3
“What are you reading?” Kamila asked, looking over her shoulder at her sister Saaman, who had stretched out across the deep red woven carpet on the living room floor. Khair Khana had had no power for several days, and shadows from the hurricane lamp fluttered against the room’s bare walls.
Saaman was lost in thought. Her book of poems lay open in front of her, but she had long ago abandoned it; she was far too distracted to concentrate. The sound of Kamila’s voice jolted her back to the quiet evening. A pretty teenager with fine features and a perfectly symmetrical face, Saaman was more serious and more reserved than her gregarious older sister. She possessed a quiet grace that manifested itself as shyness when she met someone for the first time.
“Some of your Maulana Jalalludin,” replied Saaman. After a moment she sighed: “Again.”
She rolled onto the other side of her pillow, adjusted her ponytail, and tried to focus on her poetry once more.
Only months before, Saaman had passed the competitive college entrance exams, known in Afghanistan by their French name, concours, and had won a coveted seat at Kabul University. Her parents had been immensely proud of their sixth-born daughter, who would be the first in the family to enter the country’s oldest and most respected university. She had just begun her first semester of study in the science department and was reveling in university life. Then the Taliban took Kabul. Saaman was trying to bear the abrupt end to her education with composure, but she found it difficult to accept being forced to trade her classroom for a living room filled with half a dozen restless girls.
She was hardly the only young woman in Kabul trying to fill her days. Across the capital, women of all ages and backgrounds were learning to make do in a city run by men who wanted them to disappear. The Taliban had dug in for the winter and perhaps much longer; no one dared to guess. Meanwhile, fighting ground on between the new regime and Massoud’s forces, and the United Nations pecked away at a peace process that lacked even the energy to stall.
Months had passed since the Taliban’s arrival, and the girls in Kamila’s house no longer spoke of a swift end to their home detention. Instead they watched helplessly as the nine men of the Taliban High Court issued edicts that strengthened the rules of their banishment and regulated ever smaller details of their everyday lives. Walking in the middle of the street was now prohibited, as was wearing high-heeled shoes. Clothing must be baggy and loose-fitting “to prevent the seditious limbs from being noticed,” and chadri could not be made from any lightweight material through which arms or legs might be seen. Mixing with strangers and going out without a mahram, or male relative, had been outlawed.
Kamila and her sisters banded together to seek relief from the creeping despair that threatened to suffocate them. And they began to think about possible solutions. “We should ask Habiba Jan to bring some of her books over,” Kamila said to Saaman one morning while they finished cleaning the kitchen after a breakfast of hot chai and toasted naan. Habiba’s family lived only two houses down the road, making visits fairly safe, even with the current restrictions.
“I’m so sick of reading the same thing over and over again. Maybe we could share some books with our friends.” She was on a roll.
“Yes, yes, what a great idea,” Saaman replied as she dried her hands on a rag. “We should also talk to Razia. She reads a lot, though I’m not sure what kinds of books she likes. We have the poetry covered; maybe she can bring some of those great Persian detective stories—I think she’s addicted to them.” Saaman felt energized for the first time in weeks.
With that conversation began the girls’ semiregular neighborhood book swap. Every few days a handful of girls from the northeast section of Khair Khana would stop by the Sidiqi home to drop off books they had finished and pick up new ones. Everyone was excited by the hunt for new volumes to share with the group, and as they cycled through their own small libraries they reached out to borrow from family collections. Kamila’s sitting room became an informal trading floor, with books lined up along the wall, spines out and organized alphabetically by author in neat rows for easy browsing. Girls from the neighborhood came by every day, and they all sat together in a circle, snacking on chai and pistachios and sharing their passion for the authors they loved, egging each other on to read their favorites.
Both Kamila and Saaman loved the famous Persian poets. A copy of Maulana Jalalludin Mohammad Balkhi-Rumi’s classic Divani Shamsi Tabrizi, an epic poem of forty-five thousand Dari verses, floated constantly between the sitting room and the girls’ sleeping chambers down the hall. The thirteenth-century poet, a native of the northeastern province of Balkh and known to most Westerners simply as Rumi, defined the Islamic mystical Sufi tradition in which meditations on music and poetry bring man nearer to God and the presence of the divine. Another writer who deeply moved the girls was the lyric poet Hafez, born in 1315 in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. Hafez wrote ghazals, or odes, that chronicled human loss and sought comfort in the immense beauty of God’s divine love and creation. The girls took turns reading the stanzas aloud:
from POEMS FROM THE DIVAN OF HAFIZ
translated by Gertrude Lowthian Bell
The breath of Dawn’s musk-strewing wind shall blow,
The ancient world shall turn to youth again,
And other wines from out Spring’s chalice flow;
Wine-red, the judas-tree shall set before
The pure white jessamine a brimming cup,
And wind flowers lift their scarlet chalice up
For the star-pale narcissus to adore.
