“You are Yusuf, aren’t you?”
“I am,” he said and pushed his chair back to stand. He shook her hand, surprised both that she’d offered it and that her grip was as firm as it was.
“Sultana-jan, I’m assuming,” he said, pointing to the chair across from his. He waited as she put her shoulder bag on the ground and flipped her brown cotton head scarf off her head, fluffed the top of her hair, and let it fall lightly back into place. She smiled politely, small dimples appearing at the corners of her mouth like apostrophes. She had no other makeup on her face and not a single piece of jewelry.
“Correct,” she confirmed. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“Of course,” Yusuf replied. It was inherently uncomfortable for the two of them to be seated in a room — alone. It didn’t help matters that Yusuf felt stirred by her face, the way her cheeks tapered to give her a heart-shaped countenance. “I’m glad you’re looking into this place, actually. When you start looking into the cases of these prisoners, it tells you a lot about where the justice system’s priorities are.”
“Exactly,” Sultana agreed. “When we need the police, they throw their hands up and cry ‘what can we do without funding or training?’ It’s amazing how capable and resourceful they are in finding a woman who’s escaped from a deadly home. No criminal is worse than a woman who wants to live for herself.”
“It must be hard to report on this as a woman,” Yusuf commented. “Frustrating to watch this happen.”
“I suppose so. It’s not shocking, of course. Just a reminder of how things really are. I could easily be them, I think. Other women might choose to believe differently, but any one of us could end up here.”
Yusuf thought of the cases he’d reviewed with Aneesa: the woman who had strangled her husband after he’d prostituted her to strangers for money; the woman who had left the husband who had tried to stab her with a screwdriver; the woman who had refused to marry the man thirty years her senior. Yusuf thought of his own sister, who had dared to fall in love with a man his parents did not like. They’d shouted and protested, but in the end, it was her choice and they’d paid for her wedding and smiled when their friends congratulated them, never revealing how disappointed they’d been.
His sister could have been on the roll call of Chil Mahtab, Asma the guard watching over her and Qazi Najeeb deciding her fate over a cup of green tea. That was why Yusuf was here — because he could imagine his family or himself in every tragedy in this land. He could have been the ill-trained prosecutor, incapable of framing a true legal argument. His sister could have been locked up here. His brother could have been arrested for being caught with his girlfriend. Hell, Yusuf could have been arrested for the same. Even his parents could have been arrested for some conflagration of the truth.
“What kind of article are you trying to put together, exactly?” Yusuf asked.
“I want to talk about the specific crimes and the way women are locked up without a second thought. The problem is that none of the women want their names or faces in the news. They’d be happier talking to foreign press about it, but the thought of their stories anywhere in the Afghan news makes them want to run and hide. Of course, it’s impossible to get the judges or the police to talk about any of this. They’re all doing the right thing, in their own minds.”
“I don’t think Zeba’s going to want to talk either, to tell you the truth,” Yusuf admitted. “She’s got children she’s thinking about and doesn’t want her name smeared any more than it already has been.”
“I’m sure. That’s why I’m not really talking about highlighting any particular case. I’d rather make it about the system as a whole.”
“You know, I never asked you,” Yusuf mused. “Why did you call me? I mean, there are a lot of lawyers with much more local experience here.”
“Good question,” Sultana said, laying her hands on the table as if to come clean. “I’ve been asking around and it’s pretty hard to get anyone to talk. The attorneys who have trained here don’t want to speak to a journalist, especially a female journalist. I thought you might be different. Plus, Zeba’s case is fascinating. There aren’t many murder cases, but in the few I’ve come across, the motivation is pretty clear. The women offer up exactly what it is that drove them to kill. She’s not really given any kind of reason and”—Sultana’s pointer fingers rapped on the table in synchrony—“I’m sure she must have had one. The fact that she won’t reveal it only makes me more curious.”
Yusuf took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. There most certainly had been a reason, a very good one he wanted to say. Instead, he turned to her first reason for approaching him.
“How’d you know I came from abroad?”
“Ask enough questions, you eventually discover a few things. Simple as that. Speaking of which, where is home for you?”
“New York. Or Washington,” Yusuf answered, knowing it was all probably one big America to her. “I’ve lived in both places.”
She peered at him, divining something from the contours of his face.
“You were young when you left.”
“I was,” Yusuf admitted. “We went to Pakistan.”
“We did too for a while. But you. . you were one of the lucky ones.” She smiled. “You went to America. We came back in 2003.”
Yusuf shifted in his chair. He was among the fortunate and knew it. It was the reason he felt uncomfortable around anyone his age in Afghanistan. They should have been peers, equals. They should have felt like countrymen, but they didn’t. It was as if they were all in the same car accident, but only Yusuf walked away without a scrape. Sultana must have sensed this.
“We were lucky, too. So many others were not.”
Yusuf rubbed the back of his neck. He was thankful for the drop in temperature, a hint that fall was approaching and bringing with it cooler winds from the north. After fall, winter would settle in with its bone-chilling temperatures. He’d be watching the street children shiver in their threadbare sweaters and thin-soled shoes. If summer was brutal, winter was death itself. Yusuf’s worst fear was that Zeba would be released from prison only to meet the justice of the outside world. Kamal’s family might choose to avenge his death. If they did, they would do it quickly, Yusuf knew. She would be dead before the first villagers’ toes turned white with chill. He thought of his grandmother’s funeral, the browned halwa his mother had made and folded into halved pita bread rounds. The crispness of the caramelized sugar was forever melded in his mind with the sound of his mother’s quiet sobbing and the feel of the masjid’s cold linoleum through his dress socks. It would be the same for Basir, Zeba’s son, he knew. Maybe it would be the snow. Maybe every winter’s snowfall would make him think of the day he lost his mother.
Yusuf kept his eyes on Sultana’s hands, her tapered fingers and slightly rounded nails. He was a good lawyer. He’d been told so by law school professors, classmates, mentors, and supervising attorneys. He had an appreciation for statutes, precedent, formulating arguments. He liked the inherent rationality of the procedural codes and the penal codes. They were guidelines, blueprints for how to approach and build a case. They were anchors, preventing a society from becoming a ship unmoored in wild waters.
But he had traveled to the other side of the world. Sometimes, it felt as if he’d traveled back in time. The laws and codes were changing. The judge didn’t have the full story; neither did the prosecutor. Sultana had an inkling that there was more beneath the surface, but she didn’t have a clue. As things stood, Zeba’s fate would not be based on facts — it would be based on the absence of information, which made it inherently unjust. Yusuf looked at Sultana and wondered if it just might be time to work within the set of unwritten codes that governed this land.