The Lovers (7 page)

“What are you doing?” Ismatullah yelled at him. “I
know
what you are doing, and it’s crazy!”

One night Ali went out at 3:00
A
.
M
. to meet her. “Zakia-
jan
and I were in the garden, and we must have stayed too late, because her mother saw us. She didn’t recognize me, because at night I would wear different clothes—I wore a hat at night, which I never did during the day.” He ran for the far garden wall and scampered over it in a bound.

“Who was out there with you?” Sabza demanded of her daughter, through the window.

Zakia replied that she had woken up early to grind flour and there was a farmer in the garden who begged for bread, so she went out to give him some. It was an unlikely story, and Sabza did not believe her.

“Come back inside, you
dead father’s daughter
,” Sabza hissed at Zakia. The curse cut deep. Of course her father was still alive, but few things were worse in Afghan society than the suggestion that a daughter might have no father to determine the rest of her life for her.

“I get really upset if someone curses me,” Zakia said. “I hate being cursed. After my mother realized I was having a secret affair with someone, she mistreated me like that. I would rather she beat me than curse me.” Despite the curses, her mother was at that point being kind. If Sabza suspected that her daughter had consummated her affair, she kept that suspicion to herself—voicing it would have been Zakia’s death sentence. It was a serious enough offense just to be discovered showing interest in a boy, far worse to be caught alone with him; the presumption always in such cases
would be that sex had taken place. Her mother apparently preferred to present the case to the family as a matter of her suspicions about something starting to go on, or the situation would have become far more perilous for both of the lovers. Also, she had not actually seen who it was, though she knew well enough that it must have been Ali.

With both families alerted and everyone on the lookout, it was even harder for the two young people to get together. It was as if their villages had become prisons, with all their families and neighbors the guards and the two of them the only inmates.

With spring came the new Persian year, 1392, significantly the year in which Zakia would turn eighteen and become legally an adult. Her birthday was unknown, because her national identity card, like those of most Afghans, gave only the year of her birth; so legally she was eighteen the moment it became 1392—March 21, 2013. By that time her father normally would have been shopping her around, hunting for a husband whose family would pay a suitably high bride price. Zakia was considered strikingly beautiful, fair-skinned with hands somehow unroughened by farmwork. Girls in that village were frequently married off earlier than eighteen, and usually the bride price was figured in livestock; four goats or six sheep was a typical sum. Zakia would fetch much more, possibly enough to help Zaman buy some land of his own; he would later claim to have turned down 11 lakhs of afghanis—1.1 million afghanis, or twenty thousand dollars—for her hand. (A lakh is 100,000.) That would be a small herd of sheep or half a
jreeb
of land.

Whom she married was up to her father, and that is not just the case in backward rural areas. It is the predominant practice in all of Afghanistan that fathers rule every aspect of their daughters’ lives, even when they are adults. Their fathers decide whether they can go to school, get a job, leave the house, see a doctor, wear a burqa or just a head scarf. Once women are married, their husbands assume that power over them. No one questions male authority over women in Afghanistan. If for some reason the father is absent or the husband dies young, a brother will assume ownership of the woman. Zakia could consider herself lucky that she hadn’t been
married off at the age of sixteen—the minimum legal age according to both Afghan law and shariah law in Afghanistan—or even at the age of fourteen, a practice that remains widespread although it is forbidden by the constitution and subject to strong penalties under the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law.
¹³
The age at which many girls are married in Afghanistan would be considered criminal sexual abuse in most countries.
¹⁴

Once they had resolved to marry, Ali and Zakia’s first instinct was to try to operate within their society’s cultural framework. Ali managed to persuade his father to make a bid for Zakia on his behalf. There are exceptions to the practice of fathers choosing their daughters’ husbands, but they are shrouded in secrecy, with the goal of maintaining the appearance that the husband was the father’s choice. Such exceptions, not talked about openly, do take into account how people really feel and behave. In the traditional model, the wife will never see her husband until their wedding night. In cities and among elites and more progressive families, the families of the prospective bride and groom may arrange for the couple, once the fathers have chosen them, to meet and get to know each other, closely chaperoned; in some cases they will tie the
neka
in advance, so that they’re formally married in the eyes of Islam but will not have the wedding party and the wedding night until later. That enables them to court and have intimacy at some level, without committing a legal or religious crime in the eyes of the community. But for the girl or boy to come up with the idea of marrying and then present it to their families openly would be considered shameful. The prospective groom might, however, conspire with his own father to initiate the idea by making overtures to the bride’s father, which is what Zakia and Ali tried at first to do.

