The Lovers (5 page)

Watching the sheep, they played together as their animals foraged sometimes miles from their homes. She was attracted to this moody older boy with his flute, but as a child acolyte, nothing more. She was his only audience; he rarely played his flute except when alone or out in the high pastures with Zakia. Zakia’s family had ten sheep; Ali’s had twenty-five. “As children we would go to the desert and take our animals for foraging, and we used to spend our days in the huts around the animals,” he said, but they were small children then, too young to think of love affairs. “At that time we didn’t even know of these things,” he said.

Then Zakia started to reach puberty, and since Ali was three years older than she, there were propriety issues—she was biologically a woman, and therefore by Afghan custom she had to be separated from all adult males other than her brothers and her father. Her family started keeping her indoors except when there was work to do, and then they made sure she was in the company of her siblings. Ali’s own father sold their sheep, so Ali no longer had a reason to find her in the privacy of the high pastures.

Some time went by and, as Ali put it euphemistically, he started thinking of her in that way. He was setting out traps for quail, on the still-unplanted fields one day in early spring, and she was in the next field watching him. He has trouble articulating why that mattered, but perhaps there was something in the possibility that his private passion for birds could be shared with someone else. Or perhaps it was just that he would then have been seventeen, and she had turned fourteen.

Ali himself marks the moment when he decided that he was in love to a day when both of their families were in adjoining fields and, as the two families would often do in those days, helping one another with their work. He and his brother borrowed two donkeys
from Zakia’s family to haul sacks of rocks off the fields, and they chose to ride them back, somewhat scandalously; in Bamiyan a donkey’s back should be reserved for work, not pleasure.

“Death to your fathers!” Zakia declared when she saw them. “You use our donkeys to do your work, and then you think you can ride them, too? Curses on you!” Ali and his brother were so startled by the young girl’s invective that they both leaped off the animals, laughing nervously. “I think that’s when I knew,” he said, though he couldn’t really say why. Then a few days later, when he found her alone for a moment, he whispered to her, “I love you.” He was just trying the words out and wasn’t all that sure of his feelings. She ignored him, but she also didn’t curse him for his temerity, and he said, “From that time I was forty percent sure of her.”

They began to meet and chat more and more often on the crooked paths through the fields, sometimes even managing to meet twice a day. After a while Ali realized that this was the real thing. “I knew I was in love with her.” It wasn’t just the birds; it wasn’t just their ages; it wasn’t all the long hours they had spent alone together as children tending the sheep and growing up, but perhaps it was a little bit of all those things.

From time to time, Ali would spot Zakia crossing the fields, and catch her glancing his way, and notice how she would start when he came into sight and alter her course to pass near him as often as she could. By then, as he put it, he was a hundred percent sure about how she felt. It was rare that he could manage to see her for more than a few moments without arousing suspicion, and then she would often be in the company of her younger siblings. “For one month I was searching for her after I fell in love with her, and I knew she loved me, but I didn’t know if she would agree to get married to me.”

Finally one day he found her alone with no one else in earshot, and he decided to make his move while he could, “quickly because we couldn’t stay there long.”

They were both working, weeding in fields that were on either side of a mud wall, three feet high, pretending to be absorbed with what they were doing; several of Zakia’s younger siblings were
playing or working not far away. “I would have gone down on my knees”—he had heard somewhere that was how romantics did it—“but her brothers and sisters were all around and the wall was between us.” Instead he blurted out his intentions. “I love you, and I want to marry you,” he said, not looking directly at her for more than a moment.

She did not look at him either, not even a glance. “It’s not possible. We’re from two different ethnic groups, two different religions. No one would ever allow it,” she said. Zakia struck Ali as eminently sensible, beyond her years—she would have been about fifteen then, he eighteen.

“We could run away if our families did not agree,” he said.

“Then we would have no families,” she replied. “We cannot.”

He was crushed. “She rejected me, saying that she was from a different ethnic group and such marriages have not taken place before, so it would not be possible. She swore that the relationship was not going to happen. It was really a no, and I was disillusioned.”

Zakia was surprised and realized she ought to be offended by his effrontery. “He was very naughty, Ali, and very clever, trying to turn my head when I was so young,” Zakia said. “Proposing was very naughty of him. I said we were too young, but it was also the ethnic and religious differences, not just the age. I told him that.” Despite her rejection of him, Zakia started thinking about him in a serious way for the first time. Every day she played his proposal over in her mind, every day for a month until she finally decided to seek him out. As she remembers it, her rejection of him was not as final and definitive as it had appeared to him.

Ali mooned around the village all that month, taking pains to avoid places where he might see her, and then, like many a lovelorn young man before him, he decided to join the army. He had no job prospects and no money, and he hated farmwork; Zakia wouldn’t marry him, and the Taliban were an enemy that every Hazara could hate. His friends were all joining, including one of Zakia’s brothers.

Others from their village who had already signed up said they were assured that they would be stationed somewhere in the west
of the country, where fighting was relatively rare in those days. For doing nothing the pay was pretty good by rural Afghan standards, about two hundred fifty dollars a month, and he ended up in the western province of Farah, remote, quiet, and safe.

The boldness of Ali’s proposal and his sincerity had touched Zakia’s heart, and she realized that she was falling in love with him, too. By the time she’d decided to tell him this, however, he had enlisted and moved away. “I was upset when I heard that he joined the army, since I thought it was because I gave him a ‘no’ answer, and I didn’t want him to join for that reason,” Zakia said. Now she wanted to discuss it more, and he was absent. The longer he was absent, the stronger her feelings became.

