"July Sun" – short story: an encounter in the sugar cane

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Ghulam Ali pushed his way through the sugar-cane. It was quiet and still except for the anxious scuttling of insects around his feet. He squatted down, and the stems closed in around him when he untied his shalwar to urinate. It was then that he heard something. The cane, cracking underfoot. He stood up. In the distance he saw a shock of bright red. He might have mistaken it for a bee‑eater, hovering, snapping at a dragonfly, but a light wind moved through the cane and the fabric of a red dupatta flew up.

Ghulam Ali flushed. It was a girl. He wasn’t the kind of man to leer at young women relieving themselves in the fields. He turned to leave, hoping to disappear before she discovered him, but then he heard a voice calling out. A man’s voice, but there was no one else in sight. Just the girl. He heard the man again. Where was he? Was he laughing? He stopped, reluctant to leave the girl alone, concerned for her safety now. He squinted through the thick stems. She stood with her back to him, the red dupatta rippling about her narrow shoulders. Ghulam Ali craned his neck, and it was then that he saw him. It wasn’t a man but a boy, and he was walking toward the girl. He was tall and gangly, and his long hair fell in his eyes. Ghulam Ali felt the muscles in his neck tighten. The boy stopped before the girl and tilted his head. The girl lifted her face to him. As their lips touched, a stillness came over them even as the cane swayed and the dupatta wrapped itself around them.

Ghulam Ali whipped his head around to see if anyone else was there, but the fields were deserted at this time of day. Then the girl turned around. He froze. Had she heard him? She scanned the grass. He blinked—was that Zeenat? It was Zeenat. He took a step back and stumbled, falling into the long grass. He was breathing heavily. He pulled himself up, his hands gripping the sugarcane stalks, and he looked for them, the lovers, but like ghosts they had disappeared. He scrambled through the field back to his truck parked on the roadside.

*

The empty truck rattled along the road. It was desolate here by the orange groves. A few more kilometers and he would reach the Indus Highway. He’d have to push on through the night to get to Karachi in time to collect the shipment of fertilizer and engine parts waiting for him. It would be another three days before he returned home to his village. As contracts went, it wasn’t a bad one. Better than the jobs that took him from Karachi to Peshawar, that kept him on the road for weeks at a time. Jobs he’d once been grateful for in the days after his mother’s death, when all he had to return to in the village was an empty house. But now there was Shehr Bano. Bano. Waiting for him. He hated that he’d spent most of the five months of their marriage on the road, away from home, away from her.

He glanced at his side mirror. He had put at least four kilometers between himself and the young couple, but he still felt uneasy. He turned the volume up on the cassette deck. He bore down on the accelerator and tried to put them out of his mind, but the picture of the lovers in the sugarcane kept returning. His throat felt dry every time he thought of them. They couldn’t have expected anyone from the village to see them at this time of day, in the midafternoon heat, so far from the village, or they wouldn’t have taken such a risk. It was foolish, reckless. Perhaps they didn’t care? The thought shocked him. Zeenat had shocked him. An unmarried girl, an illicit meeting . Illicit relations, even. Perhaps. He colored. Zeenat’s mother was a respected woman in her clan; both of Zeenat’s sisters had married into a Syed family, and her brother worked for the village head and had authority enough to report directly to the local landlord. And here she was, shaming them.

Perhaps it was someone else he’d mistaken for Zeenat? But he’d know Zeenat anywhere, her plump, heart‑shaped face, her pale brow. He thought of the couple walking through the fields, hidden in the tall stems, and felt somehow both aroused and disgusted all at once. He had to stop the truck. His heart beat fast. He reached for his canteen and sipped slowly, trying to keep calm. He wondered what Shehr Bano would say. She would be horrified, hurt—ashamed, even, of Zeenat’s behavior. She and Zeenat were close. Like sisters. They had grown up together. As girls they had walked back and forth from school each day, just as they now, daily, walked to the water pump together. He wiped his mouth, troubled. Shehr Bano must know about the boy, the meetings. Or at least there was a chance, a very good chance she did, wasn’t there? He swallowed. He needed air. He jumped down from the cab.

