A LIZARD WAITED, high on the shadowed wall of the attic. Its prey, an ordinary brown moth, flapped its delicate wings lazily in the late afternoon sunlight. The housemaid lay on the bare tiled floor of the empty room and watched. She’d observed the lizard’s slow, steady ascent into the dark corner; it was now just inches from the moth. Mr Hamidi also waited, outside the door. He shuffled. He played with the lock and whistled.

     ‘Ya, girlie,’ he whispered into the keyhole. Her skin crawled. She tried to relax, to conserve what energy she had left. Hunger sapped strength the way a leech drained blood from a body, a lesson she had learned growing up in an orphanage in Jakarta, where mouths were many and the food scarce.

     Outside, the shamal began to blow, hot and whistling. The labour agent in Jakarta had not warned her about the sandstorms in Riyadh; he never mentioned how the sand rose, how it veiled sight and muffled sound, how it bit into uncovered skin. She wondered if the agent had simply been unaware, or if the old matron at the orphanage had asked him to keep this information hidden from her – just as Mr Hamidi had kept himself hidden when she arrived in Riyadh a month earlier, sending a driver in his place with a sign that read ‘July’, not ‘Julie’.

     Sand blew in through the window and she coughed. Her throat had grown hoarse from shouting for help, her hands sore from pulling at the iron grill bolted to the window. She’d realised after hours of futile effort that her voice, though surprisingly loud for a woman so small, was not strong enough to carry past the villa’s garden and the wall that surrounded it. And now, the coming storm would silence everything but the azan, the call to prayer carried on the wind from the local mosque.

     There was one way out. Mr Hamidi had explained it to her two days before, a few hours after his wife left with the children to visit their grandparents three hundred miles away in Dammam. Julie had been crouched on the kitchen floor, sweeping crumbs into a dustpan.

     ‘Ya, girlie. Come here and do your job,’ he said. He stood in front of her, his short, crab-like legs spread apart, and pushed down his pants.

     ‘It’s a sin,’ she replied, shaking her head. The muscles of her gut had tightened then lurched as he ground his boot into her belly.

     ‘Telling your kafil he’s a sinner, huh?’ he’d taunted from outside as he turned the key that confined her in the attic. ‘Let’s see how long you last without me.’

     The smell of grilled chicken, sour pickles, garlic and warm bread slipped in from under the door. Mr Hamidi was eating a shawarma. Her stomach contracted. She blinked away the yellow spots from her eyes and focused on the wall. The lizard was visible, silhouetted in the fading sunlight. Its tongue struck like a whip. The moth did not struggle.

     The door creaked open and Mr Hamidi entered the attic, a white bundle in one hand. ‘Get up,’ he grunted. Hard fingers dug into her arm and yanked her to a sitting position against the wall. He pulled down her jaw and pushed the half-eaten shawarma into her mouth. ‘Eat.’

     Her teeth sank through the bread and chicken. As her hands reached out to grab the pita he pulled it away and held it up, out of reach.

     ‘Do your job first.’

     Her eyes cleared and she raised her gaze to his face. He leered, his lean cheeks unshaven. His cotton thob was bunched around his hips; he wore nothing beneath it. ‘You know the maid before you?’ he said. ‘Pretty little brown-eyed thing. The silly girl wanted to complain to my wife. Then she fell off the roof. Careless, wallahi, really careless. Her sister threatened to take me to court.’

     He coiled her long black braid around a fist and drew her closer till her cheek brushed his thigh. ‘The poor demented woman. How could she take me to court,’ he demanded, thrusting his hips forward, ‘when it was an accident?’

 

* * *

 

Accidents were a fact of life at the orphanage. Stubbed toes. Spilt milk. Dead mothers. Fatherless babies. The house that held them – thirty-eight children, the old matron and the cook – seemed an accident in itself: three tiers of cement and brick amid a cluster of corrugated metal shanties. There, Julie was a duck in a pond of frogs: the only girl in the kampong without an Indonesian name.

     ‘We had to dig you out of the rubbish bin outside,’ Cook said one afternoon, a few months after Julie turned thirteen. ‘A quiet bundle of rags covered by a newspaper. You didn’t even cry for heaven’s sake!’

