In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Faria Basher’s story is the winning entry from Asia.

When my eye fell out of its socket, I called for my mother.

‘Ma! Ma! What’s happening to me?’ I cried.

She came running into the room from the kitchen, flustered, knife still in hand from chopping onions. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. She seemed annoyed that I had interrupted her flow of work. It took her a second to look down at the floor, where my eyeball lay. ‘Oh! Oh God forgive us!’

Ma couldn’t bring herself to touch it; she picked up my eye using two spoons. We weren’t really sure what to do with the eyeball, so we plopped it in the bag of frozen peas she used to make pulao. The entire time I kept one hand over the hole in my face.

We called my father, who was at work. Ma put him on speakerphone so I could explain what had happened.

‘My eye fell out!’ I said.

My father came home immediately. Ma was in hysterics, pacing back and forth, phoning family and friends and friends of friends who might know what was happening to me.

–

The day started off like any other. My father was the first to rise. As usual, he woke the rest of the household with his loud retching over the bathroom sink. Ma got up soon after, heading to the kitchen to heat up leftover daal and cook fresh roti for our breakfast. Sometimes, if I was especially hungry, I asked her for a fried egg. I didn’t that day.

I remembered watching my father that morning as he flagged down a rickshaw and climbed onto it. Off he went to work. After he was gone, I played some songs on the harmonium. Ma was in a good mood and came in to watch me for a bit. She always said my singing calmed her, although I could think of a few instances throughout my life when the sound of my voice had driven her berserk.

It was a few hours later, while I was preparing for the visit of a student, when the eye fell out.

My father took us to the family doctor – a stocky, talkative man we had been visiting ever since I was twelve. I think he was related to my father through some long-winded connection. A cousin of a cousin, maybe. I couldn’t be sure. I watched the two men discuss my condition, occasionally dropping in some personal anecdote or news about the extended family, but otherwise they stayed mainly on course. Ma had brought along my eye in the pea bag, which was now dripping condensation on the floor.

‘I know exactly why this is happening!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘You must take her to the marriage market!’

All attention shifted to me.

‘The market?’ Ma replied, hand over her mouth. ‘But –’

‘You’re an expiring woman,’ said the doctor, pointing at me. ‘This happens to women of a certain age, you know, to the ones that put off getting married for work or school or whatever various reasons . . .’ He trailed off and looked at my father. ‘She’s in rot now. You’ll have to take her to the market before it’s too late.’

‘How much time do we have?’ my father replied.

‘How much time do you want?’ said the doctor. ‘Thirty-four years old! Not young anymore, eh? I don’t think there’s much time at all!’

‘And the eye?’ I asked. ‘Can you put it back?’

‘I am sorry,’ replied the doctor. ‘But no, I cannot.’

The doctor gave me an eyepatch to wear and instructed me to keep the area clean. My father was quite silent in the taxi home. I asked Ma to let me sit on the left side of the car, so that I could look out the window through my one remaining eye.

‘Say something!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘Your daughter is falling apart!’

My father grunted. ‘You heard what the doctor said. She is not young anymore. Perhaps we waited too long. We should have started looking a long time ago.’

‘We can start looking now.’

‘No, no one will take a one-eyed woman. We must go to the marriage market, like the doctor said.’

That night Ma slept next to me, just in case something else happened. Restless, I kept turning towards her. In the glow of the air conditioner lights, I could see her rough outline, even with one eye. She was on her back and didn’t turn towards me.

It was so cold that night. Somehow I was simultaneously shivering and sweating. Even with the wintertime duvet I felt a chill penetrating deep into my bones. Ma seemed to be awake too.

‘Ma, what will happen to me now?’

She held my hand. ‘Don’t worry so much. Your father took the day off work tomorrow. In the morning, we will figure out what to do.’

‘Will you really take me to the market?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will I still be able to play the harmonium?’

Ma sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

When I woke in the morning, I peeled off my blanket to find that one of my legs had shrivelled up and turned black, detaching from the rest of my body just below the knee. Looking at it, I felt a strange mixture of disgust and wonder, the former because it was a ghastly sight overall, and the latter because I was amazed at my body’s capacity for self-destruction.

I thought of the house geckos in our flat. Once, some twenty-odd years ago, Ma had thrown a book at one on the wall of our living room, cutting off its tail. Ha! I finally got it! she said, rejoicing in her victory. Three weeks later, I noticed the same gecko loitering on our flat walls once again, its stubby, regrowing tail sprouting from its tiny body. I wondered if my leg would come back that way.

