The morning came on quiet feet, the air thin and pale as if the sky itself had been rinsed clean. In Tuhfa's house the kettle sang its familiar thin song and the smell of frying onions rose like a domestic litany. Her father sat at the table with his newspaper folded in half, the habitual lines of his face set as though the paper could hold the world steady. The house moved in the small, careful rituals of breakfast a spoon, the rustle of cloth, the clink of a cup but under those routines something had shifted; the room felt as though a seam had been split and the day might now run in two different directions.
Tuhfa came in from the lane with her scarf still damp from the ride. She set her bag down and kept her eyes steady. The motion of her arrival had the plainness of a person who had rehearsed nothing and decided everything. She did not wait for a question or an invitation. The words left her calmly, as if she had been practicing their exact cadence in her head.
"Baba," she said, voice even and clear. "I'm cancelling my engagement to Raza."
The newspaper trembled in her father's hands. He froze mid-lift like a man who has been stopped from completing a habitual motion. The room contracted under the small explosion of that sentence: the tea hissed in its pot, the light at the window tilted, and the ordinary air of breakfast shivered.
"Who gave you this right?" he demanded, the old authority in his voice flaring like a match struck. He was a man who had always believed certain things belonged to fathers to arrange, decisions arranged like bricks in a wall. The expectation that daughters would wait and accept was a habit of his generation.
"Everything around me gives me that right," Tuhfa replied without a tremor. Her words were direct, a kind of clarified water. "Give me the right to decide my life. It was your stubbornness that accepted this proposal when I was not in favour. Yesterday made it clear I will not be traded for people's entertainment."
There was a pause so long it felt like a held breath. Her father's face moved through a sequence of expressions surprise, irritation, the quick calculation of a man who had to decide whether to hold fast to old forms or to protect the child he loved. Heat rose at his neck, then fell into a slow, dissonant sigh.
"I will call my brother," he said at last. The words were an attempt to translate his unease into a manageable action. He pushed back his chair and walked out into the bright yard, the phone already at his ear. To the neighbors passing the lane he looked like any ordinary man dealing with family business; but inside the knot of conversation he would have with his brother, arguments would be sharper and alliances tested.
Inside, Nuzahat reached and took Tuhfa's hand without fuss. Her fingers were soft, worn by years of work and worry, and the squeeze they gave was all the shelter a daughter might ask for in the shape of a mother's comfort.
"You are not at fault, my dear," Nuzahat murmured, voice low with the weary tenderness of someone who has held many small catastrophes and seen most of them pass.
"I am not weeping," Tuhfa said with a half-smile that did not reach her eyes. "I'm fine. Now I want to go to university."
The answer touched a nerve in Tooba, who could not keep fury from its edges. "Who the hell do those cousins think they are?" she snapped, heat raw. "They come here and make jokes at our expense and think it's nothing."
"Nuzahat, leave it," their mother scolded, more tired than stern. The small domestic scold that had smoothed so many mornings rose and quieted again at the verge of real conflict. Tooba let the outburst run its course but she did not let go of the anger that had set into her spine. Toora moved slowly, following Tuhfa's retreat to the room as if to hold a place of quiet company.
Their mother's sigh carried the weight of an old resignation. "It is because she belongs to another clan," Nuzahat said, voice soft, "They see difference and make mockery. But you have done right, beta. Stand firm."
________________________
The lane's rhythm carried Tuhfa to the university with a silence that had something like collected purpose. The campus smelled of chalk and dust, the air inside classrooms made tactile by the hum of electric fans and the scrape of chairs. She had not known until that morning that Rehaan would be their professor this term, and the sight of him behind the lectern folded the recent insult into a new, immediate test.
He took up his authority with the ease of a man accustomed to small triumphs. The podium suited him; the microphone and the hush of a room made the world trim itself to his edges. He began the lecture with a voice that tried for cool neutrality but undercut with a tip of performance. He did not hide his posture toward her; when he called her name, there was a thinness to the sound.
"Miss Tuhfa," he said loud enough to make it conversational and sharp enough to keep attention. "Do you remember what we studied in the previous class?" He had every intent to put her on the spot a small public grading of her composure.
