I would have been another name in the ledger if my brother God bless him had not been the one who taught us we were human first, not servants.
Sometimes I still cannot believe that such men exist among the others: the men who imagine women as blotches to be managed, whose whole politics is built on measuring daughters into silence. In our neighborhood that cruelty was almost a doctrine. Sisters were supposed to bring water, polish shoes, mend uniforms, sweep the floor, make the morning tea, serve, wait. It was taught so quietly that at first you hardly noticed: a hand dropped a plate on the floor with a little added force; a father's sigh when a daughter asked a question; the way errands always, always landed on the sister's shoulders. But my brother who was only thirteen when the house began to depend on him, and eight when he first learned to shoulder responsibility never took those duties for granted nor placed them on us.
He carried our outside burdens: shopping for vegetables, running to the bazaar, tending small tasks that a father should have done. He did the heavy errands, yes, but when he returned he never demanded that we serve him. He washed his own cup. He polished his own shoes. He tied his own laces. He never barked orders like a master to be obeyed. Instead he pressed a book into my hands and said, simply, "Read. Learn. Sisters are not for polishing boots." He said it as fact, not sermon; his voice had no triumph in it, only the plainness of someone who could not understand why anyone would imagine a sister's life should be narrower than a page.
That small insistence the refusal to make service our first lesson was a blessing I did not appreciate at the time. I took it as normal because it was what I had. Later I would see how rare it was. I would learn how fragile such gentleness could be in a town that keeps ledgers and favours the man who strikes the balance with blood.
I do not mean to paint every man with the same brush. Not all men are enemies of women; my brother proves that. He gave me space to speak, to call myself a person, to imagine more. He never demanded that my worth be measured by how long I could kneel in front of the stove. Still, I have seen how women can be the worst enemies of other women how fear sews itself into their mouths and then becomes doctrine. They learn to teach the next generation to be small because fear taught them first. That was part of why Aysha's death hurt so deeply. It was not just a man's violence; it was a community's willingness to cut out a voice and call it preservation.
I was ten years old when Aysha died, ten, in the year 2012, an age when memory is usually soft and fragmentary. Yet that day is carved clear in my mind, almost as sharp as if it happened yesterday. We were playing a child's game called Blue Fairy a silly, bright thing where each team names its players: Sky Fairy, Sandal Fairy, Sun Fairy, Tree Fairy. I was the captain of my small gang; I gave names and argued playfully over tactics. One of the rules was to blindfold an opponent, let a hand go out to be slapped, and guess whose hand had come. We laughed so openly then, breathless and trusting.
Then something shifted. One of our girls one of the team left the circle, supposed to hide near the water tank, and when she returned her face was different: wide-eyed, wet, trembling. She could not keep her voice small. She came to us and said, in a voice that still rings in my ears, "They say Aysha has been killed by men. They say they killed her in the name of honour." The words did not belong in our game. They did not belong in the playground. They landed like stones.
I remember the way the other children froze. Fear arrived like a new season. The chant that had once taught me how cruel the town could be "Government school defamed Rabia because of you" arrived again, as if the lesson never left. We had seen before how a victim is turned into the culprit by the town's angry logic; now that logic reached into the life of a woman I had seen with my own eyes.
Aysha was not an ordinary woman in the town's narrow imagination. I had met her once at a relative's house. She walks in my memory like sunlight confident, unfazed. She could talk to men without lowering her voice. She went to the market alone. She drove. She shopped and returned without asking a guardian to accompany her. She carried herself with a quiet ease that some called immodest, but I called it courage. She had learned things that women in our neighbourhood were supposed not to learn: how to be practical in the world, how to hold a conversation with anyone, how to be unafraid.
Hearing that she had been killed in front of her six-year-old child twisted something inside me. The thought of pulling a trigger while a small child looks on is unthinkable; yet the cruelty of this society the way legal and moral balances are arranged makes such barbarity possible. The killers did not risk shame. They were, instead, rewarded in the ledger of men. They became, for a time, the "honour keepers" of the town, praised in some circles for restoring a mythical balance. Who counts that balance, I ask? Who measures the cost of a woman's laughter against a man's vanity?
That day, after the elders scolded the women and the men shrugged and business went on, all the children who had known Aysha felt something die in us: a certainty that the world was fair. The town teaches a cruel arithmetic: the woman is assumed guilty until proven otherwise; the man who kills is celebrated for "removing shame." Evidence is not necessary when accusation will serve as permission. In that system, the dead woman becomes the scandal sheet against future girls. Her name becomes a lesson for mothers to wrap around their daughters tightly, like a shawl, to protect them from attention. So many mothers withdrew their daughters from school. They preferred the quiet servitude of a child in the house to the risk of running afoul of gossip and its terrible consequences.
I remember how our small walks home changed then. The half-kilometre between school and home was no longer a polite, short trot; it became a measured, fearful march. We would group under the shadow of an old wall and wait for older cousins to pass before we dared move. We counted each moment as if breath could be rationed. The world shrank into safe routes and shorter days. We learned to prefer the hollowness of staying indoors to the possibility of being noticed outside.
Even so, my mother was different. She did not measure everything by the ledger of reputation. She believed, in a tired but stubborn way, that learning mattered even if the world was not yet ready. "If women suffer because of men," she would say as she mended clothes, "then at least let them have minds that are full when the world tries to empty them." It was not a heroic proclamation; it was the weary calculation of a woman who had known suffering and still chose hope. Because of her, I went to school when many girls did not. Because of her, I kept my voice. I will always be grateful.
Still, my brother's gift of respect and my mother's stubbornness were thin defenses against the town's ledger. I loved the idea that my brother could stand between me and harm, that he could protect where others would not. I was childish enough to believe that a thirteen-year-old's shield could stave off a whole society. But reality is not kind to childish beliefs. A brother can carry groceries and speak for a sister at the market; he cannot, alone, change the scaffolding of a culture that uses fear as law. That bruise the knowledge that even a good brother cannot dismantle a system sits heavy inside me.
Aysha's death echoed into everything. The children who had once played in the yard began to whisper, to hide, to imagine ghosts as kinder than men. The older women who taught obedience more loudly than mercy hardened into teachers of fear. The young ones, tender and curious, felt their options quietly narrowed. The ledger of honour wrote its cruel equations again and again. The killers were not shamed into exile. The niece of cruelty learned to make the next generation smaller.
And yet, amid this cruelty, small acts of grace survive. My brother washing his own cup. My mother pressing a book into my hands. A teacher who, in a low voice, encourages a girl to read. Those small resistances do not make headlines. They do not unmake ledger entries. But they keep a human possibility alive. They remind me that while the town will find ways to punish women for wanting, not every man is a monster. Some men are keepers of dignity, and they teach dignity to their sisters.
When I remember Aysha, I do not keep only the horror. I keep the way she moved, the laugh she did not always bite down, the way she could stand in a room and speak with a freedom that threatened the old rules. I keep, too, the image of her small child who saw what no child should see. That image is the wound that will not close.
This is why I write: to hold these things that the ledger would bury. To tell of the brother who refused to make us servants. To tell of the mothers who, despite fear, let daughters keep learning. To tell of Aysha not as a symbol, but as a woman who walked and bought her own vegetables, who drove, shopped, spoke, and lived. She is not a lesson to be mouthed as a warning. She is a life. And the men who used the word "honour" to cover their crime I will never let that word stand for what they did. For me, "honour" has been turned into a curse, into a name that sanctifies murder. I will not use it. I will call things by their true names: murder, cowardice, collusion.