AISHA
AS A CHILD, Aisha opened the carved wooden shutters each morn- ing, letting light stream in. Strings of dried fish hung from the ceil- ing, glass jars filled with healing herbs sat on the shelf, and a mortar, yellowed with turmeric, lay next to the stove. She bent over the stove to light it. Flames burst forth, reaching toward her as if she were ker- osene to feed on.
“Aisha.” Her mother’s voice made her jump. She hadn’t heard her enter the room. “You will go to school today. I’ll finish the breakfast.” Aisha turned toward her mother in shock. Her cousins were returning to school after the winter closure, but she’d assumed that
she’d stay with her mother. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” “You’d just worry yourself thinking about it.”
Her parents had always fought about school. It was the fight that caused the fire. Aisha was sure of it. Her mother’s shrill voice rose above her father’s. Her father insisted that Aisha was too young for school.
Her father was right. A year after the fire, at eight years old, Aisha still wasn’t ready for school. She should stay with her mother. She’d already learned how to mix herb tonics. When her mother delivered babies, she was there with the blankets, thermometer, whatever her mother needed. Still, there were times her mother left her alone at the house, saying she was too small to come along. Aisha would beg her mother to take her with her, but her mother only said, “You are too young to sit with death.”
How did her mother know who would live and who would die?
Aisha grew curious about the face of death, how it might look when it entered the room. She’d asked her mother once, expecting to be reprimanded. “Death is a smell you learn to breathe in,” her mother said. “I prefer not to see it, but we all find our own way with it.”
School, too, seemed far away, a blurred image. “Fetch some drinking water,” her mother said.
Aisha could not move. Her feet sunk into the ground. The argument rang in her ears. Her father had said she wasn’t ready. The fire somehow petrified his words, encased them like glass.
“Go,” her mother said firmly.
Aisha grabbed the water jug and headed out the door away from the orchard. The rising sun cast the field in yellow. The mountains surrounded them on all sides and the cottonwood trees, growing along the river, swept up to kiss the sky. Canals dotted their land, small eddies that siphoned water from the river to flood the rice paddies that terraced the hill. Walnut and apple trees grew near the house, with mulberries at the borders. Above the rice fields, the arid soil gave way to a blanket of pine trees. Up this steep trail there was a fertile swath of land where her mother grew poppies, not the few that were mixed in with their vegetables, but a field that bloomed in sum- mer, stretched between the folds in the mountain. A place she never spoke of. Aisha only went up there when she was sure her mother was far away.
She climbed over a fallen log and then hopped over a remaining patch of snow, arriving at the spring where the water bubbled up. Her reflection stared back, her long brown hair hung around her face, still messy from sleep. She had her mother’s full lips and father’s dimpled chin. She stood up tall, spreading her lanky arms so her re- flection reached the other side, then filled the jug to the top and turned back toward home.
The wind blew gently as she crossed through the apple trees. The branches swooped toward her, daring her to climb up into them as she always had with her father. During the harvest, he’d lifted her up into the branches so she could climb to the top and get the apples. The sour taste exploded in her mouth as she ate the ones with worm- holes, tossing the best ones into baskets. He’d taught her to recognize the signs of moths nesting in the leaves and how to prune in the fall so the trees wouldn’t get sick.
They’d always fished in the river together. Her father taught her to cast into the eddies, where the fish gathered in the evening. In the mornings, they clustered in the still water. Once, Aisha had landed a fish all by herself. Her father unhooked it and squeezed the belly of the fish, causing a stream of translucent eggs filled with red-eyed fish to pop out. They had caught the mother. Her father threw her back in the water and said, “Better let this one go, and eat the children when they grow up.”
Every time Aisha caught a fish in the river, she knew it was one of the babies, all grown-up, something her father left behind for her. But now the fish were getting harder to catch. There were fewer and fewer of them. Soldiers on both sides of the border caught the moth- ers, as if they’d never learned the right way to fish, or how to care for a river.
She closed her eyes, attempting to push away the image of her fa- ther’s face—the crinkle that formed at the corner of his eyes when he laughed, the bristle of his beard against her cheek when he hugged her. Aisha was forbidden from mentioning her father and the fire.
She’d spoken of him once and could still feel the sting from her mother’s slap. “He will never come back.” His absence settled around them, bright like the sun at noon, something that illuminated every- thing, but couldn’t be directly looked at.
Excerpted from CALL HER FREEDOM by Tara Dorabji. Copyright 2025 © by Tara Dorabji. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
A sweeping family saga following one woman’s struggle to protect her culture and her family amidst the backdrop of a military occupation.
In the foothills of the Himalayas, the picturesque mountain village of Poshkarbal is home to lush cherry and apple orchards and a thriving community—one divided by a patrolled border. Aisha and her mother Noorjahan live on the outskirts—two women alone in a world dominated by men. As the village midwife, Noorjahan teaches Aisha how to heal using local herbs and remedies. Isolated but content, Aisha is shocked when Noorjahan decides it is time for her to attend the village school as few girls do. Despite the taunting of her classmates and the teacher’s initial resistance to having her in the class, Aisha becomes a star student, destined for college.
When Aisha’s hand is bequeathed to a local boy in the village, she is forced to abandon her dreams of college. She comforts herself by staying on her ancestral land, creating a nourishing life with her children and husband. But her mother’s secrets come back to haunt her and her marriage and the growing military presence in Poshkarbal force Aisha to make impossible choices in order to save her family and preserve the independence Noorjahan fought for. What follows is a family chronicle brimming with life, love, and humor, about sacrifice and honor, and fighting for your home and culture in the face of occupation.
A deeply moving novel about one woman’s love for her family, this is an epic investigation of colonialism, militarization, and the loss and innocence on the journey to creating home. Spanning 1969 to 2022, Call Her Freedom is a love story that untangles family secrets and heals generational wounds, announcing Tara Dorabji as a thrilling new voice in fiction.
Military | Historical [Simon & Schuster, On Sale: January 21, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9781668051658 / eISBN: 9781668051672]
A Bitter Sweet Illusion
Tara Dorabji is the author of the novel, Call Her Freedom, The Books Like Us Grand Prize Winner, which is available for pre-order at Simon and Schuster. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA, including the Jaipur International Film Festival. Awards include Asia’s Best Independent Documentary Film at the All Asia Independent Film Festival 2020 & Best Short Documentary at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. Tara's publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors & All the Women in My Family Sing. A creative entrepreneur, she co-founded a family of organizations that demonstrate the power of artists to change the world. She worked with teams to raise over $50 million, resourcing artists and culture bearers as changemakers. An adept public speaker and facilitator, Tara presents regionally and globally on topics including systems change, cultural strategy, radical resource redistribution & storytelling. She lives in Northern California with her family and rabbit.
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