One day circumstances brought Saliqa and Nadim together. Her mother was spending the weekend with relatives in Islamabad and the uncle was away all day. Only his wife was at home. Saliqa told her she was visiting friends.
‘Have you got permission?’ her uncle’s wife asked. Her uncle was head of the family as long as Saliqa’s father was living in a refugee reception centre in Belgium. He was waiting for a resident’s permit to enable him to get employment and send money home – or better still, send for his whole family.
‘Mummy said I could go as soon as I had finished my chores,’ Saliqa lied.
She didn’t go to her girl friend; she went to meet Nadim, face to face.
‘We can’t talk here,’ she says quickly when they seemingly meet by chance on the street corner. He hails a taxi and pushes her in. Saliqa has never sat in a taxi with a strange boy and her heart is in her throat. They stop by a park, a park in Peshawar where men and women can walk together.
They sit on a bench in the park and talk for a short half-hour. Nadim is making grand plans for the future, he wants to buy a shop or sell carpets. Saliqa is first and foremost terrified someone is going to spot them. Less than half an hour after leaving home she is back. But all hell has already broken loose. Shabnam saw her and Nadim in the taxi and went and told Sharifa who informed the uncle’s wife.
The aunt hits Saliqa hard on the mouth when she returns, locks her into a room and phones the mother in Islamabad. When the uncle comes home the whole family enters the room and demands to know what she has done. The uncle shakes with anger when he hears about the taxi, the park, and the bench. He grabs a piece of broken wire and beats her repeatedly over the back while her aunt holds on to her. He hits her face until she bleeds from mouth and nose.
‘What have you done, what have you done? You’re a whore,’ the uncle screams. ‘You are a disgrace to the family. A stain on our honour. A rotten branch.’
His voice reverberates throughout the house, in through the neighbours’ open windows. Before long everyone knew of Saliqa’s crime. The crime that caused her to lie locked in her room, praying to Allah that Nadim will propose to her, that her parents will allow her to marry, that Nadim will get work in a carpet shop and that they can move away.
‘If she can sit alone in a taxi with a boy, I’m sure she is capable of other things,’ says Nasrin, a friend of the aunt, and looks haughtily over at Saliqa’s mother. Nasrin shovels sweetmeats into her mouth with a big spoon, and waits for answers to her pronouncement.
‘She was only in the park, there is no need to beat her within an inch of her life,’ says Shirin, who is a doctor.
‘If we hadn’t stopped him we would have had to take her to the hospital,’ says Sharifa. ‘She was out in the courtyard all night praying,’ she continues. In her sleepless state she had caught sight of the wretched girl. ‘She was there until the call for prayer early this morning,’ she added.
The women sigh, one mutters a prayer. They all agree that Saliqa made a big mistake by meeting Nadim in the park, but they cannot agree whether she was merely disobedient or had committed a serious crime.
‘What a disgrace, what a disgrace,’ Saliqa’s mother wails. ‘How could a daughter of mine do something like that?’
The women discuss the way forward. If he proposes to her the disgrace can be forgotten. But Saliqa’s mother is not keen on the idea of Nadim as son-in-law. His family is poor, he is uneducated, and for the most part he just roams the streets. The only job he ever had, but subsequently lost, was in a carpet factory. If Saliqa married him she would have to move in with his family. They could never afford their own house.
‘His mother is not a good housewife,’ one of the women claims. ‘Their house is shabby and dirty. She’s lazy and doesn’t stay at home.’
One of the older women recalls Nadim’s grandmother. ‘When they lived in Kabul they entertained anybody,’ she says and adds slyly: ‘Men even came to her apartment when she was alone, and they weren’t relatives.’
‘With all due respect,’ one of the women says, turning towards Saliqa’s mother, ‘I must admit I always thought Saliqa was a bit of a show-off, always made up, dressed up to the nines. You should have realised that she had dirty thoughts.’
For a while no one says anything, as though they all agree, without actually saying so, in sympathy for Saliqa’s mother. One woman wipes her mouth; it is time to think of supper. The others get up, one by one. Sharifa mounts the stairs to her three rooms. She passes the back room where Saliqa is shut up. She will stay there until the family have decided what to do with her.
Sharifa sighs. She thinks of the punishment that befell her neighbour Jamila.
Jamila came from a superior family, she was rich, immaculate, and beautiful as a flower. A relative had put aside money earned abroad and thus could afford the eighteen-year-old beauty. The wedding was exceptional, five hundred guests, the food sumptuous, the bride radiantly beautiful. Jamila did not meet the man she was to marry prior to the wedding; the parents had arranged everything. The groom, a tall, thin man of forty-something, travelled from overseas to get married the Afghan way. He and Jamila spent two weeks together as newlyweds before he returned to arrange for a visa in order that she could join him. In the meantime Jamila lived with his two brothers and their wives.
They got her after three months. The police had ratted on her. They had spied a man crawling in through her window.
They never got the man, but the husband’s two brothers found some of his belongings in Jamila’s room, proof of the relationship. The family immediately dissolved the marriage and sent her packing home. She was locked up for two days while a family council was held.
Three days later Jamila’s brother told their neighbours that his sister had died as the result of an accident with a fan which short-circuited.
The funeral was held the next day; lots of flowers, lots of serious faces. The mother and sisters were inconsolable. All mourned the short life allotted Jamila.
‘Like the wedding,’ they said, ‘a wonderful funeral.’
The family’s honour had been salvaged.
Sharifa had a video from the wedding, but Jamila’s brother came to borrow it. She never got it back. Nothing would remain to suggest that a wedding had ever taken place. But Sharifa keeps a few photos. The bridal couple look formal and serious as they cut the cake. Jamila’s face betrays nothing and she looks lovely in the innocent white dress and veil, black hair and red mouth.
Sharifa sighs. Jamila committed a serious crime, but more from ignorance than a wicked heart.
‘She did not deserve to die. But Allah rules,’ she mumbles and breathes a prayer.
However, one thing bothers her: the two days of family council when Jamila’s mother, her own mother, agreed to kill her. She, the mother, it was, who in the end dispatched her three sons to kill her daughter. The brothers entered the room together. Together they put a pillow over her face; together they pushed it down, harder, harder, until life was extinguished.
Then they returned to the mother.
Suicide and Song
In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes’ notion of honour and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death. The undisciplined are cruelly killed. Should only one guilty party be executed it is invariably the woman.