The Lovers (24 page)

Shukria had left her office at WAW and gone home, and reached there by phone at first she was reluctant to come out, but finally, in the middle of the night, she called the shelter. They sent her a minibus, and she rendezvoused with Jawad. Everyone piled into the minibus for the ride to the WAW shelter. Speaking quietly, Zakia kept reassuring her father-in-law that it would be all right. The gates of the shelter’s compound swung open, the men dismounted, and the minibus drove in with just Zakia and Shukria. Jawad got his car and dropped Anwar off in a neighborhood where Anwar thought he might know someone. “I felt sorry for him,” Jawad said. “He lost everything, he had no place to stay, his son was in jail, his daughter-in-law in the shelter, and they all thought this shelter was going to be like the one in Bamiyan and that she would be there for months and months.” Jawad called Shah Hussein once more, to let him know where he had dropped his uncle. That phone did not ring, so he called Ali’s phone, which Shah Hussein still had.

There was a new ringtone on it now, the song “Majnoon” by the Iranian singer Moein.

In my soul I bear

The pain and sorrow of your love:

Do not let me wait any longer

Watching for you by the roadside!

I am crazy, I am possessed,

Wild with love, I sing:

I am Majnoon!

Layli, without you

I cannot live.
²

“Zakia is in the shelter,” Jawad told Shah Hussein. “Your uncle is safe.” That night, though, Anwar would sleep on the street.

At the police station, Ali had been in for a rough time. As far as the police were concerned, he was at the very least a sex criminal for running away with a woman without her family’s permission, quite possibly a kidnapper, and perhaps a murderer. “They beat me with rifle butts,” he said. “Over and over until I grabbed the rifle butt and said, ‘Please stop, you’re not allowed to hurt me, and I’m just here because I love her and she loves me.’” The beatings stopped for a while, but he was refused food or the right to use the bathroom. Sharing a cell with four other men, he was obliged to soil himself and lie in the wet.

The next day detectives from the Criminal Investigation Division came to question him again, and he persisted with his story that Zakia had stayed in the mountains somewhere in Bamiyan and he had come alone to Kabul. “They didn’t believe me. They already knew so much about my case,” he said. Someone had been talking. They knew what house he had lived in with his aunt, that the couple had recently moved to another house nearby and where it was. Zakia and Anwar had been able to escape only because police bureaucracy had moved too slowly to follow up on Ali’s arrest.

I suggested to Jawad that he go to the police station the next day, Saturday, to try to see Ali, while I wrote an article from Jawad’s reporting about what had happened to the couple; there was just enough time to make the early deadlines for the Sunday bulldog (the print edition that comes out on Saturday afternoon), and I had a head start because I’d already written a tentative lede for just such a story when we’d begun to suspect both that Zakia was pregnant and that Ali would get caught.
³

When Jawad and Anwar got to PD1, Zakia’s family was there in force, hanging around outside the station, glowering and jeering at them as they walked past. At the lockup the jailers said that only the old man could visit his son, but this gave Jawad a chance to talk with the PD1 police chief, Colonel Jamila Bayaz. She was famous as the first female police chief of an Afghan police district.
⁴
I had interviewed her when she was appointed earlier in the year; it was something the Ministry of Interior liked to boast about,
⁵
since the lack of female officers,
⁶
especially in key positions, was
an issue that was important to the international community. I had heard that Colonel Bayaz was quite good—later in 2014 she was promoted to brigadier general, one of only four female general officers in the Ministry of Interior and its police agencies at the time. There had been a fifth one, in charge of gender issues, Brigadier General Shafiqa Quraishi, but she fled the country and sought asylum abroad.
⁷
During my earlier interview with Colonel Bayaz, her deputy, a man, a senior official who wouldn’t be named, another man, and two or three other policemen all crowded into the room. When I asked Jamila questions, they answered for her. “As things like my promotion happen, it motivates other women to do more,” she said when she managed to get a word in edgewise on her own interview. She did say something else, though, quite unbidden and, as it would later turn out, quite plaintive. “I am sure our international friends will not abandon us,” she said. I later learned, from Western diplomats in Kabul, that she had applied to the Canadian government for asylum.
⁸

At the time of Ali’s arrest, though, Colonel Bayaz had been on the job for six months and was earning a reputation as a tough advocate for better treatment of women by the police, and she seemed very much in charge of her station. Jawad found her sympathetic to Zakia and Ali’s story—although unaware of Ali’s mistreatment in her lockup by the detectives (she was in direct charge of the uniformed officers only). “I know it’s a love story and the boy eloped with a girl who loved him. Higher-level officials have told me, ‘Please make sure he doesn’t escape.’” As everyone in Afghanistan well knows, escapes from Afghan lockups and prisons are routine and not very expensive, an opportunity for guards to supplement their incomes.

No one was more aware of that than Zakia’s family members, on their stakeout of the district police station. “We know you want to bribe that woman police chief to get him out, but we’re not going to let you,” Zaman told Anwar as he came out. “We have friends, too, you’ll see.”

Shukria came to the police station later that day, carrying a signed statement from Zakia that she had not been kidnapped. The
bigamy charges had gone away—perhaps her family did not feel they could make that charge stick, although they were still claiming she was married to a cousin she had never met. Or perhaps the attorney general’s office just didn’t believe the bigamy charge, since the judges in Bamiyan had themselves attested that Zakia was engaged, not married—and breaking an engagement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. But the detectives handling the case were not interested in the fine points Shukria presented to them; they were treating it as a criminal kidnapping offense, and they deemed an exculpatory letter from Ali’s wife and supposed victim insufficient.

