The Lovers (8 page)

The story fired the imagination of the country and infuriated the mullahs. None of the clerics would agree to preside over their double burial, and instead elders of both families stepped in and
performed the funeral rites—under Islam any knowledgeable person can do so.

Neither Zakia nor Ali could have imagined this yet, but their own misadventure would soon be on its way to a similar sort of fame. Munira and Farhad belonged to their parents’ generation. A younger generation of Afghans would find in Zakia and Ali’s story justification for expressing love openly and proudly, and older Afghans who had loved secretly and guiltily could find vindication, knowing they were not alone.

3

ZAKIA MAKES HER MOVE

When Mohammad Anwar trudged home after a long day tending the fields in the late summer of 2013 and opened his door, Zakia was sitting there on floor cushions and drinking tea with his daughter-in-law.

Anwar’s house was a dwelling that shouted poverty but was scrupulously clean—earthen floors swept, carpets shaken and beaten, latrine isolated and limed. The home was made up of four separate rooms, each a little building opposite the courtyard wall. Afghans love walls around their compounds; it is how they keep their women safe from the view of outsiders. Anwar had run out of money for mud bricks, and the wall was only three-quarters complete, with a jagged gap where he hoped one day to install a gate. There was no running water—the nearest water came from a well a few hundred yards away, beside the main road—nor any electricity, save for a tiny lightbulb and wire in one room that could be connected to a nine-volt battery, when they could afford one. The family’s two-inch-thick Afghan mattresses were quarter-folded and stacked along the rooms’ interior walls during the daytime; bamboo mats or the cheaper plastic mats were used where they
could not afford carpets. There was no furniture; thin cushions were scattered around for seating. At mealtimes a plastic sheet was unrolled on the floor to make a dining area, and meals were taken communally, everyone eating from a common plate with their fingers, according to Afghan custom. Like the rest of the dwellings in Surkh Dar village, the homestead was nestled into a narrow valley that rose from the road into the northern mountains; they had used the steep hillside to create the back wall in some of the four rooms. After only a ten-minute climb up the slopes nearby, one could glance back and Anwar’s house and the rest of the village would seem to disappear into the landscape, its walls and roofs made of the same earth as the bare slopes all around. Anwar’s house was also old, built by his grandfather, and decades of wind and storms had softened all the edges so that it seemed not so much erected as grown in place.

Anwar sat down to tea with Zakia, dazed with surprise. Zakia sat twisting her wrist with the opposite hand, as she often did when nervous, but was otherwise composed. There was already a lot on Anwar’s mind those days; harvest time for potatoes, their most important cash crop, was not far away. Prices were good that year, and harvests were likely to be bountiful, although labor-intensive. He might even begin paying down the debts he had incurred with the marriage of his eldest son, Bismillah, several years before, and his next-oldest son, Ismatullah, the year after that. Sons are highly prized in Afghanistan; they are the measure of a man’s worth. Though daughters can bring a substantial bride price to their fathers, they are disdained. A man with many sons is considered a rich man no matter how poor it makes him. Anwar had five sons but only three daughters, so he was proud but perennially broke.

Many Afghan men do not even know how many daughters they have; if you ask them how many children in their family, they’re likely to reply “five” if they have five sons and five daughters, for instance, since daughters don’t count. Press them for the number of daughters and often they will have to consult with a child or a wife to be sure. Anwar, however, is not one of those men.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Zakia calmly poured Anwar some tea.

“Why are we here?” he said. “What is this, daughter?” He used the term as an older man addressing a young woman, nothing more.

Things had been coming to a head for months now; it was nearly a year since Ali’s return from the army and months since their secret engagement. Zakia was on her third phone, keeping this one hidden in her underclothes after first her brother and then her father found the earlier ones. Although Sabza had not been able to identify Ali that dawn when she caught her daughter with him in the garden, and Ali managed just in time to climb the wall and run off, by then everyone had a pretty good idea with whom Zakia was involved, even if they couldn’t prove it. Once Anwar had formally asked for Zakia’s hand, it was no longer a secret in either of their villages. “Everyone knew about it. I just made up my mind: I’m not free here at home, so I have to go to him, and I just went,” Zakia said. “I just thought about Ali, and I thought, ‘I have to go to him.’ I was hopeful he would keep me or accept me, but I didn’t know. I just had to do it, even if I wasn’t planning.”