When my parents saw my dead, gangrenous leg, the severity of my situation must have dawned on them. My father skipped breakfast – unusual for him, as he was generally a hungry man – to schedule a house call from our family doctor. Ma phoned my grandmother, who arrived an hour later with freshly-made samosas.

‘Oh, you poor thing!’ said my grandmother, sitting next to me on the bed. ‘Look at the state of you!’

‘Hi, Nani. How are you?’

‘Oh, who will marry you now?’ she cried. She glared at my mother. ‘This is all your doing!’

Ma looked down at her feet. I grabbed a samosa from the paper bag Nani had brought with her. It was my favourite kind: filled with ground beef and perfectly crispy on the outside.

‘Amma, we didn’t know –’

‘Don’t “Amma” me! I told you how this happened to my brother-in-law’s daughter! He waited too long, encouraged her to study and work instead of settling down –’

‘Amma, how was I –’

‘– and she rotted! Expired, just like your daughter will now! You modern women, with your modern ideals. Well, look at where it’s gotten you. A one-eyed, one-legged woman no one will marry!’

I failed to see what was so modern about studying and working. The men in my life had been doing these things for decades, and many of them were very old-fashioned. I kept silent and chewed. I was very tired. Besides, despite being present, this entire conversation between mother and daughter seemed to be going on entirely in my absence. I felt I had very little to do with it.

‘She had dreams!’ Ma yelled. ‘She was an excellent harmonium player. Still is!’ She shook with emotion. ‘She’s good, she’s on TV, she’s on the radio, she makes a significant amount of money from her lessons. People are desperate to have her teach their kids, did you know that? All because I gave her that freedom, I put her in harmonium classes, I took her there every weekend! Not even her father helped . . .’

My father entered then. ‘Amma, thank you for visiting,’ he said. ‘If you ladies are done arguing, the family doctor is on his way.’ His gaze shifted in my general direction. I noticed he couldn’t quite look me in the eye. ‘Tomorrow we are taking her to the market.’

The family doctor was about an hour late. He always made us wait when we visited him at the hospital too, so this didn’t surprise me. He looked at me with an expression of pity that was simultaneously full of smugness, as though he very badly wanted to say I told you so but couldn’t. It would have been very cruel of him to do so. The doctor fitted me with a prosthetic, prescribed me some medicine and told my parents there could be no more delay. They had to take me to the marriage market immediately, or my rapid decay would result in death, probably within the next two days. Ma and Nani let out cries of pain and panic, while my father nodded stoically. I was just happy to be able to walk again, even if I did stumble here and there.

–

The following morning (fortunately, no other body parts had fallen off), Ma and my father were to take me to the marriage market. There was a certain degree of preparation required beforehand. With the help of the prosthetic leg, I was able to take myself to the bathroom to bathe. I took off my eyepatch and ran lukewarm water over my face, washing off the grime of the past two days. Once I was clean, Ma dried and styled my hair, applied heavy makeup on my face and dressed me in her finest sari. My father bought a fresh eyepatch from the pharmacy for me to wear.

The marriage market, as suggested by its name, was a gathering place where the city’s single women put themselves on display for eligible bachelors. It was located at a convention centre. Women were priced, then assigned booths on the large, sprawling floor, where men were floated freely around, conversing, and ultimately choosing their spouses. Marriages occurred on-site, and most of the men who went in alone came out with a wife of their choosing. Most people – whether that was a woman on display or a man casually browsing – were accompanied to the market by their families, who helped vet, barter, and choose the best mate for their children.

I had heard stories of the marriage market from friends and family, but these tales had always carried an element of detachment. I would never have imagined that I would become one of the market’s offerings. I suppose I was somewhat naive, in a sense, thinking I had more time.

After we arrived, my parents and I stood in line for a booth assignment. I looked around and observed – as well as I could with my one remaining eye – the hordes of women that had come to take part in this grand exchange. They were of all ages – fresh-faced, newly-adult women, middle-aged women, older women, and even the geriatric. I also noticed a few expiring women, just like me, wearing eyepatches or wigs to conceal balding heads, or using crutches.

Once we were at the front of the line, the ticketing attendant took one look at me and asked, ‘Expiring?’

‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘But it is still early, and slow. She is a very good harmonium player. You might see her on the television sometimes.’

‘And age?’

‘Thirty-four. But looks younger, doesn’t she?’

The attendant, a young boy, no older than somewhere in the mid-twenties, said, ‘She’ll need a discount sticker.’ He reached for a bright orange sticker on his desk and peeled it off its backing, stood up and reached over to stick it on my forehead.

‘What does it say?’ I asked my father.

‘Discounted.’

We went in. I was sure my parents had determined a suitable price for me, but I didn’t care to find out how much that was. I felt my value was diminishing, anyways, with the discount sticker and my missing eye and leg. Not that they were exactly missing. I knew exactly where they were (the eye was still in the pea bag, now back in the freezer, and the leg – well, my father had simply thrown it in the rubbish bin).

Ma set up the booth with photographs of me throughout the years. She also put out business cards. My father arranged a few pamphlets containing my biodata –information about my schooling, work experience, and musical achievements. I didn’t remember ever making one, so it must have been my parents’ own creation, a carefully-constructed document of my identity as it existed in their eyes. Ma positioned me at the front of the booth, shifting my limbs and adjusting my sari – the way a shopkeeper would a mannequin’s – to maximise my appeal to potential suitors.

As I stood there, watching one man after another walk past my booth, take one look at my eyepatch and quickly scurry away, I thought about what my life might look like after the market. Would I still have the freedom to sing and play the harmonium, the way I did while living with my parents? I suspected life as I knew it would be over, that my craft would have to take a backseat as I became one half of a whole, a wife to a husband, a mother to a child that would take root in my broken body. Suddenly I was overcome with emotion, a profound sadness I hadn’t let myself experience until right then. Also my legs – especially the one with the prosthetic – hurt from standing so long, and it was very hot inside the convention centre. I wept.

‘Don’t cry!’ warned my father. ‘You’ll scare off the potential suitors.’

Ma gently – and silently – wiped away my tears.

The first man to speak to my parents was a doctor-in-training. He was thirty years old and had been married once before. He said his first wife had passed away from natural causes, though it was unclear what these causes were.

‘Oh, may her soul rest in peace. When did she pass away?’ asked Ma.

‘Last week,’ replied the man.

The second man must have been older than my father. He certainly had more grey hairs than my father did. He looked at me briefly, read my biodata intently, and spent an oddly-long amount of time going over photographs of me as a teenager. He was a businessman and spent much of the year travelling.

‘What kind of business?’ asked my father.

‘Oh, you know the kind. Shipping and trading.’

My father really did not know the kind.

The third man was the only one to address me directly. I think he recognized me from my brief stints on television, which came about when a few channels asked me to perform on one of their nationally-broadcast music shows. I’d made good money like this, and used my earnings to buy my parents gifts, or finance road trips with friends.

‘Discounted, huh?’ asked the third man. ‘Ridiculous! Do they know what a star they have here?’

My father seemed to melt at this comment. ‘That’s what I told them! She’s a musical genius.’

‘Half a star now,’ I replied.

The third man looked at me. His gaze was intense and full of curiosity. ‘Time caught up to you?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I barely saw it coming.’

‘Yes, well, I suppose you wouldn’t, not with one eye.’

I laughed then. Really laughed. I appreciated someone approaching my situation with humour, although it did all still feel hopeless overall. I looked closer at the third man. He had a nice face, and a smile that was slightly off-kilter, but endearing regardless. He had the look of someone who knew something you didn’t.

The third man bought me that evening. The formalities were quick and uncomplicated. There was an uttering of words, a signing of papers, and a commitment to be with one another till death did us part. My parents hugged me goodbye as I prepared to go to my new home. By the end of the night, I felt generally optimistic about life with the third man. Or, as he was now, my husband.

–

There was kindness in the beginning. I like to remember it that way.

But marital life required some adjustment. I came to realise how much I had taken for granted throughout the years – having both eyes, legs, and the freedom that came with being an unmarried, childless woman. The truth was I was very comfortable at my parents’ home; it had never really occurred to me that said comfort was at the expense of Ma’s constant labour. More importantly, I had been very free. If, for instance, I wanted to see a friend for poori and tea in the middle of the day, I could. If I wished to watch a late-night artist showcase across the city, my father (albeit begrudgingly) would accompany me. I’d stay up till the early hours of the morning watching natoks on television or playing songs on my harmonium, and no one could tell me anything. I had a solid circle of friends whom I could count on for a good time. My life had belonged entirely to me; I had been a bird in an unlocked cage.

