Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan Read Online Free PDF Page B

philosophy, history, politics, novels and poetry– that were mostly written in Persian and Pashtu, but some in Russian. Our friends and neighbours had called it the Kargar library, and would regularly call in to borrow books.
    By the end of 1994 – just before the Taliban emerged – our life in Shahr-e-naw became harder than ever, the temperature dropped and it began to snow. In the evenings it was the girls’ job to go outside and fetch water and by then it was so cold that our hands would turn blue and numb. My mother had also noticed that my sisters, the other girls and I were spending all day scratching our heads, and had talked to Muzgan’s mother about what to do about this lice infestation. She had suggested that my mother simply cut our hair, but we had refused to let her anywhere near us with scissors. Meanwhile the infestation only got worse. Every day I was wearing the same pair of old corduroy trousers and a jumper, both of which had become black with dirt. By now we’d been living in Shahr-e-naw for nearly two weeks, but the time had come to leave.
    My father had managed to get a message to us through a male relative, and had told us to hire some form of transport and go first to Jalalabad, a city in the east of Afghanistan that was seventy miles from Kabul. My mother and a neighbour duly made plans to hire a minibus, but on the day we were due to leave Afghanistan, the Pakistani government closed the border at Torkham (the main crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan) in an attempt to stop the flood of refugees trying to flee Afghanistan. We would have to change our escape route.
    When the time came to leave Kabul, my mother and our neighbour, Auntie Nasfeesa, both wept. I began to cry, too, but I was only crying because my mother was. I didn’t understand that I was fleeing my homeland to escape the war. My mother told us to say goodbye to the land we’d been born in, which we dutifully did, but at the time I understood neither the significance of what I was doing nor what was actually happening to us. We left Kabul very early in the morning, when it was still cold and dark. We’d packed the minibus with basic things like bread, drinking water and bottled milk for my baby sister. We didn’t reach Jalalabad until nightfall, staying the night at my mother’s cousin’s house where we all slept inone large room. My mother had two requests for her cousin when we arrived; first, could she help us get to Peshawar where my father was waiting for us? Second, could she offer us anything to get rid of our head lice? Thankfully, her cousin was able to produce a bottle of grey liquid – with a sharp antiseptic smell I can still remember – and my mother got to work with it straightaway. It was the first time any of us had had head lice and we didn’t realise that it’s considered embarrassing, and so were surprised when my mother’s cousin’s daughters began laughing and pointing at us. In turn, they were shocked at how openly we talked about the annoying little insects that were laying dozens of eggs in our hair every day. My mother, however, was mortified and apologised to her cousin for bringing us into her home infested with lice.
    The next day we were up early again and drove the minibus to the border with Pakistan. As the official crossing at Torkham had been closed, we were going to have to cross the border illegally through the mountains, via the same route that people living in the border area were using to carry refugees between Afghanistan and Pakistan in exchange for money. We had to cross a narrow river at Naw-a-Pass in a wooden long-tail boat, then when we’d reached the other side we travelled in an open-back military truck. There wasn’t a lot of space in it so we were all sitting on top of one another. Apart from the driver and his two assistants, we were all females, with no male relatives (other than my three-year-old brother) to protect us.
    To add to our difficulties, we had with us