Love Out of Season

Rakhim, a sixty-year-old esteemed shepherd who has spent his entire life tending flocks in the steppe, suddenly finds himself overtaken by a feeling he thought long left behind is love. To his own surprise, he falls deeply for Torgyn, a young widow whose quiet strength awakens in him a long-forgotten tenderness. Unable to turn his back on his first wife, Wakila, Rakhim decides to take Torgyn as his second wife. Yet fate proves unkind to the late-blooming lover: neither Wakila nor, especially, his son Qudaýmende can come to terms with what has happened.

Pressed by the weight of disapproval and her own uncertainty, the gentle but hesitant Torgyn eventually leaves Rakhim, taking her little son with her and departing with her brother. The loss shatters Rakhim’s heart, leaving him face to face with the aching loneliness of a love that came too late.