The long-drawn tyranny of grief shall pass,
Parting shall end in meeting, the lament
Of the sad bird that sang “Alas, alas!”
Shall reach the rose in her red-curtained tent.
. . .
Dear is the rose—now, now her sweets proclaim,
While yet the purple petals blush and blow;
Hither adown the path of Spring she came,
And by the path of Autumn she will go.
Now, while we listen, Minstrel, tune thy lay!
Thyself hast said: “The Present steals away;
The Future comes, and bringing—what? Dost know?”
The lines from their treasured Persian literary heritage took the girls far away from the Taliban’s rigid idea of Islam, which grew out of a different tradition, the Deobandi, which strenuously opposed mysticism and rejected music and dance as corrupting influences. The Deobandi tradition began in northern India as a reaction to the injustices of colonial rule and evolved over time to embrace only the most literal and puritanical interpretations of Islam.
The book swap distracted the girls for several weeks, but as much as she enjoyed reading and sharing paperbacks with her friends, Kamila found herself growing more and more restless. Even the new supply of books was becoming dull, as she devoured each one, then read it again. How long can I just sit here? she thought. She knew there were women who had found ways to work; she had heard rumors about a few teachers who were running schools in their houses, for example, but the political situation remained so unpredictable that most women thought it wiser to stay indoors until something changed.
And things would have to change. There were too many widows who needed to support themselves and their families, and too many girls who were hungry for education. Frustration was growing as the economy imploded under a yoke of mismanagement, war, and neglect. Foreign aid, in the form of subsidized wheat distributions, had become critical to helping Kabul feed itself. The whole city now qualified as “vulnerable” in the aid vernacular. The situation was quickly becoming unbearable.
Kamila’s family was fortunate. Her father had stashed away some savings from his army salary and rent he received each month for a nearby apartment he owned. The money would not support the large family at home indefinitely, but it had been enough to hold them over until Mr. Sidiqi could figure out another option.
If Kamila’s mother was worried about their situation, she didn’t show it; nor did she share her concerns with her oldest daughter. But Kamila watched with great anxiety as the large family’s resources grew thinner. Her brothers, Rahim and Najeeb, went shopping less frequently and brought home fewer groceries and supplies at one time. Meat had become an even greater luxury. Kamila wondered how long the money that remained could last, given how many of them it had to feed.
To make matters worse, the family had heard nothing from Mr. Sidiqi since he left Kabul weeks earlier. Few homes had telephones. There was no national mail system—illiteracy ran rampant in the largely rural country—and the ongoing fighting had badly damaged the makeshift communications systems that had managed to survive the Soviet invasion. A thriving network of family and friends stepped in to fill this vacuum; scores of people who regularly traveled back and forth between Kabul and the north served as impromptu postmen, transmitting messages between loved ones and sharing news with those who had been left behind. Kamila’s mother tried not to worry and comforted herself with the knowledge that her husband had survived two of his country’s wars already. But she felt uneasy being so far from him at such a precarious time. They had shared three decades and eleven children, and his safe arrival in Parwan was her only wish. She planned to join him there as soon as he sent word that the situation was secure enough for her to come.
The Taliban, meanwhile, had taken their fight to the north. They followed Massoud to his stronghold in the Panjshir Valley and attacked General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, home of the legendary Blue Mosque. They were determined to eliminate their remaining opponents and consolidate control over the entire country. Then the world would have no choice but to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s rightful and legitimate government and bestow upon the men from Kandahar all the benefits of nationhood, including foreign aid and the United Nations seat that they so desperately coveted.
While they were fighting their own countrymen, the Taliban were also battling for control of the economic resources of the agriculturally fertile and mineral-rich north, which would give them the industrial base they lacked in the south. Nearly two decades earlier, the Soviets had spent millions of dollars developing the region’s vast energy resources for their own benefit. Crude oil, iron reserves, and coal could all be found in abundance in the northern territories, which had for years received Kabul aid dollars as a reward for being easier to govern than the restive south.
