by Rod Nordland
“I found this telephone with this number. Please do not bother me,” he told her.
“So you found this telephone and this number?”
“Yes,” he said, and she laughed and hung up, expecting him to call back, but he didn’t. For several days she did not call him again, and when she finally did, she was angry.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
“I was trying to see whether you truly love me.”
“That was a bad way to do it.” Zakia was so angry that she didn’t speak to him for another week. When at last she did, he was chastened and promised he’d never play with her affections like that again.
“After that, we never fought or disagreed on anything,” Ali said.
Their phone rendezvous were always going to be dangerous, in small homes crowded with many family members. “Once I was on my way up to Qarghanatu in Yakawlang”—a place they would later come to know in their flight—“and it was winter, and snow was everywhere,” Ali said. This would have been the winter of 2012–13. “We went to get our family’s money from someone who owed us some money. I received a dropped call from Zakia-jan, but I did not have credit on my phone to call her back. So I rushed to a shop and put credit on it.” That took an hour, by which time Zakia had stopped expecting a return call and had left her phone unattended, forgetting to hide it well. When he called, her brother Gula Khan found the phone and answered it but, suspicious, did not say hello.
“Zakia?” Ali said.
“Who is this?” her brother demanded. Gula Khan had been in the army with Ali, and they knew each other well.
“I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” Ali said, hoping Gula Khan wouldn’t recognize his voice.
They hung up, but Gula Khan thought he knew the voice, so from his own phone he dialed the number that had just called for Zakia, and when he did, “Mohammad Ali” came up on his screen. Gula Khan could not read and write much, but he could recognize the names stored in his phone.
Gula Khan called Ali back. “Is it Mohammad Ali?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you call my sister?”
“By mistake.”
Gula Khan did not believe him and yelled at him never to call again. After he hung up, he turned on Zakia, who was three years younger than him. “Gula Khan came and beat me with his hands. He broke my phone, he beat me, he cursed me and warned me not to talk to Ali again,” Zakia said. “I didn’t mind the beating, but I really hated being cursed.”
Before long, Ali had enlisted the same little girl who’d delivered the phone to Zakia, a girl who was not from either of their families, and gave her a few afghanis to carry a small wadded piece of paper to Zakia. On it was written his phone number. Zakia begged some money from her father to buy clothing—it was still a time when he would give her whatever he could, as the prettiest of his daughters. Instead she used the money to buy a cell phone, again through the agency of the girl, who was too young for anyone to suspect that she was doing anything other than carrying out an errand for her parents. The younger girl, who was one of those who went to school, even showed Zakia how to use the phone and how to enter the number Ali had written. Soon they were speaking nearly every evening and managed nearly every day to meet on the footpaths around the village. “Most of the time, it wasn’t really an accident that we met,” Ali said with a pleased smirk.
One day Zakia had been fiddling with the phone, trying to figure out its mysteries, and had accidentally switched it from “silent” to “normal,” without realizing. She drop-called Ali, and he called her back, and to her horror it was really ringing, with her father in the next room. She could not figure out how to quiet it, shook it, tried to pull the battery out, failed, and finally hid it under a cushion. By then Zaman had stormed in and soon found it, still ringing. He threw it against a wall, then took the SIM card out and crushed it. “He just took the phone and cursed me. He didn’t beat me. My father never beat me back then. Just my brothers did, mainly Gula Khan.”
Her siblings all soon turned on her, she said. “When this matter with Ali happened and they found out about my affair, even my little brothers and sisters tried to distance themselves from me,” she said. “It was very hard. Everyone in my family was against me.” Even nine-year-old Razak, the one she had felt closest to, would not speak to her.
