Moving Nazma under the fan made no difference to her fever, she became weaker as the night went on. She drifted in and out of consciousness, but when she was conscious, she couldn’t speak to us. We took it in turns to hold her hand. At some point during the night, a noisy wind began blowing through the broken windows and shortly after that, a storm rose up.
Around midnight there was a particularly loud clap of thunder, and her grip on my fingers tightened. She raised her eyebrows, widened her eyes and raised her body slightly in her struggle to breathe. Her eyes were still open as she died and abandoned her grip on my fingers. The end of her deep green sari moved slightly in the wind. Her inanimate form made a blurry vision through the tears at the corners of my eyes, but when I could look at her properly I saw that she was beautiful in her death.
I looked quickly over to Rinki and she was deep in sleep and smiling. Perhaps she was dreaming of going to school, escorted by her ammu and her abbu. There would be no one Rinki could get support from when she woke the next morning… no one to hold the back of her head and massage oil into her face… no one to run behind her with food when she refused to eat. She could now run around the prison whenever she wanted to, there would be no one to stop her and make her calm down.
We laid Nazma out as best we could with her arms by her sides. We combed her hair and straightened her sari, we washed her face and her feet with water from the bucket, we closed her eyes, and we prayed over her.
None of us could sleep that night, we couldn’t even think of it. We sat in silence around Nazma’s body and then at about two o’clock Rinki woke up, although she’d slept through the worst of the storm. We watched her walking towards us with her tiny irregular steps and we made room for her. No one spoke. Rinki stared at each of us in turn and most of us were crying, then she stared down at her ammu. She frowned and blinked and seemed to look harder at Nazma, but strangely, she didn’t call out to her, didn’t ask her to wake up. It was as if she knew, as if she had accepted that her ammu was dead and that she was now in an ammu-less world. She sat down quietly by her mother’s head and bent her face even closer to gaze at her. Then, after some time, she lay down beside her, and hugged her, holding Nazma’s deep green sari tightly in her tiny fingers. She closed her eyes, and although she made no sound at all, I saw a tear form in the corner of her eyelid and twinkle like the stars had done earlier that same night.
