A Sister to Honor Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  The Lost Daughter

  “An unflinching study of parenthood . . . Convincing, Franzen-style realism . . . A powerful domestic novel.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The Lost Daughter delivers the goods: flawed but sympathetic characters and a plot that will keep readers turning the pages voraciously. From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb

  “[A] complex, engaging novel about guilt, secrecy, and the mysteries of family. Lucy Ferriss is a courageous and thought-provoking writer.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta

  “This achingly beautiful novel about marriage and love, pulsing with complex life, is the work of a master American realist, up there with Richard Yates or anyone else. With spellbinding attentiveness and intimacy it explores what a husband and wife can be sure they know about each other but also, in prose wearing night-vision glasses, the inaccessible places where the hidden past lies threateningly coiled, and which love must also find a way to reach.”

  —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name

  “In the same way that Judi Dench won an Oscar in 1999 for eight minutes of screen time in Shakespeare in Love, Ms. Ferriss’s prologue is a doozy at a mere eleven pages . . . [Ferriss] has a real knack for creating dramatic tension.”

  —The New York Times

  “An emotionally riveting story . . . Ferriss moves the plot along at a fast clip, deftly weaving together recollections of the past and, as the disturbing truth of Brooke’s secret slowly emerges, the present. All the while, Ferriss infuses the story with a heady dose of realism . . . The Lost Daughter manages to be a romantic family novel with a palpable atmosphere of impending calamity.”

  —Booklist

  “A compelling story.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  MORE PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF LUCY FERRISS

  “Tough, grave, and sweet . . . a book that will stay with me for a long time.”

  —Lee Smith

  “Ferriss’s strength as an author is her uncanny ability to layer so many emotions in her fiction.”

  —St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “Beautiful . . . sympathetic, well-defined characters.”

  —The Advocate

  “Sad and soaring and sexy . . . lyrical, honest prose.”

  —Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here

  “Bittersweet but often laugh-out-loud funny.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  “Sharp humor and dazzling writing . . . one of the best books of the year, period.”

  —St. Louis Riverfront Times

  “Thought-provoking and disturbing . . . subtle and original.”

  —Contra Costa Times

  “If in this novel Ferriss makes you think, she will also make you feel.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A gripping coming-of-age story . . . dense and richly evocative.”

  —The Washington Times

  “A complex, satisfying work.”

  —Ms.

  “A beautiful novel about family and love, from one of the best writers around.”

  —Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

  “Tight, cleanly structured, and polished . . . The author’s voice is intelligent and her analysis shrewd . . . Interiors—the parts that matter—are brilliantly drawn, and the prose itself is often superb.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  ALSO BY LUCY FERRISS

  THE LOST DAUGHTER

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2015 by Lucy Ferriss.

  “Readers Guide” copyright © 2015 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-16904-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A sister to honor / Lucy Ferriss.—Berkley trade paperback edition.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-425-27640-2 (softcover)

  1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Muslim women—United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.E754S56 2015

  813'.54—dc23

  2014029571

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / January 2015

  Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

  Cover photo by Vanessa Skotnitsky / Imagebrief.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  For the women of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

  Woman is the lamp of the family.

  —PASHTUN PROVERB

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to the entire Kakakhel family, but especially Shazia Sadaf, without whose hospitality, generosity, and wealth of sympathy this book could not have been written. Others in Pakistan were equally gracious and helpful in breathing life into both characters and story: Yawar Mumtaz and his family, the Ashfaq Chaudhry family, Aslam Khan, Tahir Malik, Zoia Tariq, Hina Jilani, Mohibullah Khan, and the faculty and students of the University of Peshawar all devoted time, energy, and insight to welcoming a stranger to their home and helping her understand its customs and challenges. I am grateful to Trinity College for a sabbatical and research funds that allowed me to travel to Pakistan. Paul Assaiante provided valuable expertise in competitive squash. For reading countless drafts and never giving up on me, I have the honor of thanking three irreplaceable editors: Jackie Cantor, Al Zuckerman, and Ann Patty. Amy Schneider’s sharp eye brought the manuscript into focus, and the art department at Berkley rose beautifully to the occasion. Thanks to Eric Goodman for reading an early draft, and to Don Moon, as always, for his unflagging patience, honesty, and encouragement at every step along the winding path.