It took Ali a few days of radio silence to realize what had happened; it was a particularly bitter winter and too cold during that February and March of 2013 for them to connive to meet in the lanes and the frozen fields during the day. Instead he resorted to secretly visiting her home at night. In those days he had taken a temporary laborer’s job at a construction site, working a night shift that finished at midnight, and he would come over afterward when the lanes were deserted and the homes all dark. There was a walled vegetable garden outside the window to Zakia’s room, where Ali would stand and call to her, as quietly as he possibly could, because she shared the room with the other girls and young boys of the family. When she heard him, she would steal out of the house and climb to the flat roof, where she could look down into the garden and they could talk in whispers. The garden was barren in winter; about a dozen leafless apricot and apple trees lined the mud-brick walls and surrounded long rows of tilled earth now frozen hard. In one corner was a pair of ragged bamboo cages in which Zakia’s father kept his partridges—used in the Afghan version of cockfighting—when he could afford them. A small brook had been diverted to enter a hole at the base of the garden wall, exiting through the opposite wall. Ali’s 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. visits to the garden became regular occurrences, even on the coldest of nights, but at first she would not come down to join him.
“It was dangerous for both of us, and it was so hard,” he said. “I would wait outside her house sometimes under a rainy sky, sometimes snowing, sometimes so cold she was concerned about me in the bad weather.”
“I was always so frightened we would be caught and so worried for him,” she said. On one particularly cold night, Ali stood in the garden, dripping wet from a frigid rain that had turned to icy snow, and recited famous lines from a poem by the twentieth-century Iranian poet Malek o’Shoara Bahar, which have made their way into Afghan pop music:
Love is a nightingale pouring out his heart in song for a rose,
Bearing patiently the stinging lacerations of her thorns.11
“I don’t read and write, which is why I don’t know any real poems by heart,” said Ali, “but I love hearing love poems from others and listening to them read by singers.” He knew that there was a world out there in which poetry existed independently of music, and he even knew a few verses from famous poems. Songs, however, he knew word for word. Memorizing the words from music was easy, and he did not need to read anything; often he wasn’t aware of the lyrics’ roots in written poetry, not aware that when he recited lyrics without music, he was simply reciting poetry. They were all verses to him, arrows in his quiver.
Zakia’s favorite singer was Mir Maftoon, an Afghan from the mountainous northern province of Badakhshan, a place more remote than Bamiyan. Long before dawn one morning, early in the still-wintry spring, Ali recited one of Maftoon’s verses to her as she lay prone on the flat roof of her house, her chin on her folded hands, looking down over the edge:
Your two dark eyes are those of an Afghan,
But the mercy of Islam is not in your heart.
Outside your walls I spent nights that became daylights;
What kind of sleep is this that you never wake up?12
Touched by the verses and by his suffering in the cold, and freezing herself, Zakia finally came down to join him in the garden. And so their love story became a love affair, as Ali delicately put it. He would have stayed there in spite of the intense cold on those mornings, but come the first call to prayer, the subh, which came long before any sign of dawn in these highlands, people would start stirring, going to the mosque to pray or beginning early chores in animal pens and fields. He needed to be well
away from her house by then.
“If someone loves someone, she should have that bravery to do whatever has to be done,” Zakia said. “For a long time, I was thinking about it and thinking about doing this, and why should I regret it now? That poem moved me, it increased my courage. Those days were so cold, and he was coming to meet me anyway, even though I told him not to come, because the weather was very cold, and he came anyway, and then he recited this poem.”
It was only a matter of time before they were caught. Ali slept in the same room with his older brother Ismatullah, and his nocturnal escapades did not escape notice.
“What are you doing?” Ismatullah yelled at him. “I know what you are doing, and it’s crazy!”
One night Ali went out at 3:00 A.M. to meet her. “Zakia-jan and I were in the garden, and we must have stayed too late, because her mother saw us. She didn’t recognize me, because at night I would wear different clothes—I wore a hat at night, which I never did during the day.” He ran for the far garden wall and scampered over it in a bound.
“Who was out there with you?” Sabza demanded of her daughter, through the window.
Zakia replied that she had woken up early to grind flour and there was a farmer in the garden who begged for bread, so she went out to give him some. It was an unlikely story, and Sabza did not believe her.
