Kausar is the youngest of the three orphaned sisters in Fatimah Asghar’s grief-soaked and gorgeous debut novel. When she walks past Bobby and his friends in the school cafeteria, she overhears him say: “That’s my heart right there.” With flushed cheeks, she races to the bathroom. She stares and stares into the mirror, but alas “can’t find another heart to give”. Adrift in the world without a mother or father, her heart is a little bit Noreen’s, a little bit Aisha’s. Her two sisters are all she has – even if the distance between them is growing. Kausar “put her heart inside [her sisters’] hearts” long ago, long before they became orphans. She was “born this way, belonging to them, trying to follow their breath”.
The day their father dies, murdered on the streets of America at the opening of the novel, their home turns into a “House of Sadness”. His body is sent from Pennsylvania to Lahore and buried in soil they can’t touch, in a “place he is from, and so we are from, but we know nothing about”. A VHS tape of his burial is sent to their house – the girls watch it on repeat surrounded by aunties.
