Oh Lord Almighty, I can no longer bear the taunts of these bitches, Rabia thought, closing her eyes whilst brushing flies off the face of her two year old son, Atif. 

Now he seemed to be at peace, asleep in the shadow of a winding branch of a Kikker tree. This was the same branch under which her husband had first embraced her. The same branch on which she had sat on her first swing and had spent countless hours of her childhood; the same branch on which she now tied a long nylon rope, one of the few things her husband had ever bought her. But even this he had bought so it could be used as dawan for his own bed to make it more taut.