Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan Read online

  All I knew was that I was terribly afraid of my feelings, and that when I needed my friends, and wanted to play with them, they pushed me away. Their rejection hurt me deeply and made me grow up more quickly, but it also made me sad and lonely. I still feel wounded about the way they treated me then, but can also see now that they didn’t understand I was suffering from depression.

  I spent a lot of this time with my mother, and became particularly close to her. We went to weddings and parties together and I soon became used to the company of adults rather than that of children. It was around this time my mother fell pregnant again and gave birth to a boy: my lovely, clever brother. With his arrival things began to improve for my family for a while. I gradually got better and my mother was overjoyed to have a son at long last.

  As the civil war raged on, the different Jihadi groups fought each other to gain control of Kabul, with different areas of the city occupied by different rebel ethnic groups. The Pashtuns accounted for the largest of the factions and formed the Hezbi Islami Group led by Gulbudeen Hekmatyar, the Northern Alliance consisted principally of Tajiks (the second biggest ethnic group) and was led by Burahnuldeen Rabani and Ahmad Shah Masood, while the Hazaras formed a group called Hezbi Wahdat led by warlord Abdull Ali Mazari. Meanwhile the Uzbek faction – known as Junbish – was led by warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam. These were the same Jihadi groups who had supported each other in the battle against the Russian-backed communist regime. But when the United States came onto the scene, things changed quickly as each of the groups struggled for dominance. Where I lived, in the Microrayan district of Kabul, the area was divided between the Uzbek rebels and the Northern Alliance. When the Soviet-backed government had fallen apart, so too had any semblance of integration between the different ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Each faction now wanted power for itself, and its leaders would exploit ethnic tensions to their advantage. So the fighting intensified, with rockets increasingly being fired on a daily basis.

  When the fighting eventually subsided we went back to school wearing black clothes and headscarves, and were frightened to see bearded men with guns standing outside our school gates. We also noticed that the statues of Lenin, which had stood in our classrooms, were now hanging from the trees. The men with guns would point up at them and indicate that this was to be the fate of communists. And it soon became clear that girls were being raped or killed just for going to school. In fact, it was increasingly common for warlords to abduct any school girl that they took a fancy to. My sisters and I were young enough at the time to avoid this fate, but keenly felt the dangers facing older girls. We were, for example, all aware of what had happened to Naheed, a girl who’d lived only a few blocks away from us. A Mujahedeen gunman had taken a liking to her, gone to her sixth floor apartment and tried to rape her, and in order to escape she’d jumped from the balcony and fallen to her death. The next day the people in the neighbourhood had launched a protest by carrying her body through the streets on a charpoie (a daybed), for all to see. The sight of this had terrified me and my sisters, but life went on. Women continued to go out but were always accompanied by a male family member, and girls went to school and some women to work, but far fewer than had before.

  And so life gradually changed. Schoolgirls started to wear black clothes, and swapped short skirts and dresses for long baggy ones, and female teachers and older girls had to wear the hijab (headscarf), although this was only compulsory once a girl had reached puberty.

  The curriculum at school also changed. We began to have Arabic teachers, were schooled in Islam and learnt English instead of Russian. Some girls were already good at reciting the Quran because their parents had organised for them to have private Islamic tutoring at home – I was fortunate in this respect – but others had difficulty learning the verses of the Quran and couldn’t pronounce so much as a single Arabic word. We were routinely tested and if anyone didn’t know their Kalama (the Islamic testimony of faith) they would be punished and ridiculed as communists who neither knew nor respected their religion. Not only was the whole educational system changing, but the country itself was split amongst the different Jihadi groups.

  There was certainly no unity in Kabul, as different ethnic Jihadi groups controlled different parts of the city. While our neighbourhood, for example, was under the control of General Rashid Dostam, just across the road, the area was led by the Northern Alliance and Ahmad Shah Masood. Eastern Kabul, meanwhile, was controlled by Hezbi Islami – led by Gulbudeen Hekmatyar – and yet another district was under the influence of Hezbi Wahdat and controlled by Hazaras.

