The Lovers by Rod Nordland Read Free Book Online

not wear them. “To express our love, we might use symbols, go back to history to find an equivalent. There are so many love stories in this country—no one is going to stop us. Can I deprive my own daughters of love? Being in love is not a crime in any nation. We should give that freedom to our kids. We should give that freedom to this nation.”
    One of the most popular programs recently on Afghan radio iscalled Night of the Lovers, which airs weekly on Arman FM Radio 98.1, the country’s most popular private station. The format is simple: Young men and women call in anonymously and pour their hearts out about their loves, usually frustrated, imperiled, or forbidden. They record those personal love stories on the station’s voice-mail system, and the program picks the best ones and airs them. The idea for the show came to the station’s manager, Sameem Sadat, when he was stuck in traffic one day and saw young people in all the cars around him happily texting or chatting away, looks of delighted concentration on their faces. Mostly they were texting even if there were adults also in the car. Despite being gridlocked for half an hour or longer, they would keep going without a break. “I realized they were all in love. No one talks to anyone for thirty minutes or an hour unless they’re in love. I thought, ‘They must have stories.’” The show began on Valentine’s Day 2014, at first for an hour once a week, late at night. It was so popular though that in 2015 Arman FM increased the format to a three-hour-long program, from 9:00 P . M . to midnight on Wednesdays. After playing each recorded message, the presenters (a man and a woman) match it with an appropriate love song, broadcasting it all without giving any explicit advice or counseling, to steer clear of the mullahs. After the program the stories are posted on the program’s Facebook page, 6 attracting thousands of comments each week. In a typical week, Night of the Lovers receives three hundred recorded stories from young people all over Afghanistan, from cities and villages, from educated people and unlettered ones, and it broadcasts about twenty of the most articulate.
    The stories are nearly always sad. “I would say in all this time 7 we’ve had until now ten stories that are happy. Maybe those who succeed in love don’t tell their stories, or maybe there just aren’t many happy stories, I don’t know,” Mr. Sadat said. The program’s female presenter, Hadiya Hamdard, goes once every few weeks to Badam Bagh prison for women in Kabul, the country’s main female prison, and collects stories from the inmates there; when she arrives, she is practically mobbed by women jockeying to tell their stories. Normally, three-fourths 8 of Badam Bagh’s inmates are there for so-called social or moral crimes, which are of coursecrimes of love—sex outside marriage, attempted zina (adultery), and so forth. Each episode of Night of the Lovers broadcasts one story from a woman who is literally a prisoner of love.
    Inevitably, in the messages left with the program, there are sad stories of betrayal and denial, rejection and unrequited yearning. Another leitmotif is how hard it is, in a society that forbids even routine contact between men and women, for lovers to find a way to get together and how easy it is for them to lose each other.
    Zakia was in just such a position. With Ali away in the army, she found herself missing him and sorry about turning him down, but there was no way she could communicate her regret to him. She did not have a cell phone, did not know how to use one, and, even if she had, would have had no discreet way to learn his number. Even if she could have found someone to write a letter, there was no mail service in rural Afghanistan. She found herself maneuvering to listen to the men in the family whenever they got calls from brothers and cousins posted in the army, but there was no news about Ali. She felt frustrated and helpless, and as she