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abandoned their air of play to assume a solemn pose. All of the women were still seated, most of them with handkerchiefs clutched in their hands, stemming a steady flow from eyes and noses, or holding them up against their faces, like veils, to cover the sobs that made shoulders heave and hands slap against knees. The zakira ’s voice was now a high-pitched kind of keening and her listeners responded to each of her barely intelligible words—words to a story so familiar that clarity was unnecessary—with the rise and fall of their own sobs, a mournful kind of duet.
    Just as suddenly as the crying had begun, it was over. The zakira ’s voice, raised to a fevered climax, was muffled by the hand that she wiped over her face, murmuring again, “Allahuma sale ala Muhammad w’ale Muhammad.”
    And then another ritual began, the one my cousins had come running inside for. As the women stood up, a voice called, “Husain, Husain!”—that beloved name—and a circle formed in the center of the room as another woman opened another tattered notebook and began to sing. Not sing, recite, my mother would later correct me. The others took up the pulse of her melody, beating their chests with open hands in a rhythmic thud that sounded deeper than claps and somehow more powerful. Jaffer waved all the children forward, and I saw them push their way around taller bodies to the center of the circle, where I already stood with my mother. I watched them, my cousins, as they strained to pull collars and necklines aside and lower, to maximize the exposure of the skin on their chests, before joining enthusiastically in the chorus and the accompanying beat. I hesitated, my hand hovering awkwardly, flailing against my chest in a pale imitation of the confident pounding going on all around me.
    The stridently mournful song, or noha, was over soon. And in the space of time it took for my mother to step forward, a notebook of her own in hand, the chest-beating continued to the sound of that name again, “Husain, Husain! Ya Husain! Masloom Husain! Shaheed Husain!” A leader called the words out and the others echoed her chants in a practiced rhythm that was familiar to all.
    My mother would begin her signature noha in a voice soft and sweet at first, thick with the same emotion I saw reflected on the women’s faces around her, then strengthening as the first verse shifted into the second—tender grief giving way to crescendos of fierce anguish, the beat of hands against chests strengthening in response, matching her cadence. The words of the song were rhythmic and rhyming, a loftier version of the Urdu we spoke daily. But it was her voice that set my mother’s noha apart. None of the many that followed her recitations could match her expression. Now, the chanting in between the noha s grew more furious, more frantic, and more complicated as the morning progressed. After the last, the women at the center of the crowd became frenzied. The younger women and my cousins used two hands now, instead of one, reddening the exposed skin on their chests. The beat of their hands, no longer accompanied by song, hard and loud as that of a drum, could not be mistaken for some variant form of clapping now.
    A voice shouted, “ Hai, Sakina!,” another beloved name, the name of a child violently bereft of her father, thirsty and hungry and lost in a world indifferent to her suffering.
    “Hai, pyas!” the others replied, their voices desperate, grief-stricken, claiming her thirst as their own.
    Oh, Sakina, oh thirst, my mother shook her head, wiping tears from her eyes. After Sakina’s father, Husain, was murdered in prayer, before her thirst was quenched, the enemy descended upon the women and children of the camp, looting and burning. They slapped Sakina’s cheeks, snatching the earrings off her ears without undoing the clasps, so that her earlobes were torn and bloodied. They snatched away the veils of her mother and aunts, dishonoring the women of the