Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan by Zarghuna Kargar

husband it gave me a warm feeling .
    We would meet every afternoon, except on Fridays, when my father, who didn’t sleep in the afternoons like my mother, wasn’t at work. I carried on meeting Abdullah until one day we were spotted by a neighbour’s son, Ghulam. He saw Abdullah and I chatting under the shade of the tree and was jealous of our intimacy, and he began gossiping about us. He told my brother that he’d seen Abdullah and me alone together and that I’d been doing bad things with him, and so my brother began to restrict what I was allowed to do. Even when I told him I was only talking to Abdullah he stopped me from going out in the afternoon. He also told my mother if he saw me again with Abdullah that he would kill me. My brother felt I was causing his honour to be called into doubt and that his standing in the community would be damaged if people thought of him as being aweak man, whose sister was having a love affair he was unable to put an end to. Days passed. I was no longer able to meet Abdullah under the tree, but we would still see each other in the house. It was enough for us just occasionally to catch a glimpse of each other .
    Even now whenever Nasreen mentioned Abdullah’s name, I could hear an intense desire in her voice and sensed that she still desperately missed him.
    I remained happy because I was certain Abdullah’s mother still wanted me to marry her son. I was just waiting for the day when she would come to our rooms and ask for my hand. Then one afternoon, the weather was perfect, it was warm but with a fresh breeze, the sky was clear blue and the birds were singing. It was a perfect day .
    I asked Nasreen if she had met Abdullah under the tree that day, but she said she hadn’t. Instead it was the day Abdullah’s mother had come to her mother and asked for Nasreen’s hand in marriage to Abdullah.
    My mother wasn’t blind. She already knew I had feelings for him, but used to try to stop me from going to his family’s rooms and talking to his mother and sisters during the day .
    ‘ Listen, my girl, I know you’re still young but you’re also a woman now so be careful not to look at Abdullah. It’s forbidden for you to do anything like that. Do you understand me?’ One day I had confessed that I liked him, and demanded to know what was wrong with feeling that way. In return, she had slapped me hard and told me I was a shameless woman, asking how I could speak like that and saying that women are not allowed to have those kinds of feelings. She then forbade me to see him again. He was a boy, she told me, so he could do whatever he liked and no one would ever gossip about him, but it was different for me because I was a girl and our family could be shamed for ever because of me .
    That day I wept and longed to see Abdullah, but knew it would be impossible because my mother was afraid of my father. She had told me that if my father got to hear about my feelings for Abdullah, then the shame would force him to resolve the matter by killing me .
    I wasn’t surprised when Nasreen told me this because I know of several cases where girls have in fact been killed for loving a man that their family didn’t approve of. Gossip can sometimes get out of control, becoming completely exaggerated, but some men in the family find this hard to understand and feel compelled to defend the family honour nonetheless and prove that they disapprove of shameful behaviour by killing an innocent girl. There have been some instances in which the boy has been killed for having a forbidden love affair, but it’s usually the case that the woman ends up being blamed and punished.
    Soon Abdullah’s mother began asking my mother for my hand on behalf of her son, and I started to get scared because she was becoming insistent. But my mother actually became quite comfortable with the situation because this is the way marriages in Afghanistan are normally arranged. The boy’s family comes to the girl’s family, they