7
The babies had been crying all night. Sleepless, overworked, and worried about the health of her twin girls, Malika was tempted to collapse onto her thick red pillow near the wooden crib and join them in their tears. But she had no time for such indulgences. The infants were feverish and colicky; as soon as it opened at 2 P.M. she would take them upstairs to Dr. Maryam’s clinic.
“Bachegak, bachegak”—little baby, little baby—“please, I promise it will be okay,” Malika whispered as she scooped both babies into a tight embrace and walked them around the room, trying to lull them to sleep. The tiny newborn twins had arrived nearly two months ahead of their due date and had struggled to gain weight and strength ever since. They remained weak and sickly, their small bodies battling diarrhea and what seemed like an endless series of infections. Malika had been lucky to find a female doctor in time to assist her premature delivery; these days most women gave birth in their bedrooms without the benefit of professional help. Of course it wasn’t guaranteed that making it to a hospital would improve an expectant mother’s chances; the civil war had destroyed most medical facilities, and combatants on all sides had stripped hospitals bare of equipment and supplies. Patients had to fill their own prescriptions and even had to bring their own food.
With the Taliban in power, doctors in Kabul could once again go to work without fear of rocket attacks, but female doctors—those who hadn’t fled the country when the Taliban took Kabul—faced an entirely new set of problems. The Taliban had ordered hospitals, like every other institution, to be segregated by gender, with women physicians restricted to treating female patients and working in female-only wards. They were not allowed to work with—let alone consult—their male colleagues. Foreign aid organizations were still wrestling with the question of how much support to offer the Taliban, particularly given their policies toward women, so help had been slow to reach the nation’s hospitals. As a result, doctors and surgeons regularly worked without even the basics such as clean water, bandages, and antiseptics. Anesthesia was a luxury. Along with most other women in Kabul, Malika now had no choice but to seek treatment from one of the very few women doctors who had chosen to remain in the capital. Dr. Maryam, like many of her colleagues, ran a private clinic in addition to her hospital work in order to help support her family.
Malika arrived at the doctor’s office early and for good reason; within thirty minutes, a crowd of women had filled the austere waiting room, with many standing against the walls holding infants in their arms. Demand for Dr. Maryam’s services had grown so great in the last few months she had hired an assistant who handed out a numbered piece of paper to each woman as she entered the office. Malika waited patiently for her number to be called. She fixed her gaze on the peeling paint that curled along the old walls; she prayed for the twins’ health and wondered how she would pay for whatever medicine they might need for their latest affliction.
Stepping into the treatment room at last, Malika kissed the doctor hello and stepped aside so she could begin the examination. Dr. Maryam’s specialty was pediatrics, and in her presence the worried mother felt her shoulders slacken and her jaw unclench for the first time in hours. The doctor examined first one baby, then the other, with a natural confidence that came from decades of experience. As a child, Dr. Maryam had dreamt of becoming a doctor, and her parents, neither of whom had any formal education, worked relentlessly to help their daughter realize her goal. She left her rural village for college at the start of the Russian occupation, and the local Mujahideen came to Maryam’s father to complain that his daughter was attending Kabul University’s medical school. They suggested, rifles in hand, that a Soviet-backed school was no place for a respectable girl, and that her family must be full of sympathizers who supported the Russian invaders. In response her father made a deal: he would supply them with as much wheat as they wanted, at no charge, if they would leave his daughter alone to continue her studies. He ended up having to sell much of his family’s farmland to finance Maryam’s university education, but he never complained; the Mujahideen got their wheat and his daughter got her medical degree.
After completing her studies, Dr. Maryam worked for more than a decade at Kabul Women’s Hospital and eventually rose to a senior position supervising its new doctors. At the same time she raised two children with her husband, a scientist by training who now owned a pharmacy not far from her clinic in Khair Khana.
Once the Taliban arrived, of course, everything changed. The new government installed its own men inside the hospital and charged them with overseeing everything that went on. They regularly burst into the women’s ward to make certain that no men were present and that female doctors remained veiled while treating the sick who had come to see them. Tall in stature with a self-assured, almost regal bearing, Maryam could not easily abide being told what she could or couldn’t do when it came to caring for her patients, and she found it impossible to keep her feelings to herself. She chafed at the new restrictions and voiced her frustration to her colleagues, one of whom informed upon her. Senior Taliban officials didn’t take kindly to being questioned by anyone, let alone a woman, and Dr. Maryam was now regularly watched by the government’s soldiers; they monitored her every move.
