by Fariba Nawa
Chapter Seven
The Opium Bride
The next morning, I wake up a little later than dawn. Saber has gone out. As I wash my face in the garden with Tarana, he rushes through the door toward me.
“Darya’s husband is in town. He’s at their house right now and he might take her with him. You want to meet him?” he asks me, panting.
“Let me put on my hijab.” I run with soap still on my face. I put on the long black coat over my pajamas and the white polka-dotted head scarf I wear every day and race to the street.
The door to Darya’s house is closed and no children play nearby. It’s unusually quiet, except for the howl of the wind. I hold the head scarf over my eyes to keep the dust away.
Saber knocks loudly. Darya’s eight-year-old brother, Nemat, answers the door and smiles when he sees me. “It’s the city lady!” he turns around and yells to his mother. He opens the door, and I enter. Saber and the driver stand outside.
Basira nods her head in a cold greeting and walks up the porch to the hallway. “I heard Darya’s husband is here,” I say, following her.
“Bale, but she’s giving him a hard time again. He wants to take her this time. He’s tired of coming all this way.”
Darya stands in the hallway in the green outfit and head scarf I saw her wearing last time. Her arms are folded across her chest. Her mesmerizing green eyes flash. Her twelve-year-old body shivers. She takes two steps back toward the mud wall in the hallway. It is a dead end.
“I’m not going! I’m not going!” she shouts at her mother.
The husband, Haji Sufi, waits for her inside the room where the family sleeps, sitting cross-legged on a thin mat drinking black tea with cardamom. He can hear her shouting.
Darya looks at me for support, but her mother scowls at her daughter and shoots me a warning look not to interfere. “It’s your forsaken father’s fault that has put us in this hell. What’s done is done!”
Darya turns her head toward the wall and says nothing. Basira motions me toward the room where her guest is sitting with her uncle Ali. Darya’s husband looks up at me but doesn’t get up. Typically in Afghan culture, men and women stand when new guests arrive. A look of curiosity crosses this man’s wide, wrinkled forehead. He resembles the Taliban members I saw in 2000—an unruly long black beard, a white-striped black turban curled on his head with his right ear exposed, khaki-colored pirahan tomban with the pants rolled up to show his ankles. He sits between Ali and another elderly man, a neighbor of Basira’s. The other men sit cross-legged like him but they fold their feet neatly under their legs. He exposes his dark brown feet, a sign of uncouthness. He wears a watch, but I can’t make out what brand. I wonder if it’s a Rodo, like Touraj used to wear.
I sit across the room on another mat, my back against a window.
Haji is a title for men who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Sufi is a Muslim mystic. In Haji Sufi, I had expected an overpowering, loud Pashtun man—my image of a southern smuggler—but Sufi is soft-spoken and passive.
He says he’s between forty and forty-five years old, but Ali, translating, says he’s closer to forty-six. “He’s illiterate and doesn’t know how to count from the year he was born,” Ali adds. Haji Sufi owns five acres of his family’s fifteen acres of land. He denies growing opium on his farm, but, again, Ali adds the truth to his translation. “He farms opium but he’s too scared to tell you.”
Still, maybe because I’m a woman, or because I’m a foreigner, Sufi feels comfortable talking fairly openly with me. “I used to grow opium but now I plant wheat, watermelons, and have pine nut trees in the orchard,” he says. “I have no cars, no motorcycles, just donkeys and tractors. Everything’s expensive and hard without opium, but the government has forbid its planting now.”
Ali translates with skepticism in his voice.
I move to a safer topic. “Tell me about your family in Helmand. How many children and grandchildren do you have?”
He says he has four daughters and four sons; the youngest is eighteen. His first wife’s name is Khwaga; she’s thirty years old and his first cousin, but she’s ill. “She’s bloated and she gets shots to feel better.”
“Did she give you permission to marry another girl?”
“Yes, she did, because she cannot meet my needs anymore. She can’t even do housework. But she complains that I married a young girl who won’t be good for anything.”
“Why did you?”
