Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan (8 page)

I could only imagine that Sharifa’s mother was even more distressed than her daughter, and struggled to understand how a lovely baby girl could come into the world and not be wanted by anyone. She was being judged for her gender and it seemed bitterly unfair. Struggling to say the right thing to Sharifa, I ended up saying the first thing which sprang to
mind, and it was far from helpful. ‘You should be happy, Sharifa. You have a little sister who will bring laughter and happiness—’

‘No,’ Sharifa shouted, ‘that baby has brought nothing but pain and sorrow, and my mother’s life is a living hell now. My dad is not speaking to her and no one has even congratulated her for bringing a healthy baby into world. My mother is not feeding her and I can’t even hold her.’

She lowered her voice and mumbled, ‘My family will be scarred for ever by this, and now I have to marry some stranger that my father has chosen for me, because he is marrying a girl from that family in the hope of bringing a son to our family.’

I ventured some more useless advice: ‘Why don’t you show your father how upset you are and ask him not to make you go through with this?’

I knew even as I spoke that this would be impossible. In our culture fathers take no notice of what their daughters say, and once their decision is made about a daughter’s marriage, it is final.

I knew not only that Sharifa had no choice but to accept her father’s decision, but also that Sharifa’s mother would have to live with her husband’s new wife, a girl half her age. The usual practice was for a man to pay for a wife by giving her family money, but Sharifa’s father didn’t have enough money to buy a new bride so he had to exchange one of his daughters instead. For Sharifa’s father this arrangement would kill two birds with one stone; he would marry off one of his daughters and get a young bride who would give him a son.

After we’d spoken for a while Sharifa calmed down, we drank more tea and then I walked her home. When I got back it was clear my mother knew what had happened, so I asked what she thought Sharifa should now do. My mother said, ‘It’s a horrid situation, but if she doesn’t agree to the marriage exchange then her family will have even worse problems,’ and with that, she carried on tidying up the kitchen. I knew only too well from my mother’s experience the consequences of not having a son in an Afghan family; mothers without sons and sisters without brothers have suffered for many generations. While the father and the head of the family is alive and well he is a powerful figure and his wife
and daughters are secure, but when he dies the women become the property of the men of the extended family.

It is common practice in Afghanistan for a girl to be exchanged for a wife for her brother, or in cases like Sharifa’s, a second wife for her father. According to the Afghan constitution, the legal age for a girl to get married is sixteen and for a boy eighteen, but many girls are exchanged or married far younger. Most girls simply do as they are told and honour their parents’ choices for them. In poor families, daughters are sometimes kept for exchange later in life so that the family doesn’t have to spend much money on the wedding of their son. This form of exchange is known as Badal: one family finds a bride for their son and in exchange they give their daughter to the brother of the bride, or sometimes to an uncle or cousin instead of payment.

Strictly it is illegal for a girl to be given away to settle a family dispute or for her to be forced into marriage, but that doesn’t stop it happening. It is a common occurrence because domestic matters tend to be solved within the family, and as girls are not allowed to go to the courts or seek legal advice, they end up being totally dependent on their families. Regardless of illegality, most women simply obey their family and consider that whatever happens in their lives is God’s will. These young brides tend to be uneducated and therefore unaware of their legal rights, and while most men are aware of the law, they simply ignore it. They think the law should have no say in family matters.

I remember my mother once telling me the story of Zulikha, a girl from her village. After the death of her father, Zulikha and her sisters were distributed amongst their male cousins and forced to marry them, while the mother was compelled to marry her dead husband’s brother. According to Afghan law, based on Islamic law, forced marriages are not allowed. Both parties need to consent to any marriage. However, many people do not fully understand the teachings of the Quran, so cultural traditions tend to take precedence over the letter of the law, and in Zulikha’s case Afghan tradition was followed. She had no brothers
so her family were distributed like possessions amongst the male relatives of her dead husband’s extended family. The thinking behind this is that if the woman were to marry another man – a stranger – then the widow’s land would be lost to someone outside the family. The law states that husbands and wives have an equal share of land and property but in reality all assets are regarded as the man’s. So if a married man dies, then his brothers will come and take what they regard as theirs: the widow, her daughters and all the property.

As it turned out, Zulikha had quite a good life with her husband because he was educated and had enough money to look after her but she never forgot the fact that she was given to him like an ornament or toy of no value. She could never forgive what her uncle’s family had done to her sisters and her mother.

I was aware that Sharifa also had cousins and knew what had happened to Zulikha, but at that time she seemed to be fine. A few months later, though, she stopped coming to school and I started to worry about her. No one seemed to know how things were with Sharifa and her family, so I decided to find out for myself and one afternoon I walked over to her house. It was a good half-hour’s walk from my home, and I was hot and bothered by the time I arrived. I knocked on the old wooden door and waited; but then I noticed it was ajar and tried to peek through it when Sharifa’s younger sister opened the door and invited me in. As I went into the garden I noticed there were piles of mud bricks and planks of wood everywhere; there seemed to be some sort of building work going on.

Sharifa came out to greet me. I hadn’t seen her for several weeks – she had lost weight and become pale, and as I hugged and kissed her on the cheek as I normally would, I noticed that her lips were dry. I was sure something awful had happened.

‘Salam, Sharifa. What’s wrong? Where have you been? Why haven’t you been coming to class?’ I bombarded her with questions but she didn’t reply to any of them; then she began to cry. She asked me to come into her bedroom and began to tell me about the building work, but I interrupted her.

‘Are you building a new house or something?’

‘My dad needs a new room,’ she said.

