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2000s: A young woman defies convention in a small Pakistani village, with devastating results for her and her family.
No Honour
What you need to know before your trail
In sixteen-year-old Abida’s small Pakistani village, there are age-old rules to live by, and her family’s honour to protect. And, yet, her spirit is defiant and she yearns to make a home with the man she loves.
When the unthinkable happens, Abida faces the same fate as other young girls who have chosen unacceptable alliances – certain, public death. Fired by a fierce determination to resist everything she knows to be wrong about the society into which she was born, and aided by her devoted father, Jamil, who puts his own life on the line to help her, she escapes to Lahore and then disappears.
Jamil goes to Lahore in search of Abida – a city where the prejudices that dominate their village take on a new and horrifying form – and father and daughter are caught in a world from which they may never escape.
Travel Guide
Booktrail it to Pakistan and Lahore
Moving from the depths of rural Pakistan, riddled with poverty and religious fervour, to the dangerous streets of over-populated Lahore, No Honour is a story of family, of the indomitable spirit of love in its many forms … a story of courage and resilience, when all seems lost, and the inextinguishable fire that lights one young woman’s battle for change.
Khan Wala village
Women have no freedom and get points for various levels of freedom such as one point for managing to roam the village without a male escort and ten points if you managed to marry for love. The latter, we are told, rarely happens.
The village is remote and segregated, a prison for the women who live there, or rather those who exist and are controlled there.
Lahore
A huge contrast to show the difference of the teeming and often dusty city. Life here is not that much different for women from the countryside. They are controlled and have no freedom. They just realise more what life is like outside of a woman’s prison.
“Unlike the village, where women were very much a fixture of street life, the city was strangely empty of them. Maybe it was the dirty stares from the pot-bellied men that keot them indoors.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: No Honour
Destination/location: Pakistan, Lahore Author/guide: Awais Khan Departure Time: 2000s
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