Travelling alone from the isolated mountain village where he was born, tribesman Qasim stumbless across a lost, orphaned child.
Unable to abandon her to an inevitable fate, he names her Zaitoon, and brings her up as his daughter in the glittering, bustling, city of Lahore. Lovingly raised in the colourful chaos of that exotic city, Zaitoon is content in her new life. Yet, as the years pass, Qasim grows nostalgic about his life in the mountains. Impulsively, he promises Zaitoon in marriage to a man of his tribe, and in her romantic imagination the fifteen-year-old girl sees a region of tall, light-skinned men who roam the Himalayas like gods.
As bride to one of Qasim's 'lawless' primitive tribesmen, Zaitoon is condemned to a harsh existance in the barren hills of the Himalayas, a life of utter subjugation, where beating are common and humiliation constant. For a girl from the city it is hard to accept and, only when her very life is at stake, will Zaitoon find a means of escape from which there is no return.
Born in Karachi and brought up in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa, a graduate of Kinnaird College for Women, now lives in Houston. Sidhwa held a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, and received the prestigious Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award. She has taught at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College and Southampton University. She has been awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest national honour in the arts.
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