Back in Kabul, the economy worsened, and families slipped from poor to truly destitute. The Taliban pushed back against the international aid community’s focus on what the men from Kandahar called the “two percent of women” who worked in Kabul’s offices. They issued more edicts, cloaked in the language of diplomacy:
“We kindly request all our Afghan sisters to not apply for any job in foreign agencies and they also should not go there. Otherwise, if they were chased, threatened, and investigated by us, the responsibility will be on them. We declare to all foreign agencies to respect the issued regulation of Islamic State of Afghanistan and strictly avoid employment of Afghan female staff.”
They continued to beat women in the streets, including beggars who extended their worn, cracked hands to passersby in hope of a handout. Taliban soldiers thrashed them with their shaloqs and berated them for being outside without a mahram. They ignored the fact that a shortage of men at home was the reason most of these women were forced onto the streets in the first place. Stories were spreading of those who had turned to prostitution to support their children, a situation that carried both great shame and danger for the women and their families. But for many there was no alternative. If caught, they faced public execution.
Kamila heard about everything that was happening outside on the streets from her brothers, who faithfully served as her eyes and ears, but she saw little of it for herself. She ventured out only rarely, and when she did leave the safety of her house, she remained strictly within the limits of Khair Khana. The farthest she had dared to go were the shops of the nearby Lycée Myriam bazaar—named for its proximity to Lycée Myriam high school—where she could find everything from food to fabric, including the required and now-ubiquitous chadri. None of the women Kamila saw moving through Lycée Myriam’s narrow maze of stalls and stores were begging; they were simply buying what they needed as quickly as possible while trying to avoid the roaming caravans of the Amr bil-Maroof, who would punish them simply for talking too loudly or wearing clothing that rustled. Even if women hadn’t felt so nervous and harried by the ever-present Taliban soldiers, there was no point in lingering to browse since they couldn’t see much of anything through the rectangular mesh of their chadri. Laughing in public was also prohibited, but there seemed little risk of breaking that rule these days. In Kabul, all the joy had gone out of shopping as well.
Interaction between male shopkeepers and their female customers was closely monitored. Women kept their conversation to a minimum as they picked out and paid for their goods. Even asking after family, as polite Afghan society demanded, could create suspicion and attract Taliban attention. Male tailors could no longer measure women for dresses, since this could lead to immoral thoughts and was a violation of the Taliban’s complete segregation of men and women who were unrelated by family or marriage.
Walking through the Lycée Myriam bazaar, Kamila noticed other changes in her favorite stores. Gone was the cheerful music and the pictures of Indian film stars. Even the catalog photos of smiling women modeling pricey Pakistani dresses had vanished from the walls of the tailoring shops. And hardly any fancy dresses remained in the boutiques; with the economy imploding, women hiding in their homes, and wealthy Kabulis fleeing by the hour, the market for expensive and elaborate imported frocks had simply dried up.
Kabul was now a different city. The problems of the Mujahideen period had been grave, but the city had never been so abandoned and stripped of hope.
As winter set in, the city’s plight worsened. Costs for staples such as flour and oil climbed higher each month, and for most families just getting by was becoming more and more of a challenge. Kamila’s mother made sure her seven children had all the basics of food and clothing, but like everyone around them, their household was only barely functioning. Kamila felt the tremendous pressure that weighed on her family, and she spent hours each day trying to think of ways she could help. She felt certain that things could not continue this way, with eight people depending on the small income from the rental apartment and their dwindling savings. Along with food, they needed books and school supplies for Rahim, the only one of the children who could still attend class. They also had to buy wood for the squat bukhari stove that heated the sitting room and oil for the hurricane lamps. Najeeb, the older of the two boys, was in the best position to help the family, but as things worsened his safety was more and more at risk. And besides, there were no jobs left in Kabul.
It wasn’t long before Najeeb and his mother decided he would have to leave for Pakistan with several other young men whose families the Sidiqis knew. If he couldn’t find work there he would go to Iran and would send his salary home to the women as soon as he could. But it was impossible to know when that would be. Already tens of thousands of refugees had headed across the border. Kamila and her sisters heard countless stories of the difficulties they faced finding jobs and places to live. Most were stuck in massive, crowded refugee camps where families competed for assistance from an overburdened aid community that struggled to provide health care, schools, and work programs.