Despite these difficulties, Maryam maintained a schedule that impressed even Malika and Kamila. Each day she worked from 8 A.M. until 1 P.M. at the hospital before returning to Khair Khana to treat patients at her clinic, sometimes staying well into the night to see the very last woman who needed her care. Like Kamila and her sisters, she refused to turn any woman away. Most of her patients suffered from malnutrition because they couldn’t afford to buy food. But depression was also running rampant, debilitating former teachers, lawyers, and civil servants who now felt powerless and full of despair, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Many of them turned to Dr. Maryam for advice and comfort, as well as the opportunity to escape their homes.
Now, standing in her examining room with one hand around each tiny baby, the doctor turned her attention to their mother.
“I don’t know who I’m more worried about, Malika: you or your girls,” she said. “Are you sleeping at all? It certainly doesn’t appear so. I know you’re taking care of the entire family, but you must get some rest.” Her tone was calm but stern as she looked at her third patient. “You will do no one any good if you collapse.”
Malika stared down at the carpet, trying to beat back the tears. She thought about her husband, her boys, her sick twins, her customers, her sisters, all the people who counted on her. In that instant she felt perfectly alone, unable to share her burden, and with no choice but to simply carry on.
“Think of all that you’ve done already,” Maryam continued. She handed both babies to Malika and drew her chair near. “You’ve managed to keep your older boy in school, care for these sick little girls, help your sisters’ business, and support your family. None of these are small things and you must certainly not give up now. But you have to take better care of yourself. Otherwise you will be the one I am treating next time, not the babies. Okay?”
Malika nodded wearily. She embraced the doctor in a big hug before picking up her chadri from its hook on the door and hoisting the twins into her arms once more.
“I am going to your husband’s pharmacy now to fill the prescriptions,” Malika said. “And you must be sure to come see me again when you and your nieces are ready for more dresses!”
Later that evening Malika confided to Kamila that she felt better just from having had a moment of quiet to confide in someone she trusted about her problems. With dozens of young girls coming to the house every day, she and her sisters had grown much more accustomed to listening to other people’s problems than to sharing their own, even with each other. Kamila had been worried about her sister for days and was relieved to hear that the doctor had insisted that she take better care of herself.
Malika, however, was not the only one to receive a lecture from Dr. Maryam. Kamila too slipped out to see her after several days of feeling sluggish and lightheaded. Maryam warned Kamila that her blood pressure was too low and she needed more rest. But following the doctor’s advice was proving difficult for her, too. With orders backing up and a steady stream of new students, she was lucky to sleep more than five hours each night. Even when she finally made it to the bedroom she shared with her sisters, she stayed awake for hours worrying that they wouldn’t have enough work the following week and that the girls wouldn’t be able to deliver all the orders they already had.
Kamila had also taken Malika’s advice and was pushing the most exceptional girls to develop their own designs and embrace their individual styles. She was finding, however, that while sewing a sample of a new dress was easy enough, churning out a dozen of them all at once required multiple trips to the fabric store and days of work from several seamstresses. Mahnaz had just dreamt up a new pattern in which an elaborate geometry of translucent beads with gold flecks at their center covered a deep purple fabric in yellow and white flowers from the neck to the waistline. Kamila was thrilled with Mahnaz’s boldness and creativity, and she loved the design, but she wondered how in the world she had ever agreed to produce so many of these ornate dresses for Hamid in only seven days.
Kamila decided that if she really wanted to grow her business she would have to invest in it so that they could sew more dresses, faster. “We need machines,” she said to Rahim, “and we need them now.” With her faithful mahram at her side she went to Lycée Myriam and selected several, including an expensive embroidery apparatus imported from Pakistan and a small new generator that would go in their courtyard. The brother of one their students, Neelufar, had promised he would teach Kamila how to use the embroidery machine if she would teach his sister how to sew. Embroidered dresses sold for a premium, and those extra afghani would certainly help. “With all of this gear,” she said to Rahim while he struggled to carry the whole lot back home, “there’s no reason we can’t triple our orders, don’t you think?”
He only nodded at his sister; he was too focused on steadying the stack of machines to speak.
