“She is alive. My daughter is alive,” Sirajuddin shouted with joy. The doctor broke into a cold sweat.

The last three lines of ‘The Return’ stood out to me as capturing dehumanization due to war, in different ways. There is Sirajuddin who shouts with joy merely at the fact that Sakina is alive, despite her traumatized condition. The reality that Sakina’s state is a good outcome in Sirajuddin’s eyes points to depravity and terror being normalized in a time of conflict. We also have the doctor’s contrasting perspective to Sirajuddin of breaking into a cold sweat because he can recognize that Sakina has been raped.

However, the last lines do not give the perspective of Sakina at all. Throughout the story, Sakina progressively loses agency over her body and never regains it, even when she is reunited with her father and receiving medical care. Just as the last few lines give us information on what the doctor and Sirajuddin feel at the sight of Sakina, we can only interpret Sakina’s perspective on the rapes and surviving in the context of her physical reactions to men. This lack of Sakina’s perspective really stood out to me in these lines and speaks to her overall loss of autonomy.