Umm Khalid used to be royalty back home in Mandh, but that was a lifetime ago, in a faraway land now divided between Iran and Pakistan. It is late morning, and she potters around in the little house hidden away among the back roads of Ruwi, a gift from the government in the Seventies. She talks of all the land her family had in Baluchistan, of the goats and gandum and rice and milk they owned and dealt in, and the biriyani they called Hawari.
She was 14 when she left for Kuwait to get married to a cousin, never return to her land, and sell beans behind the school in her new neighbourhood. Now, she will not allow her portrait to be taken. Her children, she insists, might not like it. Instead, she lets me shoot her hands, bedecked with henna and gold, against the soft floral laysu that she wraps herself in.
One Comment
very much sensible picture, reminding so many things while observing it…i love it!