One morning shortly after the arrival of the new equipment, Kamila was lost in her work finishing the beading on the last of Mahnaz’s purple dresses. Malika sat nearby, wrestling with the folds of a pantsuit, trying to get them to lie just right. At last she noticed their young helper Neelab standing silently at her side. The small girl’s eyes focused on a pile of fabric scraps on the floor while she waited for Malika to acknowledge her.
“Yes, Neelab, sorry, what is it?” she asked the girl.
“Auntie Malika, there is a family at the door—three ladies and one of them is getting married. They want to see if you can make wedding outfits for the bride.”
The child looked up. “They need the dresses tomorrow.”
Malika thought she had misheard. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes,” the girl answered, “that’s what she said.”
These days the few weddings that took place were rarely rush affairs. It took too long to save or borrow the money for a celebration and gather all the guests from the far-flung places they had fled to. Anyway, most potential grooms were either outside Afghanistan or fighting on the front lines.
“Okay, ask the women to come in,” Malika said. “We can see what they need.”
Moments later two young women and their clearly anxious mother hurried into the room.
“Oh, thank goodness,” said the older woman, looking around the crowded workshop at all the girls working and breaking into a tense smile. “This is just the kind of place we have been looking for. My name is Nabila and these are my daughters, Shafiqa and Mashal. Shafiqa is getting married the day after tomorrow and we need to get her dresses made right away. We have been driving around the city all day trying to find a female tailoring shop to take the work, but yours is the first we have found that can make what we need.”
With that, Nabila pulled two bolts of fabric, one green and the other white, from a plastic tote bag.
“Here is the material,” she said, handing the pile to Malika before the seamstress even had a chance to say no. “We really appreciate you getting these dresses done for us so quickly.”
Malika was still a bit dumbfounded, but she smiled anyway and took the fabric.
Nabila then gestured at the younger girl, Mashal, who quickly disappeared from the room.
“Okay, yes, of course,” Malika said. “We’ll do it, though this kind of order would usually require at least a few days. But we’ve done many wedding dresses before and I think we can manage this. I’ll make sure that your daughter’s dresses are ready tomorrow evening.”
Malika walked Shafiqa, the bride, down the hall to a makeshift tent made of pale-colored cotton sheets that served as a fitting room. She was a pretty girl of maybe nineteen or twenty, thin and a bit wan, with light eyes and high cheekbones that bisected a narrow, doll-like face. After completing Shafiqa’s measurements Malika returned to the living room and found Nabila waiting for her with the other daughter, Mashal. She had apparently reappeared while the bride was getting measured and was standing, somewhat breathlessly, cradling in her arms an even larger bag than her mother’s.
“I am very sorry to trouble you,” the mother began, addressing Malika again. “But I see how many girls are sewing here with you and I am wondering if you would be so kind as to make four more dresses for us?” Without waiting for Malika’s reply, she reached into the bag and brought out a handful of fabric. “Shafiqa’s sisters and I also need gowns for the wedding party. As I said, we haven’t been able to find a female tailor anywhere who could handle so many gowns at once. We are really quite desperate since the wedding is only two days away. Do you think you could make all six dresses for us?”
She passed the bag over to Malika, who was struggling to contain her amazement.
“You need two wedding dresses and four wedding party gowns made in one day?”
The woman nodded energetically. She did indeed look desperate.
Malika stood silent for a moment. This kind of order would normally take at least a week of work. If it was even possible to get this done, which she was not at all sure of, she would need the help of all her sisters and every student in the school. It would have to be all hands on deck, starting as soon as possible. Like now.
Well, she thought to herself, we wanted more work. . . .
Malika escorted Nabila to the foyer, where she asked her to wait with the two girls, then hurried back to the living room workshop where Kamila was still absorbed in her beading.
“Kamila Jan, there is a woman here wanting me to make her six dresses in one day for her daughter’s wedding party. Of course I can’t do it by myself; I honestly don’t even know whether we can get it done all together. It’s a huge amount of work. What do you think?”
Kamila didn’t need to think; she dropped the purple fabric and answered immediately and decisively.
“Yes, of course we can do it. The girls and I will help you. We’re nearly finished with this order for Hamid anyway,” she said. “We’ll get it done—you know we always find a way. Besides, how many times have you rescued us? More times than we can count!”
“Well, it will be quite an adventure,” Malika said, kissing her sister on the cheek in gratitude before returning to her new customers.