Ali’s army duty in Farah exposed him to the great Persian love stories to a greater degree than ever, as for the first time he was among young men who had smartphones with movies on them, or little DVD players, so popular among troops. Whenever he could, he immersed himself in these bittersweet stories; he felt he knew a thing or two about tragic love.

“Movies? I had never seen any. TV in the village? In the name of God, no, nothing like that in the village, but in the army I would watch some clips on my phone. My friends, some of them had computers, and they would have clips they would share with me.” One of those soldiers knew how to transfer video from a computer onto his cell phone, and in this way Ali watched a long TV serial of the Yousef and Zuleikha story. Mostly, though, he was drawn to music clips, and so many of them were love songs. “Music is like a solace to pain. To people who are in love, it is a balm,” he said.

In her adolescence Zakia also learned the Persian love stories, not from movies or music—they had only a small transistor radio at home, and mostly her parents played religious programs—but from other girls. The stories were passed around in secrecy among girls who had learned them from older sisters.

“Girls my age would tell them to one another, never openly. It was a secret we all shared,” she said.

“There is a clash that exists in Afghan society about love,” says poet Jawed Farhad, who teaches Persian literature at a Kabul
university and writes love poems that provoke mullahs, with lines like these:

I am not an extremist,

Just a great romantic.

So why try to impose your harsh laws

On my affairs of the heart?
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“According to shariah law and the mullahs, romantic love is forbidden, and falling in love without the consent of the family is wrong,” Mr. Farhad says. Despite clerical disapproval, people keep the ancient love stories alive; their great antiquity and their roots in religious literature make them on some level impregnable to serious attack. “The mullahs can try, but they can never really suppress them. All those hindrances to love—class differences, economic differences, family differences, religious and sectarian differences, ethnic differences—love is something that does not understand these things. It can cross all these borders, overcome all those differences.”

For all the efforts of the mullahs and the patriarchs, Afghanistan has no shortage of love stories; perhaps the official opposition lends them more force and poignancy.

While talking with Afghan scholars about the persistence of the old Persian stories in a culture that is officially anti-romantic, I kept meeting people who would readily admit they were in love. “I myself, I’m in love,” declared Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the Afghan National Institute of Music. “I was in love all my life, and I’m proud of that.” Dr. Sarmast’s school is one of the few truly liberal institutions in the country, with mixed-sex ensembles among the children, aged eight to eighteen, and a coed playground where head scarves are optional and about half the girls do not wear them. “To express our love, we might use symbols, go back to history to find an equivalent. There are so many love stories in this country—no one is going to stop us. Can I deprive my own daughters of love? Being in love is not a crime in any nation. We should give that freedom to our kids. We should give that freedom to this nation.”

One of the most popular programs recently on Afghan radio is
called
Night of the Lovers,
which airs weekly on Arman FM Radio 98.1, the country’s most popular private station. The format is simple: Young men and women call in anonymously and pour their hearts out about their loves, usually frustrated, imperiled, or forbidden. They record those personal love stories on the station’s voice-mail system, and the program picks the best ones and airs them. The idea for the show came to the station’s manager, Sameem Sadat, when he was stuck in traffic one day and saw young people in all the cars around him happily texting or chatting away, looks of delighted concentration on their faces. Mostly they were texting even if there were adults also in the car. Despite being gridlocked for half an hour or longer, they would keep going without a break. “I realized they were all in love. No one talks to anyone for thirty minutes or an hour unless they’re in love. I thought, ‘They must have stories.’” The show began on Valentine’s Day 2014, at first for an hour once a week, late at night. It was so popular though that in 2015 Arman FM increased the format to a three-hour-long program, from 9:00
P
.
M
. to midnight on Wednesdays. After playing each recorded message, the presenters (a man and a woman) match it with an appropriate love song, broadcasting it all without giving any explicit advice or counseling, to steer clear of the mullahs. After the program the stories are posted on the program’s Facebook page,
⁶
attracting thousands of comments each week. In a typical week,
Night of the Lovers
receives three hundred recorded stories from young people all over Afghanistan, from cities and villages, from educated people and unlettered ones, and it broadcasts about twenty of the most articulate.

The stories are nearly always sad. “I would say in all this time
⁷
we’ve had until now ten stories that are happy. Maybe those who succeed in love don’t tell their stories, or maybe there just aren’t many happy stories, I don’t know,” Mr. Sadat said. The program’s female presenter, Hadiya Hamdard, goes once every few weeks to Badam Bagh prison for women in Kabul, the country’s main female prison, and collects stories from the inmates there; when she arrives, she is practically mobbed by women jockeying to tell their stories. Normally, three-fourths
⁸
of Badam Bagh’s inmates are there for so-called social or moral crimes, which are of course
crimes of love—sex outside marriage, attempted
zina
(adultery), and so forth. Each episode of
Night of the Lovers
broadcasts one story from a woman who is literally a prisoner of love.

Inevitably, in the messages left with the program, there are sad stories of betrayal and denial, rejection and unrequited yearning. Another leitmotif is how hard it is, in a society that forbids even routine contact between men and women, for lovers to find a way to get together and how easy it is for them to lose each other.

Zakia was in just such a position. With Ali away in the army, she found herself missing him and sorry about turning him down, but there was no way she could communicate her regret to him. She did not have a cell phone, did not know how to use one, and, even if she had, would have had no discreet way to learn his number. Even if she could have found someone to write a letter, there was no mail service in rural Afghanistan. She found herself maneuvering to listen to the men in the family whenever they got calls from brothers and cousins posted in the army, but there was no news about Ali. She felt frustrated and helpless, and as she would come to see it, the powerlessness she felt during those months later drove her to act boldly and take her chances when an opportunity came along again.