  Once again my father’s life was seriously in danger because he’d served under the now discredited Communist regime, and was therefore not liked by any of the rebel groups. Most of his friends had already fled Kabul; he no longer had a job and he was now father to four girls who were fast becoming teenagers. In 1993 my youngest sister had been born at the height of the civil war; although my parents had been hoping for another boy, this time round gender seemed less important. Nonetheless, at the time the security situation in Afghanistan for families with girls was far from good. When my youngest sister was only a couple of months old I used to look after her, and my mother would tell me to keep her warm so that she didn’t catch a cold, but really she was far more worried about us older girls. We’d all heard about women being raped and kidnapped, so my parents were increasingly concerned for our safety, even though I was only ten years old. All the while the war became steadily worse, and we became steadily poorer. Then when my father could wait no longer to escape to Pakistan – fleeing the country ahead of the rest of us – winter came, and as it grew colder and the snow came, so the fighting intensified.

  In peacetime our fifth-floor apartment had wonderful views, and enjoyed the coolest breezes during the summer, but in wartime it was considered dangerously exposed to be at the top of the building. And now we were always at home. The war meant that once again there was no more school because the school buildings had been taken over by refugees who’d fled the outskirts of Kabul. War may bring people together, but that doesn’t always mean they empathise with each other. The building we lived in housed ten different families, and as there would be intensive rocket firing every day we would go down to the third floor each morning and join our other neighbours. We children would sit together in the corridor, and all the surrounding doors would be closed so that if a shell hit the building, the blast of broken glass and displaced furniture wouldn’t injure anyone. We were taught this survival tactic by the men who bravely ventured out and heard about the experiences of other people in the city, discovering that many of the worst injuries were caused by shattering glass.

  Our neighbours also had teenage girls and my sisters and I would often sit with them and swap stories. Muzgan, who lived on the third floor, was both the bravest and the best storyteller among us. She frightened us all with her creepy ghost stories, though I realise now that her storytelling was her way of coping with the fear of being killed in a rocket attack. Like Sheherazade, Muzgan would always tell stories that had no ending. We would hang on her every word and beg her to tell us what happened next but Muzgan would refuse to utter another word, relishing the attention.

  While we children listened to Muzgan’s stories, every evening the men would huddle around the radio and listen intently to the BBC World Service. Since there was no electricity and we had only one small battery-run radio between us, everyone had to keep quiet during the news. The men listened solemnly as the BBC informed them how many rockets had been fired that day, where they had landed and which group of the Mujahedeen was now in control of which area. We would often recognise the names of the roads and blocks of houses where the rockets had landed, because they were in our neighbourhood, but we felt like prisoners in our own homes, unable to go out in the streets and actually see what had happened. Then, as the news programme came to an end, Muzgan would always grab the radio and turn the dial to another station, one that played cheerful and
lively music, and we girls would try to enjoy ourselves. The men, meanwhile, would embark on serious discussions about what the United Nations should be doing and what was to become of Afghanistan. None of them had jobs any more, and both money and food were fast running out.

  For my mother this was a time of enormous pressure, as my father had already fled to Pakistan, having seen how some of his former colleagues had been assassinated or abducted. Before he left, though, there was one occasion at around midnight when we’d heard a knock at our door. My mother had looked through the peephole and seen a man with a scarf wrapped around his face carrying an AK47 rifle. She had asked what he wanted. The man replied, ‘Open the door. I want to talk to Akbar Kargar.’ My mother didn’t open the door, nor did she let my father speak to the man. We never did find out who he was. He may just have been a thief, but whenever someone came and asked to speak to my father, we would all get frightened. We lived constantly with this fear, never knowing whether he would still be alive from one day to the next.

