After years lost to secrecy and the shackles of cultural expectations, she finds love, motherhood, and a life she never imagined—proof that some beginnings come beautifully late.
There are things silence steals quietly, without leaving fingerprints. I lived most of my life inside one of those losses. But let me rewind the film and take you back to my engagement day.
The sun hung low, its golden light filtering through the patterned grills of our sitting-room windows. Women from the groom’s family sat with my mother and aunts, exchanging polite laughter that mingled with the aroma of spiced tea and goat biryani from the kitchen.
When my mother called me into the room, I knew the men had sealed the deal. The groom’s mother fed my mother a laddoo, draped a shimmering pink dupatta over my head, slipped a gold ring on my finger, and pressed a sweet into my mouth.
“Mubarak ho, beti,” she whispered. I felt like a girl selected for a destiny she barely understood.
In Karachi of 1986, a girl’s future was often decided as soon as a respectable proposal arrived. I had barely passed my 10th-grade exams when the visits began. My family chose a groom with a reputation for piety, a quality praised with the reverence reserved for prayer.
“He respects women,” one relative told my mother.
“He keeps his eyes lowered,” another noted, as if that alone were proof of virtue.
No one wondered- whether piety might also conceal something.
We were married within months. I arrived at my new home with glittering bridal outfits, gold my mother had saved for years, and a heart rehearsing its role.
On our wedding night, he entered quietly. Tall, handsome, polite—yet distant. He shifted to the far edge of the bed, turned his back, and said softly, “Get some rest.” I wondered what offense I had unknowingly committed.
By morning, the distance had its rituals. My mother-in-law inspected the bedsheet for signs of consummation. When the scrutiny repeated the next day, my husband nicked his neck while shaving and dabbed the blood onto the sheet before she walked in.
It was the first time I understood that kindness and distance can inhabit the same body.
He brought me small gifts. Complimented my clothes. Laughed with me the way he laughed with his sister. But an invisible wall separated us—one I tried to dissolve with obedience, prayer, and patience. Nothing changed.
Questions about children began before the mehndi faded from my palms. “Please pray for us,” I’d reply, shielding him the way a wife was expected to.
I sat in clinics smelling of antiseptic and dread. Doctors dismissed us with “It’s just stress.” When nothing improved, we visited hakims and pirs. I drank bitter tonics, recited duas, and followed every instruction, knowing none of it could reach the truth we had no language for. Inside me, something unnamed ached. I felt less like a wife and more like a ghost—present but untouched.
Years slipped by, eroding my certainty. He was always gentle, always polite, always absent. Fifteen years later, illness came—quietly and cruelly. His family avoided naming the disease, as if the word itself carried shame. I cared for him through his final months, and in the dim light of those evenings, his eyes held apologies his mouth could not form. I forgave him long before he took his last breath.
After completing my period of iddah, I returned to my parents’ home with a small suitcase and the stigma of being a “childless widow.” The whispers followed:
“She’sunlucky.”
“Maybecursed.”
“Who knows what sin led to this?”
No one wondered whether the shame belonged somewhere else entirely.
To stay useful, I cooked, sewed, mended clothes— every stitch a quiet rebellion against becoming a burden. One afternoon, my neighbor, Khalida Appa, said softly, “Girl, you’re too young to fold your life away.” She introduced me to a widower with two daughters. He didn’t ask about my past or my “failures.” He simply said he needed a good mother for his girls.
We married quietly. His daughters approached me with caution. The younger one watched me with solemn eyes. One evening, as I braided her hair, she whispered, “Will you stay?” “Yes,” I said, my voice unexpectedly steady. “I’m not going anywhere.” Her small head rested on my shoulder. Something inside me—long locked away—unlatched.
With my new husband, intimacy arrived gently, without performance or pressure. Our laughter filled the evenings. Schoolbags piled up at the door. Sticky hands tugged at my kurta. Love grew in the spaces where silence once lived.
Then, the miracle no one expected from me happened: I became pregnant. Our home is now filled with cries of a newborn, crayons, and mismatched socks.
In rare moments of quiet, I think back to my first husband—not with anger, but with understanding. He carried a truth he feared the world would punish him for. We both lived within a silence that protected neither of us.
Today, surrounded by tenderness, I know this truth: some destinies arrive late, but when they do, they bring everything meant for you. And though I grieve the years stolen by secrecy and cultural blindness, I no longer carry their shame. That shame never belonged to me. It never belonged to him either.
It belonged to the silence that protected no one and wounded us all.
Dr. Qaiser Mukhtar, a retired public health scientist and epidemiologist, is also a poet and creative writer. She lives in Atlanta with her family and is currently writing a collection of microfiction.