They all begged Zeba for help. They needed the judge’s mercy. They needed their families to be understanding. They needed their husbands to grant them divorces. The prison was teeming with stories of sex, love, and violence.
Zina. Zina. Zina.
Two women came to Zeba together.
“Go on, you tell her,” said the older of the two, the soles of her feet stained with henna. Zeba thought them to be mother and daughter at first but soon realized she was mistaken.
“Our husband was killed by his cousins, but the family pointed their fingers at us. They’re free while we’re in here. We did nothing, but no one seems to care. What should we do?”
“You were both married to him?”
“Yes,” explained the older woman. “I was his first wife. Then he took her. He was a decent man. He had land that his cousins had been eyeing for years. They wanted it and finally killed him for it. Three of them came into our home and strangled him. Blaming the two of us only made it easier for them to claim his lot.”
Zeba bit her lip.
“Let me think about it,” Zeba said. “I’m not sure what would be best. .”
Actually, she didn’t know at all. Gulnaz had never tackled dilemmas of this ilk, which was not to say that she could not have managed them. The opportunity just hadn’t presented itself.
Madar, you would have the time of your life in this place.
Zeba cobbled together recipes from her childhood, recalling what Gulnaz had done in similar situations.
“This place, these crimes — it is an injustice what’s being done here,” Zeba declared. A chorus of agreement rang through the small cell. “What a burden it is to be born a woman.”
What she could not articulate sometimes came more naturally to her in rhyme.
“Men treasure their manhood as God’s greatest gift
Because without it, justice is brutal and swift.”
There was an outburst of laughter.
“What did she say?” Like links on a chain, the women passed Zeba’s couplet from the cell into the hallway, the beauty salon, and beyond. They repeated it to themselves, not wanting to forget the two lines that should have hung like a slogan beneath the prison’s name.
“Zeba, you’ll never have to wash your clothes again. I’ll do your laundry and use my own detergent if you’ll help me.”
The woman before her had two wide-eyed children at her side. They looked like baby birds hidden under their mother’s wings. Zeba noticed the bandages on her left wrist. She’d seen this woman undoing and redoing the strip of cotton a day earlier in the washroom, her back turned for privacy. Zeba could still picture the neat row of scabbed-over slice marks that ran from the middle of her forearm to the end of her wrist.
“My clothes?” Zeba asked with surprise.
“Now, that’s an offer worth considering. I’d move her request, whatever it is, to the top of the list. But that’s just me,” Latifa said. She was standing at the television, turning the dial to flip through the channels. When she came to the TOLO channel, she stopped abruptly and clapped her hands together. Zeba and the three women still waiting to talk to her all turned their attention to the television.
“It’s the finals! They’re going to announce the winner today,” she exclaimed. “How could I have forgotten?”
Two young men stood on a stage, microphones clutched in their nervous hands as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. They were being judged by a colorful panel of three men and one woman, some of Afghanistan’s biggest names in the music world. One man wore a tuxedo, the two other men wore butterfly-collared dress shirts under jackets, their necks adorned with bold silver jewelry, the kind only musicians could pull off. The woman, with heavily darkened eyes, wore a beige, glimmery long-sleeved shirt and layers of thin gold necklaces. Her inky, black locks cascaded over her shoulders and acted as a backdrop for her dangling gold earrings.
Her name was Fariha and she was everything the women in prison were not. She was bejeweled, sitting in a room full of men. The audience revered her voice. She leaned back in her chair with the comfort of an unchallenged ruler, sparkling as she congratulated both contestants on their tone, emotion, and range. Rubbing her hands together and lowering her smoky eyelids, she announced: “I choose. . Isah-jan as the winner!”
The camera panned to Isah, a young man with curly hair and a sheepish smile. The host of the show lifted Isah’s left hand into the air triumphantly. The audience, young men in their twenties, stood and clapped wildly.
“Isah!” Latifa cried. “I knew he would win. He’s the best by far. You know he’s from the same town as my mother.”
“Oh really? My congratulations to your whole family, then,” Nafisa mumbled. She sat cross-legged in front of her bed, flipping through a beauty magazine.
“Zeba-jan,” the woman went on. “As I said, I’ll take care of your laundry if you can help me get out of here before my boys turn seven and they’re taken away from me.”
Somehow, the fact that they were twins made them seem even more forlorn.
“How old are they now?” Zeba asked, touching the top of one boy’s head. The prison was home to enough children that walking through its halls sometimes reminded Zeba of an elementary school.
“Six, and the guards have already started talking about sending them to the orphanage with the others,” the woman said, her voice cracking. “I can’t be away from them. I’ve only survived this long because they’ve been here with me.”
“You’ve been here seven years?”
She nodded. She was younger than Zeba and had the freshness of an adolescent. But judging by the ages of her boys, she had to be in her early twenties.
“Why are you here?”
Latifa was glued to the television. The winner of the competition, Isah, was singing his victory song. The audience was clapping in time, cheering him on. Fariha moved her shoulders to the rhythm and nodded in approval.
The young mother looked at her boys and then around the room. She spoke so softly that even Zeba had to lean in and pay close attention to make out her painful story.
“I was attacked by my cousin at my home. He cornered me in a room and told me he would kill me if I screamed. My family didn’t believe me and when I went to the police, they arrested me.”
“They arrested you?”
“No one had seen or heard what had happened. The police said if it had been forced, I would have screamed. Since I hadn’t shouted, they arrested me for zina. I was already in prison when I realized I was pregnant. Once my family found out about that, I never heard from them again.”
The boys were watching Zeba, looking for her reaction. She forced a quick smile their way. They’d heard the story before, she could see.
“Because you didn’t scream. .” she echoed. The words rattled her. “But you didn’t scream because you were scared?”
“He had a knife,” she said plainly. Zeba sensed these were words she’d said a thousand times before to no avail.