  Once my father had left Kabul he wrote to tell us that he had arrived safely in Peshawar, but after that we didn’t hear any more from him for a while. His silence meant that my mother was uncertain about what to do, because she was waiting for my father’s instructions. Life was simpler for us children, though: we would just do what Muzgan told us to do – she would play some music, and we would all clap. I realise now we girls listening to happy songs must have annoyed all those adults burdened with anxiety, and remember how Muzgan’s mother would reproach her. ‘Muzgan, you shameless girl! Can’t you see we’re in terrible trouble? There might be no food for us tomorrow. Any of us could die. You should be teaching the girls to pray for the war to end.’ But Muzgan was not ashamed. ‘I don’t care and anyway, I don’t want to die feeling sad. Who knows? We might all die tonight, but I want to die when I’m dancing. I want to die happy. When you die, Mother, you’ll die worrying.’ Then her mother would snatch the radio from Muzgan, ignoring our pleas to be able to listen to the music and saying, ‘Your brother doesn’t have any more batteries left and we need to save the radio for the BBC news.’

  As these domestic squabbles continued, the fighting outside became even more intense. In the end, things got so bad we had to leave our home in Microrayan – which had become the stronghold of two different rebel groups – and move to Shahr-e-naw, another district of Kabul. Shahr-e-naw is right in the centre of Kabul, and at that time was considered to be a safer neighbourhood than Microrayan. We left Microrayan together with three other families, and as there was no time to pack we left with only the clothes we were wearing. We stayed in a friend’s house who had already fled the country, and had offered his home to refugees like us. Our living conditions there were cramped and squalid. All the women and children had to sleep together in one room, and as there was no hot water we couldn’t shower and we didn’t have clean clothes either. The food supplies were running low, and we had no idea what had happened to our homes, although we did hear from a neighbour that our apartments had been looted by the Mujahedeen. This news upset my mother greatly, particularly as she had been waiting and waiting for word from my father. My father is a writer and an intellectual, and the collection of books he had amassed at home over the years was his pride and joy. One large room in our apartment had been filled with shelf upon shelf of books – philosophy, history, politics, novels and poetry – that were mostly written in Persian and Pashtu, but some in Russian. Our friends and neighbours had called it the Kargar library, and would regularly call in to borrow books.

  By the end of 1994 – just before the Taliban emerged – our life in Shahr-e-naw became harder than ever, the temperature dropped and it began to snow. In the evenings it was the girls’ job to go outside and fetch water and by then it was so cold that our hands would turn blue and numb. My mother had also noticed that my sisters, the other girls and I were spending all day scratching our heads, and had talked to Muzgan’s mother about what to do about this lice infestation. She had suggested that my mother simply cut our hair, but we had refused to let her anywhere near us with scissors. Meanwhile the infestation only got worse. Every day I was wearing the same pair of old corduroy trousers and a jumper, both of which had become black with dirt. By now we’d been living in Shahr-e-naw for nearly two weeks, but the time had come to leave.

  My father had managed to get a message to us through a male relative, and had told us to hire some form of transport and go first to Jalalabad, a city in the east of Afghanistan that was seventy miles from Kabul. My mother and a neighbour duly made plans to hire a minibus, but on the day we were due to leave Afghanistan, the Pakistani government closed the border at Torkham (the main crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan) in an attempt to stop the flood of refugees trying to flee Afghanistan. We would have to change our escape route.

