We did not stay in our houses. Not in the way our grandmothers had,
or our mothers. We went out a little more and veiled ourselves a little
less. Some of us longed for more learning and dreamed about leaving home
to get it. The elders shook their heads and cautioned: too much
education could ruin a girl's future.
To be a Muslim girl in the Sri Lanka of the 50s and 60s was to have to
stay inside once you hit puberty; where even a glimpse of flesh was
forbidden; and where things were done the way they'd always been done.
But Yasmin Azad's family is full of love, humour and larger-than-life
characters, despite the strictures half of them were under. And almost
despite himself, Yasmin's father allows her an education - an education
that would open the whole world to her, even as it risked closing her
off from those she was closest to.
An extraordinary portrait of a time and a community in the midst of
profound change, Stay, Daughter vividly evokes a now-vanished world,
but its central clash - that of tradition and modernity - is one that
will always be with us.