What she didn’t say, and could not say, is that she and Ali had become lovers and she had no other choice; there could never be another Afghan husband for her.

She told Anwar that she wanted to see Ali, and that they needed to discuss something with him. Unfortunately, Ali was away working on a day-laborer job some distance from the village and would not be back until Friday.

“I am sorry, daughter. You cannot see him,” Anwar said. He pretended not to know what was in the offing, but it was all too clear. Just her presence in the home of another man, even chaperoned by his daughter-in-law, was an outrage to public morality. He walked Zakia halfway home, to the highway that is the boundary between their two villages.

When he came back, he saw neighbors gathered in the lanes, whispering among themselves, and it was clear that word was out and Zakia had been spotted on the wrong side of the highway.
One of Anwar’s neighbors came over to talk to him about it, so he decided to preempt the inevitable gossip and telephone Zaman, Zakia’s father. One of his sons dialed for him, since he did not know how.

“Your daughter came over to my house, and she may now want to run away with my son,” Anwar told him. “It’s better that you agree, because if that happens, it will be too late.”

“If that happens, I will demand five hundred thousand afghanis, and I know you are in debt already. You’re standing looking down the edge of a cliff, and this will put you over it,” Zaman replied.

That was an impossible sum, more than nine thousand dollars.

“My debts are not your problem, but if they run away, there will be nothing for you.”

Zaman still refused.

Over the next month, Ali and Zakia were rarely able to speak to each other, because Zakia’s family watched her so closely. When they did manage to get a few words together, she told him she would come again and that if his family would not take her, they would run away. She said she was now legally an adult and no one could stop her. “We agreed that if Ali’s family did not accept this, then we will go somewhere secretly that no one knows—just somewhere, we didn’t have any idea where. After the first time I went to their home, I said that they could send me ten times back and still I would come again. It’s because I really loved him. I was very determined. I really loved Ali, and my decision was final. It was a strong decision.”

The next time she saw an opportunity, she made her move, heading to Ali’s uncle’s house rather than to his own, thinking to evade pursuers that way. His uncle called Anwar, while Ismatullah restrained Ali from leaving to join her. Ali fought back against his older and much bigger brother, and finally Ismatullah, infuriated, smashed him in the face with a rock to subdue him, leaving a bruise that would take many months to heal. (It was still prominent when I first met Ali the following February.)

Anwar reached his brother’s house and confronted Zakia. “You
cannot do this,” he said. “What are you thinking? Daughter, why are you doing this?”

She pleaded with him openly to take her in to his family so she could marry his son. “We love each other, and we want to marry, and no one should stop us.” She was dry-eyed and determined not to cry.

“That is not your decision. It can never be,” Anwar said. He took her by the arm and forcibly walked her back to her own home, with two of his sons helping and Ismatullah still holding Ali back from intervening. It was nearly midnight, and the Zaman household was already aroused, aware that Zakia had bolted. Gula Khan was on the rooftop with another brother.

“Let’s go before they attack us,” Anwar told his sons as they left Zakia in front of her house. “You can see how angry they are.”

When he got back home, Anwar, too, beat his son, shouting at him that he was bringing disgrace and humiliation to both his own family and Zakia’s. “We didn’t want their family to be disgraced,” Ali said. Months later part of him agreed with the punishment he received and part of him was still angry about it.

“That night was very bad,” Zakia said. The following day was the first day of the main potato harvest, and everyone would have to be in the fields, but the entire family stayed up late screaming at her. “That night my father and my mother both beat me,” Zakia said. “It was the first time they had ever done that to me.” Gula Khan and her other brothers had always been the enforcers of her virtue. In the course of that parental beating, she finally realized how dire her situation was. “While they were beating me, they were saying, ‘We will kill you if you don’t listen to us. We have to do this. We have to kill you.’”