  When the time came to leave Kabul, my mother and our neighbour, Auntie Nasfeesa, both wept. I began to cry, too, but I was only crying because my mother was. I didn’t understand that I was fleeing my homeland to escape the war. My mother told us to say goodbye to the land we’d been born in, which we dutifully did, but at the time I understood neither the significance of what I was doing nor what was actually happening to us. We left Kabul very early in the morning, when it was still cold and dark. We’d packed the minibus with basic things like bread, drinking water and bottled milk for my baby sister. We didn’t reach Jalalabad until nightfall, staying the night at my mother’s cousin’s house where we all slept in one large room. My mother had two requests for her cousin when we arrived; first, could she help us get to Peshawar where my father was waiting for us? Second, could she offer us anything to get rid of our head lice? Thankfully, her cousin was able to produce a bottle of grey liquid – with a sharp antiseptic smell I can still remember – and my mother got to work with it straightaway. It was the first time any of us had had head lice and we didn’t realise that it’s considered embarrassing, and so were surprised when my mother’s cousin’s daughters began laughing and pointing at us. In turn, they were shocked at how openly we talked about the annoying little insects that were laying dozens of eggs in our hair every day. My mother, however, was mortified and apologised to her cousin for bringing us into her home infested with lice.

  The next day we were up early again and drove the minibus to the border with Pakistan. As the official crossing at Torkham had been closed, we were going to have to cross the border illegally through the mountains, via the same route that people living in the border area were using to carry refugees between Afghanistan and Pakistan in exchange for money. We had to cross a narrow river at Naw-a-Pass in a wooden long-tail boat, then when we’d reached the other side we travelled in an open-back military truck. There wasn’t a lot of space in it so we were all sitting on top of one another. Apart from the driver and his two assistants, we were all females, with no male relatives (other than my three-year-old brother) to protect us.

  To add to our difficulties, we had with us my one-year-old baby sister who drank formula milk, so my mother somehow had to find clean, warm water to mix with the powder. We all took turns to hold my baby sister while she slept. I remember clearly being driven a long way through mountains and rocks, and how I screamed because I was only small and was being flung around all over the place. The mountains were so full of dust that we sometimes couldn’t see where we were going. Sometimes we couldn’t even see each other’s eyes. The dust covered everything: the lorry, our clothes, our faces. I think even our minds were affected by it.

  We had entrusted our lives to a random driver commandeering an old Russian military truck and his two helpers. So while I feared we might crash and fall down the mountainside, my mother was no doubt more worried about being in a truck full of women accompanied only by men we didn’t know. She would have been only too aware that we could have been robbed, raped or killed; we’d even heard stories of Afghan women and girls being sold to Arab Sheiks.

  As day turned into night, my mother and the othe
r women got more and more worried. We’d been told that we would arrive in Peshawar before it got dark, yet night had come and we were still in the mountains. We were risking our lives trusting that we would eventually arrive in a better place, and hoping we would finally see my father again after so many weeks apart from him. During that cold night, I thought back to those evenings listening to Muzgan’s endless stories, craning our necks to catch the BBC news and being nagged by Muzgan’s mother. I missed Muzgan. Before I’d left Kabul I had promised to write to her. I’d told her I wanted to hear the end of the story of the little girl in the red hat whose grandmother had been eaten by a wolf, but she had said it would take too long. We’d told each other we would see one another again if we didn’t die in a rocket attack, but that still hasn’t happened. I heard from someone that she’s married and has children, but I don’t know where she’s living. That’s the strange thing about war, it can bring you so close to people, then it pulls you apart. You have to get used to losing friends, leaving one place and moving to another.

  As it turned out, we were lucky. The driver and his two helpers were not rapists. The sky was becoming lighter and the driver said his dawn prayers – Salat Ul Fajr – and then announced in a loud voice that we were going down the mountain, that this road would be easier and that we were on our way to Peshawar. ‘Inshallah (God willing), the road will be faster and we will get there by midday.’ Full of relief that nothing had happened to any of us in that wild mountain range, my mother told us to thank God for keeping us safe. The rest of the journey was much less dusty and we soon reached a small Pakistani tribal village where a street-lamp cast light on the smooth road ahead. I no longer had to cling on to the bar of the truck, and while my skin was dry from the wind and the smell of the hairlice lotion lingered in my hair, the dust no longer bothered me. I had swallowed so much of it that it almost felt normal. In comparison, the fresh air and tarmac road felt strange. I had been in those mountains for one and a half days and one long night.