Authors: Rod Nordland
Why had they waited so long to put in their applications as
refugees? we asked Ali. It seemed like they wanted their asylum bid to fail. Then to raise his hands to policemen? Ali laughed his nervous laugh and looked at the floor. “I don’t know the reason. We just got negligent. Of course humans do not see their future, what’s good for them or what’s bad. Maybe that was our destiny. We really can’t say.”
Jawad and I tried to persuade them to flee to Pakistan instead, where there would be no government go-betweens or police registration, less danger of such rapacious treatment from the police, and, most important, the opportunity to apply directly to the UNHCR rather than through a corrupt, government-controlled apparatus.
6
Jawad would go with them and make sure everything went okay. They listened politely and said they would think about it. They agreed to go to the UNHCR office in Kabul the next day to discuss their options. We made an appointment for them at nine the next morning, but when we went to find them, they were gone. At the crack of dawn, they had gotten into a minibus headed back to Bamiyan.
Zakia and Ali did not say this, but I am sure they felt it: We had all let them down. This was their story now, and for better or worse it was going to end in Bamiyan, perhaps after a long and happy life or perhaps abruptly and violently today or tomorrow or the next day. At least in Bamiyan, as Ali had said previously, they would know what their enemy looked like and what to expect when they met him.
Much later, one afternoon in the depths of the winter to come, Zakia was alone and saw Anwar’s cell phone unattended. She picked it up and made a dropped call to Jawad, as she had often done before with Ali. Jawad called back expecting the old man and was surprised to hear Zakia answer on the first ring. She just wanted to talk and seemed wistful, perhaps lonely, looking back over her life with Ali so far. Jawad immediately put her on the speakerphone so no one could accuse him of impropriety, and we talked to her together. “I wish I could have succeeded to marry
Ali with the consent of my parents, so we could live in Bamiyan without risk and have relations with my family, so we would go to see them and they would come to see us, and we would have a better and happier life,” she said. “What we have done now is not a good thing. It is a bad thing, because we cannot live freely. We are always in danger. I wish we could have achieved a reconciliation between our families. That would be better than leaving our country.”
That did not mean she was unhappy, she hastened to add. “I’m thankful, I’m glad for what we did, but they were against it and will always be against it. I am happy because I am together with him, and I am where I should be and should have been, with him. Whatever happens to us, we had this time together.”
In Afghanistan vengeance is a dish that never grows cold. Nonetheless Ali’s family struggled to persuade him that Zakia and he remained at risk and they really should find a way to leave. After the Tajik debacle, the family opposed the couple’s decision to come back to Bamiyan and pressured them to return to Kabul to wait a little longer and explore other options. So they dutifully went back to Kabul in early November 2014, but it was clear that Ali was not happy about it. Anwar and the rest of the family thought they should try again, this time through Pakistan or India, or at least spend some time in Kabul to see if anything else would develop from the Canadians or the Americans. Anwar came along again to Kabul as well. But Ali lacked the patience of the old man; it was apparent that he was just accommodating the family pressure and they would not stay long.
Manizha Naderi from WAW met with them to discuss their options. She had always been convinced that Zakia’s family would eventually kill the couple unless they fled, and probably no one in Afghanistan has more experience at rescuing women threatened with honor killings than Manizha does. Accepting that they were
so opposed to Pakistan, Manizha suggested India, where she could introduce them to an Afghan-refugee organization in Delhi that would help them. Jawad could go with them there, even I could go with them there, and it was a civilized place, where Afghan refugees were decently treated by the authorities. Living there would be tedious, with few people around who spoke their language and months of waiting ahead of them, but safe. We would find a way to help them surmount the language barrier. What was seven months or even a year of waiting, compared to the spans of their entire lives? This is not an argument persuasive to young people; to them a month was an eternity. They said they would think about it, which was as close to a no as anyone ever got out of them.