The Sidiqi family needed help now. If only she could come up with a plan that would allow her to earn money while staying within the Taliban’s rules, Kamila thought, she could take the pressure off Najeeb and her father. She felt just how much her family needed her, and knew she had to find a way to do her part. Dr. Maryam, who rented the Sidiqis’ apartment and used it as an office, had managed to do just that; she was a doctor who was still able to practice medicine, despite the restrictions. As long as no men entered her office and all her patients were female, her clinic had no problems from the Taliban.
This is what I have to figure out, Kamila thought to herself. I need to find something I can do at home, behind closed doors. I need to find something that people need, something useful that they’ll want to buy. She knew she had very few options. Only basic necessities mattered now; no one had money for anything else. Teaching school might be an option, but it was unlikely to earn her enough money, since most families still kept their girls at home out of fear for their safety. And she certainly didn’t want her income to depend on an improvement in the security situation.
Kamila spent long days thinking about her options, considering which skills she could learn quickly that would also bring in enough afghani to make a difference for her family. And then it came to her, inspired by her older sister Malika, who, along with being a great teacher, had over many years developed into a talented—and sought-after—seamstress. Women from her neighborhood in Karteh Parwan loved her work so much that Malika’s tailoring income now earned her almost as much as her teacher’s salary. That’s it, Kamila thought. I’ll become a seamstress.
There were many positives: she could do the work in her living room, her sisters could help, and, most important of all, she had seen for herself at Lycée Myriam that the market for clothing remained strong. Even with the Taliban in power and the economy collapsing, women would still need simple dresses. As long as she kept quiet and didn’t attract unnecessary attention, the risks should be manageable.
Kamila faced just one major obstacle: she had no idea how to sew. Until now she had been focused on her books and her studies and had never shown any interest in sewing, even though her mother was an expert tailor, having learned from her own mother when she was growing up in the north. Mrs. Sidiqi had made all of her own clothing as a teenager, and she in turn had taught Malika when the young woman was struggling with her first high school sewing assignment. Now that the Taliban had barred women from classrooms, Malika was again considering becoming a full-time tailor, particularly since her husband’s transport business had slowed considerably under the new regime.
“Malika,” Kamila whispered to herself. “Surely she will teach me. And no one is as talented as she is. . . .”
A few days later Kamila set off for Malika’s house in Karteh Parwan, making her way in her chadri toward the bus stop under the late morning sun. She hadn’t been able to send word ahead to her sister to expect her visit, but these days there was little risk of finding Malika or any of her other older sisters away from home; life had moved indoors. Since Rahim was in school Kamila went by herself, unaccompanied by a mahram, and her heart pounded as she walked all alone the few hundred yards to the corner. The city looked like it had been evacuated. Kamila kept her head down and prayed that no one would notice her.
Fortunately, she had to endure only a short wait before the aging blue and white bus lumbered down the street and shuddered to a stop. Kamila quickly noticed that, like everything else in Kabul, there was something different about the vehicle. She was no longer allowed use the front door, as she always had, but was forced to enter through a door toward the rear, into a new women’s section. An old patoo, a woolen blanket that often doubled as a covering for men, hung unevenly from a white rope and managed to hide the women in the back from the men who sat up front with the driver. As she boarded the bus, a young boy took Kamila’s fare in his palm; children his age were the only males who were still permitted to have contact with women outside their family.
As the bus pulled out of Khair Khana’s main road, Kamila gazed out the window. She could see almost no cars and very few people, mainly men who were huddled together in the cold trying to sell whatever their family still owned. Their wares lay sprawled out on ratty blankets on the side of the street: rubber tubes from old bicycles, unkempt baby dolls, worn shoes without laces, plastic jugs, pots and pans, and stacks of used clothing. Anything they had that they thought others might value. Armed Mujahideen no longer manned the checkpoint at the traffic circle that marked the end of her neighborhood and the beginning of Khwaja Bughra; instead, groups of Kalashnikov-wielding Taliban guarded the intersection.
Inside the bus the women spoke in hushed tones of Kabul’s growing desperation.
“Things have never been so bad for us,” one woman said. Kamila could see nothing of their faces; all she had were voices, which sounded slightly muffled from behind the chadri. “I don’t know what we will do. My husband lost his job and my girls are home with me. Perhaps we’ll go to Pakistan, but who knows if things will be any better there.”
A woman sitting opposite answered in a quiet voice, shaking her head from side to side while she spoke. She sounded exhausted.
“You know, my husband has left for Iran and now I fear they’ll try to send my son to the front lines. What will happen to my children? There’s no one left to help us. It has become so difficult.”
Kamila listened as the women shared their troubles. At last, about fifteen minutes later, the bus arrived in Karteh Parwan.
