Mist hung over the square the next week. Laughter and voices echoed through it like ghosts, reaching out amidst the whiteness.

I headed off to seek out Nanu Salima for the pomegranates I’d lost the week before. Or perhaps I was going to visit her to purge my own guilt. My fingers were still smudged with ink, and I tried hard to rub it off again with the inner lining of my robes. But it would not come off.

The scent of saffron was sharp in the air, cutting through everything else as if the hanging mist had silenced everything but that.

It made me think of the day Qamarah and I had gone to watch the sun rise in the north where the saffron fields grew. Neither of us could sleep in those days.

As we trudged through the damp grass in the dark wrapped in thick shawls, Qamarah had asked me why I liked calligraphy so much. “It’s so twisting and confusing,” she’d said. “Architecture, on the other hand, at least has form, structure, pattern. Sharp, precise lines. It’s definite.”

“It is not very different, you know,” I told her. “One is of the soul, the other of body.”

“That’s not true,” Qamarah had said. “Spaces house the soul too. Haniya doesn’t have to be home for me to detest the place.”

“Haniya merely looks out for you, is all,” I’d said.

Qamarah had scoffed. “That’s easy for you to say, she’s not your sister getting in your way. Now she has me doing endless chores and peeling potatoes every turn of the day since we got into that fight about me going to study architecture,” Qamarah said. “I asked her, ‘What are you going to do with this many potatoes?’ and she just shrugs! She’s doing it out of sheer spite, I tell you. That, or we’re going to have endless dishes of potatoes for the next month. I’ll make her potato bread, potato pie, I’ll even boil her a potato for dessert, until she rues the day she asked me to peel a potato.”

And we’d laughed in the dwindling darkness until our stomachs hurt, until the river leading northwest led us to the fields.

The violet blossoms stretched across the horizon. But when we got there, I remembered vividly, shadows moved across the pasture. Qamarah pulled me down behind tall strands of wildgrass. “Its a mardykhor beast!” she whispered, eyes bright with excitement.

But we realized they were not, indeed, beasts.

The Mahmuddin family was spread out among the flowers. Farmer Jawad’s gaze caught us at the edges of the field, and he waved for us to help. Qamarah muttered that she hadn’t come to work, but it had been too late.

Jawad uncle was not going to let us go once he had a hold of us — no one was allowed to merely stand around during the saffron gathering. And now, after all these years, thinking back on it, I understood why: There were only a few moments left until sunrise, and they had to work against the light.

Qamarah and I knelt to the ground and began to pick the violet flowers, as she muttered to Layla, uncle Jawad’s daughter, “Why are you all here at this mad hour anyway?”

“We have to pick the blossoms quickly before the first rays of dawn,” Layla told us. “Otherwise, they will wilt and we must wait again until tomorrow night. Give me that,” and she’d thrust Qamarah’s hand away, declaring, “You have to pick it carefully.”

As a glow of light seeped in at the edges of the horizon, Layla continued on about how the saffron bloomed for five days, or a week, I couldn’t remember now; that they had to pluck the stigmas and dry them away from the sun, and so on. Qamarah had muttered that it sounded like a lot of work, and Layla cried indignantly, “Why else do you think they call it the ‘red gold’ of Khardin?”

After the sun’s rays swept the field, Farmer Jawad folded in a few of the crimson strands and violet blossoms into our hands. “Here, ma’s.” I remember his smile that crinkled the edges of his sun-beaten brows.

I’d gone home and sprinkled the strands into pulao rice, and Qamarah put some in the coffee. Haniya showed us how the blossoms could be infused. “It has more uses than its beauty, you know,” Haniya had said as we ground up the petals to bake bread. And we’d complained she was just trying to make us do more work.

These were the things I had simply brushed off when I was younger, the moments I’d taken for granted.

But I could only now look at them fondly back, back in time, even as we complained about it all while living in it.

I remember how the bread looked when we pulled it out of the hot oven: tinted with a hint of lilac.

I wondered if the saffron fields existed now only in my memory; if the scorched earth ever yielded life again.

When I got to the corner of Nanu Salima’s, the cart was nowhere to be found. The spot was an empty patch leaving behind only a vague outline in the stone below.

I stopped as if someone had struck me across the face. I had never seen that corner empty in all my years of living in Ifsharan.

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Nanu Salima never missed a day at the bazaar; she would weather rainstorms to come up here from her village down below in the east, the cart wheels trundling over stone and grass, with the children trailing along behind her.

Around me, the crowd flowed as if the world did not suddenly seem tilted, wrong. Things were out of order. Why did they go on like something wasn’t missing?

The mist seemed to have thickened in the square, enshrouding everything. The scent of the saffron grew stronger, which was odd, because I had never thought of it as something that could assault your senses. But now it was all I could smell. And for some reason, it did not bring me the pleasure it once had.

I went out to the center of the square. I realized now that there were no farmers today, and it seemed quieter.

As I neared the fountain, Sahan’s figure emerged from the mist, staring into the water, her hands folded around her knees.

She looked up when I grew closer, and there was a strange somberness which she rarely showed.