For a second day, Ali said, he was beaten by officers and denied food and use of the toilet. Later in the day, he was moved along with some of the other detainees into a steaming-hot shipping container that served as their temporary jail cell due to overcrowding in the PD1 lockup. “We were five people in the container, and they brought a crane in to move the container to another place.”

“Don’t you want to take these detainees out first?” the crane engineer asked the detective in charge.

“No, these people are criminals and not to be considered human. Just move the container with them inside it.”

The prisoners were just banged up a little, but for a terrifying few minutes they thought Kabul was being destroyed in an earthquake. Afterward Ali would always think of this ordeal whenever he had to move a birdcage with a quail or a canary inside. Nothing is more unsettling than a prison that moves, with the inmates having no idea where they’re going.

Ali was philosophical about his rough treatment by the policemen at the PD1 lockup. “Life is not easy for any of us. I’ve undergone a lot of hardship, but I care about my life.” Regarding his tormenter, he said, “Perhaps he is a person who doesn’t care much about his life. Perhaps he just doesn’t love his wife. He might have married someone he didn’t love. It could be that his father or mother forced him to marry his wife. I am thankful to God that I don’t have that problem.”

At the time, though, Ali thought his life was over. Zakia
thought her life was over. Anwar was sure that their life together, at least, was over.

I was relieved. Now the couple had no choice but to let Women for Afghan Women take their case to court. Once they were no longer fugitives from the law, they could easily get passports. Also, Zakia was safe. Her pregnancy was no great surprise; we’d been hearing that she was sick on this or that day or off to the hospital because of nausea—the usual sort of first-trimester complaints. Like most Afghans, Zakia and Ali were not interested in family planning, unless by that one means planning a very large family. Ali had laughed when we asked him if they wanted children. “I don’t mind. Yeah, why not? A person has to have children for when he dies, so someone will remember him.” Under different circumstances we might not have found out so soon. Pregnancy is not something many Afghan couples are willing to divulge outside the family, especially when it doesn’t show, but Anwar had accidentally confirmed it in the excitement of the night before. Now Juliet was with child and her Romeo was in jail, indirectly in the figurative clutches of the Capulets and their sympathizers. If that was not going to win the lovers some serious support, in and out of Afghanistan, perhaps nothing ever would.

10

RELUCTANT CELEBRITIES

It was a variation on the riddle of whether a falling tree makes a sound if there is no one in the forest to hear it: Could Zakia and Ali really be celebrities if they scarcely knew about their celebrity? What could modern celebrity possibly mean to someone who had never used a personal computer or gone on the Internet? Who could not read or write, had never watched television, and did not own a radio? Who in short was unplugged from electronic society (the single exception being cell phones, which they only partly knew how to use)? Many Afghans now saw the couple as celebrities; nearly every Afghan radio and television station and newspaper covered their capture, especially the Dari outlets, and young Afghans began starting Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns in their support. Jawad was besieged by Afghan journalists who were enlisted by the BBC or
60 Minutes,
or Australian, Canadian, and German television to cover the story. But locked up without cell phones, Zakia and Ali had little idea of the storm of attention building around their predicament.

At Women for Afghan Women, Shukria was working hard to
find a resolution to their case, and because she had already started working on it before Ali’s arrest, she was well along. Her first legal move was to petition the attorney general’s office to move the case to family court, as a dispute between families, not a criminal case. Then she worked out an arrangement for the police to come to WAW’s shelter to interview Zakia. “They won’t arrest her and take her to the detention center,” Manizha Naderi of WAW said. “They will allow her to stay in the shelter until she’s convicted in court. And we won’t let that happen. Fingers crossed!”

In the meantime Zakia had plenty to say and was widely quoted; WAW was only too happy to arrange interviews, because Manizha sees public outreach and education as a vital part of her organization’s mission.
¹
Under the circumstances, speaking out seemed to Zakia the natural thing to do, and she was no longer afraid of the sound of her own voice, although she would have been surprised if anyone had tried to explain to her how famous she and Ali had become. “I am by his side, and at court I will say no one kidnapped me, that I came by my consent and will, and I want to be with him for the rest of my life,” Zakia said. “If I see my father and brothers, I will tell them, ‘Whatever has happened, has happened, and it is nothing you can change. Why is it any of your business that this has happened? This has just happened. You cannot change what’s in my heart, so stop trying to do anything about it.’”

She was still worried about her family’s retribution. “If I fell into my parents’ hands, they will do something to me, kill me or something else even worse. There is nothing they want to do except to kill me. I haven’t even seen my aunt’s son—how is it possible that I would have been married to him? There was no
neka.
How is it possible? I said this to my father and asked them, ‘Why do you lie?’ But if it is left to my father and mother, they will not agree with me even in ten years.” Mostly, though, she was worried about Ali and about her father-in-law. “He is ill and has high blood pressure, and he must be very worried. They have to let the boy go, that is all.”

Zakia’s father, Zaman, was stunned by the onslaught of interest about his daughter’s case. Nothing could be more galling to a
potential honor killer than the glare of publicity. Zaman had soon adjusted his narrative to the prevailing mood.

“My young son”—this would have been Razak—“saw him and went to the police and told the police this person has done this crime, he kidnapped my daughter. What can we do? If we
could
do something, we
would
do something. I am a poor person and don’t have the power to harm anyone. What can I do? If I was a rich and powerful person, I would do something. No one is listening to me. If I would kill him, everyone would blame me for it. But you see, we handed him to the police.” That was true, but it was Zakia they most wanted. They had hoped Ali would lead the authorities and hence her family to Zakia. There is not all that much honor in killing the offending man, since a man is just seen as doing what men do, whether it’s seduction or even rape. It is the death of the woman that is required by this concept of honor.