The Orchard of Lost Souls 211-13
The other women—there are about fifty all together in the barracks—drift into the kitchen while Filsan nurses her empty cup and gazes at the view beyond the window, a bare yard crisscrossed by poles and clotheslines in the foreground with the two domes of the central mosque behind. Breeze blocks abandoned when the nearly completed hotel was commandeered by the military form another kind of barracks for cooing pigeons beneath the window. She ignores her comrades as they ignore her, but what would she say to them if she could? She would tell them that she has never been good at making friends, that Intisaar’s children had seemed kind but had not been allowed inside the house by her father, that the neighbourhood kids had scorned her, that she found it easier to talk to her father’s friends, that her face was closed because she didn’t know how to open it.  Silence takes the place of all those words and her loneliness remains as dense and close as a shadow. . . .
As she enters and bends down to pick up a sock, she is overwhelmed by an urge to wail, her blood suddenly darkening with self-loathing, with anger that her life should be so small and inconsequential, that this two-metre-by-two-metre cell should be the span of her world. Her father had locked her away, had told her she wouldn’t regret the decisions he had made for her, that she would be a new kind of woman with the same abilities and opportunities as any man, but instead she lives the celibate, sterile, quiet existence of a nun, growing nothing but grey hairs. All her life she has been left to gather dust, as unseen as a picture on the wall, and to wail and roar and strike out sometimes seems the only way she will ever be heard.