Read an extract from A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna

In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara is waiting and watching. The smell of dung and dust hangs over her world. She is desperate to leave the petty life of the village and escape the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother. Marrying a middle-class accountant allows her to escape to the capital, but she soon finds that life as a respectable housewife is not sufficient either. She wants what the rich mothers at her children’s school have. She wants what their husbands have. Her desire for wealth and freedom becomes an obsession. But can she truly shake her past? And what of the menacing spectre of her brother, a reminder of the threads that tie her to the life she left behind?

READ AN EXTRACT FROM A SPLINTERING

My father-in-law was fond of waxing poetic about the village, its mustard fields and wood ovens. That’s what my in-laws called Mazinagar, that town of small industry, where it had been two decades since the arrival of electricity. For them, it was simply the village, the ancestral hinterlands to which they went every now and then to reconnect with a simpler life. I didn’t care what they called it, but my skin prickled when I heard my father-in-law talk about it as a lost Eden.

‘I’m so happy you are here,’ he said the morning after the wedding, over breakfast. ‘Now we’ll have an excuse to go back more often.’

It is considered noble to be proud of one’s origins. I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth. My mother-in-law, Hajra, said to her husband, ‘Well, she left

for a reason, didn’t she? Maybe she doesn’t want to go back that much.’

By the way she said it, I could tell that Hajra knew at least a little about my desperation to leave Mazinagar. Maria’s parents must have relayed to her my excitement about the match, how much I had pressured my mother to convince Lateef. If my mother knew, she would be horrified, thinking that it gave Hajra too much leverage to know that I was eager to leave my own family behind. But I did not care if I appeared grovelling. I wanted nothing more than to sit at that dining table, eating sliced white bread and apricot jam for the first time in my life, waiting for Hajra to take me under her wing.

And she did. While my relationship with Hamad blossomed slowly, in the few hours we were alone after his work and dinner, Hajra and I quickly became constant companions. The first day, she took me around the house, which had three bedrooms; the third one was a guest bedroom that Hamad’s married sister stayed in when she visited. There was a living room, a more formal drawing room for guests, a front lawn, a terrace, and servants’ quarters at the back. My in-laws’ house-help was a teenage boy from Mianwali. He was responsible for all outdoor tasks, such as taking the men’s clothes to the washerman to wash and iron. He also kneaded the dough and made bread, prepped and cut vegetables, maintained the lawn, and made the tea at 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.

‘But I do all the cooking,’ Hajra told me. ‘Hamad’s father says he can taste it when a man makes his food, that’s why he hates eating in restaurants.’

She explained the household duties she wanted me to take over. For the time being, she would continue to do the cooking, so I could observe her and get a sense of how much spice and oil the men liked in their food. I was to wash and iron her clothes along with my own – she didn’t send hers to the washerman because she thought it inappropriate for unknown men to touch female clothing – and to dust and sweep the house.

But my most important task was to play host. Almost every other day, people came over for evening tea. Sometimes, they were my father-in-law’s colleagues from work, whom I rarely met, but often, they were Hajra’s friends from the neighbourhood. On occasion, they were people that Hajra and her husband knew from Mazinagar, old neighbours or distant relatives, and in those cases, I was always called in to sit with them and converse in our dialect. It was my in-laws’ chance to show off how grounded they were, that they had intentionally chosen a girl from Mazinagar when they could have married their son off more prosperously to a city girl. I was extremely uncomfortable with these visitors. Like a snake, I was trying to shed my skin, and the linguistic resummoning required by these encounters exhausted me. Moreover, something about these people was awry. They were caught between the city and the town, between tradition and modernity, between Urdu and Punjabi. I could see through their urban pretences to the small-town peasants they once were, and I feared they could do the same with me.

With these visitors and Hajra’s female friends, I was expected to bring in a trolley filled with fresh tea, snacks and meticulously laid-out cutlery and crockery. Hajra taught me how to make squash by measuring out tablespoons of syrup into each glass of water and stirring it with ice. She showed me how to fry the samosas she made and froze each month, keeping the flame as low as possible to get a nice, even crisp. The first time I took in the trolley, Hajra’s face turned pale. Afterwards, she gently corrected me on many counts. The men were to be served first. I was to put the requested sugar in each teacup, but never to stir it myself. There should always be toothpicks on the trolley. That evening, walking past their room, I heard Hajra say to her husband, ‘She’s quite rough right now.’

A Splintering is published by Duckworth on 4 September 2025