We made another round of visits to the Western embassies and diplomats, but the Canadians seemed to have lost interest, and the Swedes and Germans became the latest among several European countries to say they agreed with the Americans that they could consider the couple only as refugees in a third country. Holland and Norway ignored the couple’s overtures, and of course, when it came to the Americans, they had foiled their only chance. They did not have the sort of money, twenty thousand dollars or more apiece, that human traffickers demand to smuggle people to Europe, where they could easily claim asylum. We were not going to encourage that route even if the money could be found, conscious of the risk that they would drown in a flimsy boat or suffocate in some truck container en route. Bereft of options that they were willing to consider, they were much more inclined to take their chances and face the future among family and friends—Zakia by then considered her in-laws to be her only family.
Then, in late November, as Zakia’s pregnancy approached its ninth month, none of them could see fleeing as refugees until after the baby was born. Zakia felt she needed the stability of being in a place they knew. She felt more urgently the need of having womenfolk around—her mother-in-law and her new sisters-in-law. They announced that they would return to Bamiyan to overwinter there, perhaps reconsidering refugee options come springtime. Anwar was persuaded by the pregnancy as well. I offered to buy
them air tickets from Kabul to Bamiyan so they could be spared the rigors and risks of the mountain roads and the Taliban checkpoints, and they got ready to fly home, this time for good, or at least for the winter.
Before they left, Ali called and asked if we would give him the money for the air tickets and he would take care of buying them himself. Then, a few minutes later, Zakia called from Anwar’s phone and warned us that he planned to keep the money and have them all travel by land; both she and Anwar thought that was a mad plan.
It turned into their first fight. We told Ali we would give them only nonrefundable air tickets, not cash so he could go instead by road, and he realized that his wife or father had warned us of his intentions. He turned on his father, and they quarreled bitterly.
“You cannot take your wife by road!” Anwar yelled at his son. “She is pregnant—you must be crazy! You don’t listen to anyone!”
“She is my wife, and I will decide what to do.” He turned to Zakia. “We are going by road. If you are my wife, then come with me.”
“I am your wife, but I am also the mother of our child. I will not go by road,” Zakia said. “Uncle is also not well enough for that trip.”
Ali stormed out of the house and headed off to Bamiyan on his own, taking a minibus with what little money he had left. The robbery in Tajikistan had wiped out everything, and the donor well was dry at WAW. I don’t know where he even got the five hundred afghanis for the minibus fare.
Ali’s brother Bismillah called from Bamiyan and asked Jawad if he could call Ali and try to calm him down, get him to return to Kabul and take the flight with his wife and Anwar. “You’re like a brother to him,” Bismillah said to Jawad. “Warn him he has to behave properly to his wife and respect his father.” As he always did when upset, Ali had switched off his phone, and we couldn’t reach him. Now, on top of everything else, Jawad was being asked to be Zakia and Ali’s marriage counselor.
We got the air tickets for Zakia and Anwar, and they would fly
up to Bamiyan on the next flight, three days later; after all the last-minute wrangling, the only seats available were in business class, so I splurged for them. The next day Jawad’s phone rang, and it was Ali calling him back, from the Shibar Pass in the minibus, halfway to Bamiyan. He had calmed down and was already revising his account of the fight. “I
had
to leave like that,” he said, “Otherwise I would get angrier with my father, and that isn’t good. The only way to avoid disputing with my father was to leave him behind and come to Bamiyan on my own.” On the way he planned to stop to see a friend who wanted to give the couple a wedding present—the friend lived in a remote corner of the province, which is why Ali had wanted to go by road, since it passed that way. That, and the money from the air tickets. Jawad talked to him for a long time, and Ali promised to meet Zakia and Anwar at the Bamiyan airfield.
A couple of days later, Anwar and Zakia went to Kabul International Airport for their flight. They boarded early in business class, so they were already seated as the planeload of passengers filed past them. Some of them recognized Zakia and smiled broadly, chuckled; a few of the older ones scowled, and she avoided eye contact with men in turbans. She was glad when the privacy curtain between classes was pulled, and she said nothing and looked uneasy when a flight attendant asked her for an autograph.
There’s a saying that marriage only really begins after a couple has survived their first fight. Ali was at the airport in Bamiyan to meet their plane. He hugged and kissed cheeks with his father and took Zakia’s hand in his. Ali’s own version of that particular saying went like this: “Until you roll a car, you can’t be a good driver.” Fortunately, he’s never driven a car, but neither had he ever been a husband.