     Julie sat cross-legged on the cracked tiles of the floor, washing plates and glasses under a tap before leaning them against the wall, largest at the back, smallest at the front, the way Cook had taught her. As she worked, she listened to the sounds from the far side of the wall; the laughter of the younger children playing in the backyard, the calls of hawkers from the alleyway beyond. Heavy rain that morning had washed some of the filth from the drains and Julie knew the air would, for a short time, smell of damp earth and banana leaves. Cook slowly stirred a pot of soup on the stove, sunlight dulled by the grime that had accumulated on the window turning her white hair bronze.

     ‘I swear, Matron, she smelled worse than a broken drainpipe,’ said Cook, eyeing Julie. ‘I was sorely tempted to name her after one.’

     The old matron grunted from her chair at the kitchen table. She, too, had white hair – a soft bun that rested on her head like spun sugar. But unlike Cook, whose skin showed no sign of ageing and stretched over her cheekbones like new leather over a bicycle saddle, the matron’s face resembled a prune drained of all sweetness.

     ‘An inconvenience, this business of names,’ the matron said. ‘How many questions I get from these little runts, “Matron, what is my mother’s name?” “Matron, what is my father’s name?” As if they’ll carry their names to the grave. Chheh!’ Saliva sprayed from her fleshy lips, covering the table in glistening spittle.

     The matron watched Julie clean the table, her mouth flattened like satay on a stick.

     ‘Now, Matron, names are necessary,’ Cook said, ladling soup into a bowl, ‘if only to distinguish one durian from another. Sometimes a name can have a strong influence on a child. Look at that foolish little Sukarno: father’s a total drunkard, but that boy walks by the rubbish heaps every morning – chest out, belly in – acting as if he’s the president of the kampong.’

     Julie wondered if little Sukarno’s swagger really did come from the name he’d been given; or from the booze his father kept in their shack at the other end of the village – booze the boy bragged of drinking whenever the old man’s back was turned.

     Cook glanced at Julie’s thin face, her fragile wrists and ankles. ‘I should have named this one after the British prime minister. What a strong name, Margaret! But so masculine-sounding for such a delicate girl.’

     ‘Pish!’ the old matron said. ‘I never understood your fixation with these kafir names. And this one – she will always need taking care of, no matter how many names you give her.’

     ‘It would have given her some courage at least, to look up to the woman she was named after.’

     ‘Then she can think of herself as Julie Andrews, the one from The Sound of Music. Maybe she will escape when the Nazis invade Jakarta.’

     Cook laughed and shredded boiled chicken to toss into the soup. Threads of white meat floated on a surface the colour of tea, among beads of oil and cassava leaves. Julie did not understand the joke but knew better than to ask for an explanation. Questions only made the matron smile and Julie had learned long ago that it was far safer to face the old woman’s contempt in silence. She watched her dip a spoon into the bowl and wondered if she saw how the soup resembled the sewage that flowed in the kampong’s open drains. Perhaps she no longer cared, knowing that, like an orphan girl’s curiosity about her parents, the food too would soon be gone.

 

* * *

 

Julie wiped her hands on her stained apron and stared at the cartons of ice cream in the freezer. Butterscotch. Chocolate. Strawberry. Mr Hamidi had bought them the night before from the hypermarket long after she had tucked his three children into bed, a kiss for each forehead.

     Two rooms away, the television blared. Mrs Hamidi and the children were watching an Arabic drama, the volume turned up full.

     Julie took out the ice cream and placed it on the counter. She peeled the lid of the butterscotch carton. If Mrs Hamidi caught her now she would go hungry, but after two years working at the villa Julie knew that was not likely on a Friday at this time – Mrs Hamidi would miss her prayers before she missed an episode of her drama. She dug in a spoon with all her might. After today, she would no longer have to worry about the Hamidis.

     Licking the spoon clean she cooled herself by the open fridge. A pile of unwashed dishes lay in the sink, along with Mr Hamidi’s emptied cup of morning kahwa. It was a week now since he had first complained of an upset stomach, and each morning Julie prepared a special coffee, brewed following an old recipe – a panacea for all ills. He would down the kahwa in a single gulp, seemingly oblivious to the tang of dirty mop water Julie mixed in. This morning he had not even grimaced and she knew this was because his mind was on the business conference in Taif. Before leaving for the airport he spoke urgently to Mrs Hamidi. Julie had no need of Arabic, she could sense the excitement in his voice. He would be gone for three days. The conference might mean a promotion, a bigger villa, even the opportunity to travel abroad.