The next day both families were in their fields, side by side, both Zakia and Ali bruised. Harvesting potatoes by hand is back-breaking work, and no one spoke across the low mud walls and sometimes just footpaths that separated their two domains. Zakia dared not look at Ali, nor he at her.

No one expected that she would try to bolt again that same
night, but that is what she did. When her family was asleep, exhausted from the day’s exertions, she crept out at about 11:00
P
.
M
. and went again to Anwar’s home. This time Ali was half expecting her and was still up when she arrived.

“My whole family wanted to send her back,” said Ali. “They wouldn’t agree. I saw there was no place to go, so I brought her to the women’s ministry.” It was late at night, but the guards at the ministry building summoned a woman who headed the provincial human-rights office, Aziza Ahmadi, who came down and arranged for Zakia to be admitted to the Bamiyan Women’s Shelter, a short distance away.

“I was happy to be in the shelter at first, because I knew that my life was at risk now, and I wanted to see my case handled legally,” Zakia said.

She had no idea then, in October 2013, that she would still be there nearly six months later.

At first Zakia cried inconsolably. “She would cry for one or two hours straight, even during late nights,” said the shelter director, Najeeba Ahmadi (no relation to Aziza Ahmadi). Other than a small plastic bag of clothing she had brought along to Anwar’s house, Zakia’s lone possession was the tattered photograph of Ali that she kept beside her thin mattress on the floor. Ali’s mother gave it to her when she visited the shelter herself, partly because Chaman wanted to make sure the shelter authorities knew that Ali’s family was behind her and partly to reassure and comfort Zakia. Later the police would confiscate the photo from the shelter and make copies of it to distribute to checkpoints in the manhunt for the lovers.

The shelter workers sat with her in those first days, trying to calm her down. “You are a brave girl, stop crying,” they would say. “You are the one who had the nerve to fight for your rights.”

“I feel pity for my parents,” Zakia replied. “I miss them, but I am worried about what they will do.”

Najeeba had seen this many times before. “In Afghan society families disown their children and do not forgive them,” she said. “Thinking about such things would disturb her and make her cry.”

“I love him, and I’m not going to give him up,” she declared in one breath and then, in the next, “I don’t know what to do. On the one hand, there is my lover and on the other hand my family.”

She appealed to Najeeba for guidance, but all the other woman could do was tell the girl to look in her own heart. “We would not tell her which side to take,” Najeeba said. “It is her decision. But we always said, ‘Think carefully before you make any decision.’”

Zakia always came back to the same thing. “I want to marry the boy.”

“If that is what you really want, then do it,” Najeeba said.

“Don’t you think it is wrong?”

“Whatever your heart believes cannot be wrong,” Najeeba said. “Now that you have fallen in love, you should fight for it till the end, until you achieve what you have wished for. Once you are married, you can still try to reconcile with your family. It might take a few years, four or five or even eight years. It might happen soon, or it might take a while.”

The easiest way to calm her crying fits was to get her talking about Ali.

“Tell us what his good qualities are. What qualities made you want to marry him?” Najeeba would say.

“He is supportive, and when you have the support of someone, that’s everything you can expect in your life. You always seek someone who will stand by your side and support you all the time, and he has all these good qualities. He is very kind, active, and he belongs to a very gentle family,” she would reply. “I have so much love for him, and I feel that he loves me as much as I love him. He is hardworking, and he is ready to sacrifice everything for me,” Zakia said.

“Besides,” she would add with a smile, “he is handsome.”

When she was calmer, she mixed well with the other girls and young women, many of them about her age. She had a keen sense of her rights as a person and lectured the other girls on that. By all accounts the prettiest of Zaman’s seven daughters, Zakia grew up adored by her father and either admired or envied by her siblings, which gave her a self-possession unusual in a young Afghan
woman, a self-possession that had turned to anger and resentment when her brothers tried to control her once she came of age. “Although she was uneducated, she kept everyone busy. She used to make jokes, tell stories, recite poetry,” Najeeba said. “She had a very funny and charming personality, and once Zakia was in the shelter, all of the girls were actively involved with her. She was a good, active, brave, amusing girl.”