Fiction: Three women return to Chennai from the Gulf looking to reunite with their loved ones

Ameera was told she would leave prison today. She signed wherever the female Dubai prison official asked her to, scribbling her name down in Arabic, her hands trembling. Then she found a chair and sat down wordlessly. The clock on the wall across the room read five minutes to six. They had informed her yesterday that officials from the Indian embassy would come to see her at six.

Beyond the undrawn curtains the sun was beating down hard. Summer. It wouldn’t grow dark till 7.30. She looked at the telephone on the table and almost instantaneously banished the thought. They certainly wouldn’t allow it. What if I get into trouble for asking to make a call, why mess it up just as I am about to leave? She tried to resist the thought again. But she just could not stop thinking about her five-year-old, Saif.

Even as her fingers worked the tasbih beads, her mind was racing. She didn’t know what the papers she’d signed said she couldn’t read. She knew just about enough Arabic to sign her own name. Was the woman official right? Was she really about to be released? Had her mercy petition been accepted? Had the Indian embassy official who’d been…

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