Now that I was on the other side of things – a wife to a man – life became very different, and I felt like I was always running out of time.

My husband was a university professor. I liked to think we had that in common, that we had both taken on educating roles in life. However, my husband taught mathematics, and as a result (or perhaps due to the fact that he was naturally drawn to mathematics), he was very formulaic in his thinking. Very exact. He wanted for us both to wake together, and for meals to be served at certain set times. He wanted the house spotless at all times, and demanded quiet when he needed to grade papers or take a nap after a long day of teaching. I failed to understand how he could live life by such rigid rules, but I soon learned that it wasn’t for me to understand at all.

I say there was kindness because my husband gave me grace, even if it was only during the initial months when I was still getting accustomed to life as his wife. He taught me certain things, like how to cook his favourite foods, wash his clothes, and how to behave when he climbed on top of me at night. He even let me play my harmonium – which my parents had dropped off along with the rest of my things – whenever I wished. In fact, he enjoyed it when I did. It was one of the reasons he had married me. When I sang, my husband would shower me with praises, telling me I had the voice of an angel. Those early days were nice, in a sense, but I wouldn’t call what laid between us love. Something resembling it, sure.

About half a year into our marriage, some of my students’ parents reached out to me about resuming my harmonium lessons. I ran the idea by my husband.

‘I deal with enough overgrown children at the university,’ he said. ‘I don’t need more in my house. Unless you want to have one of our own.’

I ignored the suggestion. ‘I could go to them,’ I counter-offered. ‘That’s what I used to do back in the day.’

‘With your one leg?’ he retorted.

I never mentioned the idea again. I couldn’t bear the thought of my students being around someone as unwelcoming as him. What he said was true. I was a half-woman, with my one leg and missing eye. But my husband had known both these things before he chose to buy me at the marriage market. What good did it do him to taunt me now? I began wondering why my husband had purchased a discounted woman like me in the first place. He was relatively young (a man’s thirty-five was very different to a woman’s thirty-five), good-looking, and he had a stable job. His family, when I met them, seemed polite and welcoming enough. Why didn’t he leave a half-woman like me to the half-men (who weren’t called half-men at all, but just men)? Sometimes I thought he liked that I was wounded – that having my shortcomings so prevalent made him feel better about his own.

It was around the eight-month mark that I became a whole woman again. One morning I woke to find that my right eye was back, as good as new. I think the new eye had even better vision than the old one. My leg, too, grew back with haste, just like the gecko’s tail from my childhood flat. It was an odd feeling, to have a functioning eye and leg after spending so long without them. It felt like a rebirth. And a death of sorts too.

My parents were overjoyed; they came over with sweets – rasgulla and sandesh, my favourites – to celebrate the occasion. ‘I knew it!’ boasted my father. ‘I knew your husband was a good match as soon as I saw him at the marriage market! Look at you, my daughter, whole again!’

–

My husband was kind, and then he was not. With men, it is always the same story.

My harmonium, which my husband had encouraged me to play, save for when he needed to sleep, became of utmost annoyance to him. ‘Keep it down, I’m grading papers!’ he’d say, or a simple, ‘Be quiet!’ If he had doted on me at first, any semblance of fondness was gone by the time we reached one-and-a-half years of marriage. The change was gradual, but it did not go unnoticed. My husband became short-tempered. He began to spend more time at the university, often staying out late with friends or colleagues. I grew suspicious, but never jealous. In a way, I felt like this man, this stranger I had married to save myself from the clutches of my body’s expiration, had always only ever been a stranger. He had never belonged to me, nor I to him. I knew that he kept a part of himself stored away in a secret place, a place that was forever out of my reach.

Once, in the dark, I asked my husband whether there was somebody else. I told him I wouldn’t be angry, and that I was only curious.

‘No,’ he said. There was just enough hesitation in his tone to let me know I wasn’t being paranoid. ‘You’re being paranoid.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes, you women are always overthinking. Now sleep.’

I imagined our marriage as an egg: flawless and smooth at first, until gradually, cracks began to appear. Who caused them, I didn’t know. I imagined the yolk of it – my husband’s secrets, my resentment towards him, our general unhappiness – oozing out of the cracks on the shell. A rotten egg, that’s what we were.