     Julie’s own movements were restricted to brief trips to a local convenience store on the outer fringes of the mausoleum-like residential district where the Hamidis lived: row upon row of sand-coloured villas enclosed by iron gates and white concrete walls topped with gleaming shards of glass. Even on weekdays, the only sounds were the opening and closing of gates and garage doors, the low hum of expensive cars and the mewling of cats as they rummaged in the municipal rubbish bins. Some maids from the villas accompanied their kafils’ wives to shop in the souks and malls. ‘Not you though,’ Mr Hamidi had said, tracing Julie’s cheek with a finger. ‘It’ll only give you ideas of running away.’

     Mr Hamidi had Julie’s passport and residence permit. When they were alone, he told her horror stories of maids who tried to leave and of the prisons where they now languished. She would be praying for death by the end of a week in prison. Then they would kill her – slowly, painfully.

     Though Julie no longer fought Mr Hamidi, still he shackled her wrists to the tall wooden bedposts with velvet handcuffs that left no bruises. Before he mounted her, he cupped her neck in both hands and squeezed, as if testing its resistance, stopping only when she began to suffocate.

     Julie knew how a body looked heaving with its last breaths. The young woman at the orphanage who’d bled to death giving birth to a child on the floor. Later the child too, its breathing staunched by Cook with a feather pillow. It was not the first time they’d seen the matron’s eyes light up as those of another dulled, but no one spoke of such things at the orphanage. On nights after Mr Hamidi left her room Julie would dream of the maid before her – the one who, the police said, ‘lost balance and fell’ while hanging wet clothes on a washing line ten feet from the edge of a roof terrace. In her nightmares, the maid had Julie’s pointed chin and rounded cheeks. As Mr Hamidi stroked her throat he said, in the matron’s voice, ‘Silence is golden.’

 

* * *

 

The sound of the Tazaj Chicken jingle reminded Julie the television drama would soon be over. She tossed the butterscotch carton into a garbage bag, followed by the chocolate and strawberry, opened the back door and flung it into the dumpster. She took a mop from the kitchen, moved silently to the first floor, picked up the cordless phone and keyed in a number.

     One ring. Two rings.

     ‘Alloo?’ A low-pitched female voice, Anita, the neighbour’s maid.

     ‘Selamat pagi,’ Julie said, ‘It’s me. I must hurry.’

     ‘Speak quickly then.’

     ‘Meet me at the baqala.’

     A pause. ‘Now?’

     ‘Yes, now.’

     Small feet hammered the polished hardwood floors of the living room. Julie pushed the mop around the already spotless floor.

     ‘Yallah!’ Mrs Hamidi called. ‘The children want ice cream. Wash your hands first.’

     ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Julie, who went to the kitchen, opened and closed the freezer door, then returned to the living room. She waited for Mrs Hamidi to wipe her silver-framed bifocals. Brown pouches sagged under the woman’s eyes, and folds of skin bunched under her jaw as she looked down. Only five years older than Julie, she looked twice her age. Three pregnancies had turned a once slender woman into what her husband sometimes called a cow.

     ‘There is no ice cream, ma’am,’ Julie said.

     Mrs Hamidi’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean? Mr Hamidi bought some yesterday.’

     ‘There is no ice cream in the freezer, ma’am,’ Julie repeated politely.

     ‘Mama, I want chocolate!’ the eldest boy shouted.

     ‘He forgot.’ Mrs Hamidi sighed irritably. ‘Go get some from the baqala.’ A hundred riyal note crackled as she pulled it from her wallet and handed it to Julie. ‘I know the exact change.’

 

* * *

 

The baqala was quiet on Friday afternoons. Julie had met Anita there a year ago. She had worn a blue batik print scarf with a ‘Made in Indonesia’ tag, a grey abaya and black sunglasses. They had not spoken, but acknowledged each other with a nod. Sometimes their errands to the baqala overlapped. Once, Anita had let her dark glasses slip, revealing the left eye shaped like a leaf, the pupil a rich mahogany, and her right swollen to a squint, the flesh around it a dark bruise. Julie made no mention of the bruise but discreetly pushed her own white scarf behind her ear until Anita could see the bite marks.

     A week later Anita had pressed a slip of paper into Julie’s palm. ‘Call me … this number … any Friday,’ she’d whispered.

     ‘The marks on your neck,’ Anita said the first time Julie called. ‘Was it your sheikh?’

     Julie said nothing.

     ‘I understand … If you ever plan to leave Riyadh you must call me. You know what I mean.’

     Now Anita stood under the baqala’s striped green canopy as Julie approach with hurried, furtive steps.