“All of you must come back today, just before six P.M., so your measurements can be taken,” she instructed. “Usually we wouldn’t ask you to come back at night because of the soldiers and the curfew, but if we’re going to work quickly, we’ll need your help,” she said. “But please make sure not to come late; we don’t want you to be on the streets or at our gate at the time of prayer.”
“Yes, yes, of course, that will be fine,” said the mother of the bride, now smiling. “We will see you this evening. And thank you. Thank you so much.”
As soon as the women had gone, the living room began to buzz with activity as Malika called her troops to order and gave directions to each and every one.
“Okay, girls, we are going to get started on this order and we need all of your help,” she began, standing before the students at the front of the living room. “We have seven hours until the women come back. By then we will need to have the shells of each dress ready for them to try on. I will lead the wedding dresses team, and Kamila will be in charge of the gowns for the mother and sisters. Saaman will cut all the fabric and do the stenciling for the embroidery. Laila and Neelab will make sure we have all the supplies we need. Sara Jan will be coming around to make sure everyone understands what they are supposed to be doing. Please don’t hesitate for one second to ask any of us a question; we don’t have time to make mistakes, and we are all glad to stop what we’re doing and help with whatever you need. And if any of you can stay a bit later today, we would very much appreciate it.”
With that, the teams broke off to begin their work. They would work in two stages, starting with the green dress, which Shafiqa would wear during the ceremony in which the bride and groom consented to marriage. Then she and the girls would turn to the white gown, which Shafiqa would wear to greet her guests during the wedding reception afterward. The bride had requested that both frocks be very long and very plain, with only a bare minimum of beading around the neckline and sleeves. It struck Malika as a bit odd, particularly since the bride had seen from the dresses hanging around the workspace what pretty embroidery work the girls could do. “But so much the better,” she told the girls. “The handwork would have set us back at least half a day.”
Kamila’s group of seamstresses began by unrolling the fabric Nabila had brought and matching each material with the woman who would wear it. She wrote their names on a piece of scrap paper that she then taped to the floor next to each pile of fabric. Once Saaman had cut the material and drawn the patterns for them, the girls went to work in pairs, dividing each bodice and skirt into panels that they could work on separately. When it came time to work on the sleeves, the girls wrote down each customer’s arm length and placed it on the table in front of them before starting to run stitches across the top of the fabric in the way that Kamila had taught them. This would make it easier to attach the arms to the rest of the dress later on. The girls made certain to leave extra fabric for the first fitting. As their teachers had told them so many times, it’s better for a sleeve to be too long than too short. “Long,” the mantra went, “you can always shorten.”
The room hummed with activity but there was little noise aside from the whirrs and clicks of the sewing machines alongside the purr of the generator and the directions that Malika and Kamila called out every few minutes. Everyone was focused on the job before her. After an hour or so, one of the younger students asked Kamila if she might play a cassette she had brought, promising to keep the volume low. Kamila agreed it would be nice to have some music, and she reached into a cabinet to retrieve her father’s old Chinese tape recorder. Soon the room filled with the melodic voice of Farhad Darya, a legendary folk-pop artist and former Kabul University music teacher who had been named Radio Afghanistan’s “Singer of the Year” in 1990, the same year he fled Kabul for Europe after running afoul of the Soviet-backed Afghan government. The girls knew all the words to every ballad, and they sang along quietly to the tunes as they sewed.
When the bodice of the white wedding dress had begun to take shape and the skirt was almost finished, Malika asked one of the students whose height nearly matched the bride’s to come and stand in the middle of the room. Here Malika’s experience showed as she pinned the front and back sections of each dress around the girl and took quick stock of how much work lay ahead.
“Okay, this is a good start,” Malika said. “On the skirts, make sure we have a cushion of fabric at the bottom. Remember they are straight skirts, which can be tricky with the shiny white fabric, so go slowly and leave yourself a lot of room to work. Our bride will be back before long.”
Once she had finished gathering all the fabric and laying out the zippers and clasps they would need later on, Laila went to the kitchen to prepare a tray of chai and halwaua-e-aurd-e-sujee, a sweet confection of flour, sugar, oil, and nuts, for the girls to snack on. The dinner hour was approaching, and it was clear she would need to make enough food for at least twenty, not the usual twelve she normally cooked for. She sent Neelab to the store across the street to buy more naan and onions. Rice they purchased in large sacks and it looked like they had enough for now; no need to buy anything before they must.