“Come back inside, you dead father’s daughter,” Sabza hissed at Zakia. The curse cut deep. Of course her father was still alive, but few things were worse in Afghan society than the suggestion that a daughter might have no father to determine the rest of her life for her.
“I get really upset if someone curses me,” Zakia said. “I hate being cursed. After my mother realized I was having a secret affair with someone, she mistreated me like that. I would rather she beat me than curse me.” Despite the curses, her mother was at that point being kind. If Sabza suspected that her daughter had consummated her affair, she kept that suspicion to herself—voicing it would have been Zakia’s death sentence. It was a serious enough offense just to be discovered showing interest in a boy, far worse to be caught alone with him; the presumption always in such cases would be that sex had taken place. Her mother apparently preferred to present the case to the family as a matter of her suspicions about something starting to go on, or the situation would have become far more perilous for both of the lovers. Also, she had not actually seen who it was, though she knew well enough that it must have been Ali.
With both families alerted and everyone on the lookout, it was even harder for the two young people to get together. It was as if their villages had become prisons, with all their families and neighbors the guards and the two of them the only inmates.
With spring came the new Persian year, 1392, significantly the year in which Zakia would turn eighteen and become legally an adult. Her birthday was unknown, because her national identity card, like those of most Afghans, gave only the year of her birth; so legally she was eighteen the moment it became 1392—March 21, 2013. By that time her father normally would have been shopping her around, hunting for a husband whose family would pay a suitably high bride price. Zakia was considered strikingly beautiful, fair-skinned with hands somehow unroughened by farmwork. Girls in that village were frequently married off earlier than eighteen, and usually the bride price was figured in livestock; four goats or six sheep was a typical sum. Zakia would fetch much more, possibly enough to help Zaman buy some land of his own; he would later claim to have turned down 11 lakhs of afghanis—1.1 million afghanis, or twenty thousand dollars—for her hand. (A lakh is 100,000.) That would be a small herd of sheep or half a jreeb of land.
Whom she married was up to her father, and that is not just the case in backward rural areas. It is the predominant practice in all of Afghanistan that fathers rule every aspect of their daughters’ lives, even when they are adults. Their fathers decide whether they can go to school, get a job, leave the house, see a doctor, wear a burqa or just a head scarf. Once women are married, their husbands assume that power over them. No one questions male authority over women in Afghanistan. If for some reason the father is absent or the husband dies young, a brother will assume ownership of the woman. Zakia could consider herself lucky that she hadn’t been married off at the age of sixteen—the minimum legal age according to both Afghan law and shariah law in Afghanistan—or even at the age of fourteen, a practice that remains widespread although it is forbidden by the constitution and subject to strong penalties under the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law.13 The age at which many girls are married in Afghanistan would be considered criminal sexual abuse in most countries.14
Once they had resolved to marry, Ali and Zakia’s first instinct was to try to operate within their society’s cultural framework. Ali managed to persuade his father to make a bid for Zakia on his behalf. There are exceptions to the practice of fathers choosing their daughters’ husbands, but they are shrouded in secrecy, with the goal of maintaining the appearance that the husband was the father’s choice. Such exceptions, not talked about openly, do take into account how people really feel and behave. In the traditional model, the wife will never see her husband until their wedding night. In cities and among elites and more progressive families, the families of the prospective bride and groom may arrange for the couple, once the fathers have chosen them, to meet and get to know each other, closely chaperoned; in some cases they will tie the neka in advance, so that they’re formally married in the eyes of Islam but will not have the wedding party and the wedding night until later. That enables them to court and have intimacy at some level, without committing a legal or religious crime in the eyes of the community. But for the girl or boy to come up with the idea of marrying and then present it to their families openly would be considered shameful. The prospective groom might, however, conspire with his own father to initiate the idea by making overtures to the bride’s father, which is what Zakia and Ali tried at first to do.
