An Unlikely Ally

Nuri is not like the others in the prison camp. Though she totes her young son on her hip, she is not your average soccer mom. Though her husband dotes on her, she is not a typical loving housewife. Everyone knows it. Nuri Thagalinki is the daughter of Nasir Thagalinki, a gangster who happily sells unmarked prescription drugs to anyone with money, with no exceptions. That was one thing that always bothered Nuri, but she never talked to her father about it. Even his own children knew not to question him. Nasir, born on a peninsula that now fenced out the world, came a long way from a scared orphan. He was able to claw his way to the surface and bring his family up with him, despite their downfalls.

These downfalls, as Nasir often saw them, lacked the right sex organs. Though his homeland praised women far more than they praised men, his country pushed the standard patriarchal agenda, and Nasir ate the words up like a starving orphan. He needed a son, and married until he got one. Through those marriages, Nasir created six beautiful daughters and one son. The birth of his son brought tears to his eyes, and he carried the boy everywhere he went. Of them all, Tairo was spoiled. By teaching his son the ropes, Nasir had inadvertently spoiled him until he was so rotten, rodents ran from him. The boy's death, at eleven, in a horrific train accident, left scars on the man that never healed.

The one person that tried to heal him was his wife, Barah, who nurtured and cared for the family since he met her. Though she was his third wife, he loved her dearly. Nuri was her third child, and his fifth. Her father never devoted much attention to her, instead intent on the family business and protecting the girls from it, but her mother and sisters doted on her. One thing they learned early on was that Nuri could argue. She would spend hours arguing until her entire face was red and she was dripping from the heat of her intensity. Early on, they knew she would become the family lawyer and replace Mickey, the family's 93 year old uncle who had been defending them for years. Nuri studied in various universities, finally ending in the largest private university in her hometown.

She wed a classmate, Gerek, soon after and the couple started life together. They moved to the outskirts of a sanctuary city, since they were barred from coming in, and settled down. Nuri got pregnant and gave birth to her daughter Rondi, but everything went downhill from there. The neighborhood was raided and she and her family (including the infant) were arrested for connections to drug trafficking. Nuri's father was devastated. He did his best to make her stay comfortable, but he couldn't. he wan't even able to see his two other grandchildren, Mehri (who was adopted into the family) and Lyron. Though they are more than they seem, both Nuri and Gerek keep a low profile. The worst thing they can do is give themselves away, especially now that Nuri's sister, Fouzia, is running her father's business and her mother is wasting away. They can only dream that one day their five year sentence will be over or the bombs from the war will kill them.