They were pleasantly surprised by how agreeable Ali’s father, Anwar, proved to be about the idea initially.

“By then everyone knew, though no one talked about it publicly,” Anwar said. People only had to see Ali walking along the footpaths playing his flute to know that he was in love with someone, and if they also spotted Zakia singing to herself in the fields, as she often did, it wouldn’t take long to put the two together. Such
interventions are also done behind the scenes in cases where everyone has already begun to suspect that the girl and the boy have somehow found love on their own.

Between the two of them, Ali and Zakia had agreed that they would give it a bit of time, first for the memory to recede of the intercepted telephone conversations and the incident in the garden, and also because Zakia’s own brother was about to get married, and after that expense—the groom’s family pays for everything, including the bride price—perhaps her father would be more amenable to an arrangement that would help him recoup some of his financial outlays.

“We agreed we would wait two months, but after forty days I couldn’t bear it any longer,” Ali said. He persuaded his father to make the approach.

The first time the two old men met, late in the summer of 2013, Zaman received Anwar graciously and politely, with green tea and cakes and nuts, dried chickpeas, raisins, and hard candies set out on trays on the floor; they sat facing, cross-legged on thin floor cushions. They had known each other all their lives and been neighbors except for the few years after they had fled in different directions from the Taliban. Their respective fields shared some of the same irrigation channels and works, and they often pooled their labor.

Anwar’s opening to Zaman was formulaic, words passed down through generations and known as the
khwast-gari,
the demanding.
¹⁵
“Please accept my son as a slave to your family,” Anwar said.

Zaman had expected as much and had his answer ready. “I don’t want to be harsh, but I tell you that such matches did not take place between two ethnic groups in the past and are not possible now,” Zaman replied. “Please, now, do not come again about this.”

Anwar hopefully viewed that as a negotiating position, so over the next month he went back twice more, finally offering a portion of his fields—Ali’s inheritance—as well as money and gold as the bride price. “You don’t have any fields of your own. I can give you fields and money if you want, maybe enough to build a house for one of your sons,” Anwar told Zaman.

“I don’t care about these things. My relatives and my villagers
will get upset with me if I marry her outside her ethnicity and her religion.”

Having asked three times, Anwar considered the matter closed. The romance would have to end, and he told his son as much. Their families had been on opposite sides in Afghanistan’s bitter civil war, although both had been tormented by the Taliban rule that followed it. But while peace had reigned between Tajiks and Hazaras for more than a decade, memories were long and prejudices died hard. Anwar had no inclination to stir up a war, and he accepted Zaman’s right to decide Zakia’s fate.

Examples of what was likely to happen if the father’s will was defied were abundant. A similar Hazara-Tajik affair had just played out in Bamiyan around the same time Zakia and Ali’s courtship had begun, and it was widely publicized. An eighteen-year-old girl named Khadija from Qarawna Village, in Saighan District, had taken refuge in the Bamiyan shelter rather than be married to a man chosen for her by her father. Khadija, a Tajik like Zakia, also had eloped with a Hazara, Mohammad Hadi, but police arrested her after hundreds of other Tajik villagers protested—even though she was of age and had formally married Mr. Hadi. After spending months in the shelter, Khadija got homesick and asked to see her family; with the supervision of Bamiyan’s Tajik judges, they assembled elders from their village with the girl’s relatives, including her father and her brothers, who all put their thumbprints on a document promising never to harm her. Fatima Kazimi, the head of the women’s-affairs ministry in Bamiyan at the time, convened a committee of social workers, shelter officials, and police to discuss the case. The committee opposed Khadija’s return to her family but the decision was overruled by the court. Khadija has never been seen since. A few weeks later, when the women’s ministry asked to see the girl to make sure she was unharmed, the family calmly announced that she had run away again, Fatima said. This time, though, they showed no interest in pursuing her. In the highlands of Bamiyan, there is really no place a girl alone could run; police would have arrested her on sight. “I’m sure they killed her and hid the body where no one has found it,” Fatima said.
¹⁶

