Summary

At the outset of Sunlight on a Broken Column, Laila was living with her grandfather, Baba Jan, and her aunts, Aunt Abida and Aunt Majida, who observed purdah. After her parents’ death, when Laila was orphaned, she became the ward of Baba Jan. In Chapter 1, of Part One, Baba Jan’s health was failing and Laila and her cousin, Zahra, “felt [their] girlhood a heavy burden” in the house (14). They worried that after their grandfather’s death, their futures would be uncertain, without a family patriarch to support them. In Chapter 2, on Laila’s fifteenth birthday, the young girls are asked to join a family meeting, at Aunt Abida’s behest. She believed that Laila was not at liberty to choose their own husband, but she wanted her to be “present while [they made] the choices, [to] hear [their] arguments...