by Rod Nordland
As Ali went dejectedly to bed, Zakia huddled with her two roommates, Abida and Safoora, across the valley.7 The three of them had planned to creep out of their beds just before midnight and wait inside the front door of the big house until the guard outside was asleep. The Bamiyan Women’s Shelter, run by the UN Women organization with an all-Afghan staff, at that time held fifteen girls and young women like themselves, all there because of the threat of beatings or death from family members or forced marriages to people they could not bear or illegal child marriages or because they were raped. Safoora’s case was particularly distressing. Brought to court in a dispute between two families over the terms of her engagement at fourteen years of age, she was taken into a back room at the courthouse and gang-raped by court employees. She complained, but the judges blocked any prosecution of the rapists, and so Safoora was in the shelter fleeing their retribution and fearing her own family’s wrath against her. It is commonplace for Afghan families to murder a daughter who has had the poor judgment or bad luck to be raped; the rapist is often treated with shocking leniency. They call it “honor killing.” Zakia had fled to this shelter to escape an honor killing as well, though for a different reason.
They say that in the heyday of the Bamiyan Buddhas, when this remote mountain valley was a center of pilgrimage and the spiritual capital of the Greco-Buddhist Kushan Empire, the eyes of the great Buddhas Solsal and Shahmama comprised hundreds of precious stones, rubies and sapphires especially but diamonds and emeralds as well. Fires were kept lit at night behind those yard-wide orbs. The gemstone lenses magnified the light and sent multicolored rays across the valley, where they would have been seen sparkling at night from many miles away, particularly on the upper plateau, which lay at nearly eye level opposite the behemoths’ gaze.
Tonight on this same plateau, a male guard was on duty in the courtyard of the women’s shelter in a small guard shack that was just big enough for him to lie down inside. The girls knew that he was ill and would probably have fallen asleep on duty, which indeed he had done. Zakia had the SIM card for her cell phone, but the phone itself was in the hallway, hidden in a cupboard. Inside the shelter building, there was a woman guard whom they had expected to be asleep, but she wasn’t. The guard challenged Zakia when she heard her stepping outside her room. Zakia quickly ducked into the bathroom, making up a story that she wanted to take a late shower. This delayed her another twenty or thirty minutes as the two other girls waited for her and Ali kept trying unsuccessfully to get through on the phone.
Safoora, younger than Zakia, was excited for her but sad to see her go—she was along just to help Zakia and the other older girl, Abida, escape. Zakia had been not only an older sister to her but also the sparkler that lit up their shabby existence: colorful, vivacious, and, in the privacy of the company of other young women, contemptuous of the social rules that had driven them all to this refuge. Abida, an overweight girl about Zakia’s age, married as a child to an abusive husband whose beatings drove her here, had decided the day before that she would flee with Zakia to return to her husband. They agreed to help one another over the wall of the shelter and run together.
It was a shelter from the harm that awaited them outside, but it was also a prison; one of the terms under which all such facilities in Afghanistan operate is that they promise not to allow the girls and women to leave until their cases are settled, if they can be settled. Many of them are in the shelters indefinitely, with few future prospects except to return to whatever family hell drove them there in the first place.
Zakia was determined that would not be her fate. The girls hugged and said their good-byes to Safoora and then began dragging mattresses out to the wall at the back of the courtyard. The mattresses were stiff, full of cotton tick; doubled over and piled one atop the other, they made a ledge halfway up the eight-foot-tall wall, so Zakia could clamber up. Later on she would insist, as she had agreed with the other girls to say, that no one had helped her escape, that she had simply walked out the unlocked front door when everyone was asleep and hopped the wall on her own. From the top of the wall, she reached down to pull Abida up as well, but the girl was too weak to pull herself up and too much deadweight for Zakia. Abida later claimed that her friend had abandoned her to save herself. Zakia insisted that the girl was too heavy to make the climb, but she also was aware that Abida wanted to return to an abusive husband. Zakia thought it was probably just as well that the girl did not do so. Abida was not driven by love but by desperation and might well have been killed for her efforts.
