This last day, devoid of any accusations of an unseemly April Fool's joke by the smallest margin, the woman known (and often mispronounced) as Fadime Sahindal would have celebrated half a century on the earth, in an existence which would, then, have included Turkish Kurdistan (yes, the adjective is important and no, a sovereign, should-be entity of uncertain borders, government, composition and international relations does not yet exist), the once free republic of now-Swedish Jamtland, Kenya, and old Uppsala, where she drew her last shocking breath, before her father fired a piece of lead too close for comfort (or dare I say it, elegance) into his daughter's brain, a second into her jaw, as if in needless and b humiliation, a chastisement unfelt and backfiring. The picture painted in that stairway, a future snuffed out, which should have been "his", in the more general sense, with the
She died, childless and bereft of her Swedish partner, because she wanted to be an individual