“My relatives had imprisoned Touraj in Helmand and he needed help,” Haji Sufi explains, avoiding my gaze. “He owed ten thousand dollars to my relatives. I gave him forty-six hundred, and in return, he gave me his daughter’s hand. He told me she was twenty years old. I never saw her but I agreed to it. If I had known she was so young, I would’ve given her to my son instead. But we did the nikah in Helmand, with Touraj. It’s too late to give her to my son now.”
The nikah is the Islamic ceremony that weds a man and woman. In some regions the woman does not need to agree to the marriage if she’s underage. In more enlightened interpretations of the nikah, the woman must agree to the marriage during the ceremony. The ceremony, presided over by a cleric, consists of a gathering of men, including the groom and close family of both the groom and the bride. The bride chooses two witnesses and a representative, usually the father or older family member, to present her answer to the cleric when he asks if the bride is in agreement to the marriage. When the question is asked during the ceremony, the witnesses come to the bride, who’s normally in a green dress among women in a separate room, and ask her three times if she wants to marry the groom. Often Afghan brides keep silent to show that they are modest, but silence is interpreted as assent. The witnesses then return to the cleric and deliver the bride’s response. Later, if the groom divorces her, his family must give a mahr, or financial restitution, to the bride personally. Such economic agreements are documented on paper, with the signatures of those present, including those of the bride and groom.
But for Darya, her father’s approval was enough to marry her to Haji Sufi.
“But she is not happy with this marriage,” I tell Haji Sufi carefully, trying not to offend him. “She is scared to go with you.”
“I do not want to force Darya to come with me, but eventually she will have to agree. In our traditions, girls do not have the right to decide whom they marry. It’s the father’s right, and her father promised her to me. I will be patient, but I am her husband. I have come here six or seven times now in the last two years, and her father’s not here each time I come. I gave this family two years until she’s old enough to separate from her mother, and now those two years are up.” His voice rises and his brow forms a frown. He answers my questions, but his anger is directed at Ali, the man currently responsible for Darya.
I sip my tea. Darya walks in with her baby sister, Hana, in her arms. She hunches next to me and tugs on my coat. Her fingers tremble. “Please don’t let him take me,” she whispers to me.
Her words echo in my ear and I turn toward her. I look at her as if I’m seeing her for the first time. She’s not crying but she’s imploring me, a complete stranger. Her plea and desperation slowly sink in. Our eyes meet and I look away from her. Am I her last hope?
But what can I do? I’m in a male-controlled society that blames women for their unfortunate fate. The laws may protect women, but the majority of the citizens will not. In the eyes of the men and women I meet in the villages, girls who set themselves on fire out of desperation are selfish, women who fight back are shameless, and women who run away are prostitutes.
Darya’s family and neighbors want her to go to Helmand in order to keep the family’s name respectful. It’s shameful enough that she was sold to an opium smuggler, but it will be more of a dishonor if she runs away or divorces her husband.
The three men in the room notice Darya’s entrance and closeness to me, but they do not acknowledge her. Sufi does not look at her. He stares at his glass of tea. “I want h
er to become my wife’s friend, like her sister. I will treat them with justice, but I will give them separate quarters. My wife is ill and needs help around the house. I expect this girl to help her, but she is too unruly and rebellious right now. She needs to be trained, and we hope, in time, she will change.”
“He wants me to become his slave,” she whispers.
Ali pauses in his translation and turns to me to comment. “He has been here only three times, not five or six like he says. He’s getting restless, but I think she’s still too young to go.”
“Why does she have to go if she doesn’t want to?” I ask Ali, fully knowing the answer.
“Because it’s not a choice for any of us,” he says.
Darya’s marriage is not a union between man and woman but an opium deal that has to be fulfilled to save her family. She is the sacrifice for the greater good. I realize that her marriage is not about honor but about lives. Haji Sufi may have the power to kill her entire family if he’s jilted. He can simply unleash his relatives, the ones who jailed Darya’s father, to attack them in Ghoryan. What Darya wants is irrelevant.