Bitter cold set in the month after they arrived back in Bamiyan, but they viewed it as a friend; the fields were frozen, there was no work, and it would be difficult for the men in Zakia’s family to return home. If they did, they would be noticed; there is hardly any good reason to go to Bamiyan in the winter. Few cars come over the two main passes from Kabul when the snows are deep there; the Hajigak Pass is often closed for most of the winter, and Shibar
Pass is not much better. The couple settled into Anwar’s mud house and talked about building an extra room on it come springtime. One of the rooms had underfloor heat, a traditional Afghan setup where brush is burned in a crawl space beneath a suspended earthen floor, keeping the room above efficiently warm for many hours. The small children and the old couple shared that room at night; the others piled on blankets and made do with
bukharis
when there was enough fuel to go around. In all there were eighteen of them sharing no more than four small rooms, ten adults and eight young children, the grandchildren of Anwar and Chaman.
Semitranslucent plastic sheeting was tacked over the small windows of the mud buildings in the compound, which would remain closed up for the long winter. It would be dark inside, with smoke stains on the timber-and-wattle ceilings. Neatly stacked in the courtyard next to the still-unfinished compound wall was the winter’s supply of fuel, scores of firewood bundles. These mostly consisted of brush and twigs, and a few bigger sticks, collected on long expeditions into the mountains by a group of the men taking the family’s two donkeys, their only form of transport. No one in the family had so much as a bicycle. There was a newcomer to their compound then, a dog chained to a stake—a rare sight, because most Afghans despise dogs and rarely keep them at their homes.
That December, Zakia went often to the hospital with labor scares and asked to be taken there whenever she felt faint or nauseous. At last it really was labor, and just after midnight on December 27, nine months and eleven days after eloping, Zakia gave birth to a baby girl. No one recorded the weight, but the new parents worried that she was too small, too weak, and she coughed too much. Zakia came through it badly anemic, had a blood transfusion, and was kept in the hospital for four days.
At home Zakia and the baby shared the room that had underfloor heating with Chaman and the small children. The cold was so severe that it was an emergency, and the newborn and its mother came before everything else, so they were given the warmest room and the thickest blankets. At first Chaman changed and cleaned the baby, picked her up when she cried, walked and rocked her to
sleep, and did everything but feed her. Zakia took her when it was time for the breast. “I’m happy to have another baby in the house,” Chaman said. “But I still want them to go abroad, somewhere safe. I love the child and I love my daughter-in-law, but they have to leave.”
Zakia could not decide what to name her daughter, so a couple of weeks after the birth she asked her brother-in-law Bismillah to choose the name for them. “He is the eldest son in the family, so all should accept that,” Zakia said. “I didn’t have a good name of my own to give her.” Bismillah spent a day thinking about it, then came to Zakia and said, “What about Ruqia?” He liked it, he said, because it rhymed with Zakia. Both were originally Arabic names, with multiple meanings, but one of those meanings was the same for both: “ascendant” or “higher.” So Ruqia it was.
The love story of Zakia and Ali and the travail that attended it is both exceptional and ordinary. Exceptional because it has not ended in violence, at least not yet, and because it got told at all. Ordinary because no matter how hard the mullahs and the patriarchs of the country try to stamp it out, love happens, and it happens a lot. No one really knows how often, since it all transpires out of sight behind the walls that surround nearly every Afghan home. The
Night of the Lovers
radio program is a rare window into the romantic lives of Afghans, and after more than a year on the air it was still receiving hundreds of submissions from lovesick Afghan young people every week. Information is even harder to find on how many love affairs are cut short by honor killings. In so many cases, lovers are thwarted before they get very far, or if they do go far, they are tracked down and killed. Usually no one hears about these killings—except in the communities where they take place. The male elders approve of the honor killings and conspire to keep them secret from the authorities. “Just five or ten percent of these cases of violence against women are ever publicly known about,” says the women’s-rights activist Hussain Hasrat.