The snake had been eating the crow’s eggs every day for weeks. “So she taught him a lesson,” twelve-year-old Taj said, pointing to the skeleton, the ribs of the snake curled up like a question mark. “You know, crows never forget a face.”

I asked him how he knew that.

“My mother told me.”

The woman Taj called mother was dead. Farzana Parveen had been bludgeoned to death with bricks by members of her own family, including her father. They killed her because she had fallen in love with Taj’s father, a widower named Muhammad Iqbal, and married him. She was 25 years old and three months pregnant.

Honor killings are so common in Pakistan that they usually only rate a brief mention in the local media. In 2013, 869 such cases were reported, according to the country’s Human Rights Commission, although the true figure is probably higher. But Farzana’s death stunned people around the world, perhaps because it seemed like a dark tale of thwarted love, or because her murder occurred in the day time, before dozens of onlookers, near the High Court in Lahore. Two days and a post-mortem later, I followed Farzana’s body back to her final resting place in the tiny village where she had lived in a mud-brick house with Iqbal during their five-month marriage.