Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan by Zarghuna Kargar Read Free Book Online Page A

realise that going back to our homeland would prove impossible.
    When the Taliban came to power, Afghanistan became a state forgotten by the international community. By this time we’d spent more than six years in Pakistan, and many of our relatives were starting to ask my father if they could marry me or one of my sisters. We were now all in our teens, and in Peshawar it’s perfectly normal for people to get married at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Such was the prevailing culture then, that my parents accepted offers both for me and for one of my sisters to get engaged. I was just seventeen years old at the time, and was happy to do whatever my parents thought was best. In fact, I didn’t really stop to think about what I was agreeing to because I was so busy studying and working full time for the BBC as a writer and producer in a children’s radio drama.
    Towards the end of 1999 my father’s brother helped him get to the United Kingdom as an asylum seeker. Meanwhile my mother went back to Afghanistan with her brother to sell our damaged apartment in Kabul, even though it wasn’t safe for her to go back there as a former minister’s wife. Fortunately, though, my mother was not well-known and my uncle was just an ordinary young man whom the Taliban considered to be my mother’s mahram (someone who is legally related to the woman, as a brother, husband, father or uncle) and therefore a suitable companion for her. They went back to Kabul for just four days. At this time property prices were at their very lowest, as people had lost all hope of Afghanistan having a bright future. Unemployment was high, people were poor and my mother was not able to secure a particularly good price for our property. When she returned to Pakistan, though, we knew we had cut our last physical tie to our old country.
    Two years after my father had left us to go and live in England he was able to get a family reunion visa so we could join him there. The day I knew I was going to London I went back to dressing in the way I had in Kabul. I bought a new pair of jeans and left my big scarf behind in Peshawar. I felt like a bird being let out of its cage as I shed my hijab for ever. I had always complained about the strict dress code in Pakistan, threatening to throw off my hijab and wear a mini-skirt, and my older sister had warned me that as an Afghan girl I could never do such a thing as people would say I had lost all sense of my cultural values. Every time I would argue back: ‘My culture is not the shalwar kamiz , my culture is my clothes.’
    My mother would get angry with me for my defiance, but really she didn’t bother much about how I dressed.
    We arrived at Heathrow airport on 14 August 2001 – the air was clean and fresh compared to the polluted humidity of Peshawar, but I couldn’t enjoy my newfound freedom because my fiancé was waiting to meet me. I had no idea what he looked like, and knew only that he was the son of a family friend. When I saw Javed for the first time, I realised the engagement was real; it wasn’t something I could ignore. I was disappointed thathe wasn’t the tall, handsome man I had imagined, and angry with my parents for arranging the marriage. I didn’t like Javed, didn’t want to talk to him and I spent a lot of time crying. Of course I knew that having a handsome husband was no guarantee of happiness, but I couldn’t help my naïve, idealised expectations. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter how I felt, because in my culture once it has been decided that a girl should marry a particular man, it would cause immense problems if that agreement was not honoured. My mother used to tell me stories of families who’d changed their minds about an arranged marriage and then found that a close male relative of theirs had been killed. My mother reminded me that I only have one brother, and warned that she didn’t want him to inherit a dispute with another family.
    I used to believe in marriage. When I