![]() ![]() The shadows of the children playing marbles and thumping each other grew long and spiky. For a while, an hour and a half, though she did not know it, until the men came in from the fields trailing dust and slapping their stomachs, Rupban clutched Cheepy-cheepy's limp and bony neck and said only "Coming, coming" to all inquiries about the bird. She put aside those things that had occurred to her. For seven months she had been ripening, like a mango on a tree. ![]() She pulled some more feathers and watched them float around her toes. And tomorrow I will have only boiled rice, no parathas." "Cheepy-cheepy, you are old and stringy," she said, calling the bird by name as she always did, "but I would like to eat you, indigestion or no indigestion. She was plucking a chicken because Hamid's cousins had arrived from Jessore and there would be a feast. Rupban squatted on a low three-legged stool outside the kitchen hut. An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen's life began-began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly-her mother, Rupban, felt an iron fist squeeze her belly. ![]()
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