Stepping onto the street, she walked down Karteh Parwan’s main boulevard until she arrived at Malika’s narrow lane. Once there she exhaled fully for the first time since she left Khair Khana. She hadn’t realized how nervous she had been. After passing row on row of one- and two-story houses she finally reached Malika’s, a white, squat, two-family home. Malika and her husband lived on the first floor and her brother-in-law’s family lived above them.
Kamila knocked on the wooden door, and in only a few moments she found herself in her older sister’s warm and powerful embrace. Kamila felt a rush of relief as she stepped inside the living room she knew so well.
“Come in, come in, I’m so glad you’re here. This is a surprise!” Malika said as she kissed her sister on each cheek. Her belly had gotten so much bigger; Kamila realized that the baby must be due soon. “Did you have any problems on the way? I’ve heard the patrols are very strict now. You have to be so careful when you go out.”
“Oh, no, it was fine,” Kamila said, dismissing her fears of just a minute earlier. No need to make Malika worry more than she already did. Her oldest sibling had been like a parent to the younger children in the large Sidiqi brood; she had helped to raise all seven of her younger sisters, feeding them and getting them ready for school every day, since their mother had her hands full with eleven children, a husband, and a household to run. “There were a lot of women on the bus. Everyone was talking about how hard things are.”
The two women sat down to steaming glasses of freshly made chai and a plate of nuts and butter cookies. Kamila filled Malika in on all that was happening at home, including Najeeb’s imminent departure and her own worries about their finances. Then, after a moment’s silence, Kamila came to the point of her visit.
“Malika Jan,” she said. “I need your help.”
She recounted to her sister how she had explored every idea she could think of to make money for the family, how she wanted to find a way to support them, to make things easier for their father and mother.
“Malika, I think that if I knew how to sew I could start making dresses at home and perhaps I could sell them to the shops at Lycée Myriam.”
Malika listened intently as her sister spoke.
“Would you teach me?” Kamila finally asked.
Malika sat silently as she weighed the idea. She, too, had been hearing of women who, out of sight of the Amr bil-Maroof and interfering neighbors, sewed dresses or knitted blankets in their living rooms to earn money for their families. Necessity was turning these women into entrepreneurs. With no jobs available and no employers willing to hire them, they were making their own way, creating businesses that would help them feed their children.
Malika worried about her sister taking such risks, but she knew the family needed the income. It was the best option Kamila had.
“Yes, of course I’ll help,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll learn quickly; you always have, ever since you were little!”
But there were conditions.
“You have to follow my rules, Kamila. Number one: never go out alone, as you did today. You have to bring Najeeb or someone else with you. And you can’t ever be on the streets during the time of prayer—that’s when soldiers are patrolling the shops and it will be very dangerous.”
Kamila listened, nodding at everything she said.
“No talking to strangers, ever, including women, because you never know who might be listening. Or who might want to turn someone else in for their own reasons. And most of all, you can’t ever be seen speaking with any men other than one of our brothers, particularly shopkeepers. You have to assume that the Taliban are always watching, that you are never invisible. You just have to be watchful every second you’re outside, okay?”
“Definitely,” Kamila said. “You’re right. You know I wanted to bring one of our brothers with me today but they were both very busy. I promise I’ll do everything you say and will be extremely careful from here on out.”
Malika looked at her, unconvinced. She wasn’t sure her strong-willed sister had ever stopped to think about the consequences once she set her mind on something.
“Really, I promise you,” Kamila said, seeing her sister’s hesitation. “I don’t want to break the rules or cause problems for anyone; I just need to work for our family. And Malika, I am going mad with nothing to do. I have to be useful again.”
Malika realized that it would be pointless to stand in her sister’s way, no matter how worried she was. She could tell by Kamila’s tone of absolute certainty that she had already decided to go forward with her plan anyway—with or without her help.
“Well, then,” Malika said, putting down her tea and removing the snacks from the wooden table. She moved like a woman with no time to waste. “Let’s begin.”
Kamila followed her sister into her sewing area, which was just off the living room. Malika had carved out this small workspace a few years earlier, and it had become her own private refuge, a corner of quiet amid the noise and laughter of her two boys. Partially completed dresses and a dark pair of women’s trousers hung here and there from chairs and table corners. Malika was in the middle of making a pantsuit for a neighbor, she explained.