At 6 P.M. sharp the bridal party rattled the gate and knocked at the girls’ front door once more. They warmly greeted Malika and Kamila and followed them to the fitting room. Stepping gingerly into her bridal dress to avoid being pinched by the straight pins that now held the panels together, Shafiqa stood motionless while Malika and Kamila walked around her, exchanging ideas with one another and taking notes about which places needed to be taken in and which needed to be let out. Afterward Nabila and her other daughters each had her turn. Kamila made certain that the young students were managing the fittings they had been assigned to, and she found herself filled with pride. Soon they won’t even need me, she thought to herself, marveling at how much the girls had learned and how confidently they worked with their customers.
Before the women left, Nabila stopped at the door to arrange her chadri. “I know this is a big job for you and all your students,” she said to Malika. “My family and I are very grateful. We haven’t had so many happy occasions these last few years, and this is one we’re glad to celebrate.”
“This is our work and we’re glad to do it,” Malika said, smiling. “We’ll look forward to seeing you and your daughters again tomorrow morning for your last fitting. Please come early so we have as much time as possible.”
Malika, Kamila, and their teams toiled on into the night. Rahim, too, joined in the dressmaking marathon once he had returned from school; his sisters were eager to have his embroidery and beading expertise. All of them would indeed have to work around the clock, as Malika had predicted. Sometime after midnight, the young women finally called an end to the day. The sisters would rise for prayer at dawn and pick up where they left off. All of them were exhausted, though Kamila still had enough energy to tease her younger sister.
“I don’t think we’ll do this again,” she said, extinguishing the last of the hurricane lamps. “When you get married, Saaman, I insist on at least two months’ notice.”
“Kamila Jan,” her sister retorted, “by the time I get married we won’t have this business anymore; you’ll be teaching literature to a classroom full of students and who knows what I’ll be doing but one thing I’m certain of: we won’t have time to make dresses; we’ll go to the finest store and buy them!”
Early the next morning the girls were back at their machines.
When Nabila and her daughters returned, they found the dressmakers so occupied with their gowns that they barely noticed the bridal party entering the house. This time Shafiqa could try on her dress without fear since Malika had removed the last of the pins. She had finished sewing the gown together just an hour earlier.
“It is so beautiful,” Shafiqa said, taking a step forward, then completing a quick pirouette. “The neckline is perfect, and the beading is lovely.”
“You look very pretty,” said Kamila. “We hope you will have a wonderful wedding.”
The green dress was almost finished as well. Mahnaz just needed to complete the last of the beading, which she rushed off to do now that they knew Shafiqa was happy with the dress’s design and pleased with its fit.
“I think we are in fine shape,” Malika told Kamila later that afternoon. “We should be ready by the time they return this evening to pick everything up. We just need to focus on finishing the dresses for Nabila and her daughters, and those gowns are so much simpler.”
But they did not have the luxury of time. Hours before they were expected, Nabila and her daughters were once again at the girls’ doorstep.
This time they were really in a hurry.
“Do you have the dresses ready, Malika Jan?” Nabila pleaded as she rushed into the workspace. Her daughters, including the bride-to-be, stood in a close huddle behind her, watching nervously. “I am so sorry. We have had a change of plans and we need the gowns right away.”
If Malika was stunned she didn’t show it. After years of sewing for friends and neighbors she had grown accustomed to the most impossible requests and had taught herself to answer calmly and patiently.
“We have most of them,” she responded, stealing a look at her sister, “but we’re still finishing your gown.” Kamila marveled at her sister’s composure. “We’ll have it done in just a few more minutes. Please sit down and have some tea while you wait.”
“Please, I don’t care about my dress, don’t let that hold us up,” Nabila insisted. The pitch of her voice was moving upward fast. “We really are in a hurry.”
Malika took a breath.
“Okay, wait here,” she said, motioning to the pillows in their workspace. “We’re just finishing the hem on your dress and we need only five minutes to get it done. Then you can take everything.”
Her words unleashed a torrent of activity as the girls pulled the white and green frocks down from the doorway where they hung. Since the power was out and they had used the last of their generator fuel, Nasia and Neelufar went to the kitchen and lit the gas stove that they would use to heat the steam iron. Malika refused to let Shafiqa’s gowns leave her house without a proper pressing. No bride wants a wrinkled wedding dress.
As for Nabila’s gown, Sara was directing the students to focus on finishing it, not perfecting it. One of the girls stood still in the gray patterned garment while three others crouched around her on the floor sewing the hem.
