the girls who ran

"The Girls Who Ran"

A story born from a dream

Some stories start with wars. Some start with love. This one starts with both. Because the people who love you the most are always the ones standing right beside you when everything falls apart.

Chapter One: The Last Good Day

Our garden was my favorite place in the whole world.

It was not anything special if you looked at it from outside. Just a small garden behind our house with a wall covered in climbing roses and an old apricot tree in the corner whose branches were so heavy with fruit every summer that they almost touched the ground. There was a long wooden table under the tree surrounded by mismatched chairs that had been carried outside over the years and never brought back in. String lights were hung between the tree and the wall. They were not on right now but at night they made the whole garden glow warm and golden and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

We lived in Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan. If you have never seen Hunza Valley I do not know how to explain it except to say that the mountains there are so tall and so white and so beautiful that even people who have lived there their whole lives still stop sometimes just to look at them. We had been looking at them our whole lives and we were still not used to them.

Our house was one of the old stone houses on a narrow winding street where everybody knew everybody. The balconies had flower pots on them. The streets were so winding that strangers always got lost but to us they felt like home. In the evenings our neighbor played old music on his radio and the sound came drifting over our garden wall like it belonged there.

That afternoon the whole family was sitting in the garden.

My father Uncle Tariq was at the head of the table. He was a tall quiet man who never raised his voice because he never needed to. When he spoke everyone listened, not because they were scared of him but because he was always worth listening to. He was my father and I knew his face better than I knew anything else in the world.

Beside him sat his brother my Uncle Javed. Uncle Javed was the complete opposite of my father in almost every way. He was loud and round and always laughing at his own jokes before he even finished telling them. He was also almost always right about everything which made it very difficult to be annoyed at him for very long.

My Dadi sat in her special chair at the corner of the table. She was small and white haired and she had made the cushion on that chair herself forty years ago and refused to get a new one even though it had completely faded. Dadi was the kind of woman who could silence a whole room with just one look. She did not miss anything. Ever.

Aunt Sana, Uncle Javed's wife, was going back and forth between the kitchen and the garden the way she always did, carrying chai and biscuits and somehow always being part of every conversation even while walking. We always said Aunt Sana could run a whole country if she wanted to. She probably could.

And then there were us. The five girls.

Zara was the oldest. Nineteen years old, Uncle Javed's daughter, dark hair always a little loose around her shoulders, the kind of confident that comes from being the eldest your whole life and knowing it. She always had big opinions about everything and she was usually right and she knew that too.

Hana was seventeen. Also Uncle Javed's daughter. Almost eighteen, two more weeks, she would tell you, holding up two fingers. She was sitting beside Zara peeling a tangerine very carefully and listening with the exact face she made when she was about to disagree with everything someone just said.

Then there was me. Noor. Fifteen years old and Uncle Tariq's daughter, which technically made me the cousin of the other four girls. But nobody in our family ever used that word. We had grown up together on the same street our whole lives. We shared everything. We fought about everything. We loved each other completely. We were sisters. That was just the truth and everybody knew it.

I was sitting across from Zara and Hana with my chin resting in my hand, watching them the way I always did. I was the kind of person who watched everything and said just enough, not too much and not too little. I noticed things other people missed. My father called it a gift. My sisters called it slightly annoying. Both were probably right.

And at the end of the bench, pressed together the way they always were, like two pages of the same book, were the twins. Mia and Maya. Fourteen years old, Uncle Javed's daughters, born seven minutes apart, completely identical to look at but completely different once you knew them. Mia was the quiet one. She was drawing something on the corner of a paper napkin right now with her tongue pressed between her teeth in concentration. Maya was the loud one. She was stealing biscuits from the plate one by one and placing them carefully in her lap and pretending very hard that she was not doing this.

We were arguing about the vacation.

"Switzerland," said Zara, spreading her hands like it was already decided. "The valleys there look like something out of a painting. Green fields, wooden houses, clear rivers."

"Cold," said Hana, dropping a piece of tangerine peel on the table.

"Beautiful."

"Cold AND beautiful. I want a beach Zara. I want actual warm sand under my feet."

"You can put your feet in a river."

"I do not want a river. I want a beach."

I smiled into my hand.

"Turkey," said Uncle Javed cheerfully, leaning forward in his chair. "Beautiful beaches, amazing food, I know a very nice hotel in Antalya, very reasonable price."

"Baba you say Turkey every single year," said Hana.

"Because every single year I am right and nobody listens to me," said Uncle Javed, completely unbothered.

Dadi made a sound that was definitely a laugh even though she tried to cover it quickly with her chai cup.

"Noor," said Mia, looking up from her napkin drawing. "What do you think?"

Everyone looked at me. I sat up straight and made a very serious face like I had been thinking deeply about this question for a long time.

"I think," I said slowly, "that wherever we go, Maya will complain about the food for the first three days. Then she will eat absolutely everything on the menu for the next four. And by the time we come home she will say it was the best trip of her life."

Maya pointed at me with a stolen biscuit. "That is extremely accurate and also very rude."

The whole table laughed. Even Dadi, properly this time, not even trying to hide it.

The afternoon light was warm and golden. The roses on the wall swayed gently in the breeze. The neighbor's radio was playing softly next door. Aunt Sana came back out with a fresh pot of chai and refilled everyone's cups without being asked. My father leaned back in his chair and looked up at the mountains in the distance with the face of a man who was, in that exact moment, completely happy.

I did not know it then. None of us did.

It was the last afternoon like that for a very long time.