Tuhfa rose, steady. "Yes, sir," she answered, and laid out the points he had assigned. She had read; she had prepared. Tooba, who had insisted on attending that morning out of simple solidarity, gave a quiet, factual recitation of the earlier discussion. Her presence was a kind of small armor.
The lecture unfolded like a test of temperament. Rehaan kept the lesson on its rails while the air around it shimmered with the undercurrent of what had happened: the family gossip, the mocking, the near-tragedy. At the end of the lecture, Rehaan called out, as if it were both instruction and provocation, "Miss Tuhfa, bring the assignments to my office there is an error I need you to correct."
She gathered the papers and obeyed. It was a small demand, bureaucratic in its shape, but she knew the pattern: a request that hid a provocation. She walked the corridor with measured steps, each one a contained resolve. The door to his office closed after her knock and opened to the small, clinical space where authority could press.
Rehaan was already behind the desk, pen moving across a form, the practiced sneer in place as if on schedule. He looked up and let a barb sharpen in his voice.
"So what do you feel about yesterday's event?" he began, the question intended as a trap in the soft weave of civility.
Tuhfa bristled but kept her voice even. "Sir," she said, "I am here about the assignment."
He smiled thinly and pushed the tone. "Are you really a PhD in Business, then? Because the way you answer seems... lacking." The insult was not about intellect; it was about dignity, a targeted attempt to bruise.
"You are missing something here," he said, lowering his voice into a dangerous murmur. "You can't afford much animosity with me. Your life is still in my hands your grades, your position. Before this, I could strip you of titles; you were the one who taught me that words cost life. So be careful. I did things ages ago to others who thought themselves clever. I might do the same to you, but with a different approach."
The words landed like a cold hand on the skin. Rehaan's threat was clinical, coated in academic distance that made it worse: a man who could convert cruelty into procedure.
Tuhfa felt the old rush that sharp, familiar switch where anger and fear commingled and then something steadied. She had been practicing the sentences Ufaq had given her; she had begun keeping a record. She remembered the small stack of dates and names folded into the notebook she carried. She also remembered that her power was in the clarity of her response rather than the heat of reaction.
"No, dear cousin," she answered, and the clipped address stopped him halfway between family and professor. "Be careful. Words cost many things. Yesterday you and your friends gave me a lesson. Now, wait a little I will give you one, too. You will lose this authority forever if you continue to bend it into cruelty."
Her voice did not tremble; it was steady as a lever. She did not plea. She did not break. She closed with something that made the room seem smaller a sentence that had weight because she intended it. With that she left, the door slamming in a sound that felt like finality.
Rehaan stood for a moment, the anger folding in his chest like a slow burn. He muttered under his breath, the promise of a man who believes power and position will follow the script he writes: "This will cost you, Tuhfa. I am your professor. Everything is in my hand."
_______________________
Outside, the day had begun to accumulate small shifts. Tuhfa's father, having finished his tense call, walked back into the house with a tempered manner and the iron in his voice softened by concern. He had told his brother that his daughter would not be given like a story to someone who thought mockery a suitable prelude to marriage. That alone would send ripples through both households.
Inside, the sisters moved with a new, brittle solidarity. Tooba's anger had not cooled but had gained a purpose; Toora followed with slow loyalty that was tactile as a hand on a shoulder. Nuzahat washed a cup with hands that trembled slightly and said little; sometimes there is nothing to say that is better than a steady presence.
Tuhfa sat with the small notebook under her palm, fingers tracing the margins she had filled: dates, names, the terse phrases Ufaq had taught her to insist upon. The day that began with a single blunt declaration "I cancel the engagement" had stretched into a map of small defenses. The problem had not been solved; it had only been reframed.
In the lane, gossip would begin to turn like a millstone; in offices, a professor would plan how to use procedure as a weapon; in two houses, men would count reputations like coins. But inside Tuhfa, after the slamming door and the steady words, something like a new architecture had started to hold: the knowledge that dignity could be defended not only with fury but with paperwork, witnesses, and a voice that would not break.
The morning was no longer simple. It had become work.