Looking back from the top of the wall for a brief second, Zakia saw that she had let go of Ali’s photo on the way up; it had been clutched in her hand and was crumpled badly. She did not hesitate, though, and at about one in the morning Zakia dropped to the ground outside the wall, in her high heels, carrying a plastic bag full of clothes. She ran lightly down the hill in the direction of the Great Buddhas, pursued by a pack of barking dogs, then stopped under some birch trees on a traffic circle at the edge of the upper plateau and dialed Ali. There was no answer. Digging into her bag, frantic, she pulled out a loaf of bread and began breaking off pieces to throw to the dogs to stop the barking.
Over in his village of Surkh Dar, Ali heard the phone ring on its nail outside and raced from his room, but by the time he reached it, the ringing had stopped. He called her back, and this time Zakia answered. Their situation was perilous. It was just past one in the morning, and she was a woman alone and therefore subject to arrest, not only by police but by any man who passed and wanted to take the law into his own hands—or worse. In a society where rape was often not regarded as a crime if the woman were found alone, worse was likely. Ali woke his father, Anwar, to tell him that the escape was on and then called a village friend, Rahmatullah, who had already agreed to help them elope by driving them to a hiding place higher in the mountains.
Rahmatullah’s battered maroon Toyota Corolla wouldn’t turn over in the cold at first, but the engine finally caught. Ali stamped his foot impatiently as his friend insisted on warming up the engine for a few minutes. The drive was only fifteen or twenty minutes down the unpaved road, along the front of the Buddha niches, through the old bazaar, and up the hill to the higher plateau, where Zakia waited. The sparse grove of birch trees at that spot was too thin to hide her, so she lay prone in a shallow drainage ditch beside the traffic circle. It seemed to Zakia that it took them nearly an hour to arrive, and by then she could see the alarm being raised at the shelter and hear the commotion there as searchers ran around the walls outside, only a few hundred yards from her hiding place. Hunkered down in the ditch, she did not see Ali in Rahmatullah’s car as it first arrived, until he alerted her with another phone call.
When the car stopped near her, it set the pack of dogs to barking again, and Ali jumped out to help her put her bag in the trunk. Each spoke the other’s name, and in that small way they were—as they both understood—declaring their rebellion against their society’s strictures and customs. There are many husbands in Afghanistan who have never used their wives’ names, even when addressing them directly. When they address their own wives, often it will not be with the personal “you”—tu in Dari8—but with the formal you, shuma,9 the same word one would use to address a stranger or an official. They never mention their wives’ names in conversation with others. There are many Afghan men who do not know the first names of their best friends’ wives. It is considered offensively intrusive to ask men the names of their daughters, let alone their wives.10
Ali led Zakia across the muddy lane, she all aswish in her full-length skirt and chador namaz, a long, flowing scarf, and he with a lightweight woolen scarf, a patu, pulled around his body against the cold but little else for warmth aside from his thin leather jacket. The snow had stopped and the skies cleared, but the moon was new and the night quite dark. As they got into the car, Zakia took his hand in hers and held it tightly. If she had kissed him it would hardly have been more unexpected and only slightly
more subversive.
They had been declaring their love for each other for years now in secret and then publicly for the past six months of her effective incarceration in the shelter. They had never been alone together indoors, let alone in the backseat of an automobile. Mostly they had seen each other only in glimpses and clandestine encounters in the fields of their families’ adjoining farms and on one day when they were taken to have their case heard in court. Zakia’s death sentence was decreed that day in court: implicitly by her judges and in screamed imprecations by her mother, father, and brothers. For two and a half years before that, they had managed to find glimpses of each other and some stolen minutes together on the farm and along village lanes and footpaths, and they had managed to speak many, many times by telephone. Ever since she entered the shelter six months earlier, however, even telephone calls were difficult; phones were forbidden to the girls. Zakia and Ali had been able to meet, with chaperones, only once during that time. Now here they were holding hands.
