Chapter 3

Stuffed to the full with food, Amatullah dragged herself away from the washing up, and up into her rainbow coloured room, where her laptop was kept. She got there in a huff, out of breath and tired from merely climbing a few steps. Woaaah! I really need to stop eating so much! She thought to herself, clutching her tummy. Weird thing was, she wasn’t actually fat, or at the very least bit chubby, even though she ate so much. She stayed stick thin, never putting on an ounce of weight, and could often feel the envious glares she got at her college when she crammed herself with yummy things to eat, and it didn’t shift her weight.

Smiling, she pulled up the laptop, carefully pressing the ‘on’ button. The last time she had practically banged it on, it had broken, and there was no way she could switch it on after that. Talk about depressing. She had been bored out of her mind, not knowing what to do. She had begged her parents to get her a new one, but they had callously denied, stating it was her own fault, and that she shouldn’t have jumped on it like she was going to get married to it.

Her comp flashed on, demanding her password – a lot of sneakiness and going through people’s things was headline news at this house – and she typed it in, waiting patiently for the sunset wallpaper to make an appearance.

To keep herself occupied, she instead looked at the familiar room that she was sitting in now. The peeling wall paper seemed to come alive as it slowly unattached itself from the wall and fell to the floor. The ceiling, with its brown stains bore cracks from the occasional moody door banging session that took place nearly every day. Her table was piled ceiling high with books, mostly novels, which she had either already read like four times and was reading for her fifth, or waiting to read. The floor – a dark green carpet – was the only place that didn’t show signs of the aged house. She stared at it, mesmerised by the swirly -yet-soft texture that was so comforting to her touch.

Finally, she saw the much loved wallpaper on her computer screen, and immediately went on Mozilla Firefox and typed in the Google search engine: Niqab