Stay, Daughter

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.