     ‘So?’ she asked.

     ‘He’s out of Riyadh,’ Julie replied. ‘Not coming back for three days.’

     Anita nodded as though she had been prepared for this all along. ‘How much time do you have before they start looking for you?’

     ‘Ten, fifteen minutes.’

     ‘Then we must move fast.’

     Anita stepped into the store for a word with the cashier. He eyed her the way the eldest Hamidi boy looked at a bowl of chocolate ice cream.

     ‘Quick,’ Anita told Julie. They went around to the delivery dock at the back of the baqala, from where they could see the main road, which was empty save for a few parked cars, two of them white-and-orange taxis.

     ‘Good,’ Anita said. ‘The cashier was right. Did you manage to get your residence permit – your iqama?’

     ‘No. The bastard keeps it locked away.’

     ‘What about money?’

     ‘A hundred and fifty. The sheikh’s wife gave me a hundred for ice cream and the rest I took from his wallet last night. They owe me eight hundred – four months’ salary.’

     ‘Shhh! Not so loud.’

     Julie exhaled to calm herself. ‘What about the man you told me about … in Al-Batha … makes fake passports?’

     ‘He was arrested last week. All I can do is get you a bus ticket to Jeddah under my name. On the bus, do not talk to anyone. If a local asks questions, just say “Mafi Arabi”. If they try talking to you in English pretend you don’t understand. The rest I will explain when we reach the bus station. Your ten minutes are almost up.’

 

* * *

 

The taxi meter showed twenty riyals by the time they reached the Al-Batha bus terminal, a flat sandstone construction topped with a royal-blue glass dome. Wide coaches – white, orange and dark blue – stood to the left of the building, one after another, in diagonal parking spaces marked for destinations. Passengers weaved in and out of the terminal: brown-skinned Saudis in thobs, pale Lebanese businessmen in suits, red-eyed Sudanese labourers and dozens of veiled women in black. Julie waited while Anita paid the fare.

     ‘The taxi driver,’ Julie said as they headed towards the terminal’s glass doors.

     Anita glanced back at the taxi. The driver was watching them.

     ‘He kept looking at us in the rear-view mirror.’

     ‘This is Riyadh. He probably hasn’t seen a woman’s face in months.’

     ‘No. He looked at us as if he knew we were doing something illegal.’

     Anita clenched her jaw. ‘It might not be what you think.’

     ‘I know, but … ’

     ‘Stay calm. Please.’

     Anita joined the queue at the women’s counter and Julie leaned against a wall, turning her head now and then to see whether the taxi driver had followed them into the terminal. She saw him at the window. He took a mobile phone from his pocket and punched in a few numbers, but before he could raise the phone to his ear a fat Yemeni with two large suitcases caught his attention and by the time Anita returned and pushed a ticket into Julie’s hands the taxi was gone.

     ‘The bus ride to Jeddah is twelve hours and it will be past midnight when you reach the station. Stay there … in the women’s prayer room or somewhere you won’t been seen … at six o’clock, take a taxi to Qala Academy, in the Aziziyah district. It’s a school for girls. Find the headmistress there; her name is Begum Hazrat. Tell her Anita, the housemaid from Riyadh, sent you. She will help.’ The ticket cost ninty riyals, which left Julie with sixty, not enough to go anywhere else if the begum turned her away.

     As she followed Anita towards the giant orange Mercedes bus, Julie felt the eyes of the men on board watching her.

     ‘Here.’ Anita pulled out an envelope from her purse. ‘My sheikh’s gift from last month’s Eid party.’

     Inside were two purple banknotes. Five hundred. Five hundred.

     First Anita’s name, now Anita’s money? ‘Why?’ Julie asked.

     ‘Just go.’

 

* * *

 

In Begum Hazrat’s office at Qala Academy a large window opened over the volleyball court below where uniformed girls whacked a white ball over the worn net, braids and ponytails flying, flushed faces shining in the sun. Whenever a team scored loud cheers floated up into the room. The begum, a tall, square-jawed woman with laughter lines at the corners of her eyes, paid no attention to the girls as she wrote herself a note in bold, neat letters. She wore a pressed blue salwar kameez and matching silk hijab and smelled of flowers. Julie faced the begum in a straight-backed chair, aware of her own sticky, dust-covered abaya and body odour.

     ‘Do you have an iqama?’

     ‘No.’

     Begum Hazrat muttered. Then she looked into Julie’s eyes. ‘You are very lucky that you are Anita’s sister.’