“Why do you look so miserable?” I asked her. “And do you know where Nanu Salima went?” I climbed up onto the fountain edge with her. “I need to get more pomegranates.”

Sahan stared at me with that same look of hesitation, and sadness; which now began to unnerve me because that was simply not Sahan. “Why are you staring at me like that?” I asked.

“They…the Shayfahan raided the village yesterday. Didn’t you hear? Because of the protests.”

A cold steel knife was sliding down my throat.

Perhaps I had fallen asleep in the calligraphy studio working on some dull commission and this whole foggy day was a dream. That must be it, it had to be so.

Sahan put a hand on my arm, but I rose, walking away. Her voice came faintly through the mist: “Rahena apa? Where are you going?”

But I had to see it for myself. I had to know.

Beyond the square, down near the river, past where the tenements thinned out, down down below, I waded through the mist into the open valleys that bordered the city.

It was colder here out in the open air, and the mist seemed to lash at me, clinging to me, calling me, seething in anger that it could not grab a hold of me.

I held my arms tight against my chest, shuddering in the chill, my woolen shawl not enough to keep out the cold.

I could not see anything clearly through the whiteness, but I went on through the damp earth, the dew staining the bottom of my robes, weighing it down. I stumbled along in the direction I had once seen Nanu Salima coming from towards the east, although I had never visited her home.

The ground was slick with dampness, and I felt I had come away to another world entirely.

Below the hill, a scattering of evergreens peered up through the mist, and here the whiteness seemed to give a little.

I climbed down, faster until I nearly fell down the hill.

The vague silhouettes of several scattered huts were clustered together up ahead. I headed towards it.

The village was silent. And it was not merely the fog. The charred remains of reed houses emerged, blackened and skeletal. Several houses made of clay remained standing, the sides where the flames had climbed up stained with soot.

I entered a ghost village.

Voices rose from somewhere. I turned to see several men dragging out a body from beneath a rubble of splintering reed.

“Careful, careful!” they called. “Be careful of the head.”

Gently, they laid down the bloodied body onto the ground, folded over the arms together over the chest, and closed the eyes.

I approached closer. They studied me warily.

“Do you know where Nanu Salima is?” I asked.

“Nanu Salima?” One of the men said. “She…we buried her this morning.”

“And her grandchildren? The girl and the boy?” I asked, the words somehow clawing up my throat, for the only way I could continue was to keep asking questions like an interrogator, an investigator, as if the answer did not matter to me, it was only an answer, only some news to gather.

“They took the children,” another man spoke from behind the others. The men moved aside for him, and he appeared into view. Light blue eyes and a round woolen cap over his head. He looked straight at me. “They took several of the men and women, for prisoners they said, and some of the children. Everyone else, they tried to burn.”

A gust of wind swept across the village, sending ashes and the scent of burned flesh and soot over us.

My lungs were gripped by the cold limbs of some beast.

“Is there anyone else beneath the rubble?” I said, my voice hoarse. “I will help you bury your dead.”

They stared at me, glancing at each other.

“Apa,” the blue-eyed man said. “That is not right for a begum like yourself—”

“I must,” I said.

Hesitantly, he motioned me to the next mound of frayed, charred reed-house.

In the next hour, we went from rubble to rubble, looking for bodies, for survivors.

As we cleared away the charred houses and searched, the blue-eyed man who’d told me his name was Nazim said, “Who are you, sister? Are you not from the city? Why did you come here?”

“I wanted…” But I wasn’t sure what I wanted. “To bid Nanu Salima’s home farewell,” I said, pushing aside the remnants of a jute rug amidst the reed roof that had caved in.

There were no more survivors. But as we nearly gave up, one of the men glimpsed something.

I was terrified I might still hear and feel the man’s emotions through my fingers, from beyond the veil of death itself; or worse, his final moments or memories of his lived life.

With a blackened stick from the rubble, I cleared away the mass of burned reed melded with scatterings of what had once been a person’s belongings: a clay cup, smashed clay pots; a broken string of beads; a pair of jute-woven shoes.

The men climbed their way up the path I’d made and slowly, carefully, pulled him out.

When we’d finished, I was covered in ash and soot. By then, the men’s wives and the children had come outside to watch me. They invited me in for a cup of tea, but I shook my head. Someone was cooking inside the house. The women still had to feed the living. The scent rose over the ashes, but all I could taste was blood.

Blood, blood in my lungs, in my mouth.

I bid a final murmur of peace before I turned away to leave them to bury their dead.

I did not know how to climb back up to return to the city. The hill felt like a mountain rising over me, treacherous and insurmountable. It was impossible, I thought, to climb it.

I wandered away instead into the mist, to where I did not know. Along sharp rocky paths, through an open pasture of yellowed wildgrass until I reached a wheat field, tall strands drifting this way and that in the wind, brushing against my arms and legs.

I continued through it until the sheaves of wheat rose so high I felt it would swallow me whole, and all around me there were only hundreds and thousands of thin strands rising high into the skies.

I lay down on the ground, smelling the earth against my skin, against my hair.

I lay there so long that I imagined I could feel Nanu Salima below down in the earth, telling me it was alright, she would be there again tomorrow, in the same place I had last left her.