They were pleasantly surprised by how agreeable Ali’s father, Anwar, proved to be about the idea initially.
“By then everyone knew, though no one talked about it publicly,” Anwar said. People only had to see Ali walking along the footpaths playing his flute to know that he was in love with someone, and if they also spotted Zakia singing to herself in the fields, as she often did, it wouldn’t take long to put the two together. Such interventions are also done behind the scenes in cases where everyone has already begun to suspect that the girl and the boy have somehow found love on their own.
Between the two of them, Ali and Zakia had agreed that they would give it a bit of time, first for the memory to recede of the intercepted telephone conversations and the incident in the garden, and also because Zakia’s own brother was about to get married, and after that expense—the groom’s family pays for everything, including the bride price—perhaps her father would be more amenable to an arrangement that would help him recoup some of his financial outlays.
“We agreed we would wait two months, but after forty days I couldn’t bear it any longer,” Ali said. He persuaded his father to make the approach.
The first time the two old men met, late in the summer of 2013, Zaman received Anwar graciously and politely, with green tea and cakes and nuts, dried chickpeas, raisins, and hard candies set out on trays on the floor; they sat facing, cross-legged on thin floor cushions. They had known each other all their lives and been neighbors except for the few years after they had fled in different directions from the Taliban. Their respective fields shared some of the same irrigation channels and works, and they often pooled their labor.
Anwar’s opening to Zaman was formulaic, words passed down through generations and known as the khwast-gari, the demanding.15 “Please accept my son as a slave to your family,” Anwar said.
Zaman had expected as much and had his answer ready. “I don’t want to be harsh, but I tell you that such matches did not take place between two ethnic groups in the past and are not possible now,” Zaman replied. “
Please, now, do not come again about this.”
Anwar hopefully viewed that as a negotiating position, so over the next month he went back twice more, finally offering a portion of his fields—Ali’s inheritance—as well as money and gold as the bride price. “You don’t have any fields of your own. I can give you fields and money if you want, maybe enough to build a house for one of your sons,” Anwar told Zaman.
“I don’t care about these things. My relatives and my villagers will get upset with me if I marry her outside her ethnicity and her religion.”
Having asked three times, Anwar considered the matter closed. The romance would have to end, and he told his son as much. Their families had been on opposite sides in Afghanistan’s bitter civil war, although both had been tormented by the Taliban rule that followed it. But while peace had reigned between Tajiks and Hazaras for more than a decade, memories were long and prejudices died hard. Anwar had no inclination to stir up a war, and he accepted Zaman’s right to decide Zakia’s fate.
Examples of what was likely to happen if the father’s will was defied were abundant. A similar Hazara-Tajik affair had just played out in Bamiyan around the same time Zakia and Ali’s courtship had begun, and it was widely publicized. An eighteen-year-old girl named Khadija from Qarawna Village, in Saighan District, had taken refuge in the Bamiyan shelter rather than be married to a man chosen for her by her father. Khadija, a Tajik like Zakia, also had eloped with a Hazara, Mohammad Hadi, but police arrested her after hundreds of other Tajik villagers protested—even though she was of age and had formally married Mr. Hadi. After spending months in the shelter, Khadija got homesick and asked to see her family; with the supervision of Bamiyan’s Tajik judges, they assembled elders from their village with the girl’s relatives, including her father and her brothers, who all put their thumbprints on a document promising never to harm her. Fatima Kazimi, the head of the women’s-affairs ministry in Bamiyan at the time, convened a committee of social workers, shelter officials, and police to discuss the case. The committee opposed Khadija’s return to her family but the decision was overruled by the court. Khadija has never been seen since. A few weeks later, when the women’s ministry asked to see the girl to make sure she was unharmed, the family calmly announced that she had run away again, Fatima said. This time, though, they showed no interest in pursuing her. In the highlands of Bamiyan, there is really no place a girl alone could run; police would have arrested her on sight. “I’m sure they killed her and hid the body where no one has found it,” Fatima said.16