     Julie stiffened, but did not correct her.

     ‘Anita saved my life once … three years ago,’ the begum said. ‘I was shopping at the ladies’ souk in Riyadh when I was overcome by severe chest pains and fell to the pavement. I heard screams and cries, but no one made a move to help, no one except this small Indonesian woman who kept patting my hand and saying, “I’m here, sister. I’m here.” Anita got her employer’s driver to help carry me to the car and drive me to hospital. A heart attack, the doctor said.

     ‘I needed an operation and afterward she came to visit me. We talked and she told me about her sister’s … that is, your … situation.’ The begum paused, giving Julie a look of appraisal. ‘Fortune is such a funny thing, isn’t it? You and your sister were practically neighbours … yet you were treated so differently.’

      The begum paused to watch the laughing girls playing volleyball.

     ‘You know,’ she said after a few moments of silence, ‘Anita was very anxious for your safety. She told me your kafil had punched her in the face when she tried to visit you. “You must go to court,” I told her. “Your sister’s employer has no right to hit you.” She was afraid for you. But her own employer, a good man on most counts, said he would have to let her go if she went about poking her nose into the neighbours’ business.’

     The begum’s face became serious.

     ‘Miss Julie. You have been very brave coming here. But I am going to ask you to be even braver.’

     Julie swallowed, her eyes widened.

     ‘What do you want me to do?’

     ‘You must surrender yourself to the Indonesian consulate. Tell them what that awful man has done to you.’

     ‘But … they’ll tell him … I’ll … go to jail. It will be his word against mine.’

     Julie remembered how frightened she had been after reading a newspaper report about a Filipina nanny accused of witchcraft. She had complained to the Labour Bureau about being underpaid. But her employer said he had found ‘talismans with demoniac symbols’ in her room, the newspaper said. The sharia court accepted his ‘evidence’ and sentenced the nanny to seventy-five lashes, after which she was deported.

     The begum poured a glass of water for Julie. ‘You must trust me.’

 

* * *

 

The begum and Julie followed the crowd through the heavy oak doors of the Indonesian consulate and into a large, air-conditioned foyer. The man at the inquiry desk wrote as the begum talked, and when the begum returned they went to a waiting room with metallic brown folding chairs where Julie lost track of time.

     ‘Assalamwalaikum, ladies,’ said the man who had spoken to the begum. ‘Mr Daud will now see you now.’

     He escorted them down a wide corridor, passing consular officials in neat suits and peci hats and plastic name-tags who paid them no attention. The receptionist stopped in front of a polished brown door and knocked twice.

     The office was small and smelled of nasi goreng. There were no windows. Mr Daud had a pockmarked face and greasy black hair. He looked up from his papers. His desk was cluttered with thick leather-bound books and documents embossed with Indonesia’s grim gold garuda.

     ‘Please sit.’ He went back to reviewing his papers.

     Julie fought a wave of nausea – the room had an oily smell.

     ‘I have studied your complaint. Everything is here in these papers. However, I need to confirm a few things.’ He looked up at Julie, his gaze direct and probing. ‘When did you come to this country?’

     ‘Fourteenth March, two years,’ Julie rasped. She fixed her eyes on the little red and white flag on Mr Daud’s desk.

     ‘A little more than two years.’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘Are you sure about the date?’

     ‘Yes. It was my first time on a plane.’

     He scribbled on a sheet of paper and took up another page, which he appeared to study carefully. ‘What was the nature of your work?’

     ‘Housework … cooking, cleaning, washing clothes.’

     ‘Did your work involve anything of a sexual nature?’

     ‘No.’

     ‘Are you sure about this?’

     ‘I am sure.’ Julie glared at him. Her cheeks burned. But if Mr Daud noticed her anger his face did not reveal it. He wrote on the piece of paper. ‘When was the first time your kafil asked you to have sex with him?’

     ‘A month after I’d started working there.’

     ‘Why didn’t you leave immediately?’

     ‘I could not. I needed the money. I took loans in Jakarta to pay the agency fees and buy my air ticket to Riyadh.’

     ‘I see … Did your employer compensate you with money when you obeyed his demands?’

     ‘No.’

     ‘Then why did you stay?’

     ‘I had to … I did not have a choice. He took away my iqama and passport.’

     Mr Daud put down his pen. ‘Are there any bruises on your body?’ he asked, drumming his fingers on the table. Julie decided she did not like Mr Daud.

