Honour on Trial by Paul Schliesmann Read Free Book Online Page A

police searched the Shafia home in Montreal. In a closet they found a diary Rona had kept for a short time in 2008. Handwritten in Persian, it described her deteriorating relations with Shafia and Tooba as well as her ostracism within the family.
    The memoir was like a voice from the grave. It painted a bleak picture of Rona's life in the Shafia household. She talked about going on endless walks around the Montreal neighbourhood to fill her days and escape abuse and about how she was being isolated from the children she had helped raise. Known to the world as her husband's cousin in order to hide their polygamous marriage, Rona's temporary immigration visa was firmly under Tooba's control. Rona, by her own account, was a woman without social standing, friends, or citizenship.
    Rue Bonnivet neighbour Mary-Ann Devantro recalled one of the times several of the Shafia girls and Rona came to visit at her apartment. Believing Rona was, in fact, the children's aunt, Devantro asked why such a beautiful woman wasn't married. Maybe she would be some day, Rona replied wistfully, not daring to reveal the truth.
    When Devantro commented on the delicately braided metal earrings Rona was wearing, Rona took them off and gave them to Devantro as a spontaneous gift. Today, they are Devantro's unhappy reminder of the beautiful woman with dark hair and sad eyes who suffered much and who, as it turned out, had ample reason to fear for her life.
    The first entry in Rona's diary began with the Islamic incantation, "In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful." Rona immediately launched into recollections of her early life in Kabul, about starting school at the age of five, and remembering her father, a retired Afghanistan army colonel. Rona had eight siblings — three step-sisters and two step-brothers from her father's first wife; and three sisters and a brother from the marriage between her father and her mother.
    "We were a middle-class family. I had just finished 11th grade when my brother Noor married. Shirin Jan, who was a distant relative on my father's side, had come to my brother's wedding reception and saw me sitting there, quiet and subdued. She liked me and asked for my hand in marriage for her son from her first husband," Rona recalls.
    That son was Mohammad Shafia, at the time a successful businessman growing his electronics sales and repair business in Kabul. Shirin Jan would visit Rona's home several times to get to know her prospective daughter-in-law. Rona definitely met with her approval. Then Shirin Jan invited the girl and her family to her home, Rona writes, "so that her son could have a good look at me. After our visit, her son announced his consent, so [they] stepped up the khwastgari." This is the ritual undertaken by the groom's family for completing an arranged marriage.
    "I knew nothing about such things," Rona writes, revealingly, "so when my elder brother came to ask me whether I accepted the union, I said, 'Give me away in marriage if he is a good man; don't if he is not.'"
    The family checked Shafia out, reporting that he was, indeed, "a good man but not educated," his schooling cut short with his father's death. The engagement would go on for two years, until Shafia and Rona were married in 1978 in Kabul's most opulent hotel, the Intercontinental, with a grand feast and celebration.
    "After getting married, my lot in life began a downward spiral, right up to today [while] I am writing these memoirs," Rona writes in her diary.
    Rona was unable to bear children. This was devastating news for the couple so they spent the next seven years travelling back and forth to India for fertility treatments. These were unsuccessful and, as a result, the relationship deteriorated.
    "Finally, my husband started picking on me. He wouldn't allow me [to] go to visit my mother, and at home he would find fault with my cooking and serving meals, and he would find excuses to harass me," Rona recounts. "I had to say, 'Go and take