Ma came over frequently, especially towards the end. I think she could sense that I was preparing for departure. During one of her visits I lay my head down on her lap. She ran a hand through my hair and hummed one of my favourite songs. My husband was at work.

‘Ma, I’m going to leave him.’

Ma’s hand froze. ‘Leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘And go where?’

‘Back to you and my father,’ I said. ‘Won’t you have me?’

‘You’ll die,’ she said, voice quaking. ‘The rot will come back.’

‘I’ll take it, Ma.’ My face felt warm, then tears.

‘Oh, what would people say?’ cried my mother. ‘A woman of your age, if you separate from him . . . No.’ Her tone turned stern, the way it used to sound sometimes when I was a child, and refused to study. ‘This is just what marriage is,’ she went on. ‘It’s new to you, so you don’t know how it is –’

‘I don’t need to know how it is anymore.’

‘You became too used to your free-bird life, your adventurous ways . . . Always running around the city, spending time out with God-knows-who! Your father and I allowed some of it, I admit, letting you go to those concerts and make those television appearances, oh and the radio –’

‘That made me happy, Ma,’ I cried. ‘I was so happy then.’

‘When your father and I first married, I cried every night for a month. But slowly, I came to accept my situation. Soon, with time, you will do the same.’

I had always thought my parents were a happy couple. It occurred to me that there was much that Ma never told me. ‘I don’t want to do the same!’ I howled. ‘I had a good life before him. I don’t see why anything had to change!’

‘You were fading away! You were becoming half a woman!’

My tears streamed down and onto Ma’s sari. ‘I’d rather have death than this kind of life.’

Ma kept silent. She no longer hummed. She resumed running her hand through my hair, which felt very comfortable. Except for when her fingers caught in the tangles.

–

As it turned out I didn’t have to leave my husband at all. I was preparing dinner one evening, months after Ma’s visit, when he entered our home with a woman in tow. She was young. I would’ve guessed she was in her mid-twenties, at best.

‘Who is this?’ I asked him. ‘Hello,’ I said to her.

‘I’ve married again,’ said my husband. ‘I went to the marriage market and picked her up today.’

‘What?’

I had a strange experience then. As I looked at my husband, then at his new wife, then back at my husband, I left my own body and entered the woman’s. I was watching this ridiculous scenario through her eyes. What must she have thought of me, in that moment, wearing my raggedy, fraying nightgown and brandishing the wooden spoon I was using to stir the pot of daal on the stove? More importantly, what did she see in him, this man that had disappointed me in so many ways, and (though she didn’t know it) would soon do the same to her? To her, I must have seemed like the only obstacle between her and the picturesque marital life of her dreams. An angry, scorned first wife.

It was a tragic situation, but slightly comical.

‘It is time for you to leave,’ continued my husband. ‘I have brought divorce papers –’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘All right?’ he asked.

I realised my husband expected some resistance here, that perhaps I had been assigned the role of desperate wife – which I had no idea how to play. The truth was I felt no desire to stay in this home with a man who had only ever used me to alleviate the loneliness of his life. Half or whole, I decided then that I would face whatever fate lay ahead of me, whether that was a slow demise through further limb loss, or a quick, painless death as I once again became an expiring woman.

I signed the papers right there at my husband’s dining table, grateful to still have two working arms. I can’t say I felt much in the moment except for relief – a sense of weightlessness that I hadn’t experienced in many, many months. As I watched my (now ex) husband embrace his new, fresh-faced wife, I felt no anger or resentment. I only thought of what lay ahead of me.

‘You’ll die,’ said my ex-husband as I left. ‘You’ll die without me.’

That night, back at my parents’ flat, the atmosphere was one of overwhelming happiness and monstrous tragedy. We did not know how much time I had left, or what I would lose next. There was little scientific evidence as to how fading-away worked, and most women cured it by marrying. Well, we had tried that. I played the harmonium late into the night, as much as I wished, filling up our flat with the sounds of my sa-re-ga-mas.

Ma slept next to me, just like she did the night I lost my eye so many months ago, and like she often did when I was a child.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to me, just before I entered the world of dreams. ‘We should have looked into other ways to save you.’

‘It’s okay, Ma,’ I murmured. ‘You did what you could. It was all you knew.’

The next morning, and for the rest of my life, I stood on two legs, and looked at the world through fresh eyes.

Image © Anda Lupulet