It may sound like a small thing, but people who had never heard their parents address each other by name, have certainly never seen them hold hands, even in private, let alone in a public place. Courtship even among engaged couples is usually forbidden. Modernized Afghan families might allow a fiancé and fiancée to meet, but only strictly chaperoned and never alone, and not with any sort of physical contact; more often the couple first meet on their wedding night. Both the wedding ceremony and the accompanying celebration are nearly always segregated by gender. Afghan soldiers often hold hands. Children hold hands. Young Afghans of the opposite sex, married or unmarried, in public, never. Where did Zakia get the idea? Neither Zakia nor Ali had ever been to a movie theater—there wasn’t a single one in the entire province—and in their villages there was no electricity, let alone television. Although larger villages would sometimes have one shared TV, usually it would be watched only by men, since women were not allowed to attend public gatherings. What gave Zakia the boldness to take his hand in hers? Is holding hands just an innate human impulse? That, like so much else about their story, was a mystery.
Perhaps it was just as simple as this: Having defied one set of grand conventions, to openly and publicly declare her love for Ali and now to elope with him in defiance of her family, her culture, her tribe, and her sect, Zakia was not now going to be bound by any of her society’s petty strictures. If she wanted to hold his hand, she would. When I had an occasion to ask her, much later, why she had done so, Zakia’s response was this: “Why not?”
Rahmatullah, in the driver’s seat, was stunned to see them sit together so intimately. “He was scared, but he’s my friend, so he went along,” Ali said. The two lovers in the back, finally together after so many months, didn’t know what to say to each other. “We hadn’t expected this to happen—we didn’t really know what would happen,” Ali said. The pack of dogs surrounded the car and barked furiously as it pulled away. The couple lay down in the backseat as the car passed the shelter and headed out of town.
The escape had been so unexpected that they still had to arrange the next leg of their flight. Two days later, after the Persian New Year’s Day holiday, Zakia’s court case was to be moved to Kabul. Bamiyan is a mostly Hazara place, so they felt safer there—the courts were dominated by Tajiks who sympathized with Zakia’s family, but the police and the governor, the women’s ministry, and the majority of the people were Hazaras and could be expected to sympathize with them. That would not be the case in Kabul, they worried; there were many more Tajiks and Pashtuns than Hazaras there. In Kabul, they feared, Zakia could easily be ordered returned to her family, for what would then become the last few days of her life.
Now they were on their way to the home of a distant relative of Ali’s in the Foladi Valley, which cut southwest up into the Koh-i-Baba range, rugged, fifteen-thousand-foot-high mountains running from east to west and framing the southern reaches of the Bamiyan Valley. The relative’s name was Salman, and Ali’s father and his uncle had only just called him as Ali was driving off to get Zakia; now Ali called him from the car. Salman was reluctant at first, partly because he shared his home with four brothers and he would have to get the fugitives inside without the brothers seeing Zakia.
“Why did you do this?” Salman said.
“It happened, and now that it happened, we can’t take it back,” Ali said. “This happened, and we’re with her, and we’re escaping.”
They arrived in Foladi at Salman’s house around the time of the first call to prayer, the subh, when the mullah begins chanting over the loudspeakers in the minarets at the first sign of dawn, which at that time of year was about five in the morning. It was easy enough to hide Zakia; Salman led her into the women’s quarters in his part of the house, a compound with several separate mud-walled buildings, one for each of the brothers. Only his wife and young daughters were there, and no male but he could enter. Ali could not go there; staying with his wife-to-be prior to marriage would itself be considered a crime, and hiding Ali elsewhere in the house was much more difficult with so many brothers and their families around. So after a hurried breakfast of bread and tea, Salman and Ali headed out, trudging through a foot and a half of snow, up the flank of the mountain, for the ninety-minute hike to the village of Koh-Sadat.
Elders from Koh-Sadat met them outside the first house in their village; the elders had been watching them climb for the past quarter hour. In so much of this barren, treeless landscape, it was nearly impossible to hide even from watchers miles away. “We have come to buy donkeys,” Ali said. Koh-Sadat was locally famous for its donkeys, so it wasn’t an implausible excuse. For the rest of the morning, they saw one donkey after another. This one was too small, and that one was too old, and the other was okay but too expensive. By then it was time for lunch, and no one can visit an Afghan community without being invited to lunch. They dragged that out as long as they could, the men sitting cross-legged on the mud floor, picking off small pieces of bread to scoop from the communal plate of pilaf and talking about whatever subject occurred to them.
