The long wooden pestle hit her stomach for the seventh time. After the fourth, she had known that the baby had died. Once that thought had faintly registered in her mind, she had stopped crying. All her broken heart and damaged body could now do was grunt, with her arms loosely wrapped around her stomach as if to protect the soul of her dead girl from the fate she would have faced. She knew it had been a girl, for it was the reason the blows landed on her, now for the eighth and the ninth time.
She didn't deserve a name, her husband had said. She had had one, though the name her mother used to call her by was long forgotten. In the language of their elders, there was no feminine gender. 'She' was a soulless, genderless 'it', standing in for all the 'her's. Womanhood reduced to diktats from the elders, to two-thousand-year old traditions maintained in pristine condition.