The Clinging Thing

"She has always owed her life to the women before her. This is not something to mourn … Freedom is often recent and always precarious. She owes her life to the women before her, in that she ought to live. The duty mustn't ever feel like duty, no, what luck, for her to be here, for her to feel so deeply and remember so much.”

Iqra has taken leave from her accounting job, and from her marriage, to return to her mother in the place she grew up.

A couple of hours out of the city, Seam River, like her mother’s home, is imbued with memory. It pulls Iqra back into not only her own stories of grief but that of her parents and her broader family. And all the women before her.
Through friendship, Safia her cousin/sister, prayer, slow honest conversations with her mother and time, she realises that, at twenty-five, she had been rushing life. Her marriage really is over and the future holds many wonderful possibilities.