Three small machines stood at attention on the sewing table. Malika used one to hem clothing, particularly garments that were made from thick fabric. Another was for embroidery. But the device she turned to most often was her “zigzag,” a lightweight beige-colored machine that could make more than a dozen kinds of stitches and was powered by a black pedal that sat beneath it on the floor.
Reaching for a swath of powder blue rayon fabric that was leaning against the wall, Malika began to explain to Kamila how to make a simple dress with beading.
“First, you begin by cutting the fabric,” she said.
As she continued, Malika grabbed a pair of fabric shears from a nearby shelf that was filled with sewing supplies—measuring tape, needles, dozens of spools of colored thread. A dusty shaft of afternoon sunlight streamed into the sitting room from the courtyard, glancing off the metal scissors. Malika carefully maneuvered a smooth, straight line against the material she was cutting.
She picked up a plastic stencil in the shape of a flower from her worktable and held it against the top corner of the cut fabric. With a thin marker she outlined the shape of the petals, tilting the fabric to show Kamila what she was doing. Then she stuck a small silver needle through the neat and even holes of the stencil to puncture the fabric beneath. Beading would later fill these small spaces.
Malika was a natural teacher. She explained each step to her sister in detail as she went, demonstrating her technique in slow and deliberate moves. Her attentive pupil followed the lesson closely, and took over where she could in the hope that doing it herself would help her better remember everything Malika was showing her. “Now I wish I had paid better attention when Mother taught you to sew, Malika Jan!” she exclaimed.
Soon Kamila was ready to bead. Together she and her sister sewed the tiny, hollow stones onto the flower by hand until the dress had a yellow blossom with small spaces of blue at its center.
Malika then turned back to finishing the garment, and announced that Kamila was ready to learn how to use her cherished zigzag. Malika showed her how to thread the machine, and how to properly, and comfortably, position herself in the chair. In only a few minutes Kamila was moving the pedal expertly.
“See? You’re a very good student, just as I expected,” Malika exclaimed, as together they worked on the final seams of the pantsuit. Kamila smiled and shared a laugh with her sister; after three hours of intense focus she was finally relaxed. It felt great to be working again, and she was so excited to be learning a skill that could very well become the lifeline she needed. Malika ended her sister’s first training session by showing her how to complete the hems at the bottom of the skirt and sleeves. When the machine’s staccato finally stopped, they had an elegant blue dress with a beaded flower near the neckline that would be smart enough for any occasion, including their cousin’s upcoming Kabul wedding. Kamila felt proud of her work and—she confessed only to herself—was somewhat amazed that she had helped make such a pretty garment.
But there was little time for the sisters to enjoy their success; the afternoon had passed quickly and evening would soon arrive. Malika gently folded the new dress into a plastic bag while Kamila secured her chadri. With a curfew in effect they had to get Kamila to the bus stop soon to make certain she would be back in Khair Khana long before dark. Without a mahram, Kamila faced an even greater chance of being stopped. The sooner she was home, the better.
“Malika, thank you so much for all your help,” Kamila said as she hugged her older sister good-bye in the doorway she had been so grateful to reach just a few hours earlier. “You always take such good care of all of us.”
Malika reached behind her for a folded piece of white paper, which she handed to Kamila. Inside lay a thick pile of colorful afghani.
“This should be enough to help you buy fabric and materials to get started,” Malika said.
Kamila embraced her tightly. The money was an incredibly generous gift at such a time.
“I will repay you as soon as I can. I promise it won’t be long,” she told her sister.
On the bus home, Kamila held her black plastic bag closely to her, beneath her chadri. Inside was the folded blue dress, the first piece of clothing she had ever made. She couldn’t wait to show Saaman and the others when she got home.
As she bounded into her house, grateful for Allah’s protection, Kamila heard the sounds of her sisters’ lively chatter coming from the sitting room. Their mother sat smiling with them.
Kamila had arrived just in time to hear the good news.
At last they had received word from Mr. Sidiqi; a cousin who had just returned from Parwan had passed his letter on to Najeeb. The note was written on worn, thin paper that was already turning yellow.
Thanks be to Allah, I have arrived in Parwan. The fighting continues, but I am well. I will soon see you here, Inshallah.
Kamila watched her mother’s eyes well up as she read her the letter, and she saw the release of a worry that had gone unspoken for so long. Mrs. Sidiqi folded the letter into fours once more and placed it on the low wooden table in their living room. Then she returned to the family’s dinner. Soon she would leave for Parwan, with Najeeb beginning his journey to Pakistan not long afterward.