Anwar was aware of the stakes, and so was everyone involved. Zakia’s family made sure she was more cloistered than ever, and Ali fruitlessly paced the pathways of her village, crossed and recrossed their fields, hoping for a glimpse of her, and tried repeatedly to call her, all to no avail. She was leaving her phone off for fear of being caught with it again. It was so very wrong, Ali felt. “Why should parents choose who we marry? It is not the mother and father who have to spend a life with the woman, it is me. No one can live with his or her mother or father forever. It’s the husbands and wives you spend the rest of your life with.” He vowed that if he ever had a daughter, he would make sure she could choose her own husband. “I have felt what that was like, and I would never let that happen to anyone.”

Zakia drop-called him, and when he called her back, he was nearly in tears. He wanted to tell her the story of Layla and Majnoon. “Ali-
jan
, I know the story,” she said. “But tell it to me again.”

Layla and Majnoon grow up together, but from different stations in life, and when their childhood love blossoms, Majnoon approaches her father and is rebuffed.
¹⁷
He goes mad and wanders the streets of their town, composing and reciting love poetry in her honor until finally Layla is married off by her father, whereupon Majnoon flees into exile and the life of a hermit. She refuses all the advances of her husband, however, and remains chaste throughout their marriage. Layla and Majnoon meet, but they do not consummate their love, and she remains loyal to her nonetheless chaste relationship with her husband. Her husband finally dies, and Layla puts on a bridal gown and plans to join Majnoon at last. By this point Majnoon has wandered off into the desert, mad with grief, and no one can find him. Believing their love to be doomed, Layla dies. Majnoon hears what has happened and rushes to her grave, where he dies as well. They are united in death, and their grave site becomes a place of pilgrimage.

Like the story of Yousef and Zuleikha and another popular tale, that of Princess Shirin and the stonecutter Farhad, the Layla-and-Majnoon story is wildly popular in a society where romantic love is all but outlawed—probably precisely
because
it is outlawed. Yousef
and Zuleikha is retold in a thirty-part serial that is played on Afghan television every year during the holy month of Ramadan—in part because, unlike some of the other great Persian tales, it is also a sacred story, enshrined in the Koran, so the mullahs cannot object to it even though it is a story replete with the themes of adultery, romantic love, and the coveting of other men’s wives. Afghan popular music, both Westernized pop as well as folkloric versions, and poetry are rooted in traditional romantic tales, particularly these three and their many variants. In a society where the majority of women are in arranged marriages to which they did not consent freely,
¹⁸
these songs and poems summon the emotional life they will never have the chance to experience themselves.

Every once in a while, even in Afghanistan, a true love story comes along that echoes those of the past and arouses the whole country. The famous tale of Munira and Farhad in 1991 came at the end of the Communist regime and the beginning of the civil-war period. Kabul was in civil turmoil as the mujahideen battled one another. Rival factions used truck containers as roadblocks and as protection from shelling and gunfire, so the containers were a ubiquitous feature of the cityscape. Munira and Farhad were young people who had fallen in love, but as Sunni and Shia their own union was forbidden. Due to be married to other people on the same Thursday, they arranged to meet secretly one last time the night before, but the only place they could find to be alone was in one of the shipping containers. While they were inside, the owner of the container came along and latched the door from outside. They were too frightened to cry out and be discovered, and by the time the owner opened it again, the oxygen in the container had been depleted, and he found them both dead in each other’s arms. Their bereft families, united like the Montagues and Capulets over their shared tragedy, dressed them both for burial in the wedding clothes that had been intended for the arranged marriages that would never take place.