The road was quiet. He stalked around the truck, his arms folded. The colors of the paintings on its sides were bright in the sunlight. The two‑axle Bedford had seen more of the country than he had, hauling grain, canisters of gas, even crates of small arms from Karachi up to the treacherous mountain paths in the north. Now it was his. And with it came freedom from home, from the village. He didn’t think about it very often, how easy it was for him to come and go. To roam. He thought of Zeenat. The women in the village rarely crossed its perimeter unless they were with their men who had to work in the fields. Shehr Bano had visited relatives in other towns once or twice in her life. She went out alone only when she had to, to fetch water or collect firewood; she never just wandered outside the village, which would be both unseemly and unsafe. And yet Zeenat had ventured out, walked five kilometers along broken back roads, through the fields, fearful all the while, he imagined, of being seen, of being caught. It seemed so unlike her. He thought of the way she sloped through the village trying not to be noticed. She was so quiet, often just nodding shyly when people greeted her. If something Shehr Bano said made her laugh, she would hold the end of her dupatta to her mouth and laugh silently into it. And yet there was that exchange he’d overheard one day between them, as he sat in the courtyard.

“Aren’t you going to help me with my pail, you lazy wretch?” Shehr Bano had said.

“I would, but you look like you could do with the exercise.”

“Watch your mouth,” Shehr Bano said.

“Seems to me it’s true what they say about you married women—your men like you big, which is why you all go from this . . . to this.”

Shehr Bano snorted with laughter, and he could only imagine the gesture Zeenat had made. He’d slipped into their room before the women came into the courtyard so they wouldn’t know he’d heard them, which was sure to alarm and embarrass them. That they were raucous, lewd even, discomfited him, but he had wondered if he would ever say something that made Shehr Bano laugh like that. Zeenat. So diffident, so circumspect, he had thought. But what could you really know of a person you glimpsed through doorways, with whom you exchanged only the most formal of pleasantries, or of any woman in the village who wasn’t one of your own?

When Shehr Bano—it was still difficult for him to think of it—lost their baby in the early weeks of pregnancy, it was Zeenat who came to sit with her in the evenings. He would leave them alone to talk, finding a perch by the doorway. It struck him as strange that he and Shehr Bano had made and lost a child before they’d even had their first argument. His sorrow was so unexpected, and his uncertainty as to whether it was fair to speak of it made him long for his mother, certain she would have soothed them both. When he heard Zeenat’s voice drifting across the stillness of the courtyard, he realized she knew how to comfort Shehr Bano as he did not.

She was a good girl. Just young. So was the boy. They were young, and young people did foolish, thoughtless things, didn’t they? And wasn’t it natural when you were in love to want to see your beloved? Wouldn’t you do anything to see him? Risk your life, even. That was how he felt about Shehr Bano. He thought of her thick eyebrows, her frizzy hair, and the smile that showed off all her teeth. He thought of the way she stomped through the village rather than swaying like the other girls, how she talked far too much, everyone thought so, how her inquisitiveness, her persistent nature should tire him out but didn’t. And he wondered if he would lose his mind if he were kept from seeing her, like Ranjha in the stories he’d heard growing up. He colored at the comparison between himself and Ranjha. But he was pleased, too, to have thought of it. Although he’d never said so to Shehr Bano, he knew he loved his wife just as heroes in poems loved their heroines, as Ranjha loved Heer: madly, madly, madly.

Perhaps Zeenat was this young man’s Heer, his Laila? Even so, they shouldn’t have been out in the fields. It was still wrong. And if he had seen them, it was possible others had as well. He would tell Shehr Bano to explain to Zeenat that no matter what they felt, they couldn’t do what they were doing. Zeenat would listen to Shehr Bano. And if she still felt so strongly, perhaps, in time, they could help, they could speak to the family on behalf of the boy. If things were handled appropriately, the couple might have the chance to be as happy as he was. That was it, he decided. He and Shehr Bano would speak to Zeenat’s mother when he got home. He would never have considered doing such a thing before, but he was a man with a family now, someone to be taken seriously. And having so much made him feel generous.

He looked up at the metal cowling above the truck’s windshield, glinting gold in the sun, twisting around a series of paintings. Set in the pink of a romantic sunset was an impression of Buraq, the steed that had carried the Prophet to heaven and back and shown him the wonders of Paradise. Buraq soared as the sun dipped behind him. And Ghulam Ali felt uplifted; perhaps a celestial trip wasn’t that far beyond his own reach.

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An excerpt from the story “July Sun” from the collection, July Sun by Aamina Ahmad . Copyright © 2026 by Aamina Ahmad. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.