Finally, in late afternoon, they left with apologies and excuses but no donkey and trudged back down to Foladi and Salman’s house. “We drove them crazy with our donkey bargaining,” Ali said, sharing a laugh with Salman.
By the time they got back, Ali’s father, Anwar, had come and a mullah named Baba Khalili had driven in over the Koh-i-Baba mountains from neighboring Wardak Province to marry them. One of Ali’s brothers and his cousin Salman would be the witnesses as they tied the neka: the signing of a document agreeing on the terms of the marriage and noting the requisite two male witnesses and the mullah who presided (significantly, the bride need not be present, and often is not). Because all of them, save the mullah, were illiterate, they would dampen their thumbs on an ink pad and press them to the paper in lieu of signatures. The neka would specify that Zakia, daughter of Zaman of Kham-e-Kalak village, would receive in the marriage a hundred thousand afghanis (about eighteen hundred U.S. dollars at the time) and a jreeb of land (about half an acre), from Ali’s family. Normally such a payment would go to her father as a bride price, although formally it would be deeded to the woman, since a bride price is officially illegal. Sometimes a small portion would be used to buy jewelry for the woman, but that was at the father’s discretion. Zakia’s father was not present and in no position to collect the hundred thousand afghanis, which was just as well, because Ali and his father were in no position to pay.
Mullah Baba Khalili demanded thirty thousand afghanis to tie the neka, formalizing it with the reading of Koranic verses and his signature and stamp. It was a huge sum for such a service, some five hundred fifty dollars, but the mullah was performing the ceremony without the customary presence of the girl’s father—and without asking too many questions. “If I don’t tie this neka, no one will ever tie it,” the mullah told Anwar when he balked at the price. The reputation of mullahs for greed is legendary in Afghanistan, one of the reasons they are the butt o
f many jokes in an otherwise devout land.11 “If anyone ever challenges it, I will testify for you,” the mullah told him.
The young couple spent their wedding night in the unfinished loft of Salman’s home, a low-ceilinged, thirty-foot-long room with no stove; it was far too cold for consummation. “It was a long time before we had a real wedding night,” Ali said. “We were so cold all we could do was hold each other for warmth.”
The next day they moved on, traveling this time in a taxi that Anwar had arranged and brought for them from Bamiyan town, a couple thousand feet below. They were heading farther up the Foladi Valley as it climbed toward the highest peak in the Koh-i-Baba range, the Shah Foladi, sixteen thousand feet high. Partway up they were welcomed into the home of a distant relative, Sayed Akhlaqi. This time they could travel together openly because they were now married, but they were still foolishly raising eyebrows, even among those friendly to them, by holding hands.
Their stay was short-lived; the next day Sayed Akhlaqi’s son raced up the road from Bamiyan on a mud-splattered dirt bike, breathlessly reporting that the police knew they were in Foladi and were on their way. The son worked as a servant in a government building and had heard the police making the arrangements, urged on by Zakia’s enraged family members. The police would arrive by evening, and it was already nearly sunset. The couple and Anwar piled into the taxi and headed farther up the mountain. As they climbed the switchbacks, Ali’s phone rang; it was someone from down below alerting them that the police had already left Sayed Akhlaqi’s house and would probably catch up to them soon. Looking back, they could see the dust being raised on the lower road by the big, forest green Ford Ranger police pickup truck as it climbed toward them. The bedraggled old taxi had no hope of outrunning it, so they stopped at a glade of small trees and heavy brush, where a creek cut across the road. The newlyweds fled into the brush along the creek on the downstream side of the road while Ali’s father, Anwar, went the opposite way, on the upstream side, hoping, if seen, to draw the police’s attention from the lovers. The driver carried on, but the police truck soon caught up to him. He refused to give them away and denied having had them along—although there weren’t many fares on this lonely road toward the Shah Foladi peak. His story was that he had been on his way to pick someone up but never found the person.