cloud of dust that envelopes her. Amina glances down. The stain of her blood on the cuff is fading. She presses her thumb over the spot, refusing to let go of Shano’s remnants.

Inevitably, her mind replays those fateful moments.

Red

Flecks of Shano’s blood spattered on the car window,  seats and dashboard. Her mangled body, twisted beside the buttress roots, as her mother howled and rocked her lifeless body. Her black willowy hair, matted and crimson. Her face, badly scarred to the point where it had become unrecognisable.  Shano had died instantly, face tilted toward the sky – pallid, hollow and daubed in streaks of claret. 

Red. 

The scarlet shawl that covered her body as they laid her casket into the ground. The rose petals that stubbornly clung on to her forehead and bottom lip. The mound of maroon-hued earth that separated them forever was the same shade of mehndi Shano had used to decorate Amina’s palms, whilst bellowing ‘Dulhe Ka Sehra Suhana Lagta Hai’ – Pakistan’s most renowned  wedding song – banally and off-key in Amina’s ear.

Red.

Amina pushes back her cuff to glance down at her wrist, at the thin, snaky blood stain which by now was no more.

She slowly walks back to the house, past the fields where Shano would dance in circles until her mother saw red and cursed her back into the house. Past the pothole she had fallen in, face bust, blood spattered on the ground. Red had defined much of who Shano was – sacrificial, courageous, fiery tempered – the signs had been all around Amina all along. 

Amina feels a strange pulsation course through her body, as though Shano was writhing within her, laughing and scheming through ubiquitous red – where she would always be – and therein, retrievable.