give it a suitable alluring subheading in three to four words   "“So one day I asked my mother about [my father]. How was it that she had given birth to me without a father? First she beat me. Then she brought a woman who was carrying a small knife or may be a razor blade. They cut off a piece of flesh from between my thighs.”  
In this brief yet revealing passage, Firdaus recounts to her doctor the harrowing experience of female circumcision suffused with gruesome imagery that reflects the indelible impact on her psyche. The leitmotif of this traumatic experience reverberates throughout the text, resurfacing each time she attempts to forge intimate connections. As Firdaus takes the doctor through her childhood memories, she describes a playful encounter with a boy named Muhammadain, in which she experiences a sharp sensation of pleasure. However, this fleeting moment of joy is soon extinguished by the surgery that her mother performs on her. The removal of a piece of flesh from between her thighs irreparably alters her ability to experience sexual pleasure and form meaningful relationships with others. A sense of disappointment and disconnection characterizes Firdaus’s subsequent interactions with men as her trauma continues to haunt her and impede her ability to trust and connect with others. Throughout the novel, she struggles to reconcile her desire for intimacy with her need for independence. Her experiences with her uncle, the schoolteacher, her husband, and her clients in the prostitution business illustrate the various phases of her evolving desires and the conflicts and contradictions that animate her innermost yearnings. As she narrates, “At first it was like pleasure, a pleasure akin to pain. It ended with pain, a pain that felt like pleasure. It belonged to a distant past, had been with me somehow right from the beginning.”   Her Eros, or erotic desire, is dislocated from its Cartesian moorings, subject to the whims and vicissitudes of external forces that threaten to unmoor it from any semblance of stability or security. As Nausheen Ishaque (2019) says that many critics are of the “view that it is Firdaus’ experience of the circumcision which proves to be her primordial trauma. The phenomenon deprives her of something the quest of which shapes and conditions her destiny.”  