     ‘No, but that’s only because I stopped fighting him … I was afraid! … I …’

     ‘Look, Miss Julie,’ said Mr Daud. ‘You must understand my position. I see cases like yours every day. Without evidence, it is simply your word against your kafil’s. If you are saying that you have been sexually abused you will need a minimum of four male witnesses to vouch for that.’

     ‘Mr Daud,’ Begum Hazrat cut in firmly, ‘there must be a way to punish this man. This young woman is clearly distraught and afraid.’

     ‘I don’t want to go to court!’ Julie cried out and, trying to fight back her sobbing, said, ‘Just let me go home!’

     Mr Daud proferred a box of tissues. She took a handful and wiped at her face. Then he showed her a slip of paper. ‘Is this your kafil’s phone number?’ he asked.

     ‘Yes, but … are you going to call him?’

      ‘Don’t look so frightened. You will not have to talk to him at any point. However, you will be able to listen to the conversation. I will put him on speaker.’

     Mr Daud dialled the number quickly and they heard the phone at the other end ringing.

     ‘Hello?’ a man’s voice said.

     ‘Asalamwalaikum. This is Daud from the Indonesian consulate in Jeddah. May I speak to Abdulrehman Hamidi?’

     ‘This is Hamidi.’

     ‘Mr Hamidi, I am calling with regard to one of your employees – a housemaid named Miss Julie …’

     ‘Jeddah?’ Mr Hamidi’s voice was loud and sounded close. ‘She’s in Jeddah? Send her back immediately!’

     ‘I have spoken with Miss Julie. Give me a good reason why I should send her back,’ Daud said.

     Mr Hamidi breathed heavily, forcing himself to remain calm.

     ‘She is bound by contract,’ he said, ‘for five years.’

     ‘Miss Julie claims you have not been paying her.’

     ‘The bitch is lying. I have receipts to prove payment.’

     ‘Receipts can be forged.’ Daud’s voice was calm, his eyes were cold.

     ‘It’s my word against hers. You should know better, habibi.’

     ‘Perhaps. But what is this about a contract? Five years you say?’

     ‘Five years.’

     Mr Daud leaned forward – there was excitement in his face now, a gleam Julie hadn’t seen before.

     ‘You are sure about this?’ Mr Daud asked.

     ‘What is this nonsense? Of course I’m sure! What …’

     ‘You see, habibi,’ Mr Daud cut in, ‘your contract may be for five years, but there is a law that overrides that.’

     Mr Hamidi fell silent. His breathing grew more rapid.

     ‘The law mandates that all Indonesian housemaids in Saudi Arabia must return to their homeland every two years to renew their visas. Your maid may have a contract for five years, but she must renew her visa. It has expired.’

     Mr Hamidi unravelled, his breathing more ragged now. ‘You are lying … I have her passport and papers! I …’

     ‘It does not matter what you have and what you don’t have. The fact is, Mr Hamidi, that Miss Julie came to Saudi Arabia two years ago. We have means of verifying this. Of course, if you insist on keeping her then I must report you to the Expatriate Administration for harbouring an illegal immigrant.’

     Only Mr Hamidi’s breathing could be heard on the speaker, and then a click, followed by the dialling tone.

     ‘I do not think your sponsor wishes to continue your contract,’ Mr Daud said, a trace of a smile on his thin, hard lips. ‘Now just a few formalities remain …’

 

* * *

 

‘You have a very interesting name,’ said the factory manager. ‘Fatiha. Do you know what it means?’

     ‘It means “inception”.’ She had chosen it for herself, from the first chapter of the Qur’an.

     The manager’s smile was friendly. ‘You can start tomorrow morning at eight-thirty.’

     The journey to the factory from the Muslim women’s shelter in Jakarta, a new concrete-block building in the neighbourhood of her old kampong took an hour by bus. She worked with sixty other women, sewing buttons on shirts and dresses with machines that pierced the fabric at breakneck speed. The work was tedious and intricate, straining her eyes and back. But she was paid every week.

     When she was not working, she prayed. There were many women like herself in the shelter, women who tossed and turned on their wooden cots at night, who spoke little of their pasts. Suicide was not uncommon. But rather than embrace death, she contemplated a life that had been given back to her.

     Once a week a few of the factory women took a bus to a beach where they talked, ate ice cream and watched children playing in the shallows.

     Fatiha watched the sun take into the sea some of the day’s sweltering heat and closed her eyes looking deep into herself, and said a prayer for a girl named Julie.