  For background on Pashtun culture, the history of honor violence, and the changing roles of women in Islam and in Pakistan, I consulted perhaps three dozen volumes. Especially helpful were Sadaf Ahmad’s Pakistani Women, Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor, Benedicte Grima’s Secrets from the Field, Amir Jafri’s Honour Killing, and Kathleen Jamie’s Among Muslims. Among a plethora of fine novels by Pakistani authors, Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falc
on, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing were particularly evocative. Those interested in ongoing advocacy for women in Pakistan may wish to consult AURAT, http://www.af.org.pk/index.php; or Women Living Under Muslim Laws, http://www.wluml.org/node/5408.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the novels of Lucy Ferriss

  Also by Lucy Ferriss

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Book One

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Book Two

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Readers Guide

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the valley below Farishta’s house, the mulberry trees clung fast to their leaves. When the sun rose over the eastern hills they looked plated in gold; but as the wind lifted the dry leaves, they whispered like yellow-haired girls sharing secrets. Seated in a circle in the warm sun, the village women pulled stripped branches from the stacks piled up during the monsoon pruning. From these they made baskets they would use in the spring, when the trees had returned to flower and to fruit and the dead leaves had scattered in the tall grass.

  Farishta was looking out from the hujra, the main room of the house. Her stepson Khalid lay sleeping on a charpoy, his injured arm dangling. His breath seemed to catch in his adenoids with a sound that gave her a prick of irritation, at which she felt ashamed. Soon her girls would be home from school; her husband, Tofan, would take time from overseeing the harvest to fetch them and check quickly on Khalid, and then he would be off again. At that point Khalid might wake. He would take from her a lunch of chicken wings and rice. He would ask where his father was.

  Slowly she turned from the window, knelt by the charpoy, and touched her palm to his forehead. It had gone clammy; the fever had broken. Tonight, perhaps, he would haul himself from the bed and make his way into the village, to the Internet café, where he drank tea and shouted at whatever political news he could find on the flat screens they lined up along the wall. Farishta didn’t like to admit how much easier she breathed when he was out of the house.

  She stood, adjusting her dupatta. She was a compact woman, of middling height, but her firstborn son, Shahid, stood head and shoulders above her, and she was now eye to eye with her thirteen-year-old, Sobia. Even Afia, once the smallest and frailest of her children, could throw an arm around Farishta’s shoulders. She smiled, thinking of Afia. Though Shahid still lit her heart brightest, Afia gave her the warmest hope. They were both half a world away, but not forever. In two months, there would be a wedding for Maryam, one of Tofan’s cousins, and the women would all ask about Farishta’s absent children. Afia, they would assure Farishta, would one day make a brilliant marriage—to a doctor in Islamabad, or a rising star in the army—and be one of the new women of Pakistan, bringing medical care to other wives and mothers while being one herself. If any female could manage such a thing with honor, it was Afia. As to Shahid . . . Farishta’s eyes burned. He might not, she admitted to herself when she had moments alone, come back. In his letters, she could read the truth: He was becoming part of the West, comfortable among its gleaming towers and atomized citizens. Her husband, Tofan, still spoke of Shahid’s returning with his business skills to help Khalid take over the farm. But that was a fantasy. Khalid would have the farm to himself, and he would fill it with his jihadi friends, and Farishta’s old age, her daughters gone, would be spent among sneering men not of her blood.

  She tried not to feel this way. She had been trying, now, for almost twenty years.

  In the kitchen the cook, Tayyab, was rattling pots. She went in to him. In the corner, her mother-in-law sat embroidering a shawl. Two years ago, the old woman had suffered a loss that had robbed her of speech, but her sight still seemed keen enough. Once, her needlework had been among the finest in the village. “Asalaam aleikum, Moray,” Farishta said, and touched her on the shoulder. The older woman looked up quickly, her eyes watchful as a bird’s. “As soon as Sobia gets home,” Farishta said to the unspoken demand. “I will speak with her.”

  Beneath his white beard, Tayyab harbored a knowing grin. How did servants come to know so much? He was hacking a chicken, the dull crunch of small bones beneath the cleaver. Tayyab’s age was a mystery. He looked as old now as he had the day Farishta was brought to the Satar compound here in Nasirabad, almost two decades ago. Since then he had had five more children and lost the two daughters he had managed to marry off. Diabetes was affecting his eyes. But his face was as lean, lined, and sober as ever below his white cap. One of his remaining daughters, in the corner, was grinding cardamom, and the sweet tang filled the air.