I understood immediately what she meant. Sharifa’s father needed to have a room separate from the rest of the house for his new bride.

Inside the house everything was as quiet as if there had been a death and the household was in mourning. No one laughed or smiled. Sharifa told me that her family had decided to exchange her for his new bride, a girl who was just seventeen, the same age as Sharifa and me. In return, Sharifa would be marrying a man in his forties whose wife had died. She would have to look after this man’s children and in so doing give up any dreams she might have had of a handsome young man of her own. Sharifa’s happiness was being sacrificed to secure her family’s future.

As I walked home I prayed fervently that there would be some kind of miracle, or that Sharifa and her family would reject this plan. Sharifa was forfeiting her future with no guarantee of the desired outcome. Who could be certain that the new wife would even give birth to a son? Sharifa’s extended family kept saying that people who marry again eventually have a son, but who knew whether that was true?

Two months passed and I heard nothing from Sharifa. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house and I was busy with school and household chores. I would occasionally wonder what had happened to her but had gradually come to accept that it was her destiny to marry an old man and safeguard her family’s future. One afternoon after school, though, when I got off the bus, I saw one of Sharifa’s younger sisters in the street. She was out buying medicine from the chemist’s. I stopped her and anxiously asked how Sharifa was. She said that Sharifa had had to get married before her father brought the new bride home because Sharifa’s husband needed help with his five children, and that Sharifa was now their stepmother even though some of the children were almost the same age as her.

‘But where is she now?’ I asked. ‘Is she here in Peshawar?’

Her sister’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Yes, she’s in Peshawar but she’s
living outside the city, in a remote village. Her husband’s house is a long way away and she’s not allowed to come and visit us very often.’

Sharifa’s sister started crying. ‘We don’t really see our sister any more. She’s too busy looking after her husband and his five children.’

I was trying to imagine how young the children must have been, seeing as Sharifa herself was not much more than a child, and asked, ‘What about your dad? Did he bring home the new bride?’

The sister shook her head, and I asked why not.

‘My dad is seriously ill. He fell ill the week before he planned to bring home his new wife and was taken into hospital. I’m going now to take him these tablets that the doctor has prescribed.’

Sharifa’s eventful life started to occupy my mind once again. I explained to my mother what had happened and she immediately suggested we should go and visit Sharifa’s mother to see how she was. The next day my mother and I went to the family’s house. As I pushed open the old wooden door, I could see the garden was full of people and assumed they were celebrating Sharifa’s father’s wedding. Maybe he had gone ahead with it after all. But then I noticed that people were looking serious and that there was not the joyful atmosphere of a wedding. A group of men moved aside to let me and my mother into the house, and it was then that I heard the sound of crying.

We went into a room and found Sharifa’s mother weeping. She was sitting on the floor; her scarf lay crumpled by her side. Her daughters sat around her and they too were weeping, but Sharifa wasn’t among them. I approached Sharifa’s mother and bent down to kiss her. She hugged me and held me tight and I sensed she was thinking that as Sharifa’s friend I was somehow connected to her daughter.

‘My child, Sharifa’s sacrifice didn’t bring us any happiness.’

This wasn’t a wedding. It was a funeral. Sharifa’s father had died earlier that day, and he had died before bringing his new wife home or securing a son for the family. Sharifa’s mother began wailing and slapping her face.

‘Oh God, what will happen to us? I have lost two pieces of my heart:
my daughter Sharifa and my husband. What will become of me and my daughters?’ She was rocking back and forth, calling out Sharifa’s name.

‘Sharifa, my child, come and see. Your sacrifice didn’t bring a son. Why did you have to leave me? Why? Now instead of you, Sharifa, your father’s new bride has to come and suffer with us.’

I stood there, unsure what to do or say. All the other women were crying and shouting too. Eventually I left the room and walked around the rest of the house and into the garden. I wanted to find Sharifa. I couldn’t believe her husband wouldn’t even allow her to come to her own father’s funeral. I pictured Sharifa’s large green eyes full of tears but unable to cry properly for her family, as she was too busy toiling away in her new house burdened down by five young children. Sharifa, the girl whose dreams were shattered and whose youth was sold.

I never saw Sharifa again. I stopped going to her house and I found it hard to accept that Sharifa had given up her education and was the wife of an older man and mother to someone else’s children. But her story, and my memories of our friendship, remain with me to this day.

Sharifa’s plight is not an unusual one. Afghan men often marry a second wife if the first one doesn’t produce a son. Most of them have no understanding of how the sex of a baby is determined, and simply blame their wives for any difficulty either in conceiving or failing to produce a son – men are never to be blamed for such things. Many mothers still constantly tell their daughters to obey their brothers and do things for them because boys are better than girls, and some Afghan mothers even keep their jewellery to give to their son’s bride, rather than to their own daughters. I’m happy to be living now in a society where men and women are equally valued, and parents are happy to have either a baby daughter or a baby son.

As a girl growing up in Afghanistan and then Pakistan my cultural upbringing has been a mix of Afghan, Persian, Indian and Arabic influences. Most of the books that I have read are in the two main languages of Afghanistan – Pashtu or Dari – and the songs and poems that I’ve heard and the movies I’ve watched have all spoken about the love between a man and a woman. These love stories – such as the Pashtu romance of Adam Khan and Durkhany, for example – have been passed on from generation to generation. Durkhany is a beautiful and intelligent woman who falls in love with a handsome musician but she is betrothed to another man. She and Adam Khan pine for each other and can only be together in death. Some of these famous tales have even been made into Bollywood films. These are the love stories I grew up with.