Purdah 1 One day they said she was old enough to learn some shame. She found it came quite naturally. Purdah is a kind of safety. The body finds a place to hide. The cloth fans out against the skin much like the earth that falls on coffins after they put dead men in. People she has known stand up, sit down as they have always done. But they make different angles in the light, their eyes aslant, a little sly. She half-remembers things from someone else’s life, perhaps from yours, or mine – carefully carrying what we do not own: between the thighs a sense of sin. We sit still, letting the cloth grow a little closer to our skin. A light filters inward through our bodies’ walls. Voices speak inside us, echoing in the places we have just left. She stands outside herself, sometimes in all four corners of a room. Wherever she goes, she is always inching past herself, as if she were a clod of earth and the roots as well, scratching for a hold between the first and second rib. Passing constantly out of her own hands, into the corner of someone else’s eyes . . . while the doors keep opening inward and again inward.