  Farishta took a wooden spoon and tasted the spicy sauce. Her eyes watered. “Good,” she said. “Khalid likes it spicy.”

  She lifted a piece of warm bread from the rounds stacked by the stove and stepped out onto the veranda. The mulberry trees seemed to float on the million wings of their gold leaves. The breeze this time of year was luscious, free of the monsoon but not yet locked into the stony chill of winter. Far off, Tofan’s cotton fields stood brown and stubbled, the harvest just finishing. She could hear the hum of the threshing machines. Every day for months now, her husband had risen before dawn and returned home only to fetch and deliver the girls. When Khalid, Shahid, and Afia had been young, she had done that duty herself; but things had changed. Her husband spoke of getting a driver for Sobia and little Muska. But today he would bring them home, and Farishta would draw Sobia into her bedroom alone and bring out the pair of bloodstained panties she had found stuffed under Sobia’s mattress. The girl had become a woman. Patiently Farishta would explain to her—as she had explained to Afia seven years ago, as her own mother had explained to her when this awful-seeming thing suddenly happened—that a new and wonderful burden was laid upon her. From now on, Sobia would need to learn how to keep her chest covered with her dupatta. She would fast this year during Ramadan. She would no longer play in her old rough ways with her cousin Azlan. She would walk with a new, firm carriage, protecting the treasure of her womanhood.

  Tayyab eased open the door from the kitchen. “Tea, memsahib?”

  She smiled as he set down the tray—teapot, cup and saucer, biscuit, sugar bowl. Tayyab was fond of the niceties. He followed Farishta’s gaze down the valley, to where the family’s Suzuki van would be making its way from the school. “Only the little one left, now,” he said.

  “Muska, yes. She’ll be my last.” By which Farishta meant, and Tayyab understood, that she was done having babies. After three daughters, she was not confident of bringing forth another son. But Tofan had Khalid, and even though Shahid had been his brother’s child, he treated him like a full son. Farishta had tried to do the same with Khalid, but her efforts had hurled themselves, always, against the mortar of his jealousy. Three years ago, when he’d gone to the mountains to join a new
madrassa there, she had sighed with relief. But each time he came home, his beard was longer, his skin darker from the sun, his eyes more shifting and suspicious.

  “You will be rich in grandchildren, memsahib,” said Tayyab. Farishta watched as he bowed, backed away, and returned to the kitchen. When she turned back to the valley, she saw the Suzuki chuffing up the hill.

  Muska dashed out from the backseat, waving the drawings she had done at school. Farishta kissed her and sent her back to take a snack from Tayyab and to feed the goat kid she had been nursing. Sobia exited the car more slowly and walked as if she held a coin between her knees. Her downcast eyes looked bruised. Inwardly Farishta smiled. She remembered the time she had felt this way, unaccountably filthy and out of sorts, wads of tissue paper between her legs, hoping no one would detect that she was slowly bleeding to death. “Come talk to me, Soby,” Farishta said, holding out her hand.

  “Something’s wrong with her,” Tofan said. A big man, he had stepped out of the car and stood quaffing a Pepsi. He scarcely paused when he dropped the girls off, especially during harvest. “She has been sullen all the way home, and when I asked—” He stopped when he looked up and caught Farishta’s glance. “Ah,” he said. Whether he understood what was happening with Sobia, what Farishta needed to do, was impossible to say. But he ducked his head back into the car, waved once, and drove off.

  Farishta pulled the sack of sanitary napkins she had been saving from the bottom of the bathroom cupboard and went into the girls’ room. Sobia was curled up on the bed, crying quietly. Farishta sat down and put a gentle hand on her daughter’s hip. “Do you want to tell me?” she asked.

  Sobia sniffled. Then she said, “I wish Afia was here.”

  “Because you could talk to her.” The girl nodded. “About what you are experiencing.” Another nod. “Well, I miss her, too. But I will speak to you as I spoke to her, when she was just your age.” She reached over and tipped up her daughter’s chin. The girl’s eyes glowed with tears. Farishta felt a surge of pride. “You are bleeding,” she said.