And then, finally, “We’re done!” one of the girls yelled to Sara, still clenching a needle between her teeth. The trio had finished its work. By now the other five dresses were pressed and packed, waiting by the door for Neelab and Malika’s son Hossein to help their anxious owners carry them outside.
Malika hurried over to give the last garment a final check. “It looks good, girls. With more time we could have made it even better, but this will do.”
By now Nabila had risen from her seat to pace across the workshop. As soon as she saw her dress being placed in the bag, she offered hasty hugs to Malika and Kamila, profusely thanking them for all of their help while at the same time commanding her daughters to get moving: they had to go now.
Neelab picked up the package with great care and accompanied the women through the courtyard to the street outside. There she found the day’s biggest surprise.
Neelab saw three cars waiting in the street for the women. She had to catch herself from exclaiming out loud when she realized that two of them were dark Toyota Hilux trucks with Q’uranic verses painted on the side. Taliban vehicles.
Several Talibs were sitting in the first truck and to Neelab’s surprise they were exceedingly polite. They gratefully took the package of dresses from her and, even more, handed her a bit more than the five hundred thousand afghani she had requested, per Malika’s agreement with the mother of the bride, Nabila. In the second truck sat a young Talib whom Neelab guessed to be the groom. Behind him was the Toyota Corolla that would transport Shafiqa, her mother, and sisters to the wedding. No flowers or streamers adorned the car’s hood and front bumper as they would have in the old days, before the Taliban put an end to noisy celebrations. But Neelab had no doubt whatsoever that this was indeed the start of a wedding procession.
Kamila and Malika looked at one another in amazement after Neelab had finished her story. And then they broke out in huge smiles. The dresses they had just dedicated the last thirty hours to making were about to be worn in a Taliban wedding. “Oh Malika,” Kamila said, “that’s why the gowns had to be so simple!”
“Maybe the groom had to leave for the front and that was why they were in such a hurry?” Laila added.
Hours later Malika was still rewinding the events of the last two days in her head. “I just don’t believe it,” she said. She was now sitting cross-legged on the floor, having stopped moving for the first time all day to enjoy a cup of tea and a plate of spaghetti.
Kamila grinned.
“This is good news,” she said. “At least we know some of the Taliban like our work!”
The event confirmed what Kamila and Malika had long suspected: Taliban outside Khair Khana now knew about their operation, both Kamila’s school and Malika’s made-to-measure business. And so far, not only were the soldiers not shutting down their ventures, they were quietly supporting them.
Kamila had known for some time that this was the case when it came to local Talibs who served at the lowest levels of government, far from the decision makers in Kandahar. A few months earlier, two sisters had come to her asking to join her courses. Kamila knew their family well; they were Pashtuns from the south who had lived for many years in Khair Khana, just behind the Sidiqis and next to the neighborhood mosque. The girls’ uncle was a good friend of Najeeb’s. Kamila had heard a while back that Mustafa, the girls’ father, was now working with the Taliban. He patrolled Khair Khana with minimal force, using his relationships with his neighbors to try to keep their corner of Kabul from attracting his bosses’ notice. Kamila had told the sisters that she would be happy to have them join the school. She was eager to help her brother’s friends, and besides, she thought, she was glad to have their father on her side. Not long afterward, the oldest of the two girls, Masuda, had asked her teacher if she could speak with her in private, away from the other students.
“My father has asked me to pass along a message,” she said, tightly gripping her sewing kit. “He asked me to please tell Kamila Jan that I know that she has a business, and that I also know she is an honorable woman whose work is helping families in Khair Khana. She should please be careful to make certain that no men come to the house, ever. If she follows the rules and if she makes sure that only women are working with her, she should not have any problems. Tell her that I will try to let her know if any of my bosses are asking about her business or planning to come to her house.”
From the way that Masuda had recited her father’s words, gazing upward as if trying to pry open the pages of an invisible notebook, Kamila could see that she had worked hard to memorize his message without missing a word. The importance of what he shared had not been lost on her, despite her youth.
“Please tell him my sisters and I very much appreciate his help,” Kamila replied, taking Masuda’s hands in her own. “We will do everything we can to follow his advice.”
As the weeks went by and their operation grew, Kamila was sure that the Taliban must be asking about her business at the mosque, just as they had with Malika’s school. She gave thanks every day that so far she had heard nothing from the government’s men.
She would do all she could to keep it that way.