Ali tells Sufi that Darya’s still too young to go. Sufi objects, “She must be thirteen. She looks like a woman already.” Then he softens his tone. “But I will be patient and then we will talk. I come here and bring gifts and food each time. I don’t want to force her, so maybe when she’s fourteen, fifteen, she will know what’s good for her. I want her to like me.”
“You’re a good man, we know,” Ali tells him. “She just needs time.”
I sit in silence for a few minutes as they talk in Pashto together. Haji Sufi may be a good man compared with other ruthless drug dealers, but everyone in the room is treating Darya like property. Her family is accepting her loss too easily. I feel my anger directed at her mother and uncle. They can help her if they go to the government and ask for protection, can’t they?
Saboora and Basira enter the room. Saboora grabs Darya’s hand, ordering her to come to the kitchen. It’s close to lunchtime, and I should not overstay my welcome. I finish my cup of tea and excuse myself. I walk toward the kitchen to talk to Darya, but Saboora stops me. “She has to cook lunch now,” she says. “She’s busy.”
My head’s spinning from the charged emotions of the last few hours. Saboora’s rudeness irks me, but I know I should not push her to let me see Darya. Saboora seems to be more of a mother to their family than Basira. She wants to protect the family and their privacy. I hope I can come back. Darya has become a part of my life, not just a character in a story. I leave Ghoryan for Herat city to rest.
Over the next few days at Sattar Agha’s, I sit in the garden surrounded by grapevines and purple petunias and consider what I could do to help Darya. I swirl my glass of green tea like it’s wine and ponder my last few weeks in Ghoryan.
“You can’t do anything,” my cousin Neela insists. She sits across the table from me in the garden, her legs crossed. “You can report it to the government, but they won’t do anything. That might harm her more. You can tell the Americans, but I don’t think they care. Besides, do you want to be responsible for risking the rest of the family’s lives? I think you should just report your story so that people can become aware of it.” Neela has just summarized in one breath the options I have been ruminating on for hours.
“Yes, I know, but this is different,” I say. “She’s not going to be a normal bride. God knows what will happen to her when he takes her to Helmand. I know that she’s not alone. There are thousands like her, but when she reached out to me, she became a part of me. I can’t explain it. Maybe I see myself in her. Maybe I see the fate of this country in her struggle.”
Neela is a twenty-four-year-old student of fine arts. She draws miniatures on hand-blown blue glass and expresses her frustrations and feelings with paint on canvas. One of her paintings hangs on her family’s living room wall. It depicts a somber woman behind steel bars. Above the bars is a realistic version of the Kaaba, the house of God, in Mecca. Under the Kaaba is an eye with tears dripping down. “That’s how I felt under the Taliban,” Neela explains. “I had to stay home and study in secret.” She’s devout and committed. She fasts once a week, even when it’s not Ramadan, and prays five times a day. Her head scarf stays on in the house, sometimes even covering her serious brown eyes. However, contrary to the common stereotypes of devout women, Neela is not submissive. She takes advantage of any rights she was given after the fall of the Taliban. “We have to take back the religion they tried to take away from us,” she tells me during one of our soul-searching conversations. She plans to choose her own husband, finish university, work outside the house, and be financially independent.
“I would run away if I were Darya,” I say. “I couldn’t become a slave. What would you do?” I ask Neela.
“The same, but what happens to girls who run away here?” she asks rhetorically.
“The female prisons are full of runaways,” I say, nodding. “It’s a crime to run away from becoming a slave. How can I ever accept this element of life in Afghanistan? It disgusts me. It’s a part of who we are, it’s our dark side, and Afghan men and women will sit here and tell me that Darya’s to blame for rebelling against becoming property. Even educated people believe this, not just illiterate women like her mother. How can I ever accept that? How can you?” I say to Neela.
“You have the luxury of an American passport. You can leave when it gets hard. We find ways around it. I’m lucky I come from an open-minded family.” Then she says with her usual candor, “If it disgusts you, why do you keep returning here? I don’t think it’s just for work.”
“Because I can’t stay away.”
It’s July 2003 and my third time back in Afghanistan. The traveling back and forth from Afghanistan to the United States is a physical manifestation of how my identity wavers, how often I can change nationalities, hiding one and bringing forth the other. I can both wear a head scarf without much trouble and walk around in a bathing suit by a pool full of men. For my female cousins in Herat, swimming half naked in front of men is an unthinkable sin. For some of my American female friends, wearing a head scarf would be a blatant offense to their freedom.
The incoherence in this actually gives me comfort. But it also takes away any sense of rootedness. When people talk about feeling grounded, I wonder what they mean. I don’t feel grounded or have a sense of home. I had an imaginary home, Herat, until I returned in 2000 and saw the changes there. I am envious of those who call one place home and enjoy a sense of belonging, of ownership of that place. In the Afghanistan of my childhood, I remember feeling that sense of belonging during the war. My world was simple, intact, innocent like Darya’s green eyes. Afghanistan was falling apart, but I felt whole.
In Darya, I see the Afghanistan both of my childhood and of my adulthood. I see a connection to my homeland in this frightened girl. I barely know her, but I feel like I’ve known her all my life. She is Afghanistan—her beauty and innocence, her resistance to control, her yearning for independence, her desperation, her plea for help to an outsider. Throughout its history, Afghanistan has been trying to form an identity outside of foreign interference while seeking help from those same foreigners. Now it is no different. The United States and its allies say they are here to save Afghanistan, but they are destroying it at the same time. I hope I won’t do the same to Darya.
Chapter Eight
Traveling on the Border of Death
A few days after meeting Haji Sufi, Saber and I go to Darya’s house again. But when we arrive, no one opens the door. I can hear voices inside, but our knocks are ignored. A young boy with unwashed hair comes out of the house across the street.
“They don’t want you coming over anymore. They are afraid that their father might find out they’re talking to you and he might beat them,” he informs me.
“Where’s Darya? Did she go with her husband?” I ask.
“I saw her playing outside yesterday, even though she should be insi
de helping her mother,” the boy says. Even this boy, who is about eight or nine years old, is judgmental of bold Darya.
“We should leave,” Saber admonishes. “Maybe they’re afraid she’s turning to you for help and you might take her from them.”
I feel rejected but relieved that Haji Sufi has not yet taken Darya. I decide to return another day. Saber and I drive toward the home of Gandomi Soltanzi, the widow who lost her husband and four of her children and who owes a large opium debt. She opens the door and flashes me a toothless smile. She begins complaining right away.
“The damn smuggler won’t leave me alone—that godforsaken Haji Sardar wants the little land I have left. Can you ask the Americans to shoot him?” she pleads. “It would be a favor to mankind.”
I offer to speak to this notorious smuggler.
The most feared drug lords in Ghoryan are cousins, Sardar and Paiman, who live on the dirt road running between Herat city and Ghoryan town. Their twin two-story houses, with manicured gardens and locked brass gates, tower over the rows of walled-in, dilapidated mud homes. The cousins hail from a smaller village in the desert called Haft Chah (Seven Wells), which breeds drug dealers with important connections in Iran. Their village is the only one where I’ve seen four-by-four trucks and $1,000 satellite phones.
Sardar and Paiman are illiterate hajis. They made the obligatory trip to Mecca three years ago. Many Ghoryan residents respect them for that title and their rise to affluence. They were shepherds, then refugees working construction jobs in Iran, and now they have carte blanche in the district as the leading drug lords. They’re part of the new mafia in Afghanistan. Their cronies terrorize women and families with opium debts.
Yet even they have lost men to the drug business. Sardar, thirty-five, supports his sister’s and brother’s families since their men died smuggling narcotics. Sardar has an untrimmed beard and small, round hands. Puffy circles under his eyes and a pudgy nose stand out on his deep brown face. He agrees to an interview under the condition that we not talk about his smuggling activities, but he says he will give his opinion on the issue.