Afgar had lost her parents so long ago she had no recollection of them at all. They’d had no time to enjoy their marriage and contemplate the joy of spending their lives together before they’d fallen prey to cholera and entrusted nine-month-old Afgar to her maternal grandmother. It was with this grandmother that she had lived when she was not being passed back and forth from house to house between her paternal uncles, paternal aunts and maternal aunts. She had no maternal uncles. When she was five, her grandmother passed on as well, leaving her care to the world. The events following her grandmother’s death were still vivid in her memory. She had no recollection of anything before that, just a handful of faint, meaningless images, whereas those incidents were clear in her mind. They were not particularly pleasant. The rearing of Afgar had been a thorny problem for her relations. If she had had only one uncle or one aunt, then, as they say in Persian, qahr-e-darvesh barjan-e-darvesh – a poor man’s rage hurts no one but himself – and they would consider Afgar their own responsibility and put up with her. But she had three maternal aunts and two paternal uncles, and thus her custody turned into a protracted battle between all parties. Her mother’s relations claimed that, since Afgar’s father’s property had gone to his brothers, it was they who should care for the child. After all, it wasn’t just a matter of today: who would shoulder her wedding expenses tomorrow? If it were just a question of food and clothing, she was welcome to those just as the other children were. But the paternal uncles would retort that the maternal aunts had spirited household items, dowry, clothing and jewellery out of the home as their sister lay dying, and now they should take on the girl as well. In this way, for four years, Afgar was transferred from one city to another, one home to another, one aunt to another and one uncle to another, and no one was able to come to a decision as to her permanent abode. Everywhere she was treated with the same negligence. No one was about to get overly attached and end up stuck with her. Yes, occasionally, an aunt would sit her by her side and tell her tales of her mother: about her beauty, her talents, her lovely manners, her good taste. But since they often mixed in barbs about Afgar’s own uselessness, she was painfully aware of her own deficiencies whenever she was told about her mother. Like many neglected children, she was conditioned by her suffering to always know who preferred what sort of behaviour from her. If she knew that a certain aunt expected her to cry, her eyes would well up with tears, and when everyone around saw tears in the eyes of the motherless child, they felt morose themselves, and Afgar would quietly slip away. None of her relatives treated her badly. Now and then they might give her a few slaps while treating their own children gently. But no one considered her deserving of love and affection either. She got herself out of bed each morning, changed her own clothes once a week, combed her hair now and then, or just went to school as she was. She’d come home from school and wander about in the lanes or parks with her cousins, or alone. At night, she slipped into bed with one of the women servants and listened to her tales. One would have thought that, between the fickleness of her relations and her nomadic existence, her studies would have been ruined. But somehow, whichever school she went to, whether she stayed two months or as many as six, she soon rose to the top of her class, so no one felt the need to remove her from school. And anyway, the District School Board didn’t take fees until middle school. When it came down to it, it was better for this burdensome child to spend half the day outside the house. Thus, Afgar continued to go to school, and after school she spent her empty afternoons and long evenings wandering about. If ever she happened to lay eyes upon something frightening or disturbing in the course of her wanderings, she never spoke of it at home. She enjoyed no camaraderie with anyone. If she was fond of anyone amongst her herd of cousins, it was Mansoor. Mansoor was the son of Barey Chacha – her eldest uncle, Ahmed Khan. Many years later, in the solitude of her bed or wandering through a serene grove, Afgar asked herself what had drawn her to Mansoor. He was handsome, but others were handsome as well. He was possessed of such innocence that the mysteries of his personality were beyond her understanding. So what was it that had attracted her to Mansoor, and that too at an age when she was barely conscious? It was the sort of love one might generally feel at that stage in life towards siblings or parents, or for one’s lover a few years later. Over the course of all her jumbled wandering, she had grown fond of Mansoor, and for this reason that emotion became a vehicle for diverse and sometimes contradictory elements: it contained the devotion one might feel for an elder, the friendship of a peer and the bashfulness of a lover. Mansoor held a prominent position among all his cousins due to his simplicity and sweetness. Perhaps it was this prominence that drew Afgar to him, and over time, the attention she paid him acquired the same stormy force as a flood that suddenly breaks its bounds. The entire family soon came to know of her fondness for him, and everyone watched this tendency of hers with an amusement tinged with seriousness. But for the past year, Afgar had lived with her youngest uncle, Murad Khan. Murad Khan’s wife had died suddenly, leaving behind a five-year-old boy. Perhaps because his son Navin was now motherless, or perhaps because he was now freed from his wife’s influence, Murad Khan had brought Afgar to live with him on a permanent basis. As an Excise Inspector, he had an excellent income and was thus well-to-do, living in a handsome five-room house on the banks of the river in his city. He had hired an ayah to look after the children, and Afgar’s other uncles and aunts at last breathed a sigh of relief.Excerpted with permission from Wandered the Traveller, Nisar Aziz Butt, translated from